August 25, 2015
CONVERGE45, a city-wide program of contemporary art events planned for Portland in 2016, now has a curator: Kristy Edmunds, who founded and ran Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. “We needed a special curator,” said CONVERGE45 co-founder Elizabeth Leach, who runs a gallery in the city’s Pearl District, reports April Baer for OPB.
Edmunds later left to direct the Melbourne International Arts Festival in Australia, and has also worked as a consultant for the New York Park Avenue Armory, and as director of the Center for the Art of Performance at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Addressing the theme, “You In Mind,” Edmunds plans to “encourage artists to explore things made without regard to sales or web hits or name recognition,” according to Baer.
Said Edmunds, “Right now, what Portland does and what Portland has offered … matters immensely … because almost everything that we can imagine, someone is trying to extract wealth from.”
As artforum.com reported earlier, Vulcan Inc., an initiative founded by Seattle’s Paul Allen, is also backing the new festival. Nike is another sponsor. And organizers seem optimistic enough about the festival’s future: Curator Cris Moss, director of the University of Oregon’s White Box space, has already been named curator for its 2017 edition.
August 25, 2015
Marion “Kippy” Stroud
Marion “Kippy” Stroud, founder and director of the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia and the Acadia Summer Arts Program, has died.
Timothy Rub, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art—where Stroud was a longtime trustee—recalled her significance to contemporary art, and her devotion to championing handmade objects and textiles as a medium, according to Stephan Salisbury in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“She was of enormous importance for us in contemporary art, and for support of our work in that area,” Rub said. “She was a donor of many fine works and, from time to time, of funds to acquire things we did not have the resources to acquire ourselves. Over the last twenty to thirty years, she had a really significant impact.”
The Fabric Workshop hosted hundreds of artists in residence over the years, including Marina Abramovic, Claes Oldenburg, Donald Lipski, Louise Bourgeois, and Red Grooms. It encouraged projects involving unlikely media crossovers: Architect Robert Venturi designed neckties there, while sculptor Italo Scanga created napkins.
About twenty years later (and around two decades ago) Stroud decided that there should be a museum that housed work produced at the workshop, so she founded the museum now in the 1200 block of Arch Street.
Stroud later also established the Acadia Summer Arts program on Mount Desert Island in Maine, which soon acquired the name Kamp Kippy. It became an “international think tank,” as Salisbury describes, drawing a mix of artists, critics, and curators.
“She also had a huge heart, a brilliant business mind, formidable organizational skills, and boundless energy and vision,” said Patterson Sims, a cousin who was also formerly the director of the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey.
August 25, 2015
Janet Dees has been hired as the new curator of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. She’ll begin on September 21. A former curator at SITE Santa Fe, Dees cocurated “Unsettled Landscapes,” the first exhibition of “SITElines: New Perspectives on the Art of the Americas,” collaborating as part of a team of four curators. On the occasion of the institution’s twentieth anniversary, she also helped organize a yearlong series of twenty projects featuring previous SITE Santa Fe artists.
Dees has also researched and taught African and African-American art, as well as Spanish Colonial art, in previous positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, and at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York.
“Janet’s practice matches our mission,” said Kathleen Bickford Berzock, associate director of curatorial affairs at the Block Museum. “She will play a pivotal role in shaping our curatorial program.”
August 25, 2015
Striking Staff Members of the National Museums of Scotland
Staff at the National Museums of Scotland have begun a seven-day strike, according to the BBC. Timed to take place during the busiest days of the Edinburgh Festival, the protests respond to the museum’s removal of a weekend allowance from new members of staff. Officials said withdrawal of the allowance could reduce an individual’s pay by between $3,000 and $4,600.
The move comes on the heels of a decision, earlier this month, by workers at London’s National Gallery to begin an indefinite strike, as artforum.com previously reported here.
“This has been an eighteen-month long dispute now and essentially it’s about fair pay,” said Alan Brown, industrial officer for Scotland’s Public and Commercial Services union.
“I’ll be on the picket line if they want to talk to me,” he added.
August 25, 2015
Former Singapore Art Museum director Tan Boon Hui has been appointed director of the Asia Society Museum, according to the Straits Times’s Deepika Shetty. He will also serve as the society’s vice-president for Global Arts and Cultural Programs, leading its art collections as well as international art and cultural activities.
Tan, who was chosen from more than one hundred candidates, will begin in December. He is currently assistant chief executive for museums and programs at Singapore’s National Heritage Board, and served as one of the project directors of the 2013 Singapore Biennale. He later also ran the Singapour en France festival, which featured Singapore contemporary arts, culture, and heritage in French cities like Nantes, Paris, and Lyon.
Performance artist Lee Wen credited Tan with “helping to legitimize performance art during those difficult years for performance art in Singapore in the 1990s.”
Tan, meanwhile, said of his new appointment: “This is hugely exciting. This is the moment for Asian art and Asian artists to enter the narrative of global art history.” The Asia Society has eleven centers (plus affiliate offices) in the US and Asia.
August 24, 2015
The Nevada Museum of Art is receiving a $2 million gift from patron and former investment banker John La Gatta, reports Seth A. Richardson for the Reno Gazette-Journal. The donation—one of the biggest in the institution’s history—will help fund the museum’s endowment and educational endeavors (including teachers’ training and the art-learning center).
As thanks for the donation the museum will rename its largest gallery, on the third floor, the John Hawley Olds La Gatta Gallery. La Gatta will also be made an honorary lifetime trustee.
“I was brought up in a household that had lots of models and art going on,” said La Gatta, whose father was an illustrator. “Our house was always stuffed full of artists and composers and so on.”
August 24, 2015
The East Village experimental performing arts space La MaMa will be opening a new venue, dubbed The Downstairs, at the same site as the venue’s Ellen Stewart Theater, according to the New York Times’ Andrew R. Chow. A 150-seat theater, an exhibition space, and a classroom will all be part of the new theater, which falls under a larger, ongoing thirty-million-dollar renovation and restoration.
“We are embracing twenty-first-century tools for collaboration and production,” said La MaMa’s artistic director Mia Yoo. A puppet show inspired by Japanese traditions, “Shank’s Mare,” will inaugurate the space on November 6.
August 24, 2015
Philippe Pirotte, director of the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule and of Portikus in Frankfurt am Main, will be curator of the Montreal Biennale’s 2016 edition. The biennial is coproduced with the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
One of the cofounders of the contemporary art center objectif_exhibitions in Antwerp, Belgium, Pirotte was also previously director of the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, where he oversaw exhibitions by artists like Jutta Koether, Oscar Tuazon, Allan Kaprow, and Owen Land. In 2012, he began as adjunct senior curator of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
“Pirotte is an uncompromising curator, a superb exhibition maker and a gifted writer who has already produced a number of memorable projects,” said Sylvie Fortin, executive and artistic director of the biennial.
Describing his vision for the upcoming festival, Pirotte said: “At the moment, I am imagining the exhibition as a space that informs us about ourselves—uninvited. Simultaneously playful and fatalistic, it is a space where things can go awry. In that sense, the exhibition does not provide relief because its objects do not necessarily reveal themselves as truths.”
August 24, 2015
The current commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment in New York City, Cynthia Lopez, will be stepping down from her post, according to the New York Times’ Andrew R. Chow. Lopez has held the post for the past sixteen months. She will be succeeded by Luis Castro, the first deputy commissioner for Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Lopez oversaw a 56 percent growth in episodic television shows filmed in New York, says the mayor. Previously a coexecutive producer for the PBS documentary series “POV,” she is also the founding chairwoman of National Association of Latino Independent Producers. She was responsible for organizing the People en Espanol Festival, which will be staged in New York in October
“It has been satisfying to know that every time a Made in NY truck is on the streets of our communities, it means 130,000 more New Yorkers in middle-class jobs,” she said.
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