Daniel Libeskind's "Crystals" at the Las Vegas City Center (bottom left) - photos by Ken Hamel/DenverArts.org

• Richard Ouzounian/Toronto Star: Crystals anchors Sin City’s City Center Daniel Libeskind’s recycled design is dazzling the crowds in Las Vegas
• Christopher Hawthorne/LA Times: In Las Vegas, one final echo of the boom years
• Andrew Meyers/The Faster Times: CityCenter and Its Groundbreaking Art Collection: Part II
• Las Vegas Sun: What’s being said about CityCenter
  

BECA Benefit Art Auction

November 29 - December 5, 2009

Online at http://www.becagallery.com

S.J. Hart - Companion Animal; one of the many works of art up for auction

Why is it so hard to design a great contemporary-art museum? This question has been bothering art lovers for a while. One institution after another has embarked on vast new building projects over the last decade, and in nearly every case the museum and its architects struggled to figure out the right balance between architectural expression and the need to showcase art. Yet after all this time and all those buildings, the question is still being asked.

• NY Times: Jeanne-Claude, Christo’s Collaborator on Environmental Canvas, Is Dead at 74
• ARTINFO: Remembering Jeanne-Claude, Polemicist and Diplomat
• Cañon City Daily Record: Jeanne-Claude remembered for her unique talent, humor
• Pueblo Cheiftain: Jeanne-Claude’s death won’t end river project
  

• In Review: Christo and Jeanne Claude
• Over the River at The Phillips Collection in DC
• More Christo News
• Christo and Jeanne-Claude Prints and Objects at the CVA

The Cleveland Museum of Art's new East Wing - photos by Ken Hamel/DenverArts.org

• A room full of Picassos including the major "Blue Period" piece "La Vie"
• A Richard Serra sculpture playing rolled iron on an angled and balanced iron base, a slight departure from his well known and often much larger steel works
• A massive Lee Krasner painting "Celebration" upstaging a much smaller (and arguably less interesting) work across the aisle from her husband Jackson Pollock
• Works by two of my favorite German artists Anselm Kiefer ("Lot's Wife") near one of Gerhard Richter's paint swatch samples formally arranged in a grid based on random colors
• In spite of the convention of institutions checking off name brand artists for their permanent collections, you can never see too many works by Cy Twombly
  
• Click here for some pix...

"Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web" by the Argentine artist Tomas Saraceno - Todd Heisler/The New York Times

• A Wealth of Art in Venice
• In Venice, a Quieter Biennale of Careful Choices and Looks
• A Small World Crammed on the Grand Stage of the Venice Biennale
• For Art Lovers, Basel Doesn’t End at the Fair

Jewel Samad/Agence France-Press — Getty Images

For a street artist — who, like many, exults in the essential slipperiness of outlaw work — it’s undoubtedly all the more gratifying when you finally make it into a big museum to do so by such epically serpentine means: an oft-arrested political street artist who’s also a highly paid commercial artist offers on his own initiative to make a vaguely Soviet-looking poster for the campaign of an anti-establishment politician (who, interestingly, can’t officially claim the poster because of rights concerns about the news photograph it was based on, snagged by the artist from the Web) and then the politician, surprisingly, sweeps into the establishment with vows to shake it up, taking the outlaw’s non-outlaw poster into the establishment with him.

James Turrell's recently installed "Mohl ip" at the Phoenix Art Museum

PHOENIX, AZ.- Phoenix Art Museum announced the acquisition of a monumental new light installation by internationally renowned artist James Turrell – known as the sculptor of light. This compelling new work, Mohl ip, purchased with funds provided by the Museum’s Contemporary Forum, is the largest of the artist’s Tall Glass series, the only neon Tall Glass in the United States and the first to be permanently on view in a public museum.

“This is a major acquisition by a seminal artist working today,” commented James Ballinger, The Sybil Harrington Director, Phoenix Art Museum. “Turrell’s light sculptures, Skyspaces and work at Roden Crater in northern Arizona, have brought him worldwide recognition. Given his importance both on the international art scene and here in Arizona, we are delighted to have this impressive new piece continuously on display in and in our collection.”

Mohl ip consists of a core of neon panels which are individually programmed by the artist to create a subtle shift in color over time, similar to the deliberate but beautiful fashion in which the sky changes from late afternoon to night. Seen through a diffusing panel of glass, the careful construction ensures that the viewer sees only a floating, changing field of light—a subtle revelatory experience of light as tangible entities and physical presence.

Since the 1960s, Turrell’s work has explored the interaction of light and space, drawing on his knowledge of mathematics, perceptual psychology and optics. At an impressive 10 x 20 ft, Mohl ip, a transliteration of the Korean term that alludes to the visual purple or pale blue light seen with the eyes closed in the early stages of meditation, is the hypnotic new centerpiece of the Phoenix Art Museum’s Cummings Great Hall. Turrell described it as “a visual mantra.”

“Mohl ip encapsulates Turrell’s career-long investigation into the manipulating light as an aesthetic and physical material that he began in 1966 with his Mendota Stoppage series and continued with his Ganzefeld pieces and Skyspaces,” commented Sara Cochran, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Phoenix Art Museum.

“This dynamic and exquisite installation also demonstrates the artist’s on-going interest in shaping the viewer’s experience so that they are able to perceive themselves perceiving. It is a powerful and delightful investigation of the very act of seeing that the public will have to experience for themselves to understand it.”

Since 1968 when Turrell received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the artist has been a recipient of 21 awards including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1984), the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government (1991) and the Governor’s Arts Award, Artist of the Year, Arizona (1997). His work has been featured in over 160 solo exhibitions worldwide and can be seen in more than 70 international collections including: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Panza Collection, Varese, Italy; Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

In 1972, Turrell began transforming Roden Crater, a natural cinder volcano situated on the southwestern edge of the Painted Desert in northern Arizona, into a large-scale artwork. Through the medium of light, the piece relates to the surrounding sky, land and culture. It is also a massive naked-eye observatory designed specifically for the viewing of celestial phenomena.

Phoenix Art Museum’s Contemporary Collection is one of the most active and growing areas of the Museum. Displayed in the 30,000 sq. ft. world-class Ellen and Howard Katz Wing for Modern Art created by architects Tod Williams/Billie Tsien and Associates, the collection includes large-scale photography, outdoor sculpture, and art created in a variety of surprising and unexpected materials, plus more "traditional" paintings on canvas. Mohl ip joins several other iconic works in the collection by Cornelia Parker, Yoyoi Kusama, Julian Opie and Josiah McElheny, some of the leading artists of our time.

To celebrate the installation and unveiling of Mohl ip, the Museum will have several other Turrell works on view for a limited time including photographs and plans of Roden Crater, limited edition prints with Segura Publications and the model for a former unrealized project with Phoenix Art Museum.

James Turrell's Tall Glass piece Mohl ip is a Museum purchase with funds provided by the Museum’s support organization Contemporary Forum. Contemporary Forum is dedicated to promoting interest, knowledge and understanding of contemporary art through education programs and acquisition of contemporary art for the Museum's collection. In addition, the Forum sponsors exhibitions of contemporary art and provides contact for its members with artists, galleries, collectors and art educators on a national and international level.

Artist's Choice: Vik Muniz, Rebus

Museum of Modern Art (NYC)

December 11, 2008 – February 23, 2009

Artist Vik Muniz

Muniz inventively questions the function and traditions of visual representation by using unlikely materials to render the subjects in his photographs. For this exhibition, Muniz has chosen a rebus—a combination of unrelated visual and linguistic elements to create a larger deductive meaning—as the organizing principle of his presentation. The exhibition will feature approximately 80 works of sculpture, photography, painting, prints, drawings, video, and design objects selected and installed by the artist in a narrative sequence to create surprising juxtapositions and new meanings. Among the artists whose work will be on view are John Baldessari, Gordon Matta-Clark, Nan Goldin, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Eugène Atget, and Rachel Whiteread. Design objects will range from a wooden pencil to a kitchen pail to a Rubik’s Cube to finally, an Exit sign.

Computer rendering of the Clyfford Still Museum

http://portlandart.net