Announcement

45 articles, 2016-02-26 00:01 1 ‘The Vacant and the Inhabited’ at Referência Galeria de Arte, Brasilia Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday 2016-02-25 22:53 854Bytes www.artnews.com 2 Solid Cutting Boards and Trays more from 24d- Studio home accessories Product Story Loops Collection is about enjoying food with family and friends, with a twist on traditional serving methods. Double sided design allows a single product to have multiple functionalities as a cutting board, serving tray, bread board, and cheese and meat tray. Geometric and organic design brings joy to... 2016-02-25 22:53 2KB www.designboom.com 3 ICONS | Spring 2016 Issues Go to Issue... Spring 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 Summer 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 Summer 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014... 2016-02-25 22:53 3KB www.artnews.com 4 5 Reasons To Volunteer At Your Museum We couldn't do what we do at the BMA without volunteers. Whether they are helping visitors at the Information Desk, facilitating art projects at family programs, volunteering at special events, or providing assistance to staff, volunteers help the Museum on a daily basis. If you're thinking about volunteering at the... 2016-02-25 20:16 1KB www.artsbma.org 5 Invocation: An Interview with Rez Abbasi Rez Abbasi's Invocation represents a distinctly South Asian-influenced voice in contemporary jazz, thanks in no small part to notable members such as Vijay Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa. Their most re... 2016-02-25 22:52 948Bytes blogs.walkerart.org 6 ‘Falsettos’ Is Returning to Broadway Lincoln Center Theater will stage a revival of “Falsettos” on Broadway in the fall. 2016-02-25 20:00 1KB artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com 7 This Dapper Robot Is an Art Critic A robot named Berenson is quietly judging art at the ‘Persona: Oddly Human’ exhibition at Paris’ Musée du quai Branly. 2016-02-25 19:10 5KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 8 Program Offers Free E-Books to Low-Income Children Under the Open eBooks program thousands of best-selling books are available free to low-income children. 2016-02-25 19:09 2KB artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com 9 Rachel Weisz to Star in ‘Plenty’ at the Public Theater The revival of David Hare’s “Plenty” is set for the Public Theater this fall, the theater announced on Thursday. 2016-02-25 19:00 1KB artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com 10 Jeremy McQueen’s Ballet Collective to Foster Black Works Starting in May, Jeremy McQueen’s new ballet collective, Black Iris Project, will present new works about black lives and history. 2016-02-25 18:02 2KB artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com 11 Morning Links: Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector Edition Must-read stories from around the art world 2016-02-25 11:53 1KB www.artnews.com

12 Setback for Picasso’s Daughter in Battle Over Sculpture A French court rejects a request by Maya Widmaier-Picasso in a battle over a sculpture by her father. 2016-02-25 17:41 1KB artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com 13 a first look at BIG's via 57 west 'courtscraper' in new york with work on via 57 west nearing completion, designboom goes inside the building for a look at bjarke ingels’ first major project in the united states. 2016-02-25 17:38 5KB www.designboom.com 14 One Direction Fanfic Takes the Art World by Storm One particularly steamy thread of 1D fanfic is now an enveloping art series, thanks to London-based artist Owen G. Parry. 2016-02-25 17:30 6KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 15 Interview with Dr. Cathleen Cummings: Film in Post-Partition India On March 5 at 6PM, the Museum is excited to welcome Dr. Cathleen Cummings to present the Callahan Lecture, where she will discuss India’s post-Partition identity and the cinematic image. Dr. Cummings is an Associate Professor of Art History at The University of Alabama at Birmingham who specializes in South Asian art... 2016-02-25 19:07 7KB www.artsbma.org 16 The Shape-Shifter: How Left the Bayou and Messed With the Establishment Lynda Benglis photographed in Taos, New Mexico, in December 2015. PAUL O’CONNOR You notice her face first. This is odd, because she’s nude, her body bronzed 2016-02-25 19:07 17KB www.artnews.com 17 FX Harsono's "Chronicles of Resilience" Remembers Indonesia's Dark History One of Indonesia’s lead contemporary artists, with a career spanning forty years, FX Harsono is due to present his latest work at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York 2016-02-25 15:21 2KB uk.blouinartinfo.com 18 Captivating Simulations Explore the Beauty and Raw Power of Waves Using abstraction, Memo Akten's 'Waves 2015' reflects on the mood and reactions after the attacks on Paris last November. 2016-02-25 15:05 2KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com 19 10 Renoir Quotes on His Birthday We're remembering Pierre-Auguste Renoir on his birthday by looking back at 10 of his quotes on art, emotion, and the virtue of perseverance. 2016-02-25 13:54 3KB news.artnet.com 20 Artists Create 3-D Scan of Nefertiti Bust Two artists secretly created a 3-D scan of the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti and produced a replica for a Cairo museum and a downloadable 3-D scan. 2016-02-25 13:29 4KB news.artnet.com 21 WWI Ceramic Poppies May Head to Belfast Arts institutions throughout Northern Ireland are submitting bids to host two segments of Paul Cummins's remaining 6,000 ceramic poppies. 2016-02-25 12:37 2KB news.artnet.com 22 Design Dealers: Kim Hostler and Juliet Burrows Interviewed Q&A wit Kim Hostler and Juliet Burrows, owners of the New York based design gallery Hostler Burrows. 2016-02-25 12:15 6KB www.blouinartinfo.com 23 What to Expect at the Armory Show 2016 As the centerpiece of the early March season in New York, the venerable Armory Show returns to Manhattan for its 22nd edition. 2016-02-25 12:08 1KB www.blouinartinfo.com

24 Madrid Art Guide February 2016 This week's guide includes Jesús Rafael Soto, Josef Albers, Anton Henning, and more. 2016-02-25 12:02 3KB news.artnet.com 25 When Islam Meant Splendor Read THE DAILY PIC on a show at the Metropolitan Museum whose fancy flask matches the grand image we once had of Islam. 2016-02-25 11:39 1KB news.artnet.com 26 Maarten Baas Presents Latest Collection at CWG's New NYC Space Dutch designer Maarten Baas will be presenting his latest collection, Carapace, at Carpenters Workshop Gallery's newly opened space in New York this March. 2016-02-25 11:16 2KB www.blouinartinfo.com 27 Who Are the Top Artists at Auction in 2015?- Find out which artists were the top-sellers at auction in 2015. Hint: Italian painters had a very good year. 2016-02-25 11:06 3KB news.artnet.com 28 Do Art Fairs Need to Expand to Survive?— The introduction of TEFAF into New York's art fair calendar highlights the increasing need of art fairs, large and small, to expand to new cities. 2016-02-25 10:45 12KB news.artnet.com 29 Sting's Art Collection Is $4 Million at Christie's Sting's art and collectibles, including a Steinway piano and works by Matisse, Picasso, and Yves Klein, sold for $4.19 million at Christie's London. 2016-02-25 10:09 1KB news.artnet.com 30 Met Opera Names Ennead Architects to Redesign Lobby The opera house has chosen the firm to lead the renovation of its cramped lobby. 2016-02-25 00:00:00 1KB www.nytimes.com 31 International: Far Beyond Warhol and Lichtenstein An exhibition reveals how Pop Art shook up Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia. 2016-02-25 00:00:00 8KB www.nytimes.com 32 Spellbinding Treasures From ’s Kamakura Period at Asia Society A new exhibition focuses on wonderfully vivid representations of Buddhist divinities. 2016-02-25 00:00:00 6KB www.nytimes.com 33 Meet Facebook’s New Emojis: Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry “Not every moment you want to share is happy,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. “Sometimes you want to share something sad or frustrating. Our community has been asking for a dislike button for years, but not because people want to tell friends they don’t like their posts... 2016-02-25 00:00:00 1KB gdusa.com 34 Ho Chi Minh City’s Shifting Skyline Stirs a Movement to Preserve History As many historic buildings are razed to make way for the new, residents have started Facebook groups dedicated to celebrating and protecting them. 2016-02-25 00:00:00 8KB www.nytimes.com 35 Serpentine Gallery Reveals 2016 Pavilion and Summer Houses London’s Serpentine Gallery has revealed the designs for the 16th annual Serpentine Pavilion and the four 25sqm Summer Houses 2016-02-24 22:45:29 2KB uk.blouinartinfo.com

36 Artist's Message In A Bottle Retrieved By Artist American artist George Boorujy's message in a bottle project was picked up by a French painter and her husband. 2016-02-24 14:42:56+00:00 2KB news.artnet.com 37 FIAC Pulls Plug on Officielle— The Officielle art fair, Paris, will not take place in 2016. 2016-02-24 14:26:46+00:00 2KB news.artnet.com 38 Andrea Bowers' Transgender Icons Shine Andrea Bowers new show, "Whose Feminism Is It Anyway?," presents icons of transgender militancy like CeCe McDonald and Jennicet Gutierrez. 2016-02-24 12:23:44+00:00 7KB news.artnet.com 39 Holocaust Survivor Regains Camille Pissarro A wrong has been righted in the case of a Nazi-looted Camille Pissarro painting, which the University of Oklahoma has agreed to share with a French museum. 2016-02-24 11:52:32+00:00 3KB news.artnet.com 40 Review: Diller Scofidio + Renfro's New Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive Bringing an encyclopedic art museum of more than 19,000 works together with an archive of some 17,000 films, the new BAMPFA is a well-considered jumble, inside and out. 2016-02-24 07:20:09 10KB www.blouinartinfo.com 41 Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar faces down Donald Trump over immigration Monument on US-Mexico border incorporates parts of separating the two countries 2016-02-23 00:00:00 1KB theartnewspaper.com 42 Umberto Eco, 84, Best-Selling Academic Who Navigated Two Worlds, Dies Mr. Eco was an expert in the arcane field of semiotics whose seven works of fiction included the blockbuster medieval mystery “The Name of the Rose.” 2016-02-19 00:00:00 9KB www.nytimes.com 43 Real Art Welcomes Kevin Passmore Real Art welcomes Kevin Passmore as one of the newest additions to our team. 2016-02-04 16:03:52+00:00 1KB realart.com 44 Chaos to Order: Lexmark Brand Experience To bring clarity to the complex story of Lexmark, a diverse company in the B-to-B space, Real Art developed three videos alongside a dynamic simulation. 2016-02-02 16:50:53+00:00 2KB realart.com 45 Real Arters on the Charities and Non-Profits That Matter to Them The so-called "Season of Giving" may be over, but supporting charity is never out of style. We asked four Real Arters to dish on their preferred charities. 2016-01-25 13:45:20+00:00 3KB realart.com Articles

45 articles, 2016-02-26 00:01

1 ‘The Vacant and the Inhabited’ at Referência Galeria de Arte, Brasilia “The Vacant and the Inhabited” is on view at Referência Galeria de Arte in Brasilia, Brazil, through Saturday, March 12. The group exhibition presents recent photographs by Haruo Mikami, Kazuo Okubo, Marcelo Feijó, Márcio Borsoi, Vitor Schietti, and Zuleika de Souza. 2016-02-25 22:53 The Editors

2 Solid Maple Cutting Boards and Trays more from 24d- Studio home accessories Product Story Loops Collection is about enjoying food with family and friends, with a twist on traditional serving methods. Double sided design allows a single product to have multiple functionalities as a cutting board, serving tray, bread board, and cheese and meat tray. Geometric and organic design brings joy to the process of cooking and serving through a playful arrangement of food in multiple circles while cutting it or serving. Gently carved indentation serves as a handle to easily lift a tray off the table. Loops Boards will last a lifetime with proper care. Materials Hard maple with Plant Extracted Oil and Besswax Finish 100% Solid , No Glue Hand Finished and Food Safe Size Loops Small Board: 25 x 20 x 2.3 cm; 9.8″ x 7.9″ x 0.9″ Loops Medium Board: 40 x 22 x 2.3 cm; 15.7″ x 8.66″ x 0.9″ Loops Large Board: 50 x 22 x 2.3 cm; 19.7″ x 8.7″ x 0.9″ Care Instructions To clean the board rinse with water and towel dry. Do not soak the board in water. Do not place in a dish washer. To prevent cracking and warping, rub the board with oil or coat with beeswax and oil when the wood looks dry. Lead Time Items will ship within two business days. Shipping We ship worldwide. All products are sent by registered mail and delivery time is approximately 7-10 business days. If you want to return a product, please contact 24d-studio at [email protected] for return information. Products can be returned within 14 days from the day of receiving the product. All returned products must be unused, in original condition and in the original seller box. No refund or credit shall be given for damaged products. 2016-02-25 22:53

3 ICONS | Spring 2016 Issues Go to Issue... Spring 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 Summer 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 Summer 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 Summer 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 Summer 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 Summer 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 Summer 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 Summer 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 Summer 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 Summer 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 Summer 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 Summer 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 Summer 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 Summer 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 Summer 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002 January 2002 December 2001 November 2001 October 2001 September 2001 Summer 2001 June 2001 May 2001 April 2001 March 2001 February 2001 January 2001 December 2000 November 2000 October 2000 September 2000 Summer 2000 June 2000 May 2000 April 2000 March 2000 February 2000 January 2000 December 1999 November 1999 October 1999 September 1999 Summer 1999 June 1999 May 1999 April 1999 March 1999 February 1999 January 1999 December 1998 November 1998 October 1998 September 1998 Summer 1998 June 1998 May 1998 April 1998 March 1998 February 1998 January 1998 December 1997 November 1997 October 1997 2016-02-25 22:53

4 5 Reasons To Volunteer At Your Museum We couldn’t do what we do at the BMA without volunteers. Whether they are helping visitors at the Information Desk, facilitating art projects at family programs, volunteering at special events, or providing assistance to staff, volunteers help the Museum on a daily basis. If you’re thinking about volunteering at the Museum, here are 5 reasons why you should! 1. You love to learn about art. Volunteers have the opportunity to learn about art and the Museum’s collection at volunteer orientations and trainings. 2. You love to contribute to your community. Volunteers make the Museum a welcoming place for visitors and help out at special events and programs that bring in the Birmingham community. 3. You want to learn more about museums. Volunteers have the opportunity to learn about the workings of museums by helping out at programs and as staff assistants. 4. You like to make friends with similar interests. Volunteers will meet other volunteers, Museum staff, and visitors who also have an interest in art and love spending time at the Museum. 5. You need experience. Volunteering is a valuable experience that helps with discovering interests, meeting new people, and resumé-building. Ready to become a Museum volunteer? Click here to apply ! 2016-02-25 20:16

5 Invocation: An Interview with Rez Abbasi Rez Abbasi’s Invocation represents a distinctly South Asian-influenced voice in contemporary jazz, thanks in no small part to notable members such as Vijay Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa. Their most recent work explores the Carnatic classical music tradition of Southern India. In advance of their performance in the McGuire Theater this Thursday, we’re sharing a recent interview between Abbasi […] 2016-02-25 22:52 By

6 ‘Falsettos’ Is Returning to Broadway Marvin and Whizzer are coming back to Broadway, to a neighborhood and a society that has changed dramatically since they last visited. Lincoln Center Theater said Thursday that this fall it would stage a revival of “Falsettos,” which in 1992 won Tony Awards for best book and best score in recognition of its moving depiction of the complex and changing relationships prompted by a middle-aged man named Marvin’s decision to leave his wife, Trina, for a man, Whizzer. The musical was presented during the height of the AIDS crisis, and long predated the legalization of same-sex marriage. In a review Frank Rich called the show “exhilarating and heartbreaking.” The revival will be directed by James Lapine, who also directed the original production. The show features music and lyrics by William Finn, and a book by Mr. Finn and Mr. Lapine. Lincoln Center Theater , a nonprofit that produces some Broadway shows, said that it would mount the revival in association with Jujamcyn Theaters. The show is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 29 and to open Oct. 27 at the Walter Kerr Theater; casting has not been announced. “Falsettos” was constructed as a consolidation of two one-act musicals, “March of the Falsettos,” which began at Playwrights Horizons in 1981, and “Falsettoland,” which began at the same theater in 1990. André Bishop, who produced “March of the Falsettos” at Playwrights Horizons, is now the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. 2016-02-25 20:00 By

7 This Dapper Robot Is an Art Critic Courtesy of Denis Vidal The art critic once wielded considerable power. Able to make or break an artist, or at least influence public perception, art critics are now dropping like flies from print media, while those that do it well face an art world that is more or less a mirror image of a Wall Street commodities market. So it’s rather fitting that the robot art critic Berenson is now roaming the halls of the Paris' Musée du quai Branly for the Persona: Oddly Human exhibition. Outfitted with a bowler hat, black coat, and white scarf, Berenson is named after American art critic Bernard Berenson, who famously wore a bowler hat and coat. And like a proper art critic, he silently drifts through Musée du quai Branly , which features indigenous art from Africa. Courtesy of Denis Vidal Berenson was conceived and designed by anthropologist Denis Vidal and robotics engineer Philippe Gaussier. Through a camera in its right eye, it records people’s reactions to artworks. These recordings are networked with a computer in a wall behind the exhibition space. Positive reactions are represented as green circles, while negative ones are represented as red circles. Berenson either smiles or frowns depending on the frequency of either green or red circles. This neural network simulator is the foundation upon which Berenson builds its own tastes. “The control is done via a neural network simulator named Prométhé,” Vidal tells The Creators Project. “We simulate in parallel several neural networks allowing learning and recognizing visual stimuli, to control the displacement of the robot and to avoid obstacles (the robot can even avoid going out of the experimental area if it is necessary). The work on Berenson used a lot of different researches we did on how animals and humans can recognize a place, a view, or an object.” Robot Berenson © musée du quai Branly. Photo: Cyril Zannettacci "We gave it the name and loose appearance of a 19th century aesthete half for fun and half for demystifying the futuristic crap which is surrounding sometimes robotics," Vidal explains. After designing Berenson, he and Gaussier wondered how their robot would react if put in an art museum. Would it be possible, they asked themselves, for a robot to build aesthetic preferences from its interactions with the visitor? These musings led to Berenson’s current roaming through the halls of Musée du quai Branly. “In the museum, the learning is controlled first by a set of visitors who are asked to show Berenson one object they like the most in our experimental area but also one object they did not like (or found less interesting),” Vidal explains. At the end of each day, Berenson has learned 10 to 20 statues, and for each of them, tenths of local views. Each local view is associated thanks to a classical conditioning mechanism to a positive, negative, or neutral value.” If the context is “go toward positive objects,” and Berenson faces two objects (one positive, one negative), Vidal says it will move in the direction of the positive object and will smile at this object. If Berenson faces only one negative object, it will display a sad face and will move, randomly avoiding obstacles. Robot Berenson © musée du quai Branly. Photo: Cyril Zannettacci “At some point, it will detect a ‘positive’ object and will go in its direction (Berenson can have the opposite behavior if we settle as a context ‘go to negative objects’),” Vidal says. “Because, the recognition of the local views is based on a competition mechanism, new objects activate the neurons associated to the recognition of nearest shapes (local views) previously learned and Berenson will answer according to these previous learnings (generalization property).” Looking at Berenson satirically, what is entertaining is that the robot art critic is a pretty good metaphor for what lies behind online media’s art and cultural criticism. Across social media and search, data and algorithms highlight trending topics or perform sentiment analysis, driving a lot of what is being covered, critiqued and seen. So Berenson might be a just a primitive robotic art critic, but he is very much in line with online criticism. According to Vidal, Berenson will be at Musée du quai Branly up until November, but will move around the exhibition only intermittently. Watch a video of Berenson in action on Business Insider, and click here to learn more about the museum. Related: Oculus Rift Headset and Controllers Puts You Inside a Robot's Body Meet the Recycled Robots of Parisian Artist +Brauer [Best of 2015] The Year in Robotics 2016-02-25 19:10 By DJ

8 Program Offers Free E-Books to Low-Income Children Open eBooks , a program making thousands of best-selling books available for free to low-income children, signed up roughly 50,000 users on its first day, according a report by the project’s partner organizations. Started on Feb. 24 with a video message from Michelle Obama, Open eBooks allows adults working in libraries, schools, shelters, hospitals and other settings to request access for the children they serve. The books, provided by more than 10 publishers, are selected by a “curation corps” and can be downloaded through an app on the children’s own mobile devices. (According to a study released last year, 85 percent of families below the poverty line with children aged between 6 and 13 own a tablet or a smartphone.) The nongovernmental effort, which guarantees access over the next three years to inventory valued at $250 million, is a partnership between the Digital Public Library of America , the New York Public Library and First Book , a nonprofit group founded in 1992 to provide books and educational materials to children in need. The distributor Baker & Taylor provided content support. Dan Cohen, the executive director of the Digital Public Library of America, wrote in a blog post that the program would go beyond the e-book loans already offered by public libraries. “Qualified kids will be able to read any of these ebooks on a whim, and at the same time, unlike with apps that require a reader to check a book back in before it can be read by someone else,” Mr. Cohen wrote. “This is truly ‘all you can read’ for children in low-income areas of the United States.” 2016-02-25 19:09 By

9 Rachel Weisz to Star in ‘Plenty’ at the Public Theater Rachel Weisz will star in a revival of David Hare’s “Plenty” at the Public Theater this fall, the Off Broadway nonprofit announced Thursday. The play, which was presented at the Public in 1982 and transferred to Broadway in 1983, is about a woman who was a secret agent for Britain during World War II and is grappling with the emotional effects of a decidedly less glamorous postwar life. The Public production starred Kate Nelligan; a movie adaptation, in 1985, starred Meryl Streep and featured Sting. Ms. Weisz, who won an Oscar for “The Constant Gardener,” will play the former secret agent, Susan Traherne. The actress appeared on Broadway in 2013, starring opposite her husband, Daniel Craig, in “Betrayal.” The revival of “Plenty” will be directed by David Leveaux, who has directed multiple productions on Broadway, including, most recently, a 2013 revival of “Romeo and Juliet.” 2016-02-25 19:00 By

10 Jeremy McQueen’s Ballet Collective to Foster Black Works The Black Iris Project , a new ballet collective aiming to foster and present new works about black lives and history, takes its name from a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, “ Black Iris III ” (1926). Jeremy McQueen, the choreographer and founder of the recently announced Black Iris Project, the painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012, and he said he became obsessed with its black-and-white dichotomy, which to him looked like a floral yin and yang. While creating a new work in 2013 for the Joffrey Ballet, which had awarded him its Choreographers of Color prize, he was inspired: He saw the Washington Ballet dancer Nardia Boodoo, who in his mind embodied the O’Keeffe painting and the history of black womanhood. The result was “Black Iris,” his piece for Ms. Boodoo. The Black Iris Project was born when Mr. McQueen decided he didn’t want to end his exploration of black history through dance. “I really wanted to bring emerging talent together to create new stories of ballet,” he said. Citing Misty Copeland’s turn as Odette/Odile in American Ballet Theater’s “Swan Lake” last year as an example, he said there has been a “huge shift” in diversity onstage. But, he added, casting black dancers in repertory works isn’t enough. “The work that we present needs to be very reflective of our current society,” he said. With grants from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, New Music USA and the CUNY Dance Initiative, the Black Iris Project has brought together 20 dancers of color from a variety of companies, including Stephanie Rae Williams from Dance Theater of Harlem and Daniel Harder of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Mr. McQueen also tapped into his musical theater history to recruit, for example, Taeler Cyrus, a company dancer in “An American in Paris” on Broadway. Three ballets, including a restaging of “Black Iris,” are in store for the company’s inaugural season, which begins with a 10-day residency at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Pocantico Center in Tarrytown, N. Y., in May, followed by an engagement at New York Live Arts in July. Mr. McQueen said additional performances are to be announced soon. 2016-02-25 18:02 By

11 Morning Links: Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector Edition The art historical background of ; or, “why am I obsessed with a game about collecting cats?” Billionaire Ken Griffin has paid approximately $500 million for two Abstract Expressionist paintings in one of the most expensive private art deals in history. The Melbourne Art Fair has been canceled due to “failure to attract international collectors, little national interest, and the withdrawal of three major galleries from exhibiting.” Judges have canceled Russia’s top art prize, the Innovatsiya (Innovation) Prize, after dissident artist Pyotr Pavlensky was nominated, and then removed from the running by the award’s organizers. Tania Bruguera, the first artist-in-residence for the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs in New York, will be performing in Union on March 6. In it, she will try to ascertain how the public feels about border control by asking them to vote “yes” or “no” regarding the abolishment of borders. Artists, engineers, and architects have collaborated to revamp Düsseldorf’s U-bahn stations with ad-free art. More details about MoMA’s upcoming Picabia retrospective, “Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction”: Here’s Thomas Hirschhorn at Chantal Crousel. 2016-02-25 11:53 The Editors

12 Setback for Picasso’s Daughter in Battle Over Sculpture A French court has rejected a plea by the daughter of Pablo Picasso to void a seizure order for a valuable sculpture at the center of a dispute over ownership between the New York dealer Larry Gagosian and an agent for the Qatari royal family. Instead, the court on Wednesday ordered Maya Widmaier-Picasso, who is 80 and a Paris resident, to pay 25,000 euros, about $28,000, in court costs to the Qatari family’s representative, Pelham Holdings. Last May Pelham tried to seize the sculpture from her Paris apartment and did not discover its whereabouts until a lawyer spotted it in October at a Picasso exhibition at the in New York that ended this month. The work, a 1931 bust of Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, is the subject of legal actions in three countries, including the United States and Switzerland, where the first sale was struck with the agent for the Qatari family to buy the work in November 2014 for €38 million, or about $42 million. Mr. Gagosian, who says he was unaware of the first sale, bought the sculpture in May 2015 for about $106 million from Ms. Widmaier-Picasso, and then sold it to the New York collector Leon D. Black. The sculpture remains in New York while the legal cases are pursued. The French ruling gives the Pelham side more legal justification to press for the discovery in New York about the terms of the Gagosian sale. 2016-02-25 17:41 By

13 a first look at BIG's via 57 west 'courtscraper' in new york a first look at BIG's via 57 west residences in new york a first look at BIG’s via 57 west residences in new york image © designboom with work on new york’s much-anticipated via 57 west development nearing completion, designboom goes inside the building for a look at bjarke ingels’ first major project in the united states. the unique shape of the residential superblock seeks to combine the advantages of compact european courtyard structures with traditional manhattan high-rises. three corners of the block are kept low, while the north-east corner is lifted up to reach its peak of 467 feet (142 meters). as a result, the building appears as a pyramid from the adjacent highway, but as a glass spire when viewed from west 58th street. at the center of the scheme, a courtyard with the same proportions as central park opens views towards the hudson river, bringing low western sun deep into the block. upon entering the building, residents are greeted with a spacious lobby ‘city planning was telling us that they wanted some sort of iconic structure, and my cousin douglas (durst) had established a relationship with bjarke ingels,’ said jody durst, president of the durst organization, speaking at a media tour of the building earlier this week. ‘we immediately hired bjarke, and he presented city planning with a concept that they couldn’t turn down.’ ‘it is really where you come into manhattan, it is something that says ‘here you are, you are entering the grid’’, added jordan barowitz, vice president & director of external affairs. ‘we took that concept into the name of the building — ‘via’, as in ‘the way’.’ walls are lined with a jagged brick bond that echoes the configuration of the courtyard balconies upon entering the building, residents are greeted with a spacious lobby, where walls are lined with a jagged brick bond that echoes the configuration of the courtyard balconies. the lower level includes a host of on-site amenities, including a movie screening room, a swimming pool, and an indoor half-basketball court. above, the scheme includes a range of studio, one, two, three, and four bedroom units, many with private terraces and balconies. in total, the development contains over 700 residences, 20% of which qualify as affordable housing. this process sees potential low-income residents enter into a lottery with the chance of being selected. ‘there is an application process, then the applications are randomly selected, qualified, and then approved for residency. it is a formula based upon income,’ explained dan mogolesko, durst’s vice president of residential leasing and operations. ‘affordable apartments for a one bedroom unit start at $600 per month. we had about 17,000 applications for this building.’ the scheme includes a range of studio, one, two, three, and four bedroom units image © designboom the dynamic form of the building carries through to the interiors, with materials and furnishings carefully considered for their resiliency and environmental impact. each aspect of the design has been planned in order to save water, reduce energy dependence, and promote resident well- being. floor-to-ceiling windows are comprised of high performance glass, while horizon wood flooring extends throughout the project’s interiors. high-spec kitchens are outfitted with pure white caesarstone countertops and backsplashes, and bathrooms are equipped with bespoke fixtures and fittings. in total, the development contains over 700 residences image © designboom as part of the development, los angeles-based artist stephen glassman has been commissioned to create a large scale artwork to complement the building. named ‘flows two ways’, the vertical sculpture serves as a reinterpretation of the hudson river and its relationship with new york city. aluminum, stainless steel, and rolled metal tubing will be used to evoke the river’s movement. ‘as a new york native, the movement to save the hudson river was formative in my growth as an artist intent on creating works of scale and social impact,’ commented glassman. the 3,600 square feet piece will be sited on the western wall of the neighboring ‘helena 57 west’ tower. via57 west is to welcome its first tenants in march 2016. see designboom’s previous coverage of the project here. residents will have access to a communal swimming pool as part of the development, stephen glassman has been commissioned to create a large scale artwork image courtesy of stephen glassman studio named ‘flows two ways’, the vertical sculpture serves as a reinterpretation of the hudson river image courtesy of stephen glassman studio aluminum, stainless steel, and rolled metal tubing will be used to evoke the river’s movement image courtesy of stephen glassman studio 2016-02-25 17:38 Philip Stevens

14 One Direction Fanfic Takes the Art World by Storm Owen G. Parry, Larry! Monument, 2016. Photo: Hydar Dewachi The particular strand of One Direction fanfiction known as " Larry Stylinson " casts band members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson as more than just boy band BFFs. The portmanteau of the two bandmates’ names positions them as secret lovers, a theory that quickly sprung to life in response to the closeness they share amongst members of the group, regardless of the high profile relationships each has had with women over the years. What might seem like nothing more than an alternative, constructed boy band narrative has become the basis for Larry! Monument , a series by British artist Owen G. Parry , on display as a part of the group exhibition Common Property at London art space Jerwood Visual Arts. Owen G. Parry, Larry Stylinson Performance AU, 2016. Photo: Hydar Dewachi A sexually charged performance between Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson impersonators, a sculptural recreation of Styles’ abdominal region inflated to suggest pregnancy (based on a more specific and bizarre strand within this fanfic), and a banner of the two kissing underwater (a feverishly discussed image within the Larry Stylinson community in regards to its authenticity), are some of the more prominent and suggestive contributions by Parry to the exhibition. We spoke with Parry to probe his mind regarding his decision to bring One Direction into the art world: Owen G. Parry, Larry Stylinson Performance AU, 2016. Photo: Hydar Dewachi The Creators Project: What in particular drew you to this very specific instance of fan fiction as a basis for an entire body of work? Owen G. Parry: I bumped into Larry quite by accident. I came across some illustrations by Larry artist Karukara on Tumblr about 2 years ago and loved them despite not being a 1D fan. But what fascinated me the most was that this homoerotic art was female authored and mostly enjoyed by women, making it really different to historical gay works produced and read through the gay male gaze. There was something that simultaneously disturbed and fascinated me by what appeared at first to be a normalizing agenda... The idealized images of Louis and Harry redecorating their very white middle class home (Larry! Domestic) or posing for a family portrait with their children (Larry!family) become brilliantly weird, queer even, in their normalizing, when Louis becomes pregnant (Larry! Mpreg) or when characters body swap or narratives are re-configured in an alternate universe. Owen G. Parry, Larry Stylinson Performance AU, 2016. Photo: Hydar Dewachi Part of your exhibition includes One Direction impersonators enacting a sexually charged performance. Fanfiction undoubtedly exists in the realm of fantasy, so what was your impetus behind literally fulfilling a strand of fan fiction? I think that fanfiction can never really be fulfilled because it’s speculative and unfixed in nature— that's why it's so exciting to me. Mine is just one version out of a million Larry fanfics, I just happened to work with my own history, imagination, and skills in creating live performance. The thing that differs is the context; a public gallery as opposed to a 'private' space online or under a pseudonym. Awkward! It's still fiction, performance fiction. It's still about what could happen or might be happening rather that what happened exactly like that. I see #Larryisreal as an affirmation, like a mystic calling forth of what could really become real and that could be applied to anything we want to make real. And in the end there seemed to be some real full-on chemistry between the Larry boys. After the performance we all went to the pub along with many audience members who continued to observe and speculate over whether they were really going to get it on. The fiction/reality blur became really exciting for all of us! Owen G. Parry, Larry Stylinson Performance AU, 2016. Photo: Hydar Dewachi Have there been any strong reactions to your series by One Direction fans or even the band’s members? Last week when I uploaded images from the performance at Jerwood Visual Arts to my Fan Riot Tumblr , they began trending on Tumblr. I was really excited to see my work reaching so many people through and beyond performance and art audiences, both online and with groups of fans turning up at the gallery to see Larry! Monument. Owen G. Parry, Larry! Monument, 2016. Photo: Hydar Dewachi There has been a dialogue around the work in the fandom and a care for Louis and Harry that could inspire any critical art community. I still think artists and critics have a lot to learn from the ways fans work. My Fan Riot project has been completely inspired by the ways fans work collectively and respond to extant works, so the fact that they began responding to my work, discussing it, sharing it, re-configuring it, and that I would potentially continue responding, was very exciting. I particularly love responses where the fans discuss the 'weirded out' gallery audience. You start to get a critique on artdom from fandom too, or perhaps these distinctions are finally irrelevant. The fact that the fans have responded to my work has made the work part of the Larry story. Not that I’ve created a monument or performance, but the fact that the fans are visiting, experiencing it and responding to it means, whether you agree or not, #Larryisreal. Owen G. Parry, Larry! Monument, 2016. Photo: Hydar Dewachi Owen G. Parry's Larry! Monument and other works by Edwin Burdis, Hannah Knox, Rob Myers, Antonio Roberts, and Superflex were on view at Jerwood Visual Arts in London through February 21. Click through to Owen G. Parry’s website. Related: Obsess Over Boy Culture at a New Fashion Exhibit in London A Force-Sensitive Teen Kicks Imperial Ass in This Fan-Made Star Wars Short A Fake Art Fair Takes Aim at Contemporary Practices 2016-02-25 17:30 By Andrew

15 Interview with Dr. Cathleen Cummings: Film in Post-Partition India On March 5 at 6PM, the Museum is excited to welcome Dr. Cathleen Cummings to present the Callahan Lecture, where she will discuss India’s post-Partition identity and the cinematic image. Dr. Cummings is an Associate Professor of Art History at The University of Alabama at Birmingham who specializes in South Asian art. Read along to learn more about Dr. Cummings, her work, and what she will discuss at the lecture: Birmingham Museum of Art: How did you become interested in South Asian art? How has the time you’ve spent in India influenced your interest in and study of the country? Cathleen Cummings: I was first introduced to South Asian art as an undergraduate at Mills College, in Oakland, California. I took my first art history class in my freshman year, really just to complete one of my core requirements, but found it to be fascinating. I think the first specifically South Asian class was in my junior year – a course on Rajput painting, which is so vivid, arresting, and beautiful. In the second semester of that year I did a study-abroad program in London and at the end of it, I decided to do some traveling. So I went on a tour to northern India and Kashmir. It was amazing! Since then I have traveled in India so many times. What continues to amaze me is how many incredible architectural sites that have not received any attention from scholars or conservators — places that no one but the immediate locals know anything about. There are many forgotten but important temple traditions across India, especially from after about the year 1500, that are not a part of any tourist program. There is still so much to see and do! BMA: During your talk, you will discuss the Partition that took place following the Independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. Scholars have debated the true reason violence following the Partition. Can you explain what occurred during the Partition and the violence that ensued? CC: There are many, many reasons for this but I’ll try to pinpoint just a few. First, as early as 1909, the British created administrative units in India based upon religious identities rather than geographic boundaries, linguistic spread, or other factors. The British not only defined society according to religious belief but suggested that each community had to be protected from the others. Both the division of the population based upon religious category, and the notion that the individual communities were a danger to each other set up the dangerous construct that resulted in Partition violence. In 1919, for example, the British organized separate elections for Muslims and Hindus in Bengal. In Bengal in particular, cultural unity on the basis of a shared language was undone through the introduction of religious nationalism. Second, partition had already been tried by the British—on a more limited scale, that of the province of Bengal—and failed disastrously. The division of Bengal in 1905 was promoted for administrative reasons: Bengal was as large as France but with a significantly larger population, and it was felt that the eastern part of the region was neglected. It was thought that by splitting the province, an improved administration could be established in the east and the population there would benefit from new schools and employment opportunities. In reality, though, other motives were behind this partition plan. Bengali Hindus were in the forefront of political agitation for greater participation in governance; but with the partition of the province, their position would be weakened, since Muslims would now dominate in the east. As a result of the partition of Bengal, there was an almost national anti-British movement that involved both non-violent and violent protests. The two parts of Bengal eventually were reunited in 1911. Third, although partition had been discussed for many, many years, the actual decision to divide British India into the two states of India and Pakistan was announced by the British only on June 3, 1947—which was to be just two months before the date of independence on August 15, 1947. According to the British partition plan, a boundary commission was to be set up to determine the borders of the new nations, a difficult task. The boundary commission report was prepared by a London lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to South Asia. Unfortunately, the commission took so long to decide on a final boundary that the two nations were granted their independence before there was a defined boundary between them. Neither the British, the Congress Party, nor the Muslim League anticipated the degree of communal violence and migration that went along with independence. The failure of the administrative machinery to anticipate such violence is one of the major reasons why mass bloodbaths continued for weeks. The British had initially announced that it would grant independence to India by June 1948, at the latest. Given the rushed nature by which India and Pakistan’s borders were decided, I can’t help but wonder if the partition might have been less bloody and destructive had independence been pushed back a few months at least, into 1948. BMA: Following the Partition, the Golden Age of Indian cinema was born. What impact did the films have on Indian society when they were first released, particularly amid such recent tragedy? CC: The films of the Nehru era – the 1950s and into the early 1960s – played a very important role in the creation of a sense of national unity in the years after independence, and in the formation of an overarching, authentic national identity. Prime Minister Nehru believed in the idea of an abstract, historical “Indian people” and this idea dominated much of the public creation of Indian national identity. Versions of classical music and dance participated in this, and they became key features of what becomes known as the Bollywood “masala” film. Films played a key role in creating this sense of a singular, unified nation and people, especially by focusing on the rural, village “everyman” and “everywoman” as hero or heroine, and by creating a vision of a new, modern, secular, industrial India that was severed from the shackles of the past. At the time of independence, India was only 18% literate, so cinema was able to reach the masses in a way that other media could not. Few films were overtly political, but an optimistic and hopeful attitude about the future prevailed. BMA: If you had to choose from one film that you’ll discuss in your lecture, which one is your favorite? Why? CC: This is a very difficult question! I am only briefly going to mention Guru Dutt’s 1957 film Pyaasa , but it is one of my favorites. The film deals with the romantic but unsuccessful poet, Vijay, who makes certain choices in the face of the cynicism and exploitation of modern Calcutta. The film is an incredibly beautiful statement about disillusionment with the post-colonial state and the struggle of a sensitive individual against the materialism of the world around him. The song sequence, “ Yeh kooche, yeh neelam ghar dilkashi ke ,” is incredibly poignant and unlike any other in Hindi commercial cinema. 2016-02-25 19:07

16 The Shape-Shifter: How Lynda Benglis Left the Bayou and Messed With the Establishment Lynda Benglis was about to turn 33, and she wanted her nude self-portrait to run alongside a feature article about her by Robert Pincus-Witten in the November 1974 issue of. John Coplans, ’s editor, wouldn’t allow that, so her dealer at the time, , took out an ad, which cost $2,436. Benglis paid for it, which involved a certain amount of panic. In the middle of October, as the issue was getting ready to go to the printer, she reached out to Cooper, frantically trying to track down collectors with outstanding payments so she could put the money toward the ad. “Everyone seems out to get me,” she wrote. Benglis’s ad might have been written off as a quirky footnote for an artist who would go on to become a pioneer of contemporary art in numerous guises, from video to sculpture to painting and beyond. The work, though, has experienced a second life as a poignant statement of dominance in an art world still mired in inequality between men and women. Two years ago, on the occasion of the ad’s 40th anniversary, magazine to weigh in on how it has aged. As Diana Al-Hadid, who was born some 40 years after Benglis, said: so much of the system is still “set up to prevent girls from being messy and spreading out.” Despite its lasting interest to her disciples, Benglis herself is no longer interested in the work. “It’s a tired subject,” she told me, adding that maybe we should wait 50 years to bring it up again. But the ad, often looked at in isolation, was a turning point for Benglis, the culmination of her first ten years as an artist, laying the groundwork for all that was to come. Benglis’s image didn’t come out of nowhere. Over the previous two years, she had been raising the stakes of her public image in a series of escalating photos, presented in the usually banal form of announcement cards and ads for her exhibitions. In January 1973, for a show at the Clocktower in New York, she released a photo of herself as a child, wearing the national dress of Greece. The April 1974 issue of printed a photo of Benglis in aviator sunglasses and a blazer, her short hair slicked back, leaning against her silver Porsche, one hand resting proudly on the car, the other on her hip. Benglis met Morris at Hunter College, where both artists were teaching. They began collaborating on a series of video works, call-and-response collages between the two artists that functioned as an investigation of their very form. Video was still a new medium at the time. Their pictures in felt like subliminal dares, invitations to try to outdo one another.“The installation I made for Castelli in 1974 was an eight-track sound work with no imagery,” Morris told me in an e-mail about his ad, which had been printed as a poster before appearing in the pages of . “I decided to concentrate the image into the poster. One of the tracks was about war and destruction. I wanted to make an image of Mars, but failed and produced that of a biker.”Benglis’s next announcement card, a photograph taken by Annie Leibowitz, shows the artist from behind, her pants around her ankles, looking over her shoulder. She’d soon follow this thread to its conclusion, going up to a sex shop on 42nd Street to purchase her phallic prop. She asked Morris to go with her, but he declined. One evening last December, I was sitting with Benglis in a café near her apartment in New York City. She wore sunglasses, despite the fact that it was dark out. I asked her if Morris’s biker image had provoked her.“Let’s just say he beat me to the punch, but he didn’t win,” Benglis said. Benglis was the Zelig of the late-’60s art scene in New York. She told Dan Flavin, who in his newer pieces had been attaching fluorescent lights to boxes, to ditch the boxes. To Robert Ryman, she said, “Why don’t you just directly on the wall?” At one of her first shows, the performance artist Jack Smith—in attendance with a young actress named Jessica Lange— jumped on one of her foam sculptures, and broke it in half. Carl Andre was the first artist to visit her studio. Her early paintings, poured directly onto the floor, had her inheriting the mantle of Jackson Pollock. Her later sculptures, with their fascination with form, made her a spiritual counterpart to Donald Judd. She’s been known to deliberately destroy her work if an audience isn’t respectful of it. She was and remains prolific, and a kind of creative anxiousness is the main thread running through her career. “I do my work,” she said to me. “I don’t think about what’s going to happen.” And yet she was always hard to classify. Her ad turned her overnight into a hero of second-wave feminism, but she didn’t care for the movement—she described it to me as “angry and full of hate.” Her work generally exists in an indefinable space between painting and sculpture. Looking back on it now, the decade between Benglis moving to New York City and releasing her ad clearly solidified her reputation as a great American artist. At the time, though, she was more like a cautiously revered outsider. englis was born in Lake Charles, La., and there are occasional traces of a Louisiana accent in her voice. Her family was of Greek origin—Benglis would eventually inherit her grandmother’s house in Kastelorizo, an island a few hundred miles southeast of Athens—and the Benglises got by through her father’s business selling building materials. Her childhood, as she described it to me, was like something out of Mark Twain: “Lots of mud, lots of water. Living in a rice paddy. Living in a house on stilts about three feet above the land. Playing underneath buildings and houses. Putting bread on the end of strings and fishing. Going crabbing. Getting buckets full of blue crab. Eating a lot of raw oysters. Going in boats all over the gulf. We had houses on the gulf that would get blown away by hurricanes, so we’d put up another one. We’d change the whole landscape.”She studied ceramics at Newcomb College in New Orleans. The city was about three hours away from Lake Charles by car but its metaphorical distance from the family home was greater. It was her first real exposure to other artists and, she said, “I knew that’s what I wanted to do.” Before moving to New York City, Benglis taught third grade for a year in Jefferson Parish, outside of New Orleans, where some of her students “had parents who didn’t know how to read or write,” she said. She rode from New Orleans to New York in a Volkswagen full of—her word—“Yankees” who had traveled down south as part of a program promoting literacy in poor communities. She arrived in New York in 1964, in the middle of a “long, hot summer.” She was constantly running out of money and her modest professions weren’t helping: a bartending job she inherited from Brice Marden’s wife; working as an assistant to Klaus Kertess, a director at the Bykert Gallery who would give her aphoristic advice on artistic freedom like “it all comes out in the wash”; a gig as the secretary for Paula Cooper, who had never learned how to type.“I accused her of being Byzantine,” Cooper told me, “but in a kind of delightful way. She was tricky, but it was always very interesting.” Cooper began showing Benglis in 1968. Their working relationship lasted for the next 25 years, but didn’t begin until Cooper agreed to meet with Benglis’s astrologist, the dealer said. Benglis’s experimentations on the floor of her studio brought her fame before she turned 30. A photo of Benglis, wearing black bell-bottoms and a blue turtleneck, pouring 40 gallons of bright latex pigment onto a gallery floor, ran in magazine in 1970. To me, she compared her work to the oil slicks on the bayou back home in Louisiana. compared her to Pollock. Because of the way her sculptures seemed to have their own production inscribed within them, the dried pigment telling the story of how and where it was poured, critics grouped Benglis in with so-called “process” artists like Richard Serra and Barry Le Va. And so, in 1969, when Marcia Tucker at the organized a show called “Anti-Illusion: Procedure/Materials” that included works by, among others, Andre, Hesse, Le Va, Ryman, Serra, and Joel Shapiro, she naturally included Benglis. Benglis considered all of these artists her peers, following a similar line of thought about material and process, but the piece she was working on in preparation for the exhibition lacked the austerity of their work. The unapologetically exuberant (1969), a river of primary colors that could pass for a lava flow, measures 33 feet in length. Benglis said Ryman and Serra didn’t want it anywhere near their work—it was too big, too colorful. Tucker herself had asked Benglis to do the show based on a much smaller piece she had seen in Benglis’s studio, according to Susan Richmond’s book. As a compromise, Tucker wanted to install Contraband near the entrance to the museum, but there wasn’t enough room: the piece would have to be set half on a ramp and half off. Benglis pulled out of the show, but the catalogue had already been printed. Her paintings are described in it as, “poured onto the floor, with no boundaries…”“Marcia, bless her soul, I think she was very conflicted in the situation,” Benglis said. “She couldn’t find a place.” (That same year, Benglis did a different poured latex piece, called , in situ at the Bykert Gallery, where it was on view in front of the first Chuck Close piece ever shown publicly.) Ironically, the Whitney acquired in 2009.“The pour pieces were already a challenge to the rigidity of Minimalism,” Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s current deputy director and chief curator told me. , she said, “was a lightning rod. It still is.” Los Angeles in the early ’70s was, to the outside world at least, all cult killings, bad trips, and apocalyptic weather. It was as formative for Benglis’s career as New York had been. She’d wanted to go there in order to better understand three things: Charles Manson, the San Fernando earthquake, and the feminist movement. “It had all snowballed,” she said. “A horrible, hairy, awful, tangled mess.” She considered New York and L. A. to be “like two medieval cities.” “It was so different out there,” she said. “There was fresh air. There were guys playing guys, and girls, you know, playing girls. Mocking whatever I decided to mock, it was easier to do there.” “We have had a few crises here,” Brach told Benglis in a letter written just before she was about to start a full-time teaching job at the school. She was supposed to replace the mostly abstract painter Allan Hacklin in the department of painting, but Brach was writing to inform her that she had been reassigned to advanced sculpture; Christopher Wilmarth, a Minimalist sculptor who claimed to have been inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé, “couldn’t make it.” “I hope that this doesn’t freak you,” Brach wrote. “I’m sure you will not mind.” By 1971, the new campus still unfinished, CalArts was being run out of a former Catholic girls’ school in Burbank. However provincial the school seemed in the early ’70s, there was an energy in the air, and CalArts was a hotbed of radical politics, postmodern art, and critical theory as the school drifted further and further into more outré territory. Judy Chicago had brought her Feminist Art Program, which she had founded with Schapiro at Fresno State University in 1970, to the school. Robert Corrigan, CalArts’ first president, had laid the groundwork for an arts education that privileged ideas over technique, where student and teacher were thought of as peers. Corrigan resigned just before Benglis’s arrival and was replaced by the far more bureaucratic William Lund, who was married to Disney’s youngest daughter and eventually helped secure the school’s financial future, at the cost of some of its audacity. Still, CalArts hardly passed for a standard education at the time. Benglis taught a class with John Baldessari that mostly involved taking students around to see the exotic sites of Los Angeles—Marilyn Monroe’s signature on the Walk of Fame, the Hollywood Wax Museum—and discussing them at length. Baldessari described Benglis to me as an eager teacher—“What was great about her is that her face always lit up and she always seemed so excited; that was very contagious”—but in many ways she was still an outcast. Benglis may have been an odd fit in New York’s hypermasculine club of Minimalism, but that didn’t mean she would gel with the West Coast women’s movement. Chicago had vaguely utopian goals for moving the Feminist Art Program to Southern California. “As macho and difficult as it was for women artists,” she told me, “there was a spirit of self-invention in Southern California that allowed me to think, for example, that I could create a new kind of art education, and a new kind of feminist art practice.”An important part of Chicago’s program was a project called , a subversion of the domestic space and the self-proclaimed first public exhibition of feminist art. Occupying a Hollywood mansion, Womanhouse provided studio space and a forum for women artists to work through “the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean, and iron their lives away,” in the words of a historical overview of the show by Faith Wilding. Benglis should have fit in perfectly there, but the show was planned before her arrival in L. A., and she didn’t even make it to the opening. She had to give a lecture at the school instead. There was only one woman in the audience at her talk, Benglis said, because all the others were at Womanhouse. The rest of the room was filled with men. “I don’t care about it anymore,” she said. For decades now, Benglis has given lectures on her work using slides, but she removed the ad ten years ago. At a recent lecture in San Antonio, someone had slipped a picture of the ad into the presentation without telling her. “And I didn’t ask that it be put there,” she said. “I don’t see any reason for it to be put there anymore. People ask me about it anyway. I don’t resist the questions. But when people force me to look at it with my nose in it, they have their own perverse reasons for doing that.”She continued: “My mother had said to me, ‘They’ll never forget it.’ I knew that, and I considered it a challenge.” She paused before adding, “I consider everything I do a challenge.” was in its prime in an era when the art world was small enough for a magazine with a circulation of about 18,000 to believe it was at the forefront of the avant-garde. It was founded in San Francisco in 1962 and moved to New York in 1967, and for many years the publication really was the main venue for debate about what was or wasn’t new in the art world. By 1974, however, had lost some of its steam as the result of editorial infighting about the magazine’s direction. On the eve of the November 1974 issue’s release, ’s publisher, Charles Cowles, was conflicted. He didn’t want his mother to see the ad, but he didn’t want the art world to accuse him of censorship. The printer, a “retired brigadier general,” as Coplans told Amy Newman in her book , an oral history of , had initially refused to print the ad. Coplans appealed to him by saying “it’s a fundamental American issue of the way democracy is run in this country.” The ad was published and the response was immediate. Five editors—Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff, Rosalind Krauss, Joseph Masheck, and Annette Michelson—announced their resignation in an open letter printed in the December issue, citing the ad’s “extreme vulgarity” and calling it a “shabby mockery of the aims of…women’s liberation.”“I felt that publishing that ad was tantamount to saying that we were all hookers together, the writers, as well as the artists,” Krauss told Newman. “That we were all for sale.”All of this was further complicated by the fact that Krauss was in a relationship with Morris, and, as she admitted to Newman, had taken Morris’s biker photo herself. (Morris wouldn’t comment on this. The photographer wanted to remain anonymous, he wrote to me, “and I see no reason at this late date to violate that desire.”)Meanwhile, the establishment provided breathless coverage. John Corry, a reporter, called the ad “a dirty picture,” and quoted “a man from the Museum of Modern Art,” who refused to be identified, saying, “You can understand—a museum shouldn’t make a comment on something like this.” also responded. The magazine asked Benglis to do a spread alongside the artist Hannah Wilke. (Benglis declined because wouldn’t give her full rights to the image.) By February 1975, Benglis was on the cover of magazine, being championed, alongside Erica Jong and Joni Mitchell, as one of the central figures in a movement the publication had dubbed the New Sexual Frankness. The ad brought her fame with a wider public outside of the art world, but she was a wary figurehead for sexual liberation, and she didn’t coast on the attention the image afforded her. For a time, she hung the dildo over the shower in her loft, like a trophy, Paula Cooper recalled. (“There was nowhere else” to put it, Benglis said.) For the most part, though, she simply moved on.“I always thought you should just empower yourself with whatever you would like, whatever means you have,” she told me, as if with a shrug. ARTnews. 2016-02-25 19:07 M.H.

17 FX Harsono's "Chronicles of Resilience" Remembers Indonesia's Dark History Fx Harsono , one of Indonesia’s leading contemporary artists with a career spanning 40 years, is due to present his latest work at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York. The exhibition is titled “The Chronicles of Resistance.” The artist is a central figure in the Indonesian art scene, which he helped establish, and his career has run parallel to the often tumultuous history of the country, which is reflected in his work generally and in much of the work in “Resistance.” Born in 1949, at the age of 26 Harsono was one of the 10 founders of the “Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru,” or “New Art Movement,” whose manifesto demanded more art experimentation, a widening definition of what art could be, and a commitment to producing more socially conscious art. It was the latter that led to the next phase of Harsono’s career. Following brutal anti-communist massacres and a military-aided coup, the country found itself under the dictatorship of Suharto for 31 years, beginning in 1967. During this time, Harsono’s installations and exhibitions were often the most powerful anti-totalitarian statements made in the Indonesian art world. Following Suharto’s resignation in 1998, the country was in turmoil again, with riots and violence committed mostly against the Chinese and Chinese-descended populations. At that point, Harsono’s work took a turn inwards. Perhaps inspired by the late 1960’s slogan “the personal is political,” he began making work about his family and his community, all Chinese-Indonesians facing hostility in the new Indonesia. Now, with “The Chronicles of Resilience,” the artist brings these two strands of his creative practice together. His two 2016 installations, “Memory of the Survivor” and “The Light of the Spirit,” which feature in the exhibition, began with Harsono’s discovery of photos of his father taken roughly around the time the artist was born. The photographs led him to think about the East Java massacres of Chinese migrants that so many of his father’s compatriots lost their lives in, and to locate the mass graves of those slain. His works in the exhibition are a testament and a memorial to these people, in mixed media and with an experimental flair that has been with the artist since the founding of “Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru.” 2016-02-25 15:21 Samuel Spencer

18 Captivating Simulations Explore the Beauty and Raw Power of Waves GIF by Memo Akten ( via ) The oceans and waves have long-inspired artists, from the famous Japanese woodblock print by Hokusai The Great Wave off Kanagawa, to contemporary artists like Memo Akten. Akten has recently released the video documentation for the latest in his Waves series. Begun in 2014, Akten says the series was inspired both by the artistic heritage and scientific study of the oceans and waves. The first in the series Waves 2014 was "a data dramatization of complex ocean simulations, distilled and re-imagined in the form of abstract visuals and sounds. " Akten calls it an exploration of the dual nature of waves which he says are "simultaneously mighty yet delicate; calming yet terrifying; graceful yet violent; a symbol of fear, danger and death as well as hope, freedom and life. " The latest in the series, Waves 2015 was produced days after the grim attacks on Parisian bars, restaurants, and the Bataclan that happened last November. The world was in shock as the grisly and terrifying details emerged in the following days, especially the firsthand accounts. As such Akten said in tweets when he began making the new piece that "somehow this one ended up a lot darker and more turbulent. " GIF by Memo Akten ( via ) It was also informed not just by the tragedy of the attacks but also the subsequent -jerk cry for bloody revenge through blanket bombing. "Made during the aftermath of the tragic November 2015 Paris killings," Akten explains on his website , "and the consequent public and political thirst to bomb Syria in retaliation, which in turn would inevitably trigger an opposing retaliation. " Being black and white, it's more solemn in tone than the intricate colors of the first one, with the simulated waves crashing and clashing as in a storm. It plays to the idea that Akten states he wanted the series to use "the tools of science as a lens to the world" and it also becomes a protest, through abstraction, at the UK's response to bomb Syria. Image: Memo Akten ( via ) For more info on Waves 2015 visit Akten's website . Related: 80 Spotlights Bathe a UK Palace in Light and Sound Memo Akten Creates Complex Patterns From Harmonic Motion User Preferences: Tech Q&A With Memo Akten 2016-02-25 15:05 Kevin Holmes

19 10 Renoir Quotes on His Birthday More than a century after his death, Pierre- August Renoir , who was born on February 25, 1841 and died in 1919, retains a prominent place in the art canon. In his early thirties, Renoir joined Edgar Degas , Camille Pissaro , and others to mount what would be remembered as the first Impressionist exhibition. The rest is history. As a painter, Renoir openly privileged the role of beauty in his works. But recent years have seen a divergence in opinion on the aesthetic qualities of his paintings. Love him or hate him, his passion for painting is hard to deny, considering he maintained the practice deep into his later years despite the myriad challenges of rheumatoid arthritis. To celebrate the Impressionist master's birthday, we've compiled a list of things Renoir taught us about art, emotion, and, invariably, the virtue of perseverance. 1. Renoir tells us that art is rooted in emotion: "Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art. " 2. And art should be anything but predictable: "Irregularity is the basis of all art. " 3. What he identified as the queen of all colors stays constant: "I've been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black. " 4. All other theories may walk out the door: "You come to nature with all of your theories, and she knocks them all flat. " 5. After all, theories rarely inform when it comes to what matters: "The most important element in a picture cannot be defined. " 6. Renoir emphasizes the importance of exceeding our limits: "One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one's capacity. " 7. Luckily, he's quick to reassure us that our aptitude for learning improves with age: "The advantage of growing old is that you become aware of your mistakes more quickly. " 8. What's more, Renoir thinks the passing of time is a good thing: "You've got to be a fool to want to stop the march of time. " 9. Knowing how to use your time , on the other hand, is yours to decide: "I was beaten from the start by this insane passion for monotony so strong in our day. I had to give up. " 10. Finally, Renoir had a special message to anyone who's ever had a crisis in faith: "Your fervent attempt to be both a teacher and an artist may at times seem like an undertaking that's simply beyond your capacity—beyond anyone's capacity. That's okay. From tremendous effort, tremendous things sometimes emerge. You'll simply never know if you don't try to find out what your true capacity is. I expect it will be far greater than you ever thought possible. " Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-02-25 13:54 Rain Embuscado

20 Artists Create 3-D Scan of Nefertiti Bust The iconic bust of Nefertiti , one of Egypt's greatest treasures, has been repatriated to its native land—sort of. The sculpture belongs to the Egyptian Museum of Berlin , but artists Nora Al- Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles believe it should be repatriated to its native land. In an act of protest, the artists smuggled Microsoft Kinect scanners hidden under their scarves into Berlin's Neues Museum last October, and clandestinely scanned the Egyptian queen over the course of five or six hours. "The Nefertiti Hack," or "The Other Nefertiti," as the pair have titled their artistic intervention, is available to download as a 3-D dataset. "The museum audience was so focused on the bust… that no one noticed or realized what we were doing there," Al-Badri told artnet News in an e-mail. Although some on the Internet have questioned the pair's ability to collect the necessary data through a glass display case, Al-Badri denied copying information from any previously-available scan, crediting "hackers" for skillfully interpreting their data. "There are always some funny theories swirling around," she added. The 3,000-year-old limestone and stucco statue was discovered by German archaeologists in 1912, and, like so many other antiquities, was claimed by a Western museum. Germany waited until 1924 to publicly exhibit the bust, and Egyptians immediately began calling for its return. A recent Egyptian effort to create their own version of the Nefertiti bust was less than successful. Meanwhile, Germany has consistently denied loan requests from the African country's cultural institutions. "The Berlin museum monopolizes the bust and thus continues an imperial practice, instead of allowing open access to Nefertiti, especially for Egyptians," Nelles told the London Times . Despite obvious interest in the bust, "no Egyptian museum will show the piece,"Al-Badri told artnet News. Instead, the art duo plans to display a gypsum replica of the 3-D print at the American University in Cairo this May. In a curious twist, Al-Badri told artnet News that they "buried the 3-D print in the desert," as "a poetic counter-act to the excavation. " They will not reveal the location. Through their actions, al-Badri and Nelles hope "to inspire a critical re-assessment of today's conditions and to overcome the colonial notion of possession in Germany," according to their artists' statement. Releasing 3-D scans can be a tricky business, when it comes to copyright law. In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a local university insisted that a downloadable scan of their copy of Michelangelo's Moses be removed from 3-D printing website Thingiverse, even though the work was in public domain. A scan of Marcel Duchamp 's chess set based on archival photos was also taken down after objections from the artist's estate. In recent years, many countries have made efforts to reclaim their cultural heritage from foreign institutions. Most notably, Greece recently tabled its long-running, Amal Almuddin-Clooney- backed crusade to pressure London's British Museum to return the Parthenon marbles , carted back to England with questionable permission by Thomas Bruce, the seventh earl of Elgin, over 200 years ago. Nefertiti's regal beauty continues to capture the public imagination today as an iconic figure of ancient Egypt. As the wife and co-regent to the Pharaoh Akhenaten, she is believed to have briefly reigned over Egypt herself, under the name Neferneferuaten. There has been a great deal of excitement over recently-discovered evidence that suggests that her final resting place may be hidden in a secret chamber inside King Tut's tomb. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-02-25 13:29 Sarah Cascone

21 WWI Ceramic Poppies May Head to Belfast Following a successful run at the Tower of London , Paul Cummins and Tom Piper's ceramic poppies are now at the center of a bidding competition, namely among multiple institutions in Northern Ireland, reports the BBC. The popular installation, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red , was designed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I , and attracted over 5 million visitors, including Kate Middleton and Prince William . Related: Did Tower of London Reject Grayson Perry's Plan to Install 800,000 Ceramic Puppies? Almost all of the original 888,246 ceramic flowers were sold to benefit charity, and the remaining 6,000 blooms make up two smaller sculptures, Wave and Weeping Window , which are currently travelling throughout the UK. The tour is run by 1418-NOW , a temporary organization that oversees art commissions marking WWI's centenary between 2014 and 2018. Currently, 1418-Now is inviting "expressions of interest" from prospective 2017 hosts. The BBC reports that the National Museums Northern Ireland and the Belfast International Arts Festival have teamed up for a joint-proposal to host the installation at the Ulster Museum in Belfast's Botanic Gardens. Meanwhile, the Belfast City Council is submitting a separate bid, with hopes of taking the ceramic flowers to the Belfast City Hall. Just northeast of Belfast, the Mid and East Antrim Borough Council announced plans of their own of taking the traveling poppies to Carrickfergus. In a statement to Carrick Times , a council spokesperson confirmed the city's submission "with a view to its future use at Carrickfergus Castle. " So far, the poppies have hit Yorkshire, Northumberland, and Liverpool, with Weeping Window appearing at St George's Hall in Liverpool (November 6, 2015–January 17, 2016). Concurrently, Wave ran at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in West Bretton (November 8, 2015– January 10, 2016). Later this year, the two segments will reunite at the Lincoln Castle in Lincoln, England; the Black Watch Museum in Perth, Scotland; and the Caernarfon Castle in Whales. A representative of 1418-NOW told artnet News that the organization plans on announcing the successful 2017 applications later this summer. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-02-25 12:37 Rain Embuscado

22 Design Dealers: Kim Hostler and Juliet Burrows Interviewed New York gallery Hostler Burrows is a leader for Nordic design in the North American market, focusing on studio ceramics, cabinet-maker furniture, and artisan textiles. Starting out as Antik in 1998, the gallery has assumed the names of the owners in 2012. Name: Kim Hostler and Juliet Burrows Ages: 54 +50 Hail from: Both from the Northeast Owners of: Hostler Burrows, 51 East 10th Street, New York, NY Gallery's Specialty: Nordic Design Designers/Artists Represented: Josef Frank, Berndt Friberg, Axel Einar Hjorth, Finn Juhl, Bodil Manz, Kristina Riska , Maren Kloppmann , Kerstin Hörlin-Holmquist, Carl Malmsten, Barbro Nilsson, Carl Harry Stålhane, Axel Salto , Richard Filipowski, Eva Zethraeus First show: Axel Salto : Forces of Nature, 1999 What shows do you have planned for this year? For our upcoming spring exhibition, we will be showcasing new works by three innovative female ceramic artists, Kristina Riska , Maren Kloppmann and Eva Zethraeus, from our contemporary program. What we love about these artists are the bold ways in which they explore the expressiveness of clay, their primary medium, and their defiance of the constructs of traditional ceramic sculpture making. Riska’s latest experimentations with clay have been in the monumental scale, an impressive attribute for work executed in this particular medium. Kloppmann, a ceramic artist based in Minneapolis, will contribute works from her Wall Pillow Field series. These -like wall mounted sculptures are a study in the ways in which Kloppmann's hand molded and glazed elements occupy three dimensional space using the effects of definitive relief, depth, texture and color. Zethraeus will bring her playful Bubble and Branch sculptures reminiscent of botanical and biological specimens detailed with platinum and phosphorescent accents. What was the vision behind founding the gallery? We first took inspiration from the unmatched beauty of Scandinavian ceramics, which was the impetus for our first show, Axel Salto : Forces of Nature. We soon discovered that such superb craftsmanship and quality was not relegated to ceramic art; it transcended the boundaries of medium and we were inspired to promote the designs of architects and artisans such as Finn Juhl, Axel Einar Hjorth, and the weaver Barbro Nilsson, all relatively unknown 20 years ago in the market. The program has evolved through our particular tastes - we invest in artists and designers whose work we love and would live with ourselves, but that also fits in aesthetically with our program. What have been some of the most significant achievements and landmark moments of the gallery? We consider our pioneering show, Axel Salto : Forces of Nature, to be one our most significant achievements. We successfully defined Salto as an unprecedented talent, and as someone who redefined and reinvigorated ceramic artistry. The recognition that this show garnered was a significant validation of our passion for Scandinavian ceramic art, and is responsible for launching us into a leadership role in this particular area of study. Later, our transition from Antik to Hostler Burrows was an important marker in our own redefinition. By moving on from the name Antik, which confined us to 20th Century Scandinavian design, we opened ourselves to exploring the integration of contemporary artists and non-Nordic designers into our vintage program. Inclusion of these artists has allowed us to further explore the relationships between artmaking in the past and present, and even to find continuity between the two, particularly in the field of studio ceramic art. We are also proud to have been a founding member of Design Miami/ Basel, and continue to be a core participant and dealer. Fairs are a significant part of our program, and we enjoy creating installations at the varied fairs in which we participate, including Design Miami/Basel, The Salon: Art + Design, The Winter Antiques Show, and the burgeoning Fog Fair in San Francisco. How has the design market changed since you entered the business? What trends are you seeing? With the advent of the Internet, the design market has become more specialized. Initially, we were primarily responsible for educating our clients about our stable of artists and designers. Now that their interests are augmented by online research, both clients and dealers are more knowledgeable. A trend we are seeing now is a fluidity in collecting habits. Instead of buying categorically, our clients are apt to mix vintage pieces more freely with fine art and contemporary design. In a market-driven trade such as design, unfavorable trends tend to disappear on their own. Who was the last up-and-coming designer you encountered that thoroughly impressed you? Kristina Riska , a ceramic artist who had shown for some time in Finland, is just beginning to emerge in the United States. Her large-scale, hand-built sculptures are totally arresting – at once mysterious and powerful, yet imbued with an emotional tenderness and delicacy. Maren Kloppmann is another noteworthy designer on the rise. Her installations are paradoxically both architectonic and biomorphic. This feature was especially apparent in her recent installation, “Murmuration” (2015), at Design Miami/Basel. It was incredible to behold how Kloppmann could employ such precise linework and geometry to evoke something as dynamic and fluid as a migrating flock of birds. What qualities must a good gallerist possess? We owe our longevity to operating with integrity, and equal parts energy and patience. Keeping curious and inquisitive has been vital to our learning and evolving within our field. Good taste is a must, but no good gallerist should ascribe to playing it safe. Our willingness to take risks has often resulted in our most exciting discoveries. If the constrictions of ordinary existence were not a problem, what one work of design would you love to own? The unique Axel Salto Vase sold at Phillips two years ago, which we sold to its original owner in 1999. If you weren’t a gallerist, you’d probably be …. JB: Dance critic. KH: Organic farmer. Design is…. Often best defined by nature. 2016-02-25 12:15 Jana Perkovic

23 What to Expect at the Armory Show 2016 As the centerpiece of the early March season in New York, the venerable Armory Show returns to Manhattan for its 22nd edition. Change has been afoot as of late — former director Noah Horowitz decamped to Art Basel, and was replaced late last year by magazine and website editor Ben Genocchio — but don’t expect any radical or immediate diversions from the typical formula: Contemporary galleries at Pier 94, Modern- focused dealers at Pier 92, and a yearly geographic focus, which in 2016 shines the spotlight on Africa. The roster overall is wholly international, bringing galleries from the usual cosmopolitan suspects as well as Athens (The Breeder), Reykjavik (i8), Amsterdam (GRIMM), and Sao Paolo (Galeria Fortes Vilaca). Meanwhile, Barcelona-based Mayoral gallery intends to build the late Joan Miro’s studio within the Armory Show, a stunt it previously pulled off in London for an exhibition last year. And no 21st-century art fair is complete without a schedule of talks featuring bold-faced names: 2016’s Armory Show includes conversations between Genocchio and social-media-obsessed art critic Jerry Saltz, as well as a Warhol-focused presentation by Blake Gopnik, and film and discussion programming geared toward this year’s African focus. If you’re eager to get a head start on the action, snag a ticket to the perennially buzzy Armory Party hosted on March 2 at the Museum of Modern Art, following the early-access VIP preview over at the piers. 2016-02-25 12:08 Scott Indrisek

24 Madrid Art Guide February 2016 Spain is an exciting place to be this week as ARCO Madrid descends on the capital city, bringing with it a coterie of international galleries exhibiting their wares. Local venues pull out all the stops when a major art fair comes to town, and so we've put together this guide to make sure you see the very best that Madrid's art scene has to offer. Let's start with the back-to-back exhibitions opening today at Galería Cayón : In “Homage to the Square," master colorist Josef Albers ' seminal geometric works are on display, and in “Virtual Solo," the focus is on the influential Venezuelan Op artist Jesús Rafael Soto. Neither of these 20th century heavy-hitters are to be missed. Next, head to Galería Javier López & Fer Francés to take in the wild, funny works of Anton Henning, featuring familiar faces like you've never seen them before—in this case, a lovingly painted Homer Simpson, looking more depressed than usual. You can find more contemporary painting at Galeria Marta Cervera , currently presenting a group show of four very different artists, each with a decisively unique point of view. Be sure to check out the scribbly, music-inspired works by Despina Stokou, whose bold marks and bright swaths of color come together in strongly expressive paintings. When you've had your fill, go to Galería Leandro Navarro for a solo show of Jorge Castillo, who presents melancholic, mysterious landscapes. If you're more in the mood for sculpture, then Galería Elvira González is a good bet, with its exhibit of life-sized, figurative works by Juan Muñoz. Lastly, if something more classic is more what you're after, head to one of the greatest museums of the world, the Museo Prado, and be sure to spend plenty of time in its current blockbuster exhibit dedicated to the French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The good news? They serve dinner very late in Spain, so you've got plenty of time to explore, see art, and be inspired before you settle down for tapas and wine. Exhibition: “ Homage to the Square " When: February 25–April 1, 2016 Where: Galería Cayón, 84 Orfila 10, Madrid, Spain Exhibition: “ Virtual Soto" When: February 25–April 1, 2016 Where: Galería Cayón, 84 Orfila 10, Madrid, Spain Exhibition: “ Juan Muñoz " When: January 20–March 30, 2016 Where: Galería Elvira González, General Castaños 3, Madrid, Spain Exhibition: “ Anton Henning " When: February 22–May 11, 2016 Where: Galería Javier López & Fer Francés, Guecho 12 B, Madrid, Spain Exhibition: “ Jorge Castillo: En Suecia " When: January 14–March 1, 2016 Where: Galería Leandro Navarro, Amor de Dios, 1, Madrid, Spain Exhibition: “ Group Show: Sadie Bening, Marcel Eichner, Despina Stokou, Dean Levin " When: February 23–April 2, 2016 Where: Galeria Marta Cervera, C/ Valencia 28, Madrid, Spain Exhibition: “ Ingres " When: Through March 27, 2016 Where: Museo del Prado, 28, Felipe IV Street, Madrid, Spain Exhibition: “ Candida Höfer: The Space, The Detail, The Image " When: January 28–April 3, 2016 Where: Galería Helga De Alvear, Doctor Fourquet 12, Madrid, Spain 2016-02-25 12:02 Tatiana Berg

25 When Islam Meant Splendor (Rogers Fund, 1957 (57.164); photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) THE DAILY PIC (#1498): When we think of the Muslim world now, we Westerners picture brutal dictators, a wannabe caliphate and endless streams of suffering innocents. “Transformed: Medieval Syrian and Iranian Art in the Early 20th Century," a one-room exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, shows how not that long ago the Middle East was imagined in the West as a land of great culture and treasure. So much so that this 14th-century flask, born in Iran without much decoration, was reworked early last century to better match foreign clients' notions of the grandeur of Islam's past. And now all we imagine importing from the region is refugees and chaos. For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive . 2016-02-25 11:39 Blake Gopnik

26 Maarten Baas Presents Latest Collection at CWG's New NYC Space Dutch designer Maarten Baas will be presenting his latest collection, Carapace, at Carpenters Workshop Gallery's newly opened space in New York this March. Carapace is a scientific term for a protective skin on animals such as beetles or turtles, serving a function that is protective, decorative, and camouflaging. Baas has created a series of objects with a hard shell that hides a soft interior, forming gentle curves on the outside. He says he was inspired both by forms of natural life - and a study of the 1950s refrigerator. In the series of furniture presented at the exhibition, all pieces are characterized by a patchwork of bronze plating, dot welded, piece by piece, to form a dark skin resembling a beetle shell. Each individual piece has been bent and welded by hand. “I feel it's important to have a hard layer, under which something good and fruitful can bloom,” says the designer. “The works explore the feeling of vulnerability up against the desire for development in the environment. I like the contrast between a very hard outside and a soft inside, something that’s fragile, something that needs to develop, like an oyster has in the most extreme way. And everyone has it, literally... ones’ heart is protected by ones’ chest, but also more psychologically, everyone tends to protect parts of themselves that are sensitive.” The Carapace exhibition presents an interesting new step for the artist-designer by being far closer to functional furniture than the works exhibited so far. A graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, Baas is one of the contemporary designers far more at home in the world of art, than that of design in the strict sense of the world. His graduating work, a series of furniture pieces burned with a torch, then preserved in epoxy, led to a series of exhibitions and awards, and has turned into the acclaimed Smoke series – which he continues to produce on demand. One of Baas's best-known works is Grandfather's Clock, part of the Real Time series, a clock with a video clockface, in which a man is drawing and erasing the hands of the clock in real time. His unique, handmade designs have since then been widely exhibited in art museums and galleries worldwide – including at Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Carpenters Workshop Gallery has presented Baas since 2007. 2016-02-25 11:16 Jana Perkovic

27 Who Are the Top Artists at Auction in 2015?- Between 2014 and 2015, the overall global auction market declined by six percent, on a value basis. However, the US market moved ahead, posting an overall increase to reach sales of $3.4 billion, compared with $2.9 billion in the previous year, as markets in the UK and China eroded. In order to determine top artists during this time period, we looked at individual sale categories to see which ones are bringing in the most money at auction using artnet's annual auction data. While the list of the top works includes what one might consider the usual suspects, the numbers are nonetheless interesting for what they indicate about average prices for top artists and the number of works sold. For instance, Pablo Picasso topped the list of modern artists with total 2015 auction sales of $652.9 million, and artnet data shows that this is for more than 2,800 works sold. But the next highest-selling artists, Alberto Giacometti and Amedeo Modigliani , who happen to be neck-and-neck as far as sales totals, with $251.6 million and $251.1 million respectively, had far lower volume. For Giacometti, there were 117 works that came to auction, while for Modigliani there were just 33 works at auction. Both artists had a huge year, with Giacometti's L'homme au dought (1947), selling for $141.3 million at Christie's this past May , while Modigliani's Nu couchee (1917-18) brought $170.4 million at Christie's , also this past May. Picasso, however, was the highest- selling artist, with L'femme d' Alger (Version O) (1955), garnering $179.4 million . Other top-selling artists in the list include Joan Miró ($146 million for more than 1,000 works sold), and Marc Chagall ($100 million for 986 works). For the Impressionist and post-Impressionist category, the leader was Claude Monet with an auction total of $338.6 million, again for a relatively slim number of works on offer, with artnet listing just 33 lots sold at auction for 2015. The second-highest selling artist was , with $143.5 million in sales, for just 13 works sold. The Dutch painter accounted for the two highest-selling works in this category. L'Allée des Alyscamps (1889), which sold for $66.3 million this past May , and Paysage sous un ciel mouvemente (1889), sold for $54 million this past November , both at Sotheby's in New York. Related: Do Riches Await In the Van Gogh Market? Paintings by Monet accounted for eight of the 20 highest selling Impressionist works, led by Nymphéas (1905), sold by Sotheby's for $54 million in May. In the post-war and contemporary sector, unsurprisingly Andy Warhol ranked at the top, with auction volume of $525.6 million, for a more than 1,400 works sold. Francis Bacon held the second slot, with less than half by volume, a total of $232.5 million for 103 works sold, and Cy Twombly was third highest with $223.8 million for 72 works sold. Just nine works by Mark Rothko were sold, for a total of $219 million. And Lucio Fontana , whose slashed, minimalist artworks have been soaring along with the broader market for Italian conceptual art, took in $215.5 million in auction sales for 234 works. Lichtenstein, who ranked sixth for overall volume, had sales of $213.8 million for 489 works sold. Roughly half of that though was accounted for by a single major painting, Nurse (1964), which sold for $95 million this past November. It was just another indication of how heated the top of the market for blue-chip works has become: when it last sold at auction in 1995, the same painting made a mere $1.4 million. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-02-25 11:06 Eileen Kinsella

28 Do Art Fairs Need to Expand to Survive?— Additional reporting by Eileen Kinsella. Grow or Go TEFAF , the prestigious annual fair that has called Maastricht, the Netherlands, home for four decades, is now breaking into the crowded New York art fair landscape with not one but two fairs. One, premiering in October 2016, will show art from antiquity to the twentieth century. Another, launching in May 2017, will emphasize modern and contemporary art and design. The New York expansion is, as per the fair's organizers, the result of years of research and may increase the already cutthroat competition on the New York fair scene. Though TEFAF is among the most senior art fairs, its expansion didn't come as a huge surprise. Fair expansion to other cities and continents has become regular news these days. But has it become a necessity? Do fairs need to grow in order to simply survive? Art Basel was content to remain in Switzerland, where it started in 1970, for more than thirty years, but it expanded to Miami Beach in 2002—the most visible member of the Basel fair family—and Hong Kong in 2013, when it purchased the existing Art HK. Frieze Art Fair launched in London in 2003; after a decade, it expanded twofold, launching Frieze Masters , for historical work, and Frieze New York , for contemporary art, in 2012. In just a few years, Frieze New York's attendance has grown to some 40,000 visitors. It's not only the biggest that are growing. Even boutique fairs have set their sights in other cities and regions. NADA Miami Beach , the main attraction in Miami after Art Basel, launched in 2003. In May 2012, it initiated NADA New York during Frieze New York, and in 2014, it launched Collaborations, a project with Art Cologne. The Independent art fair first opened in New York in March 2010 (during the Armory Show, then New York's only major art fair), and announced a year ago that it would set up shop in Brussels in April 2016 , timed to Art Brussels. Then there's the Outsider Art Fair , inaugurated in New York in 1993. The scrappy fair was snapped up in 2012 by longtime New York dealer Andrew Edlin, who quickly announced that he would bring the show to Paris, where it landed in October 2013, to coincide with FIAC (Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain). In fall 2015, it held its third edition, which had 50 percent more exhibitors than the first two. Expansions don't always pan out. Paris Photo, launched in France in 1997, expanded to Los Angeles in 2013, but just this month, only two months before its fourth edition was scheduled, the organizers pulled the plug on the California event. A FIAC Los Angeles was to be organized by the Reed Expositions, which also puts on the highly respected French Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain, but now that won't happen at all. ( Last year, it announced a postponement of a planned 2015 outing .) Reed also this week canceled Officielle , FIAC's own satellite fair, which was to take place in October. Defensive Moves, Offensive Gambits In branching out to other countries, art fairs are actually mimicking a longstanding move by galleries that is often characterized as, at least in part, playing defense. It's old news that, for better or worse, galleries are growing into globe-spanning enterprises. Gagosian has a baker's dozen locations, from New York to Hong Kong. Sprueth Magers just opened their LA outpost and Hauser & Wirth , with three international locations to its name, will soon add a fourth in the same city. Pace Gallery 's locations stretch from New York to Beijing, and David Zwirner is looking to open a gallery in Hong Kong. Increasingly, it seems that galleries have to grow to succeed, if only so that they can offer their artists representation in more than one market, thus protecting themselves from having their artists poached by galleries with a larger footprint. Similarly, TEFAF's expansion seems to serve partly as a bulwark against a possible Frieze Masters New York. But they're not just defensive moves. “When Frieze came to New York, they wanted to kill the Armory Show," New York dealer Sean Kelly told artnet News. “I then joined the selection committee at the Armory Show because I thought that was quite bad form. " Similarly, TEFAF's October fair, focusing on antiquity to 20th-century art, may be not only defensive but also a "head-butt," as one fair organizer called it, talking to artnet News confidentially; it will take place during same month as Frieze Masters, which surveys the same material. "We never think of competing with anyone else," TEFAF board member Michel Cox Witmer told artnet News when asked if the planned October fair in New York was meant to compete with Frieze Masters (though that fair is in London), "but instead we concentrate our efforts to make TEFAF the best that it can be. " Location, Location, Location “The US remains the largest, richest, and most stable force of today's art market," said Cox Witmer about why TEFAF settled on New York as the site of its new outpost. He also noted that the fair had considered expansion in other markets such as South America, Asia, or other parts of Europe before settling on New York. TEFAF had announced in 2013 that it would stage an event in Beijing, but that plan was scotched nine months later. That aborted expansion highlights what is perhaps the all-important factor: location, location, location. For example, Basel's expansion to Hong Kong rather than China was shrewd because tax regulations make the mainland a difficult place to do business. Its growth to Miami gave it a foothold in the Americas in a city that wasn't already stocked up with competitors—it's also a major tourist destination. Location is vital not only in terms of what city you expand to, but what specific address you occupy. TEFAF's twofold New York outpost could prove to be trouble not only for Frieze Masters, but also for Frieze New York. Since its spring fair in Manhattan will include contemporary art, it could potentially present competition for dealers at Frieze New York, which happens simultaneously. In this regard, Frieze New York's inconvenient location, on Randalls Island in the East River, could work to its disadvantage. “It's incontrovertibly true that Frieze New York is a one-day fair," Sean Kelly said. Traffic to and from the fair gets badly backed up since Randalls Island is not built to support that many cars, and the only other alternative is a ferry ride, also not convenient. So buyers attend during the opening day but don't make return trips. “At Armory, by contrast, we do the same amount of business on day three and day five as we do on day one, and I make vastly more sales there overall," Kelly added. “Now, that said, Frieze does a very fine job, and we do enough business on day one that we're always very happy to be there. " A representative of Frieze rebutted Kelly's observation, pointing to a press release where Akio Aoki of Vermelho Gallery (São Paulo) said that she had seen “consistent sales throughout. " But director Victoria Siddall conceded in an email to artnet News that “visitors will also want to spend time around the city" seeing museums and galleries. "We encourage this," she said. The Frieze representative also pointed out that as of this spring there will be a new ferry line, leaving from East 90th Street and taking five minutes to get to the island. But if limited sales due to the out-of-the-way location have caused so-called “anchor" exhibitors like White Cube and David Zwirner to decamp to TEFAF at the more central Park Avenue Armory, said one art advisor, it could lead to an exodus. (In fact, Frieze's advertising has recently featured more prominent images of the Manhattan skyline, as if to de-emphasize its site.) And though TEFAF's spring fair doesn't occupy the same time slot as Armory, some insiders wonder whether TEFAF could pose serious competition to that fair as well, especially since the Armory's Pier 92 includes modern art. Armory, one dealer said, doesn't have the prestige of Frieze or the Basel fairs, and lacks the “snob appeal" of FIAC. Could TEFAF, known worldwide as a top-notch affair, poach some dealers from the dowdy piers? “The Armory has such a strong hold on a certain kind of American contemporary collector," said New York art adviser Heather Flow, “that I'm not sure that TEFAF could really break into that market. " The two TEFAF fairs will be taking the place of two existing events in the New York fair calendar: the fall fair will replace the International Fine Art & Antiques Show and the spring fair will replace Spring Masters, both of which are organized by Artvest Partners. "The Park Avenue Armory is smaller, so it can't accommodate as many dealers," said Armory director Ben Genocchio. "The booth sizes tend to be smaller, so I think you will find that the two fairs will remain quite different. " "The issue in coming to New York," said Michael Plummer one of the principals of Artvest Partners over email, "was the limited exhibition space that is of the quality of the Park Ave Armory. " He noted that TEFAF Maastricht is used to a much bigger footprint at the Maastricht Convention Center with 200 plus dealers accommodating over 70,000 visitors. "TEFAF is not coming to New York to wipe all the others off the map but rather to fit into the existing fair landscape. " All Fairs Are Local The fair expansion phenomenon could be said to reflect a growing regionalization of the art market with fair operators serving clients where they live. “Ten years ago it was a must to travel to Basel, whether you lived in Bangkok or in Bogotá," Belgian collector Alain Servais told artnet News in an email. “Today, because of the presence of strong fairs on the three main continents, one can go to Art Basel in Hong Kong if traveling from Bangkok or Art Basel in Miami Beach or Frieze New York if coming from Bogotá. " But that's not without its downside. “It's good for CO 2 consumption," adds Servais, “though less so for diversity and cultural exchange. " But growth of this kind isn't for every fair, and some directors say it would only dilute their focus. “I have no plans for expansion," Expo Chicago director Tony Karman told artnet News in a phone interview. “That means I put my effort and that of my staff on one fair. It allows us to focus and make this show of the highest level in order to best support the exhibitors. " Genocchio was even more pointed. “We are not a franchise fair, making us basically unlike everyone else," he said. "We are and aim to remain the American art fair, not a carpetbagger operation that blows into town once a year for five days. " “We're not an art fair corporation looking to increase our global influence," said Elizabeth Dee, co-founder of Independent. "We're not operating on that model or with that ambition. We just want to serve the people who are most important: the artists and the galleries that serve them. " During an interview at Spring Street Studios, the new Tribeca venue for the Independent, which used to take place in Chelsea, Dee noted that expansion has its costs. “We had to triple our staff to expand to Belgium," she said, acknowledging with a laugh that that meant growing the number of employees from three to nine. While initially aiming to serve mostly European dealers showing artists who are not in the public eye in New York, Independent has now successfully found its footing, according to Dee, and the fair's expansion to Belgium allows them an additional platform closer to home. Whatever the rationale behind expansion, if it means more fairs to attend without requiring visitors to set foot on a , local collectors are the ones who win out. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-02-25 10:45 Brian Boucher

29 Sting's Art Collection Is $4 Million at Christie's Pop rocker Sting and wife Trudie Styler decided to clean out one of their England homes and the contents earned about £3 million ($4.19 million) at Christie's London last night. The nine bedroom mansion, dubbed Queen Anne's Gate, sold for £19 million ($26.52 million) last year. The Queen Anne's Gate auction featured 150 items, ranging from a massive Steinway piano that was purchased for £116,500 ($162,634)—it was reportedly used by Sting to compose three hit albums—to several impressive works of modern and contemporary art. It's not surprising that Sting and Styler have blue-chip taste in art, and own works by post-war standards such as Pablo Picasso , Henri Matisse , and R ené Magritte , as well as contemporary artists such as Keith Haring and Moscow-born artist Veronica Smirnoff. Highlights from the sale included Ben Nicholson's abstract composition March 55 , which sold for £1,022,500 ($1,427,410), nearly three times its pre-sale estimate; a set of 20 Matisse 'pochoir' stencils from 1947, which sold for £530,500 ($740,578); a racy black-and-white Haring ink drawing for £146,500 ($204,514); and a 1949 Picasso lithograph, an edition of 50, which sold for £45,000 ($62,820). The auction also included personal items and high-end furniture, like two Yves Klein tables in pink and blue that sold for £25,000 ($34,900) each; a Line Vautrin circular, embellished mirror for £37,500 ($52,350); and a pair of large, grey sofas with no designer attributed, which sold for £13,125 ($18,323). Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-02-25 10:09 Cait Munro

30 Met Opera Names Ennead Architects to Redesign Lobby The Metropolitan Opera has selected Ennead Architects to design the renovation and expansion of its lobby, the opera house said on Thursday. Provided it can raise the funds and get public approvals, the Met hopes to make its Lincoln Center building more welcoming by improving the cramped lobby — which the building’s architect, Wallace K. Harrison, was forced to scale back on to save money 50 years ago. “We chose Ennead because their ideas seemed most attuned to the original Wallace Harrison plan for an extended lobby,” said Peter Gelb , the Met’s general manager, “and because of their successful designs of the recent glass extensions of the Brooklyn Museum and the Planetarium, as well as their redesign of the Public Theater lobby.” 2016-02-25 00:00:00 By

31 Pop Art International: Far Beyond Warhol and Lichtenstein PHILADELPHIA — “Remember how insane the 1960s felt, every day?” someone asked me at a preview of the traveling exhibition “International Pop,” which is making its final stop here at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Absolutely I remember, and the show — brash, manic and acid- tinged — took me right back there. Maybe because the name sounds snappy, Pop Art has a reputation for being light and bright, and some of it is: ’s larky comic-strip outtakes, Andy Warhol ’s “Silver Clouds.” But a lot of its images are grim: electric chairs, police dogs, fighter planes, body parts. Under Pop’s sleek veneer lay traces of the social and political pathogens that made the ’60s in America so jumpy. From day to day you never knew what disaster you’d wake up to. Less familiar is Pop’s status internationally. And it did get around. It flourished, sometimes under other names, in Britain, France and Germany. It cropped up, at once embraced and mistrusted, in Argentina and Brazil, countries under the thumb of dictatorships; and in an Eastern Europe penned in by Soviet Communism; and in Japan, where memories of Hiroshima and the material rewards of Western occupation made for intensely conflicted art. Introducing the histories of these far-flung versions of Pop is what the show — originally organized at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis by Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan, and in Philadelphia by Erica F. Battle — is primarily, and most interestingly, about. And that telling of those stories produces one visual surprise after another. For every classic, textbook item — a Jasper Johns flag painting, a Warhol Brillo box — there are dozens you’ve never laid eyes on. Collectively, they distill an era’s distinctive mix of earned paranoia and skeptical utopianism. Although Pop is often thought of as American in origin, the earliest recorded use of the name was in Britain. According to the catalog, the British artist Richard Hamilton coined the term in 1957, by which time his fellow countryman Eduardo Paolozzi had been making the kind of art it described — in this case collages of daily news clips, magazine advertisements and soft porn — for more than 10 years. In 1958, the curator Lawrence Alloway, a transplant from London to New York, officially put Pop Art on the art historical record. Pop marked a radical change in that record. It interrupted the trans-Atlantic dominance of moody, high-minded Abstract Expression with an unmetaphysical art of the everyday world. In 1960 the young Edward Ruscha, barely out of art school in Los Angeles, nailed the transition in a painting called “Felix,” in which the cartoon character Felix the Cat, inserted as crisp black- and-white photostat, grins broadly as he prepares to leap clear of confining bands of brushy red, white and blue paint. Many viewers, in and beyond the United States, have assumed that Pop was meant to advertise, even promote, consumer culture, though a lot of the art leaves that purpose in doubt. ’s “Still Life #35,” from 1963, is a succulently colored, billboard-scale panorama of white bread, soft drinks and cigarettes. Whether it celebrates feel-good consumption or casts a cool eye on potential addictions to carbs and smoke is a question. American Pop routinely rides an ambiguous line, though there’s no doubt that one way or another it’s almost always, aggressively, an art about appetite: about eating, drinking, lusting, getting, having. This is the way it looked to Europe in 1964 when Robert Rauschenberg, who had arrived at that year’s Venice Biennale as part of a Pop package organized by the New York art dealer , took the grand prize for best of show. Talk about waking up to a threat. In the eyes of many Italian artists, American art, until then known mostly from afar through magazines, was suddenly an invading force fueled by money and the news media. The invasion wasn’t just into the Biennale but into the traditions and power structures of European culture. The impact was, many perceived, saturating and irreversible, setting rules for a new international art game. A few young Italians who had been heading in a Popish direction, like Tano Festa and Mario Schifano, persevered, at least for a while. Others, in discouragement or disgust, dropped away. Meanwhile, a group of critically minded German painters gathered under the label Capitalist Realism — Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter — had begun playing satirically and productively with Pop’s consumerist model. And a few long-distance visitors to the Biennale, among them Waldemar Cordeiro and Marta Minujin from Argentina, grasped the political potential of Pop and took news of it home. Ms. Minujin, versatile and irrepressible, a pioneer in every form she has tackled, is one of the show’s most engaging figures, someone you know you’d like to know. Another is the short-lived Pauline Boty (1938-1966), represented by a single small collage that consists of cutout portraits of some of her heroes (Rimbaud, Marilyn Monroe, Proust) fixed like Byzantine saints on a sequin-spangled gold ground. Ms. Boty was the only female member of the early British Pop Art movement that also included Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and David Hockney, though she rarely figures in an account of it. (She is mentioned only twice, and fleetingly — as “the Wimbledon Bardot” — in Christopher Simon Sykes’s two-volume Hockney biography.) Pop Art, everywhere, was a mostly male preserve. And while the show makes moves toward inclusiveness, it still only goes so far. From all of Eastern Europe there is just one woman here, though a remarkable one, the Slovakian artist Jana Zelibska, whose 1967 “Venus” — an elegant folding screen in the form of a reclining nude with a peek-through vagina — takes up a lot of well-deserved space. Yayoi Kusama and Yoko Ono (Ms. Ono paired with John Lennon) are minority figures in a contingent of Japanese male artists, who seem bent on injecting American Pop with a psychosis-inducing serum. In 1964, Ushio Shinohara recreated Rauschenberg’s 1958 sculpture “Coca-Cola Plan” as dripping, off-kilter ruin. (He was working from a magazine photo.) In Tadanori Yokoo’s animated “Kiss Kiss Kiss,” a mild-mannered Lichtensteinian love scene becomes a stabbing erotic attack. Of the American Pop painters selected, only three are women — , Jann Haworth and Marjorie Strider, who died in 2014. We know, however, from exhibitions like “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968,” organized by the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia five years ago, there were, and are, many more. The erotically forthright work by women feels particularly bold, coming as it did when postwar codes of gender “normality” were still widely held and before an organized feminism movement could give support. It was dangerous to be a rebellious woman in the 1960s. And under military regimes like those in Argentina and Brazil, it was risky to be a rebel of any kind. It would have taken guts, and fury, for Hélio Oiticica to carry his banner reading “Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero” through Brazilian streets, and for León Ferrari to display his still-shocking 1965 sculpture “The Western, Christian Civilization,” with its off-the-shelf plaster figure of the crucified Jesus fixed to a 6-foot-tall model of a United States fighter plane. Mr. Ferrari, who died in 2013, was attacking the United States on two counts: for its bombing of North Vietnam (Operation Rolling Thunder began that year) and for its support of reactionary governments in Argentina, another of which would take power the next year. (No wonder Pop Art, when perceived as an American export, was eyed by many artists with distrust, even as they adopted some of its materials and tactics.) Those were realities of the times, everywhere. War was escalating. Racial and class conflicts were intensifying. Protest was growing more violent. Pop Art, adaptable to polemic, was tuned into all of this. It was, or could be, angry and tough. So what did the art market do with it? It withdrew support and gave a push to Minimalism, blank and abstract enough to block out bad news. Look at one of Carl Andre’s stacks of bricks, or at a Dan Flavin sculpture made from industrial light tubes, or at a big, ultra-plain Donald Judd box and you’d think that 1960s insanity never happened. This show lets you know it did. 2016-02-25 00:00:00 By

32 Spellbinding Treasures From Japan’s Kamakura Period at Asia Society In different times and places a combustive mix of realism and religion has given rise to some of the world’s greatest art. The European Renaissance was one such era. Another was the brief Kamakura period of Japan, from 1185 to 1333. “Kamakura: Realism and Spirituality in the Sculpture of Japan,” a spellbinding exhibition at Asia Society, features wonderfully vivid representations of Buddhist divinities. The first piece visitors encounter may not seem to agree with modern notions of realism. It’s a dark, nearly 22-inch-tall head of a guardian king, whose ferocious expression appears more cartoonish than naturalistic, carved from Japanese cypress sometime in the 13th century. But he has an intense psychological presence in the smooth rendering of his deeply knit brow, gaping mouth revealing tongue and teeth, and bugged-out eyes made of rock crystal with pupils painted on the reverse, a signature innovation of the period. Originally attached to a whole, armor-clad warrior, this object does more than just symbolize a mythic character. It also seems to be an incarnation of divine ferocity, as if it were appearing in a dream or a hallucination. More than realism, this is visionary realism. In Buddhist lore there are four guardian kings, whose mission is to defend temples and the Buddha from evil doers and to scare away fools and knaves ill-equipped for enlightenment. Guardian king images were particularly popular during the Kamakura period, partly because of anxieties about the threat of invasion by Mongols, who Japanese forces managed to repel in 1274 and 1281. Also, the period followed a time of violent domestic strife among warlords that caused the destruction of many temples and artworks. The Kamakura period ushered in a rebuilding and the creation of numerous vigorous new artworks. This exhibition’s most amazing sculpture represents another wrathful royal divinity: Daiitoku Myoo, or the Wisdom King of Awe-Inspiring Power. He has six faces, legs and arms and is riding a kneeling, pony-size water buffalo. The king’s foremost and largest face bears an expression of gleeful fury, and he holds a sword in one hand, a trident in another and, in a third, a noose for capturing people and dragging them on to the right spiritual path. The water buffalo is a marvel of naturalistic representation, and the whole sculpture is a technical tour de force. That something so complicated could be made from wood — as opposed to cast in bronze — brings up another distinctive innovation of Kamakura sculpture. Rather than carving figures from single blocks of wood, artists sculpted parts from separate pieces and glued them together in a technique called yosegi-zukuri. This enabled the creation of bigger and more complex works. Kamakura sculptures typically were brightly polychromed and gilded. Traces of their former colors can be seen on the works in this show, but most pieces have darkened so much over time that it’s hard to see that they’re made of wood rather than bronze. This exhibition, organized by the art historian Ive Covaci and Adriana Proser, the museum’s curator of traditional Asian art, offers, along with wrathful deities, numerous figures exuding beatific serenity. One of the most realistic is “The Shinto Deity Hachiman in the Guise of a Buddhist Monk” (1328). With his shaved head, crystalline eyes and slightly frowning lips, he sits in the lotus position, his robe enveloping his body in curving, gracefully rhythmic folds. He raises one beautifully carved hand and rests the other on his thigh. While this sculpture looks like the portrait of a real, meditating person, it actually represents a Shinto god. That religion predated the sixth-century arrival in Japan of Buddhism, which absorbed Shinto gods like Hachiman into its own pantheon. When conservators disassembled the Hachiman sculpture they discovered an inscription inside its hollow head identifying it as the work of Koshun (active around 1315-1329). Artists signing their works was yet another development of Kamakura sculpture, and a number of the period’s masters are known; works by several of them are in this exhibition. There is a lovely, small sculpture representing the childlike figure Jizo Bosatsu by Zen’en (1197-1258), a member of the Zen-based school Zenpa. Three other works are by Kaikei (active around 1183-1223), including an impressively fierce yet calm representation of a seated, sword bearing Fudo Myoo , a deity who diverts anger toward salvation. The “Empowering Interiors” section of the show illustrates the tradition of depositing sacred objects and texts inside Buddhist statues to endow them with supernatural powers. The contents of a small version of Jizo Bosatsu by Koen (1207-after 1275) are displayed along with the statue. Among these items is an inventory compiled by a monk named Shaishin, who oversaw the sculpture’s consecration. It lists “one grain of a Buddha relic, gilt-bronze images of Shakyamuni and Amida” and “1,000 votive prints of Amida and Jizo.” As the art historian Nedachi Kensuke explains in his essay in the excellent catalog, such inclusions were supposed to give their sculptural housings “miraculous efficacy” in response to the prayers of believers. Modern viewers may shrug off such practices as superstition. But the spiritual realism of this exhibition’s works still captivates. At the start of her catalog essay, Ms. Covaci quotes an apt saying by the Buddhist monk Myoe (1173-1232): “When you think about an object carved from wood or drawn in a picture as if it were a living being, then it is a living being.” 2016-02-25 00:00:00 By

33 Meet Facebook’s New Emojis: Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry “Not every moment you want to share is happy,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. “Sometimes you want to share something sad or frustrating. Our community has been asking for a dislike button for years, but not because people want to tell friends they don’t like their posts. People want to express empathy and make it comfortable to share a wider range of emotions.” In response to demand from a global audience of more than a billion users, Facebook has moved beyond the “like” button with a new shorthand to express your thoughts and feelings. The giant social network is offering five new options: love, haha, wow, sad or angry. News Feed posts will now show a tally of the reactions for each post. The social network has been conducting research for more than a year; the winners were the five emojis that translated to cultures around the globe. The project was led by Julie Zhuo, a product design director at Facebook who, in turn, consulted Professor Dacher Keltner, a social psychology expert at UC Berkeley. The original recommendation included some two dozen emotions, but that was rejected as too much of an engineering challenge and unnecessarily complex. The five selected options are said to have universal understanding and application. 2016-02-25 00:00:00 Ilana Greenberg

34 Ho Chi Minh City’s Shifting Skyline Stirs a Movement to Preserve History HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — When Nguyen Viet moved back to Vietnam from Britain in 2014, he was hired to write design guidelines for a redevelopment project in downtown Ho Chi Minh City. He had just earned his master’s degree in urban design and planning, and was eager to make an impact. But before he could finish writing the guidelines, a building on the project site — a 1929 Art Deco apartment beside the former Rue Catinat, once a central artery of French-colonial Indochina — was demolished. “What I realized is that they have very little power,” Mr. Viet, 28, said of his fellow urban planners. “The fates of the buildings were being decided by someone else.” The buildings along the Rue Catinat , now Dong Khoi Street, helped this sprawling city of about eight million, formerly called Saigon, earn the nickname “the Pearl of the Orient.” Colonial-era travel writing describes tree-lined boulevards flanked by grand hotels with wide verandas. They also formed the backdrop for “ The Quiet American ,” the Graham Greene novel set during Vietnam’s war for independence from France in the early 1950s, and for indelible images of the Vietnam War. But when Ho Chi Minh City’s property market perked up after a slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis, dozens of prewar buildings — spanning the colonial to modernist eras — were razed to make room for new ones. As the city’s modest skyline grows, residents are watching with a mixture of awe and trepidation. “There’s been a lot of destruction, especially in the last five to seven years, I would say, and mainly by these huge, huge, huge developments,” said Hoanh Tran, design principal at HTA+Pizzini Architects here and a former historic preservation consultant in New York City. Today, many of the city’s remaining colonial-era apartment blocks are mixed-use and charmingly dilapidated, with an entrepreneurial buzz that lures stylish retailers and mom-and-pop vendors alike. A prime example is 151 Dong Khoi Street, a colonial-era building with yellow concrete walls and tiled wall . Its ground level has an arcade — once the entrance to the Catinat-Ciné movie house — where vendors hawk greeting cards and inexpensive artwork. But its upper levels house L’Usine, a cafe and lifestyle boutique, and Galerie Quynh, a commercial art gallery that would not look out of place in Paris or New York. Tearing these old buildings down, Mr. Tran said, rips holes in the city’s social fabric. “If it happens a lot, then in a decade you won’t recognize this place,” he said. The historic downtown already presents a striking contrast to its former self. Its colonial-era cathedral, post office and opera house now sit near glittering malls, apartments and office towers. A handful of 35-plus-story skyscrapers have appeared since 2010, and an 81-story building is being constructed by the private conglomerate Vingroup. Statistics on demolitions are scarce, but the Ho Chi Minh City Urban Development Management Support Center, a French-Vietnamese research agency, found that at least 207 colonial-era villas in two of the city’s 24 districts were demolished or significantly altered between 1994 and 2014. In the past few years, several thousand residents have started to network on new Facebook groups dedicated to celebrating and protecting the city’s historic buildings, several participants said. The groundswell appears to reflect a wider trend: Although Vietnam’s governing Communist Party bans private media and aggressively punishes internal dissidents, the rise of social media has enabled millions of Vietnamese to discuss hot-button social issues online without much fear of reprisal. Thousands of Vietnamese flocked to Facebook last year, for example, to criticize a government plan to cut down and replace 6,700 trees in Hanoi, the capital. City officials eventually backed down. “A lot of young people would like to be part of a movement,” said Nguyen Duc Hiep, an environmental scientist in Australia and a visiting researcher at Ton Duc Thang University here. “They don’t want to watch and let the authorities decide what should be done; they want to have a voice,” said Mr. Hiep, who is also an administrator of a Facebook group dedicated to vintage shophouses. The public outcry here has largely focused on a plan to overhaul the Saigon Tax Trade Center, a 1924 department store that was drastically transformed over the decades, but whose interior still has wrought-iron balustrades, an intricately tiled floor and grand staircase, and other original design features. The grass-roots advocacy has focused on those features, but aesthetics are not the only motivating factor: Some residents feel protective toward the building because they remember visiting it as children. “It is the history that the Saigoneers want to keep,” said Tuan A. Phung, the honorary consul general of Finland in Ho Chi Minh City and the leader of a 2014 online petition to save the building. “The feeling, the atmosphere, memories.” Later in 2014, the Culture Ministry asked the city’s governing People’s Committee to step in. And last year the tax center’s owner, the state-owned Saigon Trading Group, sent local officials a conservation plan for its scheduled redevelopment work. But Mr. Phung said he worries about the plan, which proposes to remove the vintage design features and later reinstall them, because the details were not publicly released. “They don’t have the habit of being responsive” to public feedback, he said of the company’s executives, who did not respond to interview requests. “Instead they’re responsive to the boss, which is the People’s Committee.” Equally contentious is a plan by Vingroup to build a mixed-use development in Ba Son, a military-controlled naval complex at the edge of downtown. In a brief statement, Vingroup said the project will include commercial, residential and “heritage preservation” elements, including a section with the original Ba Son Shipyard. But the makeover risks treading on a key symbol of Vietnamese nationalism. The naval complex was developed during the Nguyen dynasty and hosted a 1925 labor strike against French industrialists led by future President Ton Duc Thang. In 1993, the Culture Ministry declared the shipyard a national historic site. Architects and other experts say privately that the project’s historical resonance, powerful developer and military association make it politically delicate. And they wonder aloud if most of the site’s historic buildings will be sensitively renovated, or even retained. Nguyen Hong Tien, a Construction Ministry official in Hanoi, said Vingroup’s previous projects in downtown Ho Chi Minh City have benefited the city’s economy and aesthetic. However, he added, “If we just see the immediate benefits of new development, then in the future we cannot restore what we have lost.” Tim Doling, a historian in Ho Chi Minh City who profiles threatened properties on his website, Historic Vietnam , said the recent loss of so much urban heritage had diminished the country’s appeal for tourists. “The key to tourism is creating stories around urban landscapes, and people come here wanting to do Graham Greene tours,” he said. “Most of the stuff associated with Graham Greene is gone.” On that list, he said, is the 1929 apartment that was demolished in 2014, and another historic building along the old Rue Catinat that was replaced by a Vingroup mall. 2016-02-25 00:00:00 By

35 Serpentine Gallery Reveals 2016 Pavilion and Summer Houses London’s Serpentine Gallery has revealed the designs for the 16th annual Serpentine Pavilion and the four 25sqm Summer Houses that were commissioned as part of the institution’s newly expanded Architecture Program for 2016 This year’s Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) (Copenhagen/New York), is described as an “unzipped wall” which transforms a straight line into a three-dimensional space, creating a dynamic structure that will house the events of the Pavilion’s programme. “For the Serpentine Pavilion 2016, we have attempted to design a structure that embodies multiple aspects that are often perceived as opposites: a structure that is free-form yet rigorous, modular yet sculptural, both transparent and opaque, both solid box and blob,” the architects explain. “This unzipping of the wall turns the line into a surface, transforming the wall into a space. A complex three-dimensional environment is created which can be explored and experienced in a variety of ways, inside and outside.” The four Summer Houses, by NLÉ (Amsterdam/Lagos), Barkow Leibinger (Berlin/New York), Yona Friedman (Paris) and Asif Khan (London), were designed in response to Queen Caroline’s Temple, a classical style summer house built in 1734 and located a short distance from the Serpentine Gallery. Serpentine Galleries Director, Julia Peyton-Jones, and Co-Director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, said: “We are delighted to reveal the designs for our expanded Architecture Programme. “As you can see from the architect’s renders, Bjarke Ingels has responded to the brief for a multi-purpose Pavilion with a supremely elegant structure that is both curvaceous wall and soaring spire. “The response to design a Summer House inspired by the 18th Century Queen Caroline’s Temple by our four international architects has been equally inspired and has produced four unique spaces for visitors to explore this summer.” Click the slideshow to see the Serpentine Pavilion and Summer House designs 2016-02-24 22:45:29 Nicholas Forrest

36 Artist's Message In A Bottle Retrieved By Artist An American artist's message in a bottle project quickly became an impromptu communiqué between two creative minds when it was picked up on a French beach by a painter and her husband. The bottle was deposited into the New York Harbor in 2013 by George Boorujy, a New York- based artist represented by P. P. O. W gallery. Into the bottle, Boorujy deposited a drawing of a cormorant—he's best known for detailed, shockingly lifelike drawings of animals—as well as a letter with his contact information. Two and a half years later, he received an email from Brigitte Barthelemy and her husband Alain, who found the bottle on a beach in the Aquitaine region of France, near the town of Royan, while walking their dog. The bottle had traveled approximately 3,500 miles. Boorujy describes the first email he recieved from Barthelemy as "one of the most charming emails I have ever received," and "perfectly French. " The Barthelemy's sent Boorujy pictures of the bottle, which was predictably worse for the wear, with a large barnacle attached to the top. "When I saw the email from Alain and Brigitte, I was amazed and crazy with excitement," he told French newspaper Sud Ouest. "And the fact that Brigitte is also a painter is extraordinary. " "I honestly don't know what's more surprising," Boorujy wrote on his blog , "that it made it to Europe, or being that it was tossed from Staten Island that it wasn't pulled by the currents right to Italy. (For French readers, that was a cheap joke about the number of Italians in Staten Island. But I am from New Jersey and allowed to make such cheap jokes.)" Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-02-24 14:42:56+00:00 Cait Munro

37 FIAC Pulls Plug on Officielle— Paris's Officielle Art Fair will not take place in 2016, according to an email to exhibitors from Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain (FIAC) staffers Jennifer Flay and Maxime Hourdequin of Reed Expositions, which organized the fair. Officielle, an official satellite , functioned as a kind of off-site extension of FIAC. Sales were lackluster, one New York dealer told artnet News, speaking on background. Reed also recently canceled Paris Photo LA, a satellite to Paris Photo, after three outings, and announced that a planned FIAC Los Angeles wouldn't happen at all. “We have failed to create the conditions that could make such an event at the Cité de la Mode et du Design an unconditional success," Flay and Hourdequin write. The news comes despite a rush of collectors during opening hours last October. The fair's sixty-eight exhibitors in 2016 came from as far as Los Angeles and Shanghai, and included New Yorkers such as 11R, Nicelle Beauchene, and Rachel Uffner. About a quarter of the exhibitors were Parisian, including Galerie 8 +4, Houg, Hussenot, and Eva Meyer. “They did a good job at an interesting venue and had strong galleries," Nicelle Beauchene told artnet News by phone, “but there was barely anybody there. The collectors didn't come out for it. I think the venue was the problem. You had to take a boat or public transportation, and it wasn't in the best neighborhood. " Another fair, Paris Internationale , had actually sprung up in competition, Beauchene pointed out, drawing dealers and collectors to a more central venue. “Once Paris Internationale started up, that took people away from Officielle as well," she said. Flay and Hourdequin say that they are “currently exploring other opportunities for the event. " Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-02-24 14:26:46+00:00 Brian Boucher

38 Andrea Bowers' Transgender Icons Shine When activism finds its way into the art gallery, the house style is what Paige Sarlin calls " new left-wing melancholy ," or what I think of as “post- radical chic:" neutralized and neutralizing, mining the paraphernalia of protest for historical pathos. This is not the way Andrea Bowers operates, as you can confirm for yourself if you visit the LA artist's show at Andrew Kreps Gallery in Chelsea, dubbed “ Whose Feminism Is It Anyway? " Bowers says that she makes her work by listening to "alternative media," finding stories that inspire her, and then figuring out how to relate to them using the tools of her art. Back in 2004 for the Whitney Biennial , she showed a video detailing the story of environmental activist John Quigley, known for physically occupying a tree to stop developers in LA (in 2011, she crossed the line from documentarian to participant, joining Quigley in another "treesitting" protest). More recently, Bowers's has done acclaimed , large-scale drawing installations about immigrant deaths at the Mexican border and about the Steubenville, Ohio high school rape case. In terms of media, “Whose Feminism Is It Anyway? " is disparate, the works mostly connected to the theme of transgender liberation, a cause which Time in 2014 famously dubbed the “next civil rights frontier. " It includes small graphite drawings, large scruffy marker-on-cardboard constructions, and an assemblage incorporating angel wings and ribbons with feminist and trans-rights slogans on them, such as "My Body, My Choice," and "Trans Is Beautiful. " At this gallery show's literal center is a table piled high with cardboard-backed facsimiles of historical activist graphics that Bowers has spent decades collecting, with an eye to how images of women figure in left-wing culture. This reflects the topic of the show, inasmuch as "Whose Feminism Is It Anyway? " focuses specifically on images of trans women, and not of trans men. But additionally, the fact that you are invited to rifle through these images nudges you to think about how Bowers herself approaches this historical material, as a resource library for present- day inspiration instead of a dead-letter office of soured dreams. The most eye-catching works in the show grow out of this approach, a series of vivid, large- sized photographic portraits of present-day trans activist icons, their poses and props inspired by Bowers's collection of graphics: CeCe McDonald, clad as the avenging angel of Liberty , with wings and a hammer, or Johanna Saavedra , striding down an LA street and ready to throw a brick à la a well-known poster from May ‘68 . There is a particular significance, here, to these symbolic trappings. McDonald, for instance, became an icon after pleading guilty to second-degree manslaughter in 2012. After being physically attacked on the street, she defended herself with a pair of scissors. Her attacker ended up dead, and the state refused to accept her argument of self-defense. “In the final analysis, CeCe McDonald is a transgender Black woman who had the courage to ‘stand her ground' and defend herself from a hate attack," opined . “As a punishment for surviving, she has been sentenced to 41 months of torture inside of a men's prison. " Jennicet Gutierrez, subject of another of Bowers's portraits, made the news last year when she interrupted President Obama in the middle of a speech about LGBTQ rights. “President Obama," she cried, before being forcefully ejected from the banquet, “release all LGBTQ immigrants from detention and stop all deportations. " (Obama by far has the worst record on deportations of any recent president, Republican or Democrat.) For her audacity and allergy to cant, Gutierrez received a condescending editorial in The Advocate , comparing her to Kanye West and saying “we should resist tossing aside our civility to fight injustice. " To depict her, as Bowers does here, proudly brandishing a rifle, is to take a side in a living argument about tactics. The fact that the resulting image evokes canonical political imagery becomes a way for the artist to point out the historical provenance of Gutierrez's militancy. It is perfectly possible to read these images as merely affirmative, not that much different from countless magazine covers celebrating newly minted transgender celebrities such as Laverne Cox or Caitlyn Jenner. Even flourishes such as Bowers's hammers, bricks, and rifles can be recuperated according to the codes of fashion photography, which continuously mines radical signifiers for edgy frisson. They are more than fashion plates—but they demand an audience who is willing or able to relate to a larger argument outside the gallery. You can tell that Bowers very much means these photos to amplify the voices of her subjects— partly because elsewhere in the show, she does just that: Kreps's neighboring space features a video she shot of a discussion between McDonald, Gutierrez, and Patrisse Cullors of #BlackLiveMatter that the artist organized at Otis College of Art and Design. “The programming of these types of events in the curriculum of art acts as a reminder of art's compatibility with activism," a press release explains. Yet there is a debate about that compatibility is worth flushing to the surface. “I was trained to believe that galleries were compromised institutions," Bowers told Thomas Lawson a few years ago. “I have a lot of guilt associated with my participation. " In that interview, she talked about how different the gallery space was when activated for activist purposes and for what she called the “regular art crowd. " Will the "regular art crowd" side with The Advocate or with Jennicet Gutierrez? Will this crowd even see, here, that they are being asked to take a side in a debate about respectability? This question hangs over the show, but Bowers doesn't seem to obsess about it either. She's using the space for what it offers. At least one work here, though, can be read almost as an allegory of the uneasy fit between different possible communities: An eight-foot-long drawing in orange colored pencil, recreating the pattern of fancy wrapping paper. It's lovely, and you get so lost in its superficial craft that you almost don't notice that within its intricate expanse, a fragment of writing floats, incongruously small. Here it is: This quote from a radical feminist collective could be a motto for CeCe McDonald's supporters. But the way the in-your-face message is buried here might also be read as as a message itself: You have to smash through the show's superficial impression and discard the concerns of artistic fashion to arrive at its most urgent meaning. Many artists have made careers “raising questions" about art and its relationship to politics; Andrea Bowers actually raises questions about art and its relationship to politics. That makes her work much more discomforting and tricky to get a handle on, but also much more interesting. “Andrea Bowers: Whose Feminism Is It Anyway? " is on view at Andrew Kreps Gallery, through March 26, 2016. 2016-02-24 12:23:44+00:00 Ben Davis

39 Holocaust Survivor Regains Camille Pissarro After a three-year legal dispute , the University of Oklahoma (OU) has agreed to return Camille Pissarro 's 1886 painting La Bergère Rentrant des Moutons (Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep) to French Holocaust survivor Léone Meyer. The terms of the settlement transfer ownership of the work, which was donated to the university by Clara Weitzenhoffer in 2000, to Meyer, the adopted daughter of original owner Raoul Meyer, reports the Oklahoman. The Nazis stole the painting during the German occupation of Paris. This summer, the painting will return to France, to be exhibited for five years at yet-to-be- determined museum selected by both parties. Moving forward, the canvas will be shown for three-year intervals at OU's Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art and in France. "Léone Meyer has agreed that, rather than getting the painting back for her own living room, to continue the public display of the painting for the public," her lawyer, Pierre Ciric, told the New York Times . "This is a wonderful victory," said Oklahoma representative Paul Wesselhoft at a press conference. "It's unfortunate that it took so long. " "Ladies and gentlemen, La Bergère is free, La Bergère is returning home," added a pleased Eric Sundby, president of OU's Holocaust Remembrance and Restitution Society. "This victory for the family is also a victory for those murdered during the Holocaust. " In May of 2015, in response to the ongoing dispute, Oklahoma legislators signed a non-binding resolution calling on the university to investigate its collection and return compromised works. "The university is pleased that a constructive agreement has been reached," said OU president David Boren in a statement. "The rotating display of the work meets the university's long-stated goal to ensure the painting remains available to Oklahomans and that it continues to be available for educational purposes. " It remains to be seen whether other institutions, such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, will follow the university's example. This past June, a Los Angeles judge ruled that the Spanish museum was not obligated to return Pissarro's Rue Saint-Honoré, Après-midi, Effet de Pluie (1887) to the heirs of Lilly Cassirer, who was forced to sell it while fleeing Germany in 1939. In his ruling, Judge John F. Walter recommended that the museum consider making a compromise with the original owner's heirs. Other Pissarro works with links to the Nazis include La Seine vue du Pont-Neuf, au fond le Louvre, discovered in late German art collector Cornelius Gurlitt's Munich apartment in 2012. Follow artnet News on Facebook. 2016-02-24 11:52:32+00:00 Sarah Cascone

40 Review: Diller Scofidio + Renfro's New Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive BERKELEY, Calif. — Moving from the stark white galleries of the new Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive to a vibrant orange stairwell leading upstairs to the café, I was reminded of somewhere else. Ah, yes. The former Brasserie restaurant at the Seagram Building in New York, which also drew visitors into a glowing, citrus-colored space. This was not a comparison forced by the fact that Charles Renfro, a partner in the architectural firm Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, designed both the Brasserie, which opened in 2000 and closed last year, and the museum known as BAMPFA (pronounced bam-P-F-A), which opened on January 31. Nor did it arise from conscious recognition that both projects added sinuous forms and audacious materials to existing modernist boxes: The Brasserie filled a gutted Philip Johnson interior with curved lenticular glass and slabs of pearwood, while BAMPFA is a mutant retrofit of a disused 1939 Moderne printing plant. Like I said, I wasn’t really thinking about parallels. I only felt I had been at this threshold before, between something cool and cosseting, and something porous and intimate. This kind of palpable contrast makes sense, given that the building is a well-considered jumble, inside and out. The new BAMPFA brings an encyclopedic art museum of more than 19,000 works together with an archive of more than 17,000 films, demanding a Mutt and Jeff combination of bright, free-flowing galleries and hermetic theaters. And the building encasing them, located across the street from the University of California at Berkeley’s campus, dramatizes the hybrid mission with an arresting juxtaposition: A steel-shingled element drapes over and invades the former printing plant’s rectangular structure. The addition, whose stainless- steel roof had to be installed tile by curved tile, in software-dictated order, has been compared to a pastry bag, but to my eye looked more like a light beam from a projector. It creates striking moments — including the café cantilevering over the main gallery, its interior windows framing patrons as if they were talking heads in a documentary. The two institutions used to cohabitate in a 1970 Brutalist concrete structure designed by Mario Ciampi on the southeast corner of campus. But a 1997 engineering survey confirmed that the Ciampi building, which was notable for its 7,000 square-foot domed atrium, was poorly made for earthquakes. Bracing completed in 2001 raised the seismic rating from “very poor” to “poor,” and it was clear that more effective supports would compromise the long, unbroken span valued for exhibitions and community events. By then, the Pacific Film Archive had relocated to a nearby space. In 2008, BAMPFA released a design by Toyo Ito for a new building at the corner of Oxford and Center streets. The museum was attracting about 75,000 visitors each year, largely from the university, and it was hoped that the location, near the main campus entrance and just a block away from a BART rail station, would enlarge and diversify the audience. The site was so felicitous that Lawrence Rinder, BAMPFA’s director since 2008, later told a local journalist that he could build a Quonset hut there, and it would be a success. The Ito building was to have curving white stainless steel walls resembling partially drawn curtains and came with a price of $143 million—$200 million factoring in realistic cost overruns. The timing on the eve of a global economic meltdown could not have been worse. BAMPFA canceled the Ito design in favor of retrofitting the site’s existing structure, the vacant UC Berkeley Press Building constructed as a WPA project by the San Francisco architects Masten and Hurd. In an interview at the time of the opening , Rinder told me that he considered only American architects for the job, to economize on travel expenses. “We were looking at every last saving,” he said. Diller, Scofidio + Renfro was selected from among a group of ten firms that also included Bernard Tschumi, Will Bruder and Tod Williams Billie Tsien. The choice, Rinder said, was based on DS+R’s proven capacity to deal with both still and kinetic artforms” (like the ticker-tape-like digital displays at their redesigned Lincoln Center), its portfolio of “freestanding iconic buildings” as well as repurposed historical ones, and its “track record of sticking to a budget.” That figure was $96 million in 2010, when the new plan was announced. BAMPFA met the final cost of $112 million—an increase that Rinder said was in line with inflation—through a capital campaign plus a university contribution of $20 million. Among the notable features of the L-shaped press building were a saw-tooth roof, a spiraling Art Deco staircase with a silvery curl of a banister and sensational interior graffiti that had amassed after the structure was vacated in 2004. Among its deficits was a modest 48,000-square-foot- over-three-floors size and a dull wall along Center Street, which one blog commentator described as a “dead zone” that “sucked the life out of that highly traveled path between BART and the U.” Renfro preserved the roof and organized the 10,000-square-foot main gallery beneath it; the saw teeth create a friendly, shed-like topping and set the tone for the diagonals that run rampant through the museum in counterpoint to the press building’s orthogonal structure. It’s a serene, lovely and to all appearances blameless space to see art. After thinking about ways to use the graffiti, he got rid of it, though he said that some of it might be lurking behind sheet rock (“I’m really not sure,” he added nervously.) He consigned the Art Deco staircase to the staff quarters, which are entered on Oxford Street, adding a touch of luxe to a part of the building that appears to have been value engineered down to raw functionality. He put the public entrance around the corner on Center Street and topped the abhorred wall with a BAMPFA sign in steel supergraphics. Passerspy can look into the lobby and gift shop next to it. Also visible from the street is a 60-by-25-foot interior wall that will showcase a different bespoke artwork every six months. For the museum’s inaugural exhibition, “Architecture of Life,” the Art Wall presents “The World Garden” a brushed-ink mural based on the ancient Chinese literati garden, by the Beijing-based artist Qiu Zhijie. Renfro’s chief task was to find space. The 45,000-square-foot addition, which he calls “the cipher” because of a somewhat mysterious quality it evokes, holds a 232-seat purpose-built cinema (the Barbro Osher theater) as well as the café (Babette, relocated from the former site). Renfro dug underneath the building for another 28,000 square feet, scooping out the Carla and David Crane Forum, a place for people to gather on tiered seating repurposed from Canary Island trees from a lot next door to the printing plant, which had been sacrificed to the expansion, and four study centers, where light pours down through both a glass lobby wall and glass strips embedded around the periphery of the building. Also below grade is a 32-seat film theater, and four connecting gallery rooms, including one dedicated to Himalayan art, with end-grain wood tiling that’s an homage to the printing facility’s floor. (The original wood was so saturated with toxic ink that it couldn’t be recycled.) BAMPFA activities will spill outdoors as well. A large LED screen is attached to the Addison Street side of the museum at the tail of the cipher, its rectilinear detailing in steel a tribute to the original Art Deco press building. Hundreds of people will be able to watch films there, standing, for now, in a small plaza-like area. Renfro noted that the screen is not just a device for entertainment but also reflective of the cinematic experience on the other side, a symbolic “window” into the big theater, whose own screen is right behind it. When I mentioned to Lawrence Rinder that a blog comment had offered congratulations for the chance to divert Berkeley’s “bored homeless people,” he laughed and said he would consider programming a film series for them. Transitions are rarely subtle in this museum, a byproduct of box meeting cipher. Renfro told me his favorite place is a glassy spot just outside the café entrance, where the two elements come together. The oddly scaled wedge—too insubstantial for a gallery, too small for a party—seems to serve little purpose apart from being interesting. (Renfro said it was conceived as a lounge.) Cantilevered over the main floor, it gives a view of a building shard poking through an interior wall—a 2008 artwork by Felix Schramm that’s part of the “Architecture of Life” show. Rinder likened the work to a “serious punch list problem.” It was a compliment. Renfro may not have intended to comment on the theatricality of Ito’s curtain-raising design, but the new BAMPFA is equally devoted to the idea of spectacle. Even bland spaces offer drama, like the unexpected door in the rear of the gift shop that leads to a downstairs gallery. It’s a surreptitious moment in a building dedicated to visual connection. Looking up from the main gallery through the triangular café windows at the press opening, I saw Charles Renfro himself, talking to another journalist. Once again I thought of his Brasserie, especially the line of video cameras over the bar that broadcast the arrival of unwitting guests before they themselves became spectators of the drama. As Bogie would have said, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” 2016-02-24 07:20:09 Julie Lasky

41 Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar faces down Donald Trump over immigration This is our new website, which is still incomplete. Please send any comments to [email protected]. Our old website is still live but is not being updated: old.theartnewspaper.com By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. 2016-02-23 00:00:00 theartnewspaper.com

42 Umberto Eco, 84, Best- Selling Academic Who Navigated Two Worlds, Dies Umberto Eco, an Italian scholar in the arcane field of semiotics who became the author of best- selling novels, notably the blockbuster medieval mystery “The Name of the Rose,” died on Friday at his home in Milan. He was 84. His Italian publisher, Bompiani, confirmed his death, according to the Italian news agency ANSA. No cause was given. As a semiotician, Mr. Eco sought to interpret cultures through their signs and symbols — words, religious icons, banners, clothing, musical scores, even cartoons — and published more than 20 nonfiction books on these subjects while teaching at the University of Bologna, Europe’s oldest university. But rather than segregate his academic life from his popular fiction, Mr. Eco infused his seven novels with many of his scholarly preoccupations. In bridging these two worlds, he was never more successful than he was with “The Name of the Rose,” his first novel, which was originally published in Europe in 1980. It sold more than 10 million copies in about 30 languages. (A 1986 Hollywood adaptation directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Sean Connery received only a lukewarm reception.) The book is set in a 14th-century Italian monastery where monks are being murdered by their co- religionists bent on concealing a long-lost philosophical treatise by Aristotle. Despite devoting whole chapters to discussions of Christian theology and heresies, Mr. Eco managed to enthrall a mass audience with the book, a rollicking detective thriller. His subsequent novels — with protagonists like a clairvoyant crusader in the Middle Ages, a shipwrecked adventurer in the 1600s and a 19th-century physicist — also demanded that readers absorb heavy doses of semiotic ruminations along with compelling fictional tales. In a 1995 interview with Vogue, Mr. Eco acknowledged that he was not an easy read. “People always ask me, ‘How is it that your novels, which are so difficult, have a certain success?’” he said. “I am offended by the question. It’s as if they asked a woman, ‘How can it be that men are interested in you?’” Then, with typical irony, Mr. Eco added, “I myself like easy books that put me to sleep immediately.” While Mr. Eco had many defenders in academia and the literary world, critics in both realms sometimes dismissed him for lacking either scholarly gravitas or novelistic talent. “No cultural artifact is too lowly or trivial for Eco’s analysis,” Ian Thomson, a literary biographer, wrote in The Guardian in 1999 in a review of “Serendipities: Language and Lunacy,” Mr. Eco’s collection of essays on how false beliefs had changed history. And the British novelist Salman Rushdie, in a scathing review in The London Observer, derided Mr. Eco’s 1988 novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum,” as “humorless, devoid of character, entirely free of anything resembling a credible spoken word, and mind-numbingly full of gobbledygook of all sorts.” Appearing alongside Mr. Rushdie at a literary panel in New York in 2008, Mr. Eco wryly chose to read from “Foucault’s Pendulum.” As a global superstar in both highbrow and popular cultural circles, Mr. Eco accepted such criticism with equanimity. “I’m not a fundamentalist, saying there’s no difference between Homer and Walt Disney,” he told a Guardian journalist who was exploring his juxtaposition of scholarship and pop iconography in 2002. “But Mickey Mouse can be perfect in the sense that a Japanese haiku is.” Able to deliver lectures in five modern languages, as well as in Latin and classical Greek, Mr. Eco crisscrossed the Atlantic for academic conferences, book tours and celebrity cocktail parties. Impish, bearded and a chain-smoker, he enjoyed bantering over cheap wine with his students late into the night at taverns in Bologna. He and his German-born wife, Renate Ramge, an architecture and arts teacher, kept apartments in Paris and Milan and a 17th-century manor once owned by the Jesuits in the hills near Rimini, on the Adriatic Sea. They had two children, Stefano, a television producer in Rome, and Carlotta, an architect in Milan. Umberto Eco was born on Jan. 5, 1932, in Alessandria, an industrial town in the Piedmont region in northwest Italy. His father, Giulio, was an accountant at a metals firm; his mother, Giovanna, was an office worker there. As a child, Umberto spent hours every day in his grandfather’s cellar, reading through the older man’s eclectic collection of Jules Verne, Marco Polo and Charles Darwin and adventure comics. During the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, he remembered wearing a fascist uniform and winning first prize in a writing competition for young fascists. After World War II, Mr. Eco joined a Catholic youth organization and rose to become its national leader. He resigned in 1954 during protests against the conservative policies of Pope Pius XII. But Mr. Eco maintained a strong attachment to the church, writing his 1956 doctoral thesis at the University of Turin on St. Thomas Aquinas. He went on to teach philosophy and then semiotics at the University of Bologna. He also gained fame in Italy for his weekly columns on popular culture and politics for L’Espresso, the country’s leading magazine. But it was the publication of “The Name of the Rose” that vaulted Mr. Eco to global renown. The monk-detective of the novel, William of Baskerville, was named after one of Sherlock Holmes’s cases, “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” The novel is narrated by a young novice who accompanies William through his investigation at the murder-prone monastery and acts as a medieval Dr. Watson. In another literary allusion, this time to the blind Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who set one of his stories in an encyclopedic library, Mr. Eco named the villain of the novel Jorge de Burgos and portrays him as the monastery’s blind librarian. De Burgos and his accomplices carry out their killings to prevent the disclosure of a supposedly lost Aristotle tome exalting the role of humor. The murderers believe the book is an instrument of Satan. In “Foucault’s Pendulum,” his second novel, Mr. Eco weaves an elaborate conspiracy inspired partly by a pendulum devised by the 19th-century French physicist Léon Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. Despite mixing allusions to the Kabbalah, mathematical formulas and Disney characters, the novel also became a worldwide best seller — even though it did not receive the near unanimous acclaim that critics had accorded to “The Name of the Rose.” The pattern repeated itself with Mr. Eco’s other novels, which were often disparaged by critics but devoured by readers in spite of their dense prose and difficult concepts. Reviewing Mr. Eco’s fourth novel, “Baudolino” (2000), in The New York Times, Richard Bernstein wrote that it “will make you wonder how a storyteller as crafty as Mr. Eco ended up producing a novel so formulaic and cluttered as this one.” Set amid the religious disputes and wars of the 12th century, “Baudolino” became the best- selling hardcover novel of all time in Germany and a commercial success elsewhere in the world. Critics were kinder to Mr. Eco’s third novel, “The Island of the Day Before” (1994), in which an Italian nobleman, who cannot swim, survives on his shipwrecked vessel at a point in the tropical Pacific Ocean where the dateline divides one day from another. “Eco has abandoned his familiar Middle Ages to create an extravagant celebration of the obsessions of the seventeenth century,” a reviewer in The New Yorker wrote, alluding to the author’s many anecdotes and explanations on the philosophy, politics and superstitions of Europe in that era. Last fall, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published a new Eco novel, “Numero Zero,” translated by Richard Dixon. The story, set in 1992, revolves around a ghostwriter who is pulled into an underworld of media politics and murder conspiracies, with a suggestion that Mussolini did not actually die in 1945 but lived in the shadows for decades. “This slender novel, which feels like a mere diversion compared with his more epic works, is nonetheless stuffed with ideas and energy,” John Williams wrote in The New York Times Book Review. Mr. Eco received Italy’s highest literary award, the Premio Strega; was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government, and was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. While he continued to make his scholarly peers uncomfortable with his pop culture celebrity, Mr. Eco saw no contradiction in his dual status. “I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels,” he said. 2016-02-19 00:00:00 By

43 Real Art Welcomes Kevin Passmore Real Art welcomes Kevin Passmore as one of the newest additions to our team. After moving from Dayton to St. Louis nearly 14 years ago, Passmore is proud to be returning to the Gem City, bringing a passion for motion and commercial production into the fray. A 2014 graduate of the Ringling College of Art and Design, Passmore earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Motion Design. Leveraging years of experience in commercial photography and a fresh skill set in animation and VFX, Passmore is excited to bring his talents to the team at Real Art. When left to his own devices, you will find Kevin kicking it with his wife Kim and son Indy, who spend their free time making noise, writing songs on the piano or twanging out on a homemade 3​-string cigar box guitar. 2016-02-04 16:03:52+00:00 realart.com

44 Chaos to Order: Lexmark Brand Experience Lexmark, a spin-off of IBM based in

Lexington, Kentucky works exclusively in the B-to-B space in seven industries—Banking, Education, Government, Healthcare, Insurance, Manufacturing, and Retail. Having just rebranded and redesigned their headquarters, Lexmark turned to Real Art to help tell the story of their solutions. Just as Lexmark guides their customers towards clarity through software and services that remove the inefficiencies of information silos, we created an experience that would bring together the full range of Lexmark’s diverse products, capabilities, and industries. We knew we had to take the project to the next level in order to do it justice. Employing design, 3D animation, and development we created a living, breathing world on a huge, touchscreen monitor—an interactive city that zooms into different locations to uncover Lexmark’s unique solutions. Visitors to their headquarters are led through an exploration of the city from a bird’s- eye view down to each individual industry, finally diving into the actual floor plans of separate businesses. The simulation triggers the experience of watching Lexmark’s services go to work, as graphics show each business move from chaos to order. An accompanying series of interactive animations and videos showed specific problems within each industry and the solutions provided by Lexmark, giving potential customers a tour through each unique situation market by market. In addition, Real Art developed 3 videos that play across multiple screens highlighting solutions like HR, accounts payable, and document management. Through engaging graphics and an illustrative script, the videos shine light on the many ways in which Lexmark empowers businesses to streamline their systems and processes. From video production, to extensive 3D modeling, to developing the interactive wall in Unity, each element of the project demanded great attention-to-detail, ultimately transforming Lexmark’s headquarters into an interactive space that breathes life into the company and its many possibilities. 2016-02-02 16:50:53+00:00 realart.com

45 Real Arters on the Charities and Non-Profits That Matter to Them The so-called “Season of Giving” may be over, but supporting charity is never out of style. We asked four Real Arters to dish on their preferred charities and non-profits that mean the most to them. Alison Dvorsky : The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) How to Donate “The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) funds research for cures and better treatments for blood cancers,” Dvorsky said. “This cause is near and dear to my heart because both of my parents have blood cancers. My dad’s life was saved two years ago by a stem cell treatment developed in part by this research and funding. Just this year, there are four new treatments available to patients. You can donate through my fundraising page or through the LLS website.” Alison Westfall : Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF) How to Donate “Cystic Fibrosis (CF) is a chronic, genetic disorder which has devastating effects on the lungs and digestive system. About 30,000 Americans have CF and about 10 million are symptomless carriers,” Westfall said. “Our son Carson was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis shortly after he was born and my husband I decided at that point to do everything that we can to support the foundation that keeps our little guy and the 30,000+ others affected with this disease on the road to a cure. With no federal support, the foundation is the primary vehicle for funding CF research. Currently, over 30 promising drugs are in the treatment pipeline, including a few of which attempt to address the root cause of the disease. While this is a very serious disease, we feel with continued awareness, education and research, a cure will be found for Carson and all others affected. Carson’s Crew was established by our family and friends to help in our mission of raising funds for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF).” Shelby White : Extra Life How to Donate “For the past 5 years, I’ve been active with Extra Life , an annual video game marathon whose proceeds go to the Children’s Medical Network center of your choice,” White said. I participate in Extra Life every year because it combines two things I’m passionate about: video games and giving back. All of the proceeds I raise go to Dayton Children’s Hospital to give kids a better quality of living while they’re going through some of the hardest times of their lives.” Drew Guarini : The Diabetes Research Institute Foundation (DRIF) How to Donate “I have now lived with Type 1 Diabetes for 11 years and it’s something that never gets easier. Though I feel extremely fortunate that medical advancements have made life with diabetes much more manageable in 2016, there is still a long way to go for a true cure,” Guarini said. “This is why I choose to support the Diabetes Research Institute Foundation, or DRIF, when donating money to diabetes-related charities. Whereas many of the major diabetes charitable organizations focus on allocating funds for treatment based research and developments, the DRIF is much more actively focused on actually curing the disease.” 2016-01-25 13:45:20+00:00 realart.com

Total 45 articles. Created at 2016-02-26 00:01