Category: visual

Here’s some of how a $25,000 NEA grant broke down for L.A.’s Craft and Folk Museum to mount Chapters: Book Arts in Southern California: “Security for the show cost $1,200. Postcard printing and mailing cost $150. Three advertising spots on a local NPR station totaled $1,500. Lighting and painting supplies were $1,140. Insurance for the show was $1,200. The most expensive item on the list: $8,000 for labels and wall text fabrication for the exhibition. Artist fees for all commissioned work totaled only $6,000.”

Things have changed dramatically in just a few years – and in several decades. “For the first time since the 1940s, when Lisbon was a refuge from the war, says Pestana, the city is ‘really cosmopolitan.'”

And what’s the deal with art historians who have failed to use primary sources while talking about them? “A modest exhibition of slate paintings will not be the grandest tribute paid to Sidney Nolan in his centenary year. But it is perhaps the most poignant. Australia’s greatest 20th-century artist painted them in the early 1940s while in the early throes of his decade-long affair with Sunday Reed, and living in a decidedly modern menage with Sunday and her husband John.”

The artist will sculpt the first woman to appear in Parliament Square as a statue alongside the area’s many men – and that first woman will be suffragist Millicent Fawcett.

Rowan Moore is not having it: “It has wrung tens of millions out of the public purse on the basis of deceptions, distortions and facts that proved to be fake. … Its claims to fundraising prowess are exaggerated, its promised transport benefits minimal. Its backers assert overwhelming public support on the basis of a poll that told those polled nothing of the costs and drawbacks of the project.”

Kenyatta Hinkle, who made a name for herself as a young artist in a 2012 Hammer Museum show, has a new show making waves in L.A. She “would play hip-hop, including Kanye West, and then draw on acid-free, recycled paper, dipping Spanish moss into India ink while dancing, which creates the nebulous and sporadic nature of her work.”

“The idea of cultural continuity between the remains, some of which are thousands of years old — one of the most well-known, Kennewick Man, is, at 8,500 years old, older than the pyramids — and a contemporary group, is highly questionable; human populations are not bounded entities through time in this way. That a selected group can decide the future of remains — and the future of research — on the basis of their biology, is disturbing. Identity should not dictate the pursuit or closing down of knowledge.”

Steve Tobin’s The Trinity Root was made to commemorate a sycamore tree in the churchyard of Trinity’s St. Paul’s Chapel that took the brunt of debris from the Twin Towers (which were across the street) and saved the historic chapel from serious damage. He gave it to Trinity for free in exchange for the promise that the church would keep it in its courtyard permanently. Then, two years ago, a new rector packed the sculpture off to Connecticut.

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) painted geometric compositions even before Kandinsky and Malevich did. She was also a mystic, and her planned museum south of Stockholm is being planned by a group of “anthroposophists.” But Klint’s family claims that the group is exaggerating her connection to the movement and is refusing to lend any of her art to the project.

“Germany has dealt with the long shadow of Nazi-era looting for many years. Now the government is setting aside funding to investigate another dark chapter of the past: the expropriation of works of art by the Stasi, the East German secret police, during the Cold War. The research could open the door to new restitution claims from the families of victims.”