June 2006 Archive

Art Process and Thicket, two art communities to watch

John-Paul Delaney, “Gone” 1994 Community is so important and most artists don’t really have one. So it’s interesting to me that over the last month I’ve gotten emails from community-minded artists who’ve started art communities. One is a Rome-based artist, John-Paul Delaney, whose Art Process website I told you about a year ago. Back then the site was a simple thing: a free place for artists to join and post images of their art. A year later, Delaney’s worked to improve the site, he’s got many more members, and Art Process works as a showplace as well as a flickr-esque ... More » »

Hot New York, hot art, not so hot art

Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah, by Allan McCollum The hottest show we saw in Chelsea yesterday was the hottest in more ways than one–quality and temperature. We nearly died of the heat, and stayed in there as long as we could bear it. “An Ongoing Low-Grade Mystery” was in Paula Cooper Gallery’s upstairs space on 21st, Street, across from the first-floor gallery. It was closed except by request. So we requested. Ooops. No air-conditioning. Everything in the show, which was organized by Bob Nickas and is the third in a series of red shows by him, ... More » »

More on John Giglio – "BlowHomes"

John Giglio’s BlowHomes at the Aldrich in Ridgefield, CT On my way to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT for John Giglio’s exhibit, “The Main Street Sculpture Project: BlowHomes,” I was eager to see how the artist had transformed the historic houses into what he described as “BlowHomes.” Giglio is known for his sculpture and performance art, and his exploration of the relationship between self and community. The BlowHomes continue with these themes of space, structure and existence, reinventing historic monuments into inflatable sculptures. The sculptures are made of heavy-duty vinyl fabric, filled with air, and easily taken ... More » »

Julian Levy Collection: The past is the present

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972), Portrait of Julien Levy, Daguerreotype-Object, 1939. Assemblage with silvered glass, mirrored glass shards, black sand, gelatin silver prints, and other materials, Case: 5 3/16 x 4 1/8 x 1 inches; Frame: 11 x 10 x 2 1/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001.photo provided by PMA Part of the surprise in Dreaming in Black and White: Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery, now showing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is how many of the photographs appear fresh, their strategies still part of mainstream photographic ... More » »

Weekly Update – Self-Taught Artists Foundation

[Ed. Note: This post has been corrected. Two names were wrong, Sister Gertrude Morgan (not Morris) and Bill Traylor (not James). Sorry for the mistakes.] [This week's Weekly has my story about the new Philadelphia philanthropy, the Self-Taught American Artists Foundation created by Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz. Here's the link to the art page and below is the copy with some pictures. Click the images to see them bigger.]Castle in the Clouds An art-collecting couple spreads the word of self-taught artists. James Castle’s command of perspective is amazing given that he had no art lessons. There’s no stopping an art ... More » »

The big picture on artblog!!!

by Blaine Siegel It took us three years and some prodding from Doug Witmer this morning and the intelligence of Caitlin-the-intern to push us to figure out how to make our photos link to large versions. Yes. This is the big news from artblog central, where we know a lot but you know more. by Timothy Belknap As most of you knowledge workers know, just click on the images, and voila!@#$$!!!! In case you’re interested in this eye candy, you can see it in the flesh at Slought in the Day After show of graduating students work.

Renovated Bollinger

Posted by Caitlin Matt Bollinger is back with his second solo exhibit, “Recent Renovations,” which opened May 31st at Rodger LaPelle Galleries. The 31 paintings in this exhibit are thematically consistent with the raw, edgy representation of American life that was visible in Bollinger’s exhibit last May 2005 (see post here). However, he has expanded his subject matter from figure drawing to include more landscape-driven works, such as “Flood,” a response to Hurricane Katrina, and “Grocery Aisle,” a small painting of a supermarket. “Afternoon in July” (Oil on canvas, 120” x 96”) Of notable mention is the diptych “Afternoon in ... More » »

John Giglio’s notebooks rock, too

Images from John Giglio’s notebooks of a body cocooned into a wall For work you’ve never seen before, work that mixes conceptual body art with dance, performance, sculpture, architecture and installation, check out the exhibit of John Giglio at Carbon 14 (just north of Rodger Lapelle), where the artist has lined the walls with a huge small sampling of drawings from his voluminous notebooks. The drawings are plans for performances or installations, explicit and beautifully conceived so that a viewer can “get” the concepts pretty easily. (I would fight tooth and nail for him to be on my team in ... More » »

Hold the presses–artists are switching galleries!

There’s a great, gossipy piece by Dorothy Spears in today’s NY Times about mid-career folks like Tom Friedman and Lisa Yuskavage who’ve switched galleries recently for a combination of reasons having to do with money and money. Not news but it’s always eye opening to read about the business as it’s played in New Yawk. The First Gallerists’ Club – New York Times

John Giglio’s Performance-Sculpture rocks Carbon 14

John Giglio Originally uploaded by sokref1. Over the course of a decades-spanning career, sculptor and performance artist John Giglio has created works that seem to be exploded surreal 3-D cartoons whose mission is to demonstrate the weird and wonderful connections between body, buildings and psychic space. Di Chirico is another reference in works that are playful and ominous with bodies wrapped or masked, buildings turned into bubbles and limbs stretched to impossible extremes. Documentation of Giglio’s works from the 1990s to the present is up now at Carbon 14, and I highly recommend a visit. C-14, the experimental space dedicated ... More » »