Displaying items by tag: sculpture

A pair of American tourists were pinched by Italian police when Fiumicino airport authorities in Rome discovered a stolen Pompeii relic in their luggage, reports the Local. The remarkably ill-advised crime rivals our favorite Italian art news story of the year, “Italian Student Smashes Sculpture While Taking Selfie” in its general stupidity.

The massive artifact, which was removed from a building at the historic site, weighed more than 65 pounds, but that wasn’t about to stop the thieves from smuggling it on board an aircraft and back to the States.

Get ready for a new public installation. A monumental sculpture featuring the animal heads of the traditional Chinese zodiac will be unveiled on September 17 outside the Adler Planetarium. “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Bronze” is by Ai Weiwei, a leading figure in the contemporary art world and China’s most outspoken political artist.

China considers Weiwei such a threat to its national security that they revoked his passport several years ago, and he is not allowed to leave the country.

Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the curator who shepherded an art world set piece in Madison Square Park on Friday, called what was being installed “the great levitating sculpture.”

The sculpture was “Points of View” and consisted of three extremely tall, extremely heavy pieces, but none of them rose from the ground and floated magically through the air. There were no David Blaine maneuvers, no seemingly impossible sleight of hand.

Project Perpetual, a new philanthropy established to raise money for humanitarian causes by collaborating with artists, has enlisted Jeff Koons to create the first in a series of new works that will be used to raise money for the United Nations Foundation.

Mr. Koons, who is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art that runs through Oct. 19, and who recently created a “virtual sculpture” for Garage magazine, will create one large sculpture and three to five smaller pieces.

Christie’s announced the sale of Donald Judd’s "Untitled (Bernstein 93-1)" as one of the highlights of the fall auction season. The fifteen foot high sculpture will be included in the Evening Sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art on Wednesday, November 12th. In scale, design, radiance, effect and simplicity, "Untitled (Bernstein 93-1)" is one of the most important works by the artist to be presented on the market and confirms Donald Judd's position as a master of Minimalist art. "Untitled (Bernstein 93-1)" was executed a few months before the artist’s death; this magnificent sculpture, one of the artists large scale stack sculptures, has remained in the same collection since its creation in 1993.

Donald Judd's "Untitled (Bernstein 93-1)," is an icon of 20th century sculpture, and one of the artists most important and recognizable works. Judd's approach to sculpture was truly revolutionary, using industrial materials and pared-down geometric forms that equally stressed the physical structure and the space around it.

The Speed Art Museum continues to add to its curatorial staff in preparation for re-opening in 2016. Erika Holmquist-Wall, a specialist in 19th and 20th century Nordic art and design, joins the museum next month as the Mary and Barry Bingham Sr. Curator of European and American Painting and Sculpture.

The Speed announced the hire of contemporary art curator Miranda Lash, formerly of the New Orleans Museum of Art, in July.

"Neptune's Daughter," a bronze sculpture that stood prominently in the Garden of Enchantment to the right of the de Young Museum until 2011, was vandalized that year and quietly removed from the garden without any press attention. The four-foot statue of a young girl atop a sea horse, created by artist Melvin Earl Cummings in 1926, was on prominent display at the museum for nearly 90 years before unidentified vandals pried off one of its arms and disappeared with it. And now, thanks to some Good Samaritans and the good will of the insurers, the arm has been restored and "Neptune's Daughter" will be rededicated next month.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the museum had insured the sculpture with Lloyd's of London, who paid the museum just under six figures for it after a search of Golden Gate Park three years ago turned up no trace of the missing bronze arm.

Following its inaugural outing in 2012, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities’ 5×5 program takes to the streets again this fall. The city’s largest public arts project kicks off with an opening weekend celebration on September 6 and 7, promising both visual art and cultural events spread across each of the city’s eight wards through December. The works take the form of everything from site-specific performance art to sculpture to screenprinting demonstrations, all of which are free and open to the public.

The 25 participating artists — as chosen five apiece by five curators, hence the festival’s name — range in both medium and background.

The Portuguese government announced on Friday that it will not list 84 painting and a sculpture of the Spaniard artist Joan Miró as cultural heritage. This decision allows the government to sell the works to help the country's economic crisis.

Joan Miró was one of the world's most important surrealist artists. He created many paintings, sculptures, and engravings.

As a small-town Midwestern boy in the 1940s, Robert Duncan saved souvenir license plates from cereal boxes, not knowing that he was igniting a passion for collecting painting and sculpture.

"The stakes are just higher in contemporary art," says Mr. Duncan, now 72, "and the game is more fun."

Mr. Duncan and his wife, Karen, have spent decades building a collection of contemporary art that former museum director George Neubert ranks among the 50 best in the country. It encompasses nearly 2,000 works by such artists as Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman, Yinka Shonibare and Kiki Smith.

The couple live in Lincoln, Neb., but maintain strong ties with their hometown of Clarinda, Iowa, where they went on their first date as junior-high students. The Duncans are turning the 1908 Carnegie library there into the Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum.