Displaying items by tag: Cindy Sherman

On December 13 the Art Institute of Chicago unveils 44 contemporary works donated by collecting titans Gael Neeson and Stefan Edlis. The largest gift in the museum’s 136-year history, the mix reads like an art lover’s “Twelve Days of Christmas,” with one Robert Rauschenberg, two Cy Twomblys, four Gerhard Richters, six Cindy Shermans, and nine Andy Warhols among the blue-chip pieces.

The National Academy Museum & School has added 150 high-resolution artworks to the Google Art Project, enabling individuals across America to access and explore a sample of its rich collection of paintings, sculptures, new media and architectural drawings and models. The works available through the Google Art Project are representative of the wide-ranging collection of the National Academy. Among the works included are paintings by Samuel F. B. Morse and Asher B. Durand - the artists who founded the Academy in 1825 - as well as works by many of the iconic names in American art and architecture, all of whom have been members of the Academy and who contributed to its legacy: Cecelia Beaux, Thomas Eakins, Frank Gehry, Winslow Homer, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Wayne Thiebaud and Frank Lloyd Wright, among many others.

A group of 54 artists and other art worlders has signed a letter asking Mayor de Blasio and Meenakshi Srinivasan, chair of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, to deny the Frick Collection’s proposed plan for expansion.

“Those of us in the art world who cherish the unique and tranquil ambiance offered by the Frick are urging the Frick to withdraw its proposed plan and consider alternative methods of expansion that would preserve the character essential to its appeal,” says the missive, which is signed by gallerists Paul Kasmin and Irving Blum, filmmaker Sophia Coppola, and artists Jeff Koons, Chuck Close, John Currin, Brice Marden, Frank Stella, Cindy Sherman, Deborah Kass, Cecily Brown, Lisa Yuskavage, Rudolf Stingel, and Sarah Sze, among others.

Artists Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman have donated to the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies’s Original Print and Photography Collections, respectively.

The FAPE’s collections are displayed in U.S. embassies all over the world, and aim to promote the creativity and diversity of American culture. The tradition of artists donating artworks to the FAPE’s Original Print and Photography Collections began in 1989, when Frank Stella donated an edition of "The Symphony" to every American embassy, and every year, an American artist has donated a new edition of original prints.

On Saturday, January 31, 2015, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, will unveil its reinstalled collections of post-war and contemporary art. Featuring work from 1945 to the present, the collections will be housed in three dedicated galleries that have been newly renovated and refurbished over the past year.

The Wadsworth’s illustrious post-war and contemporary holdings will be divided between the Huntington Gallery, where mid-century abstract painting and sculpture by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Tony Smith will be displayed; the Hilles Gallery, which will feature works by Robert Rauschenberg, Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, and Richard Tuttle; and the Colt building’s mezzanine gallery, where one of Sol LeWitt’s famed wall drawings will be on view as well as works by other minimalists and conceptualists.

Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the Institute of Contemporary  Art/Boston (ICA), announced today the appointment of Eva Respini as Barbara Lee Chief Curator. Respini is currently Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, where she organized the critically acclaimed retrospectives Cindy Sherman and Robert Heinecken as well as exhibitions with artists Klara Liden, Anne Collier, Leslie Hewitt, and Akram Zaatari. She will assume her new position at the ICA in March 2015.

“Eva Respini brings a combination of scholarship and a 21st-century sensibility to image-making, technology, and the role of the museum of the future,” says Medvedow. “She offers a rich understanding of contemporary art and is a creative and intelligent leader in her field. We look forward to the contributions that she will bring to the museum.”

It may come as no surprise that when you ask Americans to choose their favorite artwork, Edward Hopper’s iconic “Nighthawks” sits at the top of the list. For the Art Everywhere US initiative (imported from the UK), online voters picked Hopper’s 1942 noir masterpiece and 57 other works from a curated selection of 100 pieces from the collections of five museums — the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, LACMA, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney. Starting August 4, the works will adorn as many as 50,000 billboards and signs across America.

The works to go on view range from patriotic picks like Gilbert Stuart’s 1821 portrait of George Washington and Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” to more contemporary choices like photographs from Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman. As part of a special presentation at the annual meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors, Art Everywhere will present the full list of works.

This past November, Francis Bacon’s triptych portrait Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s, setting an artist’s record and becoming the most expensive work ever sold at auction. Less than a month later, the massive contemporary masterpiece turned up on loan, not at a modern-day art mecca like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (as Edvard Munch’s The Scream did), but on the opposite end of the US, at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. The painting, which remained on view there through early April, was loaned by its new owner Elaine Wynn, ex-wife of casino mogul and top collector Steve Wynn. Mrs. Wynn, a resident of Nevada, was reportedly entitled to save more than $10 million in taxes by first parking the painting at the Portland Art Museum before bringing it to her home state.

 Financier, philanthropist, and art collector Eli Broad is suing a German sub-contractor that was hired to create a unique, latticed facade for his forthcoming flagship museum. The Broad Collection, or The Broad for short, was slated to open in downtown Los Angeles by the end of 2014, but officials announced in February that the date had been pushed to 2015 due to construction delays. The $140-million institution will house approximately 2,000 contemporary artworks, including pieces by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, and Mark Grotjahn, from the collection of Broad and his wife, Edythe.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday, May 30 in Los Angeles Superior Court, accuses Seele Inc., an architectural engineering and fabrication firm based near Munich, of numerous infractions, including breach of contract, fraud, deceit, and unfair competition. Seele was brought on by Broad and the museum’s general contractor Matt Construction in late 2011 to create the institution’s “veil” -- a honeycomb-esque facade that wraps around the building’s exterior and is expected to be one of The Broad’s most distinctive features. Seele has helmed numerous projects in the U.S., including creating striking exteriors for the Seattle Central Library and the New York Times’s Manhattan headquarters.

Auction houses expect to sell as much as $2.3 billion of art in New York this month as billionaires from China to Brazil compete for trophy works by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Jeff Koons in a surging market.

Two weeks of semiannual sales of Impressionist, modern, postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, Sotheby’s (BID) and Phillips begin May 6, with online bidding as early as today. Their combined sales target represents a 77 percent increase from estimates for a similar round of auctions a year ago.