Tag: News

VANCOUVER.- British Columbia’s most prestigious annual award for the visual arts, the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts, and the VIVA Awards will be presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery on May 12, 2010. The seventh annual Audain Prize, awarded by the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts, will be presented to renowned Haida artist Robert Davidson. The VIVA Awards, granted annually by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation, will go to Vancouver artists Germaine Koh and Marina Roy. “The Audain and VIVA awards offer a tremendous opportunity every year to celebrate and focus attention on the extraordinarily talented artists living in British Columbia. By providing this much deserved recognition, the foundations that generously fund these awards are affirming and furthering the careers of the province’s most deserving artists,” said Vancouver Art Gallery director Kathleen Bartels

NEW YORK, NY.- The Board of Trustees at The New School endorsed a plan yesterday to create a major campus hub at 65 Fifth Avenue, a university-owned site between 13th and 14th Streets. The University Center, as the building will be known, will add 365,000 square feet for an array of uses including new academic space, an auditorium for public programs, a central university library, and a 608-bed dormitory with a separate entrance on Fifth Avenue. “The University Center embodies The New School’s evolution,” said President Bob Kerrey. “This institution is in the midst of a transformation, amplifying its urban campus to serve degree-seeking students who now make up the majority of our enrollment. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of our curricula, the University Center provides space for students across all of The New School and its programs to interact and collaborate.” Designed by Roger Duffy of Sk

NEW YORK, NY.- The Board of Trustees at The New School endorsed a plan yesterday to create a major campus hub at 65 Fifth Avenue, a university-owned site between 13th and 14th Streets. The University Center, as the building will be known, will add 365,000 square feet for an array of uses including new academic space, an auditorium for public programs, a central university library, and a 608-bed dormitory with a separate entrance on Fifth Avenue. “The University Center embodies The New School’s evolution,” said President Bob Kerrey. “This institution is in the midst of a transformation, amplifying its urban campus to serve degree-seeking students who now make up the majority of our enrollment. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of our curricula, the University Center provides space for students across all of The New School and its programs to interact and collaborate.” Designed by Roger Duffy of Sk

KANSAS CITY, MO (AP).- King Tut, that popular Egyptian boy king whose traveling tomb lured gangbuster museum crowds two decades ago, is once again touring the country. But Egypt lovers who can’t make a trip to Denver or New York and don’t want to pay nearly $30 to see treasures from King Tutankhamun’s burial site, have another option. Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art now boasts its own permanent — and free — ancient Egyptian coffin and funeral objects. On May 8, the Nelson-Atkins begins displaying the 2,300-year-old coffin and other antiquities of noblewoman Meretites in its Egyptian Galleries, the new centerpiece of the museum’s refurbished Ancient Art Galleries. Meretites’ intricately-detailed 7-foot inner coffin is among the first thing visitors see entering the Egyptian gallery — revamped

NEW YORK, NY.- Paul Kasmin Gallery presents the exhibition A Venomous Bloom by Kent Henricksen. Opening on May 6, 2010 at 511 W. 27th Street, this will be the artist’s first show with the gallery. In Henricksen’s canvases, gods and thieves, ladies and marauders, angels and tricksters are brought together and transformed through the use of silkscreen, embroidery, and gold leaf. Characters drawn from such diverse sources as Albrecht Dürer woodcuts, historical newspaper illustrations, José Guadalupe Posada engravings, and Max Ernst collages are recast into new roles, telling new tales. These narratives often upend historical power dynamics, using Henricksen’s layered imagery to visually question the traditional roles of the oppressor and the oppressed across cultures. As in Tibetan Thangka paintings, interwoven scenes orbit central figures,

By: Brett Zongker, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON, DC (AP).- When David Rubenstein was a boy growing up in a blue-collar Baltimore neighborhood, he was keenly drawn to its downtown library. Now the billionaire investor has pledged $5 million to bolster the National Book Festival, hoping to encourage a love of reading in others. Rubenstein, whose parents never attended college, recalled Thursday how he checked out the maximum number of books permitted each week, taking home 12 at a time. “Eventually, I think I read most of the books in that library,” he said. “The love of reading really helped me get where I am today.” Rubenstein, a co-founder and managing director of the Carlyle Group private equity firm, announced his gift Thursday to the Library of Congress to ensure the National Book Festival continues on the National Mall for years to come. Rubenstein will give $1 million a year for five years to expand the festival into a full program promoting books and reading. The g

LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Getty Foundation has awarded $630,000 for the preservation of two major works of art: The Mystic Lamb by Hubert and Jan van Eyck (the Ghent Altarpiece) of 1432 and The Last Supper by Giorgio Vasari of 1546. These grants are part of the Getty’s Panel Paintings Initiative, an international effort to train conservation specialists to ensure that important and intricate works of art such as these survive for future generations. The tradition of painting on wood panels was widespread in Europe from the late 12th through the17th centuries. Panel paintings are among the most significant works in American, European, and Russian museum collections and in religious buildings, including works by Duccio di Buoninsegna, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, and Rembrandt van Rijn. Unfortunately, many of these works are now threatened by serious problems due to the warping, cracking, and splitting of the wood on which

LOS ANGELES, CA (AP).- The outlook for the sale of a one-of-a-kind Michael Jackson portrait isn’t thrilling. The eBay.com auction of a fantastical portrait the King of Pop posed for before his death ended with no bids, according to the auction’s organizer. The painting’s owner had hoped to fetch millions for “The Book,” a 50-by-40-inch painting by Australian artist Brett-Livingstone Strong of Jackson wearing a red velvet jacket and clutching a journal. “I have two parties considering it, so perhaps I will have a buyer soon,” organizer Marc Samson said Wednesday. The painting’s owner, Marty Abrams, anticipated the portrait, originally sold to Japanese businessman Hiromichi Saeki for $2.1 million in 1990, would go for over $3 million in the auction, which required a minimum starting bid of $2.75 million. The toy inventor acquired the painting with his partner, John Gentilly, in 1992 from Saeki as payment on a debt. For over 17 years, Abrams kept the painting in storage in a New Je

NEW YORK, NY.- The Board of Trustees at The New School endorsed a plan yesterday to create a major campus hub at 65 Fifth Avenue, a university-owned site between 13th and 14th Streets. The University Center, as the building will be known, will add 365,000 square feet for an array of uses including new academic space, an auditorium for public programs, a central university library, and a 608-bed dormitory with a separate entrance on Fifth Avenue. “The University Center embodies The New School’s evolution,” said President Bob Kerrey. “This institution is in the midst of a transformation, amplifying its urban campus to serve degree-seeking students who now make up the majority of our enrollment. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of our curricula, the University Center provides space for students across all of The New School and its programs to interact and collaborate.” Designed by Roger Duffy of Sk

TORONTO.- American art superstar Julian Schnabel has spent his life pushing the limits of painting and crossing artistic boundaries as an award-winning filmmaker. Now, for the first time, a major retrospective examines the connections between painting and film in Schnabel’s work, tracing how his paintings exist in dialogue with the cinema and revealing the rich interplay between the two media. Julian Schnabel: Art and Film will occupy the entire fifth floor of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Vivian & David Campbell Centre for Contemporary Art from September 1, 2010 through January 2, 2011. The exhibition surveys Schnabel’s work as a painter from the mid-1970s to the present and features more than 25 key works, including: several celebrated plate paintings (The Patients and the Doctors, 1978); paintings on velvet (Portrait of Andy Warhol, 1982) and sailcloth (Jane Birkin #2, 1990); monumental 22-by-22-foot canvasses (Anno