ArtsBeat

'Beyond/In' artists announced

It's still a year away, but already the excitement surrounding the next incarnation of "Beyond/In Western New York," the ballooning biennial that launched in 2005, is palpable. This morning at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, director Louis Grachos, consultant Bruce Ferguson and project leader John Massier announced the size and shape of the coming exhibition, slated for Sept. 24, 2010.

Its broad theme, "Alternating Currents," is meant to reflect on the conflicting forces that make up the Western New York -- its glorious history and shaky present, its utopian idealism and dystopian reality, a desire to stay and a need to leave -- and in so doing hopes to both represent and catalyze the entire region.

What's different this year is that the organizers have decided to invite 14 international artists (as yet unnanounced, save performance artist Didier Pasquette) to complement, and hopefully not overwhelm, the host of regional artists whose work is at the heart of the ambitious project.

After the jump, you can take a peek at the selection of regional artists (defined as hailing from within an approximately 200-mile radius of Buffalo). As I'm able, I'll be adding links to previous Buffalo News coverage and criticism of the artists in the show.

There'll be much more to come on "Beyond/In: Alternating Currents" as it draws closer. Stay tuned.

--Colin Dabkowski

Erie County funding for the arts

This has been available for a couple of weeks now, but I want to post up the page of Erie County's proposed 2010 budget that outlines funding recommendations for arts and cultural groups. In all, the county has allocated $5,066,500 to 43 arts and culturals.

Check out the recommendations in a PDF below, or download it here.

Humanities-speak gone wild

Over at Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green links to the College Art Association's list of papers to be presented at its annual conference, summarized here by the Art History Newsletter. This is the kind of thing I love to read, simply for the utterly confounding, intentionally obfuscating and always entertaining terms certain writers and academics sometimes use to sex up the titles of their papers.

My fave: “Pray, Sir, Whose Dog Are You? Nobility and Animality in Eighteenth-Century French Hunting Pictures.”

This list, which is definitely one for the ages, reminds me of Gary Kamiya's much-circulated essay for Salon, jokingly titled "Transgressing the Transgressors: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Total Bull***," available here. It documents a successful attempt by physicist Alan Sokal to place a completely invented paper into a prestigious cultural journal simply by couching it in terms that appeal to what Sokal characterized as a group of lazy intellectuals.

'Pictures Generation' wins odd new art award

A photograph by Cindy Sherman from her "Untitled Film Stills" series. Part of "The Pictures Generation,

" a 2009 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

"The Pictures Generation," a show that closed earlier this year at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been dubbed the best group show of the year in something called "Rob Pruitt Presents: The First Annual Art Awards." This new collection of awards -- part genuine contest, part performance art piece, part fundraiser -- was jointly sponsored by the Guggenheim Museum and Calvin Klein.

It's an unconventional award, to be sure. Pruitt, an artist whose work often deals with the machinations of the art world, organized the Oct. 29 awards ceremony to resemble a Hollywood affair. An account of the evening from the Guggenheim's Web site:

After a dinner of locally sourced cuisine culled from Brooklyn-based restaurants and chefs, presenters including Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum Richard Armstrong, Cecily Brown, Jeffrey Deitch, James Franco, Knight Landesman, Julianne Moore, and Guggenheim Chief Curator Nancy Spector announced the winners. On receiving her award, a statuette created by Pruitt resembling a celebratory bucket of champagne that also serves as a fully functional lamp, Heilmann acknowledged the significance of being recognized while also declaring, “The Guggenheim belongs to all of us."

'Turner to Cezanne': the Everson's potent exhibition

 
"The Francois Zola Dam," ca. 1877-78, from "Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection" at the Everson Museum of art in Syracuse.

This week's ArtsBeat column focused on a promising cross-cultural collaboration now under way in the city of Syracuse. The focal point of the collaboration, in which several Syracuse cultural organizations are mounting programs that reflect in diverse ways on the Impressionist movement in visual art, is a small jewel of an exhibition at the city's Everson Museum of Art.

"Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection," is not your typical touring blockbuster show. It features some 50 works of art from the collection of Welsh sisters Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, who, during their collecting careers in the early to mid-20th century, amassed a significant trove of works by pre-Impressionists like J.M.W. Turner and Corot, straight-up Impressionist masters like Monet and Pissarro and post-Impressionists like van Gogh and, perhaps most importantly, Paul Cezanne.

An elephant could paint that

It's a big week for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, which today announced the appointment of Leslie Zemsky as the first female board president in the institution's history. To the surprise and relief of many an art-lover, the gallery also announced today that it would extend its hours to be open six days a week as opposed to a paltry four, starting Nov. 3.

The gallery also opened its exhibition of recent work by North Tonawanda-born artist Robert Mangold (look for a preview of the show in tomorrow's Gusto), who was in attendance at the gallery today for an event announcing several major new acquisitions and forthcoming exhibitions. Times are as tough economically as they've ever been, but from the looks of it, the Albright-Knox is soldiering through with tremendous momentum.

"From the Western Door": Rogovin's photos, Gansworth's text

They're two of Western New York's most important living artists.

One is a renowned photographer and social documentarian--a former optometrist and political activist who turned to photography after being professionally "blacklisted" during the McCarthy Era.  His stark, unsentimentalized depictions of poor and working class people living on Buffalo's East and Lower West Sides over three decades (especially his "Remembering The Forgotten Ones" series)  are increasingly recognized as among the finest portfolios of 20th century documentary photography ever produced.  Even as he approaches his 100th birthday on December 30th of this year, he remains vitally engaged in the arts community and with causes that promote social justice.

The other, an artist and writer less than half the age of his compatriot, is an enrolled member of the Onondaga Nation who was raised on the Tuscarora Indian Nation in Niagara County.   Over the past two decades, he has transformed himself from a self-supporting Buffalo State College student into an award winning, nationally recognized poet and novelist, a leading figure in Native American literature, and the Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College.

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Listen to Gansworth read selections from "From the Western Door to the Lower West Side."

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News from Cleveland Museum

Word came on Wednesday (via Donald Rosenberg of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and to me via CultureGrrl) that an Ohio probate court, as expected, gave the Cleveland Museum of Art permission to use money from endowments restricted to art purchases for the ongoing expansion of its facilities.

The decision, which as I wrote some weeks ago, will have audible reverberations in a museum world seeking increasingly creative -- and some would say desperate -- funding measures. The question at hand is whether the Cleveland museum's decision honors the "spirit" of its now-deceased donors intentions when they gave money to the museum in the early and mid-20th century.

The Obamas dig Ed Ruscha

"I think I'll..." by Ed Ruscha. One of the pieces of art chosen by the Obamas to adorn the White Hous walls.

In today's New York Times, Carol Vogel has a breezy but fascinating piece on the art the Barack and Michelle Obama have chosen to decorate the White House. Among the artists represented: Ed Rushca, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Degas and Morandi. Talk about some wide-ranging tastes.

Check out the story and accompanying slideshow.

--Colin Dabkowski

(Photo: Nytimes.com)

Remembering Jackie Felix

Beloved Buffalo artist Jackie Felix died on Saturday after a long illness. John Massier, visual arts curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, has this remembrance of Felix on his weekly blog. Well worth reading.

Also, as Massier points out, a memorial for Felix, which will feature her works and remembrances from members of the local arts community, is scheduled for Nov. 7 at the Burchfield Penney Art Center.

--Colin Dabkowski