Category: visual

The school is in trouble over “a host of code violations,” most stemming “from illegal signs on many of the for-profit university’s more than 30 properties across the city or from buying buildings and converting them into classrooms or group housing without proper permits.”

The National Museum of Women in the Arts hopes its New York Avenue Sculpture Project “will bring some much-needed zing to its sector of downtown and spark interest in the 23-year-old museum. … All the artists will be women, and the work will change every year or two.”

“Emporis, the global building database, on Tuesday will name the residential and hotel tower” Aqua, designed by Jeanne Gang and “best known for its spectacularly undulating balconies, its 2009 skyscraper of the year.” The runner-up for the Emporis Skyscraper Award is Dubai’s O-14 high-rise.

The federal stimulus funding will pay for a “new 35,000-square-foot learning centre [that] will be a substantial upgrade of [the] gallery’s existing educational spaces … and will house new programs. There will be a staff expansion as well, allowing the AGO to host twice as many schoolchildren.”

What Claire Kujundzic “thought was being leased to VANOC as a work of public art isn’t available to the public at all, and won’t be even after the Games. Furthermore, Ms. Kujundzic’s contract to lease the work to VANOC bars her from publicizing it. So the public can’t see it, and the public can’t hear about it directly from her.”

“Under the agreement…, the city will give SFMOMA the existing fire station on Howard Street. In exchange, the museum will build the city a state-of-the-art fire station on Folsom Street, a deal that essentially translates to a $10 million gift from museum leadership to San Francisco, the mayor’s office said.”

“The renowned art museum in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood said its investment portfolio closed out the year valued at $161.6 million — some 53 percent higher than at the end of June, the close of its last fiscal year.”

“For models, Caravaggio used laborers, prostitutes and gypsies. The church was outraged. Painting after painting was rejected: a dead Virgin that looked like a bloated corpse, a jailer yanking Christ’s hair, saints with dirty feet.” But 16th-century Rome was not a pretty place.

“With new multimedia tours, inventive collaborations with local and international artists and, most significantly, ambitious new expansion plans, the museum is intent on looking ahead. Two weeks ago, officials said they had raised $250 million in just six months, letting the museum double its endowment and put $150 million toward the building of a new wing and other development.”

“There’s another reason [besides sustainability issues] why I feel uncomfortable about the [Oral-B] Sonic Complete – it doesn’t look very nice. Now I know this sounds: a) flaky, especially when compared to the eco-crimes of wasting fossil fuel and clogging up landfill sites; b) subjective, as other people may like it; and c) hypocritical from someone, like me, who spends much of her time preaching about how there’s much more to design than mere style. But look at it. …”