Displaying items by tag: Contemporary Art

 An abstract mural depicting the GPS-tracked movements of Brooklyn Navy Yard workers was unveiled Thursday.

Artist Paul Campbell asked 10 Navy Yard employees to track their steps all over the city for one day using smartphone apps, and then recorded their movements on a 66-foot-long wall on Flushing Avenue at Vanderbilt Avenue.

The mural shows the workers' routes using different colored lines that wriggle across the length of the wall, tangling with each other.

The New Museum in New York announced that it has received a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of scholarship in contemporary art. The grant is among three new scholarships that will help the museum continue to encourage and facilitate discussion and debate around contemporary culture. Founded in 1977, the New Museum was the first institution devoted to contemporary art established in New York City after World War II. Since its inception, the New Museum has been dedicated to creating a broad dialogue between artists and the public.

The Mellon Grant, which will be awarded over three years, will support a research fellow position as well as public and private seminars focused on contemporary art issues.

The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University has named 15 new members to its board of advisors and reappointed eight former board members. The unprecedented number of appointments, which follow the recruitment of Christopher Bedford as the Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose in 2012 and the naming of Lizbeth Krupp as chair of the board of advisors last fall, are another important step in a new era in the museum’s history.

The Rose’s volunteer board includes prominent personalities in the contemporary art, academic, philanthropic, cultural and business communities in the Boston area and across the U.S. The new board members are Gannit Ankori, Leslie Aronzon, Mark Bradford, Ronni J. Casty, Rena M. Conti, Tory Fair, John S. Foster, Steven A.N. Goldstein, Susan B. Kaplan, Lizbeth Krupp, Frederick Lawrence, Beth Marcus, Dianne Markman, Tim Phillips, and Lisa Yuskavage.  Reappointed board members are Gerald Fineberg, Lois Foster, Matthew Kozol, Jonathan Novak, Betsy Pfau, Meryl Rose, Ann Tanenbaum, and George Wachter.

On Saturday, August 2, New York’s Summer Streets program, a project organized by the New York City Department of Transportation, kicked off in Manhattan. The event, which will take place again on August 9 and on August 16, creates a pedestrian alley down Park Avenue and Lafayette Street, opening up nearly 7 miles of city thoroughfares so that people can play, run, walk, and bike. While the roster of activities includes everything from musical performances to yoga classes, art plays a major part in the program.

This year, Summer Streets features an installation by contemporary Norwegian sound artist Jana Winderen. “Dive” is a seven-block-long art installation in the Park Avenue Tunnel that was commissioned by New York City DOT Art.

Mead Carney, the contemporary art space and advisory firm founded by Nigel Mead in London in 2012, is the first commercial gallery to open in Porto Montenegro, which has been dubbed “the Monte Carlo of the Adriatic”. This month the gallery launched with the exhibition, “The Shock of the New” (until 30 September), which includes work by Damien Hirst, Gerhard Richter and Richard Prince.

The Adriatic Sea port, a tax-friendly destination and the home port of choice for many super-yacht owners, is in the Bay of Kotor, which is a Unesco World Heritage site.

In early May, Christie's invited a group of 18 new collectors from China to visit New York. The auction house escorted the guests on guided tours through the Museum of Modern Art, arranged VIP tickets to a local art fair and threw a lavish dinner in the Rockefeller Center ballroom of Christie's. Auctioneers also reserved two discreet skyboxes overlooking the house's saleroom so the group could watch its major spring sales of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art.

Christie's efforts paid off: During its May 13 contemporary art sale, members of the group placed bids on at least half the top 10 priciest pieces in what became an historic, $745 million auction.

North Devon’s council has approved Damien Hirst’s plan to build an entire town just outside of Ilfracombe, a seaside resort on the English coast. The contemporary artist announced the project, which will include 750 homes, a school, playgrounds, stores, office buildings, and a health center, in early 2012. The new development, which is being referred to as the Southern Extension, is expected to feature environmentally-friendly architectural elements such as wind turbines, solar panels, and high-tech insulation. Hirst currently has a studio, restaurant, and several properties in Ilfracombe. 

While planners believe that the development would bring construction jobs to the area and boost the town’s economy, critics claim that the project is too large for the 187-acre area and would negatively affect surrounding wildlife

Samuel Hunter, professor of art and archaeology, emeritus, at Princeton University and a renowned modern and contemporary art scholar, died of natural causes on July 27 in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 91.

"Sam came to Princeton in 1969 as a well-established historian of modern and contemporary art who had by that time played a prominent role in his field for more than 20 years as a professor, curator, museum director, editor and critic," said Michael Koortbojian, the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Art and Archaeology and chair of the Department of Art and Archaeology.

The internationally regarded Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) opens tomorrow with an exciting month-long calendar of more than 40 exhibitions, special events, performances and tours across 30 of the city’s museums, galleries and institutions, as well as artist-run, temporary and pop-up spaces. In its 11th year, the festival brings together over 100 leading and emerging Scottish and international artists and features the return of its annual, city-wide commissions programme, including a major presentation by leading Indian artist Nalini Malani as part of 14-18 NOW’s LIGHTS OUT and WWI Centenary Art Commissions. As part of the Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme, and during the year of Homecoming Scotland, the 2014 programme also sees the presentation of a major international group exhibition Where do I end and you begin programmed by Edinburgh Art Festival in collaboration with City Art Centre.
 
Edinburgh Art Festival also features a daily programme of events for all ages, featuring one-off artist performances, live musical events, film screenings and festival tours, as well as talks by some of the world’s leading artists and curators.

NeueHouse, a members-only workspace collective in New York’s Flatiron district, announced that it will open a Los Angeles outpost in early 2015. The flagship West Coast location will be located in the historic Columbia Square CBS Radio Building and Studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. The six-story structure was designed by the modernist architect William Lescaze, a pioneer of the International Style, in 1938 for CBS CEO William S. Paley.

In addition to providing work spaces for creative professionals, NeueHouse, which opened in New York in May 2013, collects and exhibits contemporary art, hosts screenings, and organizes press conferences and panel discussions.