AUGUSTA, GA.- “Deep Sea: Drawings by William O. Golding”, an exhibition of twenty-nine remarkable maritime drawings by self-taught African-American artist William O. Golding (1874–1943), opens to the public December 12, at the Morris Museum of Art. Shanghaied from the Savannah waterfront when he was eight years old, William O. Golding chronicled his travels world-wide through drawings that he created near the end of his life while a patient at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Savannah. Between 1932 and 1939, he executed approximately sixty drawings, literally drawn from his memories of the ships on which he sailed and the ports he visited around the globe. “Golding’s is a remarkable story of a remarkable life, most of which was spent as a merchant seaman at the very end of the Age of Sail. He traveled the world at a time when most Americans spent their entire lives within fifty miles of their place of birth, and he
Ringling Museum of Art to Host Exhibition Featuring Objects Bought in 1927
SARASOTA, FL.- Many discoveries surround the more than 300 objects John Ringling purchased in 1927 from Alva Vanderbilt Belmont’s Gothic Room in Marble House at Newport, Rhode Island. These discoveries will be explored in The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art’s newest exhibition “Gothic Art in the Gilded Age: Medieval and Renaissance Treasures in the Gavet-Vanderbilt-Ringling Collection”, on view December 19, 2009 through April 4, 2010. The exhibition considers the development of the collecting and display of medieval and early Renaissance art in the United States during the
First One Person Exhibition in New York for Sangram Majumdar at Gallery Schlesinger
NEW YORK, NY.- Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects presents the first one person exhibition in New York City of paintings by Sangram Majumdar at Gallery Schlesinger. Majumdar is a young painterly realist whose work expands the perimeters of contemporary representation. Sangram Majumdar’s paintings describe ostensibly traditional subject matter- still life, landscape and figure. Yet Majumdar’s paintings have grown progressively more radical in the way they try to encapsulate human perception. These paintings are densely layered with a range of marks, implicit narratives, and visual possibilities. In her essay for the exhibition catalog Jennifer Samet observes that “Sangram Majumdar’s paintings reminds us of the potential and the achievement of transfixing simultaneity within a single visual image. He seems to slice open his worlds, cutting into them almost mercilessly to present an image rich with evocation.“ She
Police Seize Stash of Masterpieces Belonging to Founder of Dairy Company Parmalat
ROME (AP).- Italian tax police said Saturday that they had seized works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Cezanne and other giants of art in a crackdown on assets hidden by the disgraced founder of the collapsed dairy company Parmalat. Authorities estimated the 19 masterpieces stashed away in attics and basements were valued at some euro100 million ($150 million). Parma Prosecutor Gerardo Laguardia said that, based on wiretapped phone conversations, officials believed at least one of the paintings hidden by Calisto Tanzi was about to be sold. “We got lucky. We learned that there were negotiations under way to sell one of the paintings” and raid three apartments in the area of Parma, near Parmalat’s headquarters, Laguardia said in an interview on Italy’s Sky TG24 TV. He didn’t identify the painting. Bologna-based tax Police Col. Piero Iovino told The Associated Press by telephone that investigators believed the entire batch of paintings, watercolors and drawings were up to be sold. The prosp
Künstlerhaus Bethanien Opens Exhibition by Brazilian Photographer Dirceu Maués
BERLIN.- Dirceu Maués is a photographer whose oeuvre constitutes a far-reaching investigation into the photographic process and the techniques and equipment involved. His works, therefore, are always in-depth examinations of the photographic mechanism as such, and this study presents him with his own opportunity to define a camera’s functional categories. The current omnipresence of digitally generated images is an occasion for Dirceu Maués to reflect on more original forms of photography in his works. Deliberately setting them apart from the predominantly functional parameters to be found in today’s modern cameras, he constructs his
Police Seize Stash of Masterpieces Belonging to Founder of Dairy Company Parmalat
ROME (AP).- Italian tax police said Saturday that they had seized works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Cezanne and other giants of art in a crackdown on assets hidden by the disgraced founder of the collapsed dairy company Parmalat. Authorities estimated the 19 masterpieces stashed away in attics and basements were valued at some euro100 million ($150 million). Parma Prosecutor Gerardo Laguardia said that, based on wiretapped phone conversations, officials believed at least one of the paintings hidden by Calisto Tanzi was about to be sold. “We got lucky. We learned that there were negotiations under way to sell one of the paintings” and raid three apartments in the area of Parma, near Parmalat’s headquarters, Laguardia said in an interview on Italy’s Sky TG24 TV. He didn’t identify the painting.
VMFA Acquires Painting by First African-American Artist to Win Acclaim
RICHMOND, VA.- The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has acquired a painting by Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901), the first black artist to receive widespread acclaim in the United States. The 1885 painting, “Moonlight Marine” is an oil on canvas. Dr. Sylvia Yount, VMFA’s Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art, calls it “an exceptional example of the painter’s bolder, mature style.” Painting and the sea form the twin poles of Bannister’s life, Yount says. In his younger days, he focused on pastoral landscapes, but his later marine subjects – views of the Atlantic and the Rhode Island coastline
Long-Lost Painting by John Sloan now on View at Detroit Institute of Arts
DETROIT, MI.- It’s been an unusual journey from Fourteenth Street in New York to Woodward Avenue in Detroit for a painting created by American artist John Sloan. Sloan painted Fourteenth Street at Sixth Avenue in 1934 for the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), created to employ artists during the Great Depression. The painting, which had been officially missing since 1938, has been located and is now on long-term loan to the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). Sloan was known for capturing the energy and essence of neighborhood life in New York City. Fourteenth Street vividly depicts bustling crowds dealing with the commute to work, school and shops after a snowstorm on a busy street. It is on view outside the exhibition “Government Support for the Arts: WPA Prints from the 1930s” through March 21. “John Sloan is an important American painter,” said Kenneth Myers, DIA chief curator and curator of American art. “The
Tate and The British Council are to be the Joint Owners of Steve McQueen’s ‘Giardini’
LONDON.- Tate and The British Council are to be the joint owners of Steve McQueen’s ‘Giardini’, the British showing at the 53rd Venice Biennale, widely praised in the international press for its sensitivity and beauty. The gift arose from the collaboration between The Art Fund with Outset Contemporary Art Fun to finance half the production costs of the film, under which The Art Fund jointly received an edition of the work to give to a public collection at the end of the Biennale, which closed on November 22. The arrangement means the work will be seen at home and abroad; plans are being devised by Tate to show the film in the UK, while the British Council is making arrangements for it to travel to China in Spring 2010.
Grand Rapids Art Museum Director Celeste Adams Resigns
GRAND RAPIDS, MI.- Today Celeste Adams shared with the Grand Rapids Art Museum Board of Trustees her decision to resign her position as Museum Director effective March 17, 2010, her thirteenth anniversary as Director. She stated, “I have completed my work here and the time is right for me to move on to a new challenge and for the Museum to move into a new era of life.” Ms. Adams will assist with the transition, serving as Consulting Director from March 2010 to March 2011 or until a new Director begins. Celeste Adams became Director of the Grand Rapids Art Museum in 1997. During her thirteen years as Director, she has led the Art Museum through an extraordinary era of growth and transformation and achieved major goals for the institution including landmark exhibitions, important acquisitions of art, and a successful $83 million capital campaign that produced a nationally recognized new Art Museum facility with