Editor’s Note: Nancy Holt died in New York of complications of leukemia on February 8, 2014. This post was first published in June 2012. Nancy Holt’s Sightlines, curated by Alena J. Williams, is a touring show now enjoying a stop at Santa Fe Art Institute through June 29th. (Meantime, a group show dedicated to the land art movement, Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 opened May 27th at More …
Robin Rule, the passionate and complicated Denver gallery owner, died of cancer on December 29, 2013, age 55. Her indomitable spirit animated the Denver art world from 1987 to 2013, and her legacy will forever be tied up with the issues of the contemporary art world today in which complex loyalties and the difficulty of maintaining a business as a woman owner without patrons, backers or trust fund still apply. Rule More …
A Denver Art Preview. From a focus on women artists of the Front Range, through painting and sculpture with abstract line, the first few months of 2014 reveal a span of new art shows in Denver, worth viewing between football games, snowboarding trips and waiting in line at the marijuana shops. The Transit of Venus: Four Decades, Front Range Women in the Visual Arts January 10 – February 23, 2014 More …
If media coverage at the end of a year can seem like a redux of sameness — big money, big deals — consider in arts media the equity gap between the few stories that seem to get told hundreds or thousands of times, versus the thousands of stories that don’t get told a single time. (An inner voice says, “Don’t now try to argue for fairness.” Ok.) Here, though, is More …
Comic Future, an exhibition curated by Fairfax Dorn and installed at Ballroom Marfa in Texas through February 2, 2014, reveals the dismantling of comedic devices by two of the artists, Carroll Dunham and Paul McCarthy. Blue Planet (84 ¼ by 60 inches), a painting by Dunham (father of Lena Dunham of Girls fame), renders the largest form of the canvas blue in an ovoid, amorphous blob, central to the composition. More …
One of Telluride Film Festival‘s many idiosyncracies is that the festival does not announce its program in advance. The festival has begun once the program is out. Here are a few suggestions about movies that have been much-awaited. In my view the most-awaited film at the festival, is The Unknown Known by Errol Morris, his portrait of Donald Rumsfeld, the man who brought you the war in Iraq and some great neologisms, More …
“A radical rethinking of SITE’s signature exhibition,” and a “reimagined series,” were just two of the phrases that SITE Santa Fe Phillips director and chief curator Irene Hofmann used on Monday night at the Farmer’s Market Pavilion in Santa Fe to describe what will become, in summer 2014, the first of a three-part series of biannual exhibitions focused on contemporary art of the Americas. Replete with a new name and More …
The St. Julien Hotel ballroom in Boulder was bustling February 15th with an all-star cast of start-up entrepreneurs, filmmakers, and media visionaries, who gathered to speak to a crowd of tech-heads, young and old, paying $65 to attend Boulder Film Festival’s fourth annual Digital Media Symposium. With keynote speakers Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Microsoft and Louie Psihoyos, Oscar-winning director of “The Cove”, the crowd got an afternoon’s worth of More …
Launched in 2011 by the Now in its second year, the theme is “Art and Political Activism.” Behold Shepard Fairey, who came to campus Sunday night (February 17, 2013) for a Q&A with SFUAD’s graphic design department chair, David Grey. During the week of February 18, Fairey will also design and paint a permanent outdoor mural on the school campus. This is the artist whose 1990s Andre the Giant sticker More …
Our age has a “my sister-my daughter” relationship with celebrity. Is it our twin or our spawn? An interesting question deals not in the obvious worshipful condition, but in how to define a role – and a difference – for art objects in an image- and celebrity-inebriated society like ours. Walter Benjamin wrote the famous Mechanical Reproduction essay back in 1928, but even a seer like him couldn’t forsee Steve More …
In the city of New Orleans, two exhibitions that ran concurrently, as cogeneration extends from one source, appeared as if an intrinsic grandfather birthed the concepts presented. “Lifelike, ” which closed at the New Orleans Museum of Art February 3, encompassed work made from the late 1960’s to the present. Artists including Robert Bechtle, Vija Celmins, John Clem Clarke, Chuck Close, Daniel Douke, Alex Hay, Jasper Johns, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, More …