Displaying items by tag: new museum

It's official: New Yorker writer Hilton Als is the New Museum's Visionary speaker for 2015. Als will helm the annual event to be held at the museum on September 15 with the reading of a new, unpublished essay on Diane Arbus's relationship with New York City.

"Arbus is a perfect vehicle for Als's meditation," boasts a press release from the museum. "Running from privilege, she took herself further and further away from anything that could be described as normative and descended into a world teetering on the brink of the void. Like Als, she saw herself in her subjects, but, for her, life became a desperate struggle to disassociate from them."

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.

Art Basel, the most anticipated art fair in the world, will be held from June 13-16, 2013 in Switzerland. A VIP preview and vernissage were held on June 11 and June 12 respectively and included the $12 million sale of Alexander Calder’s (1898-1976) Sumac (1961) by London’s Helly Nahmad Gallery.

Now in its 44^th year, Art Basel welcomes 304 international exhibitors to Messe Basel, a venue situated at the border of Switzerland, France and Germany. The fair presents the finest works of modern and contemporary art by more than 4,000 artists. Works on view include paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, photographs, video and editioned works. The show is split into eight sectors – Galleries, Feature, Statements, Edition, Unlimited, Parcours, Film, and Magazines – and allows patrons to explore the many facets of modern and contemporary art including museum-quality paintings, curated projects, and site-specific artworks.  

The remarkable roster of exhibitors includes Acquavella Galleries Inc. (New York), Castelli Gallery (New York), Gagosian Gallery (multiple locations), Hauser & Wirth (Zurich/New York), Dominique Levy (New York), and Lisson Gallery (Milan/London).

Art Basel offers a full program of events including symposiums, artist talks, and lectures. Featured participants include Massimiliano Gioni, curator of the 55^th Venice Biennale and Director at the New Museum, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine Gallery in London.    

Since 2009, there has been chatter that the Vatican would have its own pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It has finally been confirmed that they will take part in the contemporary art fair’s 55^th year. A vice president of the Vatican’s Holy See promoting committee attended a Biennale press conference on October 26.

The Biennale, which will take place from June 1 to November 24, 2013, welcomes eight new countries to the upcoming fair including the Bahamas, Kuwait, the Maldives, and Paraguay. While the Vatican has kept the works they plan to exhibit under wraps, an Italian newspaper reported that they will feature less than 10 men and women from around the world. They also said that a mix of established and emerging artists on view will explore the first 11 chapters of the Book of Genesis.

Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, the Italian-born associate director of the New Museum in New York, the Biennale’s headline exhibitions will take place at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and the Arsenale. Gioni plans to incorporate older pieces from the late 19^th and 20^th century into the fair.

Contemporary art is occupying hallowed halls this season: Andy Warhol at the Met, Matthew Barney at the Morgan Library.

And Conceptualism, which 40 years ago proposed trashing museums altogether, is now assuming old master status in them. It’s even getting a historical survey in “Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art,” a show that opens at the Brooklyn Museum on Friday and provides the back story for a surprising number of other shows, mostly of new art, coming in the months ahead.

Not that the Brooklyn exhibition has blockbuster potential; if anything, the opposite is true. It’s a compendium of archival odds and ends: postcards, snapshots, arcane pronouncements. And it’s based on a 40-year-old scrapbook of a book with an interminable art-speak title, of which “Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972: A Cross-Reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic Boundaries” is just the first quarter. Compiled by Ms. Lippard, a pioneering feminist writer and curator, and published in 1973, the book remains a founding document of a hugely influential kind of art that emerged from an era of social upheaval and that spurred far-reaching changes in thinking about what art could be — meaning, among other things, unheroic, non-Western, female, ephemeral.