Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor

TITLE: Elizabeth Taylor
ARTIST: Burt Glinn
CATEGORY: Photographs
REGION: American
STYLE: Contemporary (ca. 1945-present)
http://tullaboothgallery.com

Ragellah Rourke - Painter

Art Review: Locksley Shea Collection in Florida

With You I Want to Live (2007), by Tracey Emin.

By Emma Trelles
FORT LAUDERDALE -- With You I Want To Live, a pink neon sculpture by British artist Tracey Emin, is a bit of a triple-threat. In its own right, the work reflects Emin’s millennial-tinged obsessions with ardor - its pleasures, its unavoidable pratfalls. She is, after all, also the author of Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a pup tent stitched with the 102 names of people she shagged or with whom she simply slumbered.

The piece is also the title of a show, now at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale and culled from the private holdings of four South Florida collectors. Scrolled like a quick jot on a notepad, the sculpture suggests this maxim: Why buy something if you’re not smitten with its presence?

Pointing to art as a vehicle for quick and certain profit seems sort of reckless at the moment (not to mention unimaginative), and it’s just not enough to explain our appetite for love affairs, whether they are with man, woman, or the 41 artworks on display and on loan from the collection of art dealers Gordon Locksley and George T. Shea. (A second gathering from The Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz Collection is also on exhibit).

Installed in the museum’s second-floor galleries, the Locksley and Shea collection mirrors a 40-year involvement with groundbreaking artists and with a calling that both men find as essential as oxygen.

“I think that the collecting gene begins with necessities. It begins with needing a bowl from which to eat,” says Locksley in a Q&A printed in the exhibition’s catalogue. “The need to have the basic tools to prepare food and to live, which man, by nature, decorates. That evolves into collecting.

“Some people want to possess beauty...,” the 78-year old adds. We want to own it; we need to own it.”

British Phone Booth (2006), by Banksy.

The show is indeed a grand one, housing some of the most important and varied makers of 20th and 21st century art. Whether you love their offerings (Mark Bradford’s collage-and-acrylic homage to the Los Angeles skyline; the spare elegance of Robert Morris’ plywood installation,), or they elicit a response along the lines of “meh” (Damien Hirst’s acid-inspired dot painting; Takashi Murakami’s super-flat ode to Louis Vuitton), most of it holds a place in any thoughtful dialogue about contemporary art.

The show opens with an absorbing study by two young Berlin-based painters, Maike Abetz and Oliver Drescher. Tausend Plateaus is a large-scale acrylic canvas as ambitious as it is delicately rendered.

The picture is stuffed with the iconography of art across the ages and includes the Greek wood-god Pan, the Muses,and medieval gargoyles alongside a riff on da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and a fiery Sacred Heart. With a pair of young lovers at its center and a smattering of Fender guitars, the painting reminded me of the art-pastiche-rock of Sonic Youth, particularly its 1988 release, Daydream Nation, which is similarly frenzied and lush in its attack.

Tausend Plateaus introduces the wide span of aesthetics found within the show’s interiors and illustrates how Locksley and Shea cultivate relationships equally with contemporary masters and up-and-comers. The collectors bought works by Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly, for instance, before anyone took either artist seriously.

Alixa and Naima, by Swoon.

Locksley’s intensely personal relationship with his acquisitions is also evidenced in the rarely seen graphite drawings of Andy Warhol’s flowers, made exclusively for Locksley by the Pop artist in 1975. The collector describes his relationship with Warhol as bizarre in that he would visit the artist at night at his studio on New York’s East 47th Street. There they would chat, alone, with the lights off and Factory denizen Billy Name hiding in a nearby closet.

Some of what’s on deck has never been viewed: a stunning Native American rain wall, comprised of 11 polychrome panels and once owned by Donald Judd, and a hulking mixed-media piece by NewYork street-and-graffiti artist Swoon, which was commissioned exclusively for the exhibit.

Of note are random meditations on the overlooked locales and people of American cities, such as John Sonsini’s vibrant oil portrait of four Mexican day laborers. Despite hints of urban concerns throughout the exhibit, there’s not much of a direct address to thematic unity. The passion for collecting, the show’s chief premise, for example, is never deeply explored through its artworks, and what does appear just seems like a sample of Locksley’s and Shea’s greatest hits.

Grouping works by movement or era - as with the minimalist canvases made by Robert Mangold and Brice Marden in the early 1970s - functions adequately, but a meatier approach would have perhaps assembled motifs such as beauty, and our enthrallment with its presence and its absence.

Also, it must be said, too many lengthy placards explaining the providence of artwork slows things down. Do we really need to read about how the Luo brothers blend old and new Chinese culture when their wood panels clearly mash together tigers, lotus blossoms, Coke cans and Sly Stallone? My guess is no.

Yet these are small gripes, really, because the summer months typically fill South Florida’s galleries with art geared toward schoolchildren or with dull-to-horrid juried exhibitions. It’s a delight to have a show of this caliber to visit, and not just through our heat-crazed season but straight into next spring.

Emma Trelles is an arts and culture writer based in South Florida.

With You I Want to Live: the Gordon Locksley and George T. Shea Collection is on display through March 22, 2010, at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale/Nova Southeastern University. Information: Call 954-525-5500 or visit www.moaflnsu.org.

Time is Money

THE MOST ENTERTAINING ACTIVITY of the past two weeks, as one raced from Venice to Basel, was comparing the vastly differing points of view over the same subjects. Thanks to globalization, which has multiplied the number of countries and artists represented at the fairs and exhibitions, the most diligent marathon runners (artists, dealers, critics, collectors) ended up a bit confused. They seemed most flustered when it came time for one of their favorite activities: judging. There were no clear standards, and what was “brilliant” to one person proved “disappointing” to another. “Splendid” or “vulgar,” “in” or “out”—comments varied as unpredictably as the weather, which itself oscillated between blinding sunshine and severe downpours.

Last Wednesday evening, when I went to the Basel premiere of “Il Tempo del Postino,” an event held to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the city’s eponymous art fair, someone asked me if I had an extra ticket for “Il Tempo del Cappuccino.” We all could have used some coffee, perhaps, but anyway there was only Moët champagne. “Il Tempo del Postino,” a “group exhibition” that “occupies time rather than space” (a bit like a spectacular variety show) was curated and directed by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno with the help of artists Anri Sala and Rirkrit Tiravanija, and just about everyone and their dealer was in attendance. Those (myself included) who had seen the show’s original premiere at the Manchester International Festival in 2007 were ahead of the others, and I had fun making my neighbors, curator Raimundas Malašauskas and artist Mario García Torres, guess which artist made which work. Some were delighted that Matthew Barney didn’t reproduce the fist-fucking scene that caused such a controversy for the British, while others thought the work had been better with it. (This time, at the end of Barney’s contribution there was only a concert in the lobby performed with a score by Jonathan Bepler.) To keep things exciting, two new works were added to this version of “Il Tempo”: one by Thomas Demand—a projection of a film imitating rain that was “not at all interesting” for some, “absolutely fantastic” for others—and another by Fischli & Weiss featuring their well-known characters, Rat and Bear. For the latter, the pair were represented in child form, and Bear Cub and Baby Rat fiddled with a remote control and closed the stage curtain by accident.

Since the audience consisted exclusively of art enthusiasts, success was guaranteed. The public, moved to ecstasy, shouted for an encore—perhaps the first harmonious opinion this whole trip. All the contemporary art lovers were deliriously happy with Sala’s four geishas, who sang an aria from Madame Butterfly (“Now that’s an opera”), as well as with Doug Aitken’s piece, in which cattle auctioneers dispersed throughout the audience wildly rattled off numbers, their voices coming together in a crescendo of faster and faster bids, while a large onstage screen went from pitch black to bright. Most everyone agreed, too, that the show was very appropriate for a fair and much more inspiring than tiresome talk of a market “return” or “collapse.” After the performance, the artists left for the Schiesser’s, where a dinner had been organized by Fondation Beyeler director (and former Art Basel director) Samuel Keller and press rep Isabela Mora. For those who didn’t attend, the only thing open was a restaurant around the corner serving kebabs, because the three-hour show didn’t end until just before midnight.

Artist Matthew Barney. Right: François-Henry Pinault with Salma Hayek. (Photo: Nicolas Trembley)
It wouldn’t be Basel without a proliferation of parallel fairs, and like musical chairs, Design Miami/Basel found itself plopped in Hall 5 of the city’s Messeplatz convention center. Voltashow, which had once been in Voltaplatz, was moved to the Markthalle, where the Design show used to be; Bâlelatina became the Hot Art fair; Scope moved to the Sportplatz, etc. Along with artist Christian Holstad, I opted to visit the former Wartek beer factory hosting Liste, which has served as the gateway drug to the official fair for the past twelve years. If, at Art Basel, you could find miniature versions of the now-famous installations at the Venice Biennale or the Pinault Foundation (Tomas Saraceno at Tanya Bonakdar, Mike Kelley at Jablonka, Guyton\Walker at Air de Paris, among many others), that’s not quite the case at Liste. This year, as always, some found Liste to be very good, while others complained that the complexity and punk had disappeared. Those who opted to hold solo shows seemed the most satisfied. David Kordansky sold all of Elad Lassry’s photographs as soon as the fair opened, and Overduin and Kite were more than pleased with reactions to Scott Olson’s paintings.

But the art public wasn’t just there for the fairs. The Schaulager, which always organizes a brunch to lure in the famished tourists, this year presented part of the collection of the Kunstmuseum. Most of the works came from the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation (to which the Schaulager belongs), and the show got plenty of attention. Public opinion was much less mitigated about these chefs d’oeuvre, and everyone was amazed to discover that all the works, from Hans Holbein to Wolfgang Tillmans, had been purchased as soon as they had been produced. (Holbein was a longtime Basel resident, and the Kunstmuseum has the largest collection of his works in the world.) Danh Vo’s show at the Kunsthalle was a hit, and alternative spaces, such as the one hosted by New Jerseyy, a collective of artists and curators (Daniel Baumann, Tobias Madison, Emanuel Rossetti, and Dan Solbach), also proved very popular. The evening that Ida Ekblad painted a storefront window and Nils Bech sang a cappella on a ladder was a must-attend, as was the launch of Provence, a new magazine about art hobbies produced by a group of young dandies from Frankfurt’s Städelschule.

On Saturday, after all the madness, I made my way to Dinard, in Brittany, where François Pinault was showing yet another part of his collection. (How much remains?) The show, curated by Caroline Bourgeois, couldn’t be more different from the one at the Dogana and Palazzo Grassi. First of all, the Palais des Arts, where it was held, is a much smaller space (eighty-six hundred square feet), and it is designed for a local public that is less accustomed to contemporary art, which can sometimes be rather provocative. One local newspaper ran the headline “A Shocking Exhibition.” Much more intimate, this show, cheekily titled “Who’s Afraid of Artists?,” features seven sections, ranging from “Around Minimalism,” with classics by Flavin, Manzoni, and Agnes Martin, to “Afraid of Death,” with Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture of Pope John Paul II being hit by a meteorite and a series of works by Damien Hirst offering evidence of one of the collector’s obsessions: skulls. Pinault, who has always spoken with pride about his simple Breton origins, was welcomed like a prodigal son by a large crowd of badauds that also came to greet ex-president Jacques Chirac and the actress Salma Hayek, who was beaming and holding the arm of Pinault’s son. Very few gallery owners or artists attended this very personal exhibition, and there was little idle chatter at the opening. It seemed as though the great collector had decided to return to his roots modestly, a (relatively) simple, uncomplicated end to June’s festivities.

— Nicolas Trembley, artforum.com

NEA reports decline in arts audiences for 2008

Audiences for the arts in the U.S. continue to decline and age at significant rates, according to a report released Monday by the National Endowment for the Arts. But the Internet holds out hope, as more people are going online to experience culture.

Nearly 35% of U.S. adults – or about 78 million people – attended an art museum or an arts performance in 2008, said the report. That's down from about 40% in 1982, 1992 and 2002. In particular, audiences for classical and jazz concerts have declined by double digits since 1982, the most of all the art forms.

Surprisingly, the largest drop in arts consumption comes from people ages 45 to 54, which has traditionally been the most dependable group of arts participants.

The NEA report said that college-educated Americans – including those with graduate degrees – are cutting back on their arts consumption across all forms. Ballet attendance by this demographic has dropped by 43% since 1982.

One optimistic note in Monday's report is the "substantial number" of people going online to experience the arts. Of the adults who went online for any purpose in 2008, approximately 40% used the Internet to view, listen to, download or post artworks or performances. About 30% of adults who use the Internet do so to consume music, theater or dance performances at least once a week. More than 20% go online to view paintings, sculpture, or photography at least once a week.

The NEA's report, which is titled "Arts Participation 2008: Highlights From a National Survey," was conducted in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau. The survey has been conducted five times since its inception in 1982 and targets U.S. adults 18 and older on their patterns of arts participation over a 12-month period.

Among the NEA's other findings was a decline in the number of adults creating and performing art. The decline was reported across all art forms, with the exception of the number of adults doing photography, which has increased from 12% in 1992 to 15% in 2008.

A more detailed version of the survey is expected in the fall. More findings from the report include:

-- The U.S. rate of attendance for art museums fell from a high of 26% in 1992-2002 to 23% in 2008, comparable to the 1982 level.

-- Audiences for jazz and classical music are substantially older than before. In 1982, jazz concerts drew the youngest adult audience -- with a median age of 29. In the 2008 survey, the median age of jazz concert-goers was 46, representing a 17-year increase. Since 1982, young adult (18-24) attendance rates for jazz and classical music have declined the most, compared with other art forms.

-- Between 1982 and 2008, attendance at performing arts such as classical music, jazz, opera, ballet, musical theater and dramatic plays has seen double-digit rates of decline.

-- Less-educated adults – those without college degrees – have significantly reduced their already low levels of arts attendance.

Entrance to UAE section at Venice

VENICE—While the critical orthodoxy holds that the Venice Biennale’s system of national pavilions is a 20th-century relic due for overhaul, the United Arab Emirates pavilion, together with Abu Dhabi’s “platform for visual arts” — both making their debuts in Venice this year — illuminate the continuing relevance and fertile risk of engaging art and culture as tools of nation building. The UAE and its capital, Abu Dhabi, both put on shows that are part old-fashioned World’s Fair–style expos and part art exhibitions — a curatorially incorrect (and therefore exciting) mixture of political boosterism and artistic self-interrogation.

The Abu Dhabi exhibition, mounted by the city’s Authority for Culture and Heritage, is in a warehouse a 10-second boat ride away from the back of the Arsenale. Before you get to the art, you walk through an entry hall emblazoned with intimidatingly huge banners like the ones found everywhere alongside highways in the UAE. They’re both absurd and thrilling in their bombast, advertising the general brilliance of the city and its utopian property developments, undaunted by the economic crisis. One of the banners advertises an apparently solid-gold building as the centerpiece of an unnamed waterfront development in Abu Dhabi, with go-go real-estate sales copy underneath: “Relaxed property laws mean that investors (local and international) keen for a slice of the action are snapping up property in the emirate’s thriving real estate market.”

This is weird to see in what you thought was going to be an art exhibition. A mirror at the end of the space has stuck to it a prophetic text titled “The Future of Culture” (how many nations would dare proclaim such a thing?), with the oxymoronic climax: “New forms have to be invented for our cultural institutions. The more things change, the more they remain the same, only the pace is different.”How are the region’s artists responding to these top-down political, economic, and cultural ambitions? You might expect (and perhaps secretly hope) for them to sign up for the cause in a Socialist Realist or Constructivist manner and launch an exhilarating new political-artistic aesthetic for the 21st century. But unsurprisingly they don’t. The first piece you see is a low-key video by filmmaker Waël Noureddine: He simply points his camera at quotidian street life and presents it more or less unedited. It’s boring, but Noureddine’s insistence on banality might be a minor act of heroism in the heady climate of ubiquitous optimism.

There are also rough and refreshingly un-maudlin portraits of construction workers by Sami Al Turki, and Romantic, desolate photos by Mohammed Kazem of a lone figure with his back to us, gazing at vistas of empty desert dotted with construction work, flags planted next to him in the ground as if he could possibly stake a claim to this rapidly changing territory. Upstairs there’s a room crammed with objects — toys, pots and pans, notebooks — accumulated by Hassan Sharif, another small-scale hero for his insistence on the vernacular rather than the splendid. Sharif is the founder of Dubai’s grass-roots arts hub the Flying House, where his mad collections are archived in full.

While the work is strong, the show’s curator, Catherine David (formerly of Witte de With in Rotterdam and director of Documenta in 1997), has refused any integration or confrontation with the both awkward and stimulating expo context. And so, as good as these artists are, they end up looking like appendages to the exhibition’s main agenda of nation building rather than agents of it. Frankly, the massive posters in the lobby are more aesthetically powerful than any of the art on display.

On the other hand, the UAE pavilion, which is really just a large room in the Arsenale, is confessional and funny about the pressures of national representation. Curator Tirdad Zolghadr immediately confronts us with a corporate-style SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of the situation he finds himself in, showcasing both the UAE and its art to the world. His conclusion: “a reasonable measure of self reflexivity” but “no apologetics.”

A quarter of the space is taken up with architectural models of Abu Dhabi’s planned new cultural district, Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness), which are bitterly disappointing responses to the exhibition’s call for “new forms” to be invented for the UAE’s cultural institutions. Instead, we get an elaboration on existing Western models: Frank Gehry gets to build a Guggenheim even wilder than Bilbao, Jean Nouvel has designed an exquisite Middle East outpost for the Louvre, and Zaha Hadid plans a gargantuan performing-arts center that looks like a sleek digital amphibian slithering out of the sea. Not to be outdone, Dubai, too, is planning a “Culture Village,” and UNStudio has designed a Museum of Middle Eastern Modern Art that is so similar to Hadid’s building that you think it must be a deliberate attempt to demystify her virtuosity through repetition.

In contrast to the grandiosity of the Abu Dhabi “platform,” with its big-gun foreign curator, huge space, and aesthetic purity, the emphasis in the UAE pavilion, titled “It's Not You, It's Me,” is on the bottom-up pooling of knowledge and the cultivation of arts infrastructure: Computer stations let you surf the nascent online UAE Art Archive, which showcases the work of national artists, and there’s a video kiosk featuring conversations between cultural policymakers in the UAE.

But the main component of the pavilion is a selection of photographs by the 26-year-old Lamya Gargash. There are maybe a maximum of three types of living situations that we can easily imagine in Dubai through standard media coverage (Simon Jenkins and Germaine Greer in particular are guilty of shockingly lazy stereotypes): the decadent five- (or seven-) star hotel, the ex-pat gated community/compound on an artificial island, and the Dickensian laborers’ camp. Gargash undermines this list with a type of accommodation that doesn’t come so easily to mind: the humble one-star hotel.

Gargash photographs people-less hotel rooms (though she occasionally inserts framed photos of family members), lobbies, and corridors head-on and unemotionally with a medium-format camera, creating a systematic analysis of what usually gets summarily repressed in the official narrative of Dubai, city of wonders: the generic and the banal. We see beds with gaudy purple comforters and white sheets folded crisp and tight and awaiting your arrival, clean tiled floors, tissue dispensers and cushions just so, elaborately folded towels, air-conditioning units, flowers — nothing fancy, but everything pristine.

Her transient hotel rooms might be an update on Bedouin tents as a mode of living. They also reveal the aesthetics of the UAE’s small and hidden lower/middle class, from which an embedded civic society — rather than a get-rich-quick expat commercial zone — will grow. Gargash is a worthy “representative” of her natijavascript:void(0)on, pointing out an optimistic, necessary, and largely ignored “future of culture” in the UAE.

New Culture City being built in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Metropolitan Art Advisors art tour at Pace in Chelsea

Ann Lydecker welcomes the members of 85 Broads and introduces Jay Grimm, Associate Director at Pace Wildenstien Gallery on West 25th St in NYC. This is the first Chuck Close painting and tapestry exhibition in the USA in over four years.

Jack Balas at CTS in Brooklyn

Jack Balas, Home Run, 2008, oil on canvas, , 32x40in (81x102cm)

Jack Balas is interested in recontextualizing images of men in a variety of emotional, political and stylistic scenarios -- contexts in which they function as everyman, but are more vulnerable than their surface perfection might suggest.

Born in Chicago in 1955, Jack Balas received his BFA and MFA from Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship in Painting in 1995. His work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York City; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Tucson Museum of Art, among others. A portfolio of his paintings, "Today I Drove Along the Rio Grande," was published in The Paris Review (New York). His most recent museum solo was his 2008 project "We'll Be Seeing You" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver.

Ian Davenport

Alan Christea Gallery booth: Ian Davenport’s "Etched Lines, Thirty Five" (2009)

John Niero designer of ELLE Chair

www.justnotnormal.us John and Ann - fast friends - leopard + cougar?

Eric and Julie Zener at Gallery Henoch

Margaret Lydecker, Founder of Greendrinks.org, Eric Zener www.ericzener.com, Julie Zener and art advisor Ann Lydecker.

Art + Politics mixing

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom with Ann Lydecker, Founder of Metropolitan Art Advisors at a private party in San Francisco, California.

Sandra Bermudez - "YES" to marriage proposal

From her blue cloud series she also has similar works "Always" and "Forever"
www.sandrabermudez.com in Miami, Florida

Design Art by Eleanor Lydecker

Eleanors newest creation - the magnificent shell dresser.
She also designs beautiful shell framed mirrors. For ordering information: www.theysellseashells.com

Bill Rabinovitch

Metropolitan Art Advisors at Melissa Meyers Studio

San Francisco Art Galleries bite the dust

For a while, the economic realities facing the world have been blamed for the decline of the contemporary art market. A surprising outcome of the decline is newfound collaborations among galleries and a fresh willingness from galleries for price transparency. In some cases, the downturn brought misfortune to San Francisco with multiple losses of one fine art gallery after another. Some say this is a natural expectation, and an opportunity for the best to rise resulting from attrition, but the list is surprising. It includes prominent art dealers who have the diminished and seriously downsized their exhibition spaces, or have closed their doors and are lost to the gallery world ether. In alpha, not chron order, some of them are:

ArtWorksSF – Contemporary fine art, mixed media, photograph and performance space moved out of 49 Geary digs to 2861 California Street from which they manage a roster of local café exhibitions as well a portraiture business.

Bucheon – Always edgy and avant garde, the two ladies who ran the scene from the obscure upper Hayes Street in late 1990s, to hip lower Hayes in early 2000s, and final posh space on Grove Street last, are gone. It’s quiet where they were, as their last exhibition announced narrative works by artists Eckhard Etzold, Michael Frerris Jr., Mars-1, Sarah Ratchye, Gordon Henderson, Lordan Bunch, Laurel Connell, Olive Ayhens, Danny Keith, Alex Luke, Megan Wolfe, David Choong Lee, Lucho Pozo, Dan Nicoletta and Christina Empedocles, in a large show for such a small space. The show was extended, and some gallery alumnae have been redistributed, and welcomed with alacrity, by Mark Wolfe Contemporary, for example.

Cain SchulteCain Schulte Gallery – With a consistently critical schedule of exhibitions, the gallery that morphed in 2006 out of Michael Martin’s space on Townsend and 3d Street by it’s two partners, Marina Cain and Kit Schulte, has moved to 714 Guerrero Street. Continuing to support its artists and clients with a full schedule of privately run home-based exhibitions and events, Cain Schulte representing contemporary artists from the United States and Europe with a focus in painting, the gallery promises to consistently participate in national and international art fairs. The word is that Kit’s established a gallery in Berlin, as Marina continues the business privately while seeking better digs. Go, Cain Schulte! You give galleries a good name.

Don SokerDon Soker Contemporary Art bode farewell to the 49 Geary community with a small reception hosted by Claire Carlevaro of Art Exchange Gallery this March. A beloved gentleman gallerist, the word is that he’s gone to private consulting while his website states an upcoming inaugural exhibition at an immense new space somewhere in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. A standout presenter with a good eye for solid relevant artworks, this will be something to look forward to.

Oakland’s Esteban Sabar closed his gallery last August, another casualty. Just two years after its opening, and one year after its initial foray into Art Miami|Basel scene, the gallery is gone. The initial controversy generaged by the new rush of 20 something hipsters that 'invaded' and discovered Oakland’s downtown overnight wasn’t enough to support an established ‘art scene.’ Its owner, Esteban Sabar, earned respect with disarming charm and the sort of unabashed honesty one rarely encounters regularly in the art world, whatever corner of it you find yourself in. Flamboyant, garrulous, friendly, and possessed with unique talents, Sabar is silent these days. I hope it won’t be for long as his program was so far out it was fun and refreshing.

Gallery 415’s focus on Latin American artists moved out of its 49 Geary home to the heart of the Mission District. While this seems apropos given the large Hispanic community that considers the Mission its home, the rest of us are probably envious of the unique opportunity to present from the growing importance of the newest group of artists: the San Francisco Mission School. While the gallery’s owner, Claudine intends to focus on private art consulting at her new location, it’s probable that she will continue to champion artwork by emerging and mid career Latin American artists, in step with the recent focus on Latin America, as well as the growth of affluence and desire to invest by the American-born Hispanic community. Luckily, growth in Latin American art, artists and collectors, is not just a blip on the radar anymore, as Art Basel at Miami has certainly made things much more accessible! New address: 622 - 27th Street, San Francisco.

Hacket-Freedman, another Hayes Valley alum, closed its doors as of May 1. Founded in 1986, by Michael Hackett and Tracy Freedman, the gallery offered a select inventory of 20th-century and contemporary painting and sculpture, with a particular focus on postwar American and Californian art; the established partnership specialized in represented contemporary realism, including the estate of David Park. One partner if off to the wilds of private consulting, while the other will manage the rest of the collection, I’ve heard.

Hang Art introduced a novel approach to buying art in the late 1990s with its clear and published business structure. Using a happy formula for emerging artists with non-wavering price formulas that are client-friendly too (their website states they show artwork under $200!). The gallery showcases works by emerging artists and features a list of ‘staff picks’ and actively promotes affordable artworks to a broad collector base. On May 1, Hang Art downsized to one exhibition space at 567 Sutter Street. Smart move.

Octavia’s Haze – Sometime in 2008, painter James Michalopoulos began to show his work exclusively at the space developed by Michael Melampy. The cleverly-named gallery showed glass objects and vessels on the corner of, ahem, Octavia and Hayes Streets from about 1999 to 2008. Now co-mingled on lower Hayes Street with another shop, and while the name doesn’t seem as apt or clever as it was at its old space, they seem to be continue a brisk trade in hand blown glass vessels with their new partners.

Reaves Gallery – Sharon Reaves, artist mentor turned art dealer, took her emerging artist business from the Castro to a beautiful space on Gough Street. A year later (actually just a week or so ago) and according to its website, the gallery is gone for rebranding, and its website now features the Reaves Collection. Sharon tells me she’s gone for the opportunity of a lifetime in NYC. Lifetime opportunities are good. Loud applause.

871 Fine Arts – Fine art book, posters, artists books and other ephemera moved out of 49 Geary next to Crown Point Press on Hawthorne Lane. Quiet move, not much fanfare, in fact hardly any, as former clients still come by looking for it.

Weinstein Gallery – This powerhouse gallery showing modern works by Chagall, Miro, and Picasso, as well as uber-pricey glass sculptures by Christopher Reis, closed its Grant Street space to consolidate with its posh mega space on the corner of Powell and Geary Streets last week.

Wow. That’s quite a list. Oh, I forgot, there’s another casualty - what about the quiet-made-quite-public-furor over the tenured staff slash and burn at SF’s venerable San Francisco Art Institute... in the name of the economy, etc. Oh well, so much for San Francisco’s fame as an art vanguard.Micaela Gallery

We San Franciscans are fortunate to still have a couple of galleries left, and hope to benefit from a couple of surprising moves. Altman|Siegel’s directors came west as they grew out of gallery experiences in NYC and moved in to 49 Geary, Jack Fischer moved out of his exciting mini gallery into Don Soker’s window-lit space and is rockin’ San Francisco. Micaela moved her glass sculpture and media arts out of Hayes Valley (and hopes the move was not jinxed by the Hayes Valley kiss of death) and into ArtWorkSF’s space, also at 49 Geary, and painter-turned-gallerist George Lawson opened up Room for Painting Room for Paper next door to Micaela.
For those that are gone, we hope it’s farewell but not goodbye. For those that reduced their efforts and await the economy to rebound, and for the rest of us, long live contemporary fine art in San Francisco!

Ed Adler - urban cowboy painter

Molly Barnes brown bag lunches at Roger Smith Hotel

The Show Might Not Go On

The global financial meltdown is taking a toll on art exhibitions, with at least 20 big shows having been canceled or postponed this year and next.

The situation seems grimmer in North America than in Europe, since U.S. museums typically are more reliant on private sector funding than their Continental counterparts. With shareholders suffering, companies are under intense pressure to cut costs for such things as sponsorships, while foundations have seen the values of their portfolios crumble, limiting their ability to finance projects.

One of the hardest-hit institutions has been the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which has lost at least three major shows. But even though American museums are bearing the brunt of recessionary pressures, the effect is being felt abroad since many traveling exhibitions rely on making stops in the United States to recoup their costs.

Read more at the Art Newspaper.

The first museum survey of one of the most influential street artists of our time

Metropolitan Art Advisors rate this artist a BUY!
ICA Boston nailed it. Worth the trip to Boston from out of state.
A 2009 version of Warhol meets Banksy meets Russian and Chinese communistic aesthetics?

From humble beginnings as a defiant, skateboard-obsessed art student pasting homemade stickers, Shepard Fairey has developed into one of the most influential street artists of our time. Despite breaking many of the spoken and unspoken rules of contemporary art and culture, his work is now seen in museums and galleries, as well as the worlds of graphic design and signature apparel. His multi-faceted, open-ended and generous artistic practice actively resists categorization. Building off of precedents set by artists such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, Fairey shifts easily between the realms of fine, commercial, and even political art.

Fairey's multi-layered renderings of counter-cultural revolutionaries and rap, punk and rock stars, as well as updated and re-imagined propaganda-style posters, carry his signature graphic style, marked by his frequent use of black, white, and red. Recently, his portrait of Barack Obama, a ubiquitous sight on the campaign trail, drew a new level of attention to the artist's work and was recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, for its collection.

Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand traces the development of the artist's career, from the earliest Obey imagery through his latest efforts, and includes screen prints, stencils, stickers, rubylith illustrations, collages, and works on wood, metal, and canvas. The artist is also creating a new mural for the ICA and public art works at sites around Boston.

Unica Zurn at Drawing Center

The black-and-white photographs of Unica Zürn’s body—bound by string, coiled, and reduced to a sack of bulbous flesh—are some of Hans Bellmer’s most admired works and, until recently, her mere cameo in art history’s canon. As a remedial course, perhaps, this elegant show offers a bounty of Zürn’s automatic drawings, a few shimmering paintings, and some brilliant pieces of her writing (for which she is most regarded). Although it reprises themes set forth in Ubu Gallery’s similar 2005 show, the Drawing Center exhibition thoughtfully and tenderly examines her short career and mental illness without didactically trying to “rediscover” her and without mythologizing her suicide at age fifty-four or her interest in sadomasochism. The tranquil sea-blue walls and the thick black frames here temper the hotness of these issues, and so do the sweet, nearly oceanic and biomorphic forms in her finely detailed renderings. These creatures hover at the center of her pages, bearing multiple countenances, breasts, limbs, and orifices, though, unlike a Bellmer "Poupeé," rarely do Zürn’s striations recall actual bodies. Instead, forty-nine mostly untitled works here offer roving, repetitive deviations: delicate lines, smudged ink, and twisting spirals appear as faces, then just shapes, and finally as faces, again, through an echolike effect. Intense and otherworldly, they offer a window into a mind that contemporary artists––particularly those invested in psychedelic motifs––should investigate. For some, her work might feel like the sun against their eyes; for others, a beacon in the distance.— Lauren O’Neill-Butler

Sophie Calle at Paula Cooper Gallery 534 W 21st St NY

Widely popular at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself––on view in the United States for the first time––recontextualizes an agonizingly ambiguous letter the artist received from a lover concluding their relationship. Although the misery ensuing from breakups has been explored in cultural venues low and high, Take Care of Yourself combines this common theme with pointed and intelligent thematic allusions to issues ranging from gender to seriality. Concluding a winding explanation of the relationship’s dissolution, Calle’s former lover, whom she renames X, implores her to “take care of yourself.” To better understand these words, the artist distributed the letter to 107 women differing extensively in age and profession, asking each to offer some interpretation or advice.

Semantically deconstructing a statement that most would gloss over with emotion, Take Care of Yourself draws heavily on Calle’s noted documentary and conceptual practice. The walls in the main gallery are covered, from floor to ceiling, with each woman’s name, profession, and photograph while reading the letter, as well as the work produced. Each result highlights a different facet of the text, inviting reconsideration of both words and the experiences they signify. In one example, a translator considers X’s odd choice of the formal French vous (you) over the more familiarized tu, suggesting the underlying meaning of a seemingly minor decision. In another especially poignant piece, Calle sits in a chair next to the letter and addresses a family mediator’s inquiries. The mediator’s thorough questioning forces the artist to assume both passive and active roles, ultimately resulting in a cathartic meditation on the boundaries of personal experience. — Britany Salsbury

Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African-American Art

William Henry Johnson (1901–1970), Ice Cream Stand, ca. 1939–42, Courtesy of Landau Traveling Exhibitions

The works of more than 50 African-American artists from the late 1800s to the present will be on view at the Amon Carter Museum from June 6 through August 23, 2009, in the special exhibition The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African-American Art: Works on Paper. The Kelley collection is one of the most esteemed private collections of African-American art, and the special exhibition features more than 90 works on paper by artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, William H. Johnson, Alison Saar and Charles White.

Two significant eras are the focus of the exhibition: the 1930s and 1940s, a period which saw the birth of African-American regionalism, and the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the rise of politically motivated and African-inspired themes; subjects range from racism and its related hardships to family, music and religion.

“An array of fascinating, vivid imagery makes this exhibition particularly compelling,” says Jane Myers, senior curator of prints and drawings. “Virtually every work clearly emanates from the artists’ own powerful, personal narrative.”

The Kelleys have been collecting art since the mid-1980s, when they saw the exhibition Hidden Heritage: Afro-American Art, 1800–1950 at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Realizing they did not recognize any of the artists’ names, they vowed to educate themselves about this aspect of their heritage and built a collection to advance the legacy of African-American art.

“We are delighted the Amon Carter Museum has chosen to host this exhibition,” Harmon Kelley says. “Placing our drawings and prints in the context of the museum’s rich holdings of American art is a wonderful and unique opportunity.”

Concurrent to this exhibition, the one-gallery exhibition African-American Art: Selections from the Amon Carter Museum’s Collection is on view. This exhibition showcases some of the museum’s landmark prints and drawings from the same era as those in the Kelley show. Artists featured include Charles Alton, Grafton Tyler Brown, Elizabeth Catlett, William H. Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, William E. Smith, Dox Thrash, Charles White and John Wilson.