Category: visual

“Hanging over the Met’s decision this year to postpone its new $600 million wing for Modern and contemporary art – as well as the museum’s recent management turmoil – have been nagging questions: Is Mr. Lauder’s gift, valued at more than $1 billion four years ago, now at risk? If the Met takes too long to resurrect the project or ultimately scales it back, might Mr. Lauder take his collection elsewhere?” Lauder says definitely not, but the donation contract does have a completion date.

Digital restrictions are the backdrop to the work of all Chinese artists, and for some, the so-called Great Firewall—the online surveillance structure that blocks data from foreign countries—provides both subject and medium. “The Chinese internet is such a unique and rich material, I am often inspired by it,” says the New York- and Shanghai-based artist Miao Ying. “For anyone who resides in China, you will be shaped by it, not just because of the firewall. China has its own internet environment and it is developing more rapidly than anywhere else.”

How did Perdita Hunt change the Watts Gallery’s “Sleeping Beauty look” wherein the gallery “was cold and dark, the roof leaked, the canvases sagged, and the tea room was poisoning its clients”? The first step was a vision that didn’t include raw sewage running down the side of the building.

Artist Brian Belott, who has curated a show with a combo of children’s art and his own art: “A child wakes up in the morning with so much energy, and I try, in my own practice, no matter what I do, to tap into that hyper-spazzy energy that slowly gets shut down as you enter the adult world. As an artist, I’m into celebratory stuff. I’d much rather create a dance party than a pity party.”

The artist has been creating an archive of ’90s Chicano youth in Los Angeles via her Instagram account, and now a six-week residency at LACMA. “Archiving and preserving and talking about these materials,” she explains, “sometimes that can be more important than making a photo.”

And the upshot was that part of New Mexico became “Georgia O’Keeffe country.” Why? “As Mont Sainte-Victoire was to Cezanne, so Pedernal was to O’Keeffe, who painted it, obsessively, almost 30 times. ‘It’s my private mountain,’ she once said. ‘It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.'”

Maria Balshaw “delivers her radical intent with a certain breeziness, casually mentioning she is aiming for total gender parity. ‘I don’t strive for shows 50 per cent by women because that’s a feminist gesture, but because we want to refer to the world we live in,’ she explains.”

The thoughtful – if blunt – show will make people reimagine how we tell the story of U.S. history – and how we tell stories about each other.

“British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey … are elevating grass into something quite beautiful. They have been creating large-scale canvases of living grass, by tinkering with the natural growth process of this little plant in order to create impressive, photographic-like images.” (includes video)

Kat Eschner tells the story of cobalt and the many shades of blue pigment that the element made achievable and affordable (no more finding and grinding lapis lazuli!).