Thickly Settled (detail view), as seen at LA><ART in 2007.
Congratulations to Austin-based artist Jeff Williams, winner of this year’s $30,000 Texas Prize!! CA audiences will perhaps be most familiar with Jeff’s dust-encrusted miniblind sculptures from a few years ago (as seen at LA><ART). More recently he created stressed concrete sculptures for a 2011 Artpace residency. For more on Jeff, see his interview from … might be good. (Congrats are also due to AMOA-Arthouse, in the midst of a major transition period after merging last year, for pulling off the TX Prize at all this year; and also to finalists Jamal Cyrus and Will Henry.)
David Kordansky, Regen Projects, François Ghebaly, Night Gallery and Susanne Vielmetter are participating in the Frieze Art Fair on Randall’s Island in NY this weekend, which opened this morning amid hubbub that apparently lives up to its pre-show hype!
Just in time to fill the dearth of attention on the LA art scene: the first Los Angeles biennial, organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART, will be presented at the Hammer, LAXART, and the Department of Cultural Affairs’ Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park. Check out this video preview!
Photo via LA Times website. Credit: Gregory Gilmer / L.A. County Arts Commission
Ayanna Hudson of the L.A. County Arts Commission has been selected as director of arts education for the National Endowment for the Arts. As reported by the LA Times, Hudson will spearhead the Endowment’s efforts to ” impact the lives of millions of youth through the arts.”
Closeup of Thomas Eakins "The Wrestlers" from Google Art Project
LACMA is one of the participating institutions in the Google Art Project, where you can fritter away hours zooming into hi-res images of 100 of their objects for super clarity, just like a conservator puttering around in storage. Don’t expect anything contemporary, though — the most recent artwork they’ve included is Thomas Eakins’ 1899 The Wrestlers.
Street artist Shepard Fairey, (wearing a suit!) pled guilty to misdemeanor criminal contempt charges connected with his altering evidence in a 2009 court battle over his use of a copyrighted photograph as the basis for his renowned Barack Obama Hope poster. Fairey admitted deleting documents and fabricating others and lying to his lawyers after one of his employees discovered the documents Fairey believed destroyed.
Ironically, the original copyright infringement beef between Fairey and the AP was settled; Fairey won’t use any more AP images without permission, and will split his profits from the poster image, but the criminal contempt conviction might put Fairey in prison for up to six months. Sentencing is set for July 16.
The LA Times‘ Deborah Vankin reports that the enormous rock for artist Michael Heizer ‘s “Levitated Mass” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been levitated. Emmert Costruction has lifted the 340 ton rock onto a custom-built steel transportation frame that began crawling from Stove Valley quarry in Riverside County to downtown Los Angeles last night. It is scheduled to arrive on March 10.
Iconic LA sculptor Ken Price, 77, died early today after struggling with tongue and throat cancer for several years. He recently completed preparations for his retrospective, which opens this fall at LACMA and travels to the Nasher Sculpture Center next year. Christopher Knight’s extensive obituary chronicles Price’s early education, his breakout shows at Ferus Gallery and his incorporation of LA industrial paint colors and the “verve, frequent humor and evident humanity” of Mexican folk ceramics.
In 2010/2011 Machine Project produced a year of programming which proposed new, alternative, and experimental ways of presenting work at the Hammer Museum. Projects included a vacation for houseplants, a two-minute performance series underneath the stairs, an overnight dream-in and a ton of other stuff, now documented and discussed in a FREE downloadable report! Highly recommended for anyone who wants to see how the public engagement sausage gets made.
An amusing and embarrassing story in today’s NY Times relates how UC Berkeley accidentally sold a carved redwood panel by WPA artist Sargent Johnson for $150 (+tax) from it’s surplus furniture depot. There’s a happy ending, though- through the sharp eyes and acquisitive instincts of a lucky antique dealer, the piece was re-sold for an undisclosed sum between $200,000 and $1 million to the the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, where it will be on public display, a prominent part of the museum’s American art collection.
