The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Sunday, January 9, 2022


 
Fossils of a prehistoric rainforest hide in Australia's rusted rocks

In an image provided by the paleontologist Michael Frese, a fossilized wasp, found in geothite rock in New South Wales, Australia, and dating to the Miocene Epoch, 15 million years ago. Fossil finds show that Australia’s Central Tablelands, today a land of grasses and spindly trees, was a lush rainforest some 15 million years ago. Michael Frese via The New York Times.

by Jack Tamisiea


NEW YORK, NY.- Australia’s Central Tablelands, hundreds of miles northwest of Sydney, are dominated today by grasses and spindly trees. But scientists recently discovered that some of the area’s rusted rocks conceal traces of the lush rainforests that covered the area 15 million years ago during the Miocene Epoch. The area, McGraths Flat, is not Australia’s only Miocene deposit, but these new fossils are a paleontological boon because of their exquisite preservation. Over the past three years, paleontologists have excavated flowers, insects and even a bird’s wispy feather. The scientists’ discoveries, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, help reconstruct Australia’s Miocene rainforest in extensive detail, and the site “opens a whole new area of exploration for Australian paleontology,” said Scott Hocknull, a paleontologist at Queensland Museum who was not involved in the research. Fifteen million years ago, a river carved through the jungle, leavin ... More


The Best Photos of the Day
Best Photos of the Day
On view at Tate Britain, Life Between Islands is a landmark exhibition exploring the extraordinary breadth of Caribbean-British art over four generations. It is the first time a major national museum has told this story in such depth, showcasing 70 years of culture, experiences and ideas expressed through art, from visionary paintings to documentary photography.Photo: © Tate Photography.





Tate Liverpool seeks architect for major reimagining of gallery   That $1,000 Bourbon you bought may be a phony   Navigating worlds an ocean apart, through art


Tate Liverpool © Rob Battersby.

LIVERPOOL.- Tate Liverpool today announced that it is seeking tenders from architects to work with the gallery to achieve a major reimagining of its landmark gallery on Royal Albert Dock Liverpool. When Tate Liverpool opened in 1988 it was a pioneer for arts-led regeneration; a gallery of international standing, in an iconic world city, designed by the leading architect of his generation, Sir James Stirling. Now the gallery has outlined the brief for a refurbishment of its gallery and public spaces that will enable it to thrive for the next thirty years. The works will transform the welcome and usability of the building, increasing the gallery’s visibility on the waterfront and within the Albert Dock, easing the transition between social and gallery environments and offering more engaging routes through the building. Following a grant from central Government of initial funding for this project, the gallery is seeking an architect to reimagi ... More
 

The whiskey expert Adam Herz, who keeps a collection of counterfeit sprits, at home in Los Angeles, Dec. 3, 2021. Rozette Rago/The New York Times.

by Clay Risen


NEW YORK, NY.- To the casual eye, there was nothing amiss about the bottle of whiskey sitting on a shelf at Acker, a wine store on New York’s Upper West Side. But for anyone who knew what to look for, the warning signs were clear. The whiskey, a bourbon called Colonel E.H. Taylor Four Grain that Acker was selling for about $1,000, normally came packaged in a special cardboard tube; this one sat there tubeless. Its strip stamp, attached over the top of the cork, was on backward. Still, when a producer from the TV news program “Inside Edition” asked in April about the bottle’s authenticity, the store assured him it was legitimate. The producer bought the whiskey, then took it to Buffalo Trace, the Kentucky distillery that makes the Colonel E.H. Taylor line of bourbon, for chemical analysis. ... More
 

Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now installation view. Photo: Tate Photography.

LONDON.- When Tate Britain invited Hew Locke, a British-Guyanese sculptor, to contribute work to a landmark show on Caribbean and British art, he thought of an exhibition his father had been in 30 years earlier. In 1989, Donald Locke’s sculptures were part of “The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain” at the Hayward Gallery, just down the river from Tate Britain. That show, celebrating artists of color’s contributions to the British art world, was disparaged by some critics, with one calling the works on display “tame and derivative” and another saying the artists “parroted Western visual idioms they don’t understand.” “Looking back at who was in the show, it was a really important show,” Locke said of the participating artists in a recent interview, “but it was dismissed at the time.” That reception, and how it reflected attitudes in the British ... More


Major exhibition at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft celebrates Dame Vera Lynn   Parrasch Heijnen opens a solo exhibition with Tokyo-based artist Yui Yaegashi   Charlotte Potter Kasic named Executive Director of the Barry Art Museum


Vera Lynn Now rehearsing in London for her radio show, 'Sincerely Yours', 1956. Photo: Alamy.

DITCHLING.- Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft opened a major new exhibition celebrating one of Britain’s most beloved performers, Dame Vera Lynn. Running 8 January – 18 April 2022, Dame Vera Lynn: An Extraordinary Life showcases over 100 objects from the estate of the ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’, including numerous previously unseen personal items. Unveiled today is a new portrait of Dame Vera by Neil Gower, commemorating the entertainer’s life and work, and her love of Ditchling, where she lived from the 1940s until her death in 2020. Exhibiting never-before-seen objects from Dame Vera’s private collection, Dame Vera Lynn: An Extraordinary Life offers unparalleled insight into both the public and personal life of the singer, whose songs were crucial in maintaining morale during the Second World War. The exhibition also reveals never-before-seen artworks by Dame Vera, who was an enthusiastic painter f ... More
 

Yui Yaegashi, dore grey, 2021. Oil on canvas, 13-1/8 x 8-3/4 inches | 30.5 x 22 cm.

LOS ANGELES, CA.- Parrasch Heijnen is presenting the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Tokyo-based artist Yui Yaegashi (b. 1985, Chiba, Japan). In an ongoing investigation of interwoven layers and chromatic nuance, Yui Yaegashi’s small-scale work exudes a substantial presence. Her oeuvre builds on the extensive history of nonobjective art. Each of Yaegashi’s intentional actions visibly transfers an essence of energy onto the canvas. The artist constructs a novel world through her exploration and experimentation relating to motion, the brushstroke, and time. The act of creation, of painting, of conceptualizing the size and the space each canvas inhabits, is Yaegashi’s main focus. Perception of scale ebbs and flows as the works are experienced in relation to the body. The artist’s paintings are meant to be taken in both from a distance and at close range, where initial perceptions are dismantled and new details emer ... More
 

Kasic, a pioneering glass artist who served as interim director for 14 months, has extensive experience in arts programming.

NORFOLK, VA.- Charlotte Potter Kasic has been named executive director of the Barry Art Museum at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Founded in 2018, the museum features contemporary glass sculpture, modern American paintings, historic dolls and automata, and a schedule of rotating exhibitions and programs. “I am delighted that Charlotte will be assuming the role of executive director,” said Robert Wojtowicz, ex-officio board member, chair of the search committee, vice provost and dean of ODU’s Graduate School. “As interim executive director for the past 14 months, she cultivated a bold and wide-ranging vision for the Museum as a true campus and community centerpiece.” Previously, Kasic served as the founding programming director of the Chrysler Museum of Art’s Perry Glass Studio and as the executive director of the Yestermorrow ... More



Alexis McGrigg's debut solo show with Almine Rech opens in Paris   Max Julien, star of a cult blaxploitation film, dies at 88   Air de Paris opens an exhibition of works by Emma McIntyre


Portrait of Alexis McGrigg, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech. Photo: Trenton Steele.

PARIS.- Almine Rech is presenting Alexis McGrigg's first solo show with the gallery, on view from January 8 to February 5, 2022. In "The Labour of Being", her debut solo show with Almine Rech, Alexis McGrigg takes her ethereal visual storytelling to another level of outer space. Her latest series continues the examination of Blackness as an intangible plane. This exploration of the “Other” in a world where there is no “Other” pushes the boundaries of societal constraints and allows the observer to imagine what freedom feels like beyond form, one through which the souls of black people transcend between here and a third space on the boundary of our universe. She refers to this space as “Home”. In between earth and this third space is an expanse invisible to the eye — The Ether. It is within this plane that the souls find rest and a meeting place to convene during their journey. “There are souls in th ... More
 

Black audiences flocked to see him in “The Mack,” and generations of cinephiles have paid homage to his star turn, his smooth delivery and his extraordinary costumes.

by Penelope Green


NEW YORK, NY.- Max Julien, the sultry, soft-voiced actor and screenwriter who rose to pop culture prominence with his starring role in “The Mack,” a 1973 film about the rise and fall of a pimp, died Jan. 1 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 88. His wife, Arabella Chavers Julien, said the cause was cardiopulmonary arrest. “The Mack” is the story of Goldie, a young man who is framed and sent to jail, and who upon his release aims to make his fortune and his name by becoming a pimp. (The word “mack” is an Americanization of “maquereau,” French street slang for pimp.) It’s a hero’s journey, played out on the mean streets of Oakland, California, a real-life war zone in the early 1970s presided over by Black crime lords and Black militants, who battled each ... More
 

Emma McIntyre is a New Zealander painter born in Tamaki Makaurau in 1990 © David Straight.

PARIS.- The gesture is determined, never letting up from start to finish. It makes use of multiple depths, filters and wet and dry surfaces that butt up against each other. Emma McIntyre liberated herself long ago from the modernist grid 1. Her painting is, first of all, the product of an alchemy that has been put on hold, the fruit, even, of a suspension of time. Her palette then rejects uniformity, its tendency sometimes vivid, sometimes atmospheric and sometimes sombre. The patches of colour enter into dialogue with the brush marks and occasional handprints. Time becomes muddled, the film goes out of focus. The image is sometimes so blurred that we no longer know where to look, so rich is the chronology. To start with, the canvas is laid out horizontally and the first layer is applied. This is followed by a shift to the vertical, where the concern is with structure, composition, the exercise of painterly preference. This shift spawns ... More


Crescent City Auction Gallery announces Important Winter Estates Auction   Revival for a native New Zealand group pushed close to cultural death   Marilyn Bergman, half of an Oscar-winning songwriting duo, dies at 93


Unsigned oil on canvas Portrait of a Lady attributed to Pierre Mignard (French, 1612-1695) (estimate: $600-$900).

NEW ORLEANS, LA.- Crescent City Auction Gallery will ring in the New Year with an Important Winter Estates Auction, scheduled for the weekend of January 21st and 22nd, online and in the gallery at 1330 Saint Charles Avenue in New Orleans. Start times are 11 am Central time on Day 1 and 10 am on Day 2. More than 800 lots will come up for bid over the two days. Featured will be numerous local and regional estates, including property from the estate of Lisa Montgomery of New Orleans and property from the collection of Ronald Ralpheal Levert, the proprietor of Godeau’s Antiques in Baton Rouge. Items will range from fine jewelry (including diamonds and pearls) to vintage couture (Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Prada, Celine, Gucci, others). But the sale will also be top-heavy with the quality merchandise people have come to expect from Crescent City Auction Gallery: fine French and American period furniture, original works ... More
 

A statue of Tommy Solomon, the last “full-blooded” member of the Moriori people, at Manukau on the south east coast of Chatham Island, which is known as Rekohu among the Moriori, in New Zealand Dec. 22, 2021. Cornell Tukiri/The New York Times.

by Pete McKenzie


WELLINGTON.- On the windswept coast of Chatham Island, about 500 miles east of mainland New Zealand, stands a statue of a thick-jowled, cheerful man, his gaze fixed on the endless sea stretched before him. The memorial honors Tommy Solomon, who for decades has been mythologized as the last “full-blooded” member of the Moriori people, the native Polynesian inhabitants of the island. Today, many New Zealanders remember Solomon, who died in 1933, as the last survivor of a culture that drifted into extinction. Except it hadn’t. After Solomon’s death, a few hundred people with at least partial Moriori heritage remained. Over the decades that followed, they survived cultural marginalization in a country where children were taught ... More
 

The Bergmans and Hamlisch won the 1974 best-song Academy Award for “The Way We Were,” from the Robert Redford-Barbra Streisand romance of the same name.

by Anita Gates


NEW YORK, NY.- Marilyn Bergman, who with her husband, Alan, gave the world memorable lyrics about “misty watercolor memories” and “the windmills of your mind” and won three Academy Awards, died Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 93. A spokesperson, Jason Lee, said the cause was respiratory failure. The Bergmans’ lyrics, set to melodies by composers such as Marvin Hamlisch and Michel Legrand, were not everywhere, but it sometimes seemed that way. For many years, their words were also heard every week over the opening credits to hit TV shows such as “Maude,” “Good Times” and “Alice.” The Bergmans and Hamlisch won the 1974 best-song Academy Award for “The Way We Were,” from the Robert Redford-Barbra Streisand romance of the same name. (The ... More




Albrecht Dürer's travels through his own words and sketches | National Gallery



More News

Sidney Poitier was the star we desperately needed him to be
NEW YORK, NY.- Were anyone to ask me who’s the greatest American movie star, my answer would never change. And it will never change because the answer is easy. The greatest American movie star is Sidney Poitier. You mean the greatest Black movie star? I don’t. Am I being controversial? Confrontational? Contrarian? No. I’m simply telling the truth. Who did more with less? Of whom was less expected as much as more? Who had more eyes and more daggers, more hopes and fears and intentions aimed his way, at his person, his skill and, by extension, his people? Race shouldn’t matter here. But it must, since Hollywood made his race the matter. Movie after movie insisted he be the Black man for white America, which he was fine with, of course. He was Black. But the radical shock of Sidney Poitier was the stress his stardom placed on “man.” Human. ... More

A conductor adds her name to Philharmonic contenders
NEW YORK, NY.- It’s auditions season at the New York Philharmonic — and not for a seat among its players. With Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, having announced in September that he will depart in 2024, every guest conductor now takes the podium with the search for his replacement looming. This game of Fantasy Baton is complicated by the fact that the Philharmonic is wandering while David Geffen Hall is renovated, playing sometimes unfamiliar repertory in unfamiliar (and perhaps uncongenial) spaces. But the fall brought good reviews for Dalia Stasevska, Simone Young, Giancarlo Guerrero and Dima Slobodeniouk. No guest so far, though, has received a platform like Susanna Mälkki got Thursday. Making her fourth appearance with the Philharmonic, she is the only outsider to be granted one of the orchestra’s ... More

City Ballet pushes back start of winter season, citing omicron
NEW YORK, NY.- New York City Ballet announced Friday that it would delay the opening of its winter season by nine days, making it the latest prominent performing arts group to cancel or postpone programming because of the recent surge in coronavirus cases. The company’s winter season, which had been scheduled to begin Jan. 18, will start Jan. 27, the company said in a news release. The canceled performances will not be made up; the season will still end as originally planned Feb. 27. The postponement is yet another virus-related difficulty for City Ballet, which had to cancel its last 17 performances of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” its most popular offering, after several people involved in the production tested positive for the coronavirus. The company said it was forced to postpone the winter season because it had lost two weeks ... More

Harry Colomby, teacher who aided a jazz great's career, dies at 92
NEW YORK, NY.- Harry Colomby was a schoolteacher with a love of jazz when he stopped by the Cafe Bohemia in New York's Greenwich Village in 1955 to remind drummer Art Blakey that he and his band, the Jazz Messengers, were scheduled to perform in a few days at the school where Colomby taught. While waiting, Colomby greeted celebrated composer and pianist Thelonious Monk; they had met once before. “Oh, Harry. Yeah, I remember you,” Colomby recalled him saying, as detailed in the liner notes to the live 1965 Monk album “Misterioso.” “Say, you got your car here? You can drive me uptown?” In the car, Monk asked if Colomby was ready to quit teaching. “So I drove Thelonious to his house at 2:30 in the morning and at 3 a.m., a half-hour later, became his personal manager,” he wrote. “I’m still not sure how it happened.” Colomby’s ... More

My dinner with Sidney Poitier
NEW YORK, NY.- Yes, he came to dinner. In the summer of 2014, I received word through a friend that I was being asked to a dinner in Los Angeles that would include Sidney Poitier. I’m not easily star-struck. As you can imagine, in my line of work, you meet all types. Being easily impressed is an occupational liability. But Poitier wasn’t just a star, he was a legend, a lion, an almost mythical figure in Black culture and the culture at large. He was Black royalty. He was more than just the first African American to win an Academy Award for best actor, for his performance in the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field”; he and his lifelong best friend, Harry Belafonte, were also the exemplars of the artist-as-activist model, both risking not only their careers but their lives, at the height of their celebrity, for the cause of civil rights. They paved the way for others to follow. ... More

Overlooked no more: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, artist and author who explored identity
NEW YORK, NY.- In 1982, about three months before the publication of her avant-garde magnum opus, “Dictee,” Theresa Hak Kyung Cha wrote to her older brother, John. “It is hard to say what I feel, how I feel, except that I feel freed, and I also feel naked,” she wrote. She had been carrying the manuscript around for three years and had just turned it in to her publisher. “It feels good,” her letter said. “It feels frightening.” “Dictee” is part memoir, part history, part experimental meditation; a challenging, innovative exploration of Cha’s life, her mother’s difficult journey across East Asia and to the United States, the fractured immigrant experience, female warriors and language itself. It received a subdued reception when it was released, but in the years since, it has become an essential work for feminist writers, conceptual artists and Asian American ... More

Christopher "Daze" Ellis' second solo exhibition with P·P·O·W opens in New York
NEW YORK, NY.- P·P·O·W is presenting Christopher “Daze” Ellis’ second solo exhibition with the gallery, Give It All You Got. Born in 1962 in New York City, Daze began his prolific career as part of the second generation of graffiti writers, painting New York City subway cars in 1976 while attending The High School of Art and Design. Inspired at an early age by writers such as Blade, Lee Quinones, and PHASE 2, Daze gained notoriety as a teenager in the late 70s and early 80s and remains one of the few artists of his generation to make the successful transition from subways to the studio. Combining a selection of significant works from the 1980s and early 1990s with a series of new paintings and sculptures, Give It All You Got chronicles a lifelong dedication to portraying the lifeforce of New York City and commemorating those who made ... More

The Weatherspoon Art Museum opens the first comprehensive retrospective of Lorraine O'Grady
GREENSBORO, NC.- The Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro opened a retrospective of pioneering conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady. The exhibition opened on January 8, 2022 at the Weatherspoon Art Museum and is organized by the Brooklyn Museum. Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And spans four decades of the artist’s career and features nearly all the artist’s major projects, including the Mlle Bourgeoise Noire trilogy, Rivers, First Draft, and Body Is the Ground of My Experience, plus a wide selection of archival materials on view for the first time. The exhibition also features the critically acclaimed new body of work titled Announcement of a New Persona (Performances to Come!). Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is the first comprehensive overview of the work of Lorraine O’Grady (b. Boston, 1934), one of the most significant figures ... More

Yoffy Press releases 'Our Strange New Land: Photographs by Alex Harris'
ATLANTA, GA.- Commissioned by the High Museum in Atlanta as part of its Picturing the South series, photographer Alex Harris chose to examine the rapidly evolving world of independent fiction filmmaking while also exploring our increasingly visual culture. Made on over 40 film sets throughout the region, his photographs reveal a new generation of filmmakers coming to terms with matters of race, class, and sexuality that relate not just to the South but to the whole country. Harris’ photographs also hint at more universal aspects of life – the ways in which we are all actors in our own lives, creating our sets, practicing our lines, refining our characters, playing ourselves. Blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor have created this immersive photobook, using still photographs to evoke their own cinematic-like narrative. ... More

Morris Museum announces two new exhibitions
MORRISTOWN, NJ.- On and Off the Streets: Urban Art New Jersey is the first museum exhibition to examine the duality of New Jersey artists whose creative versatility extends from the street to the studio. Although their outdoor murals are more commonly experienced in the “open air" galleries that have cropped up in Jersey City, Newark, Asbury Park, and Trenton, these twelve artists also maintain a successful studio practice, producing works on canvas, paper, and wood, as well as sculpture, video, stickers, stencils, skateboard decks, and fashion. Along with these studio-produced works, eleven of the artists have painted 13-1/2 feet tall x 20 feet wide murals directly on the Morris Museum's gallery walls expressly for this exhibition to capture the scale and site-specific nature of their street art practice. The impact of the streets on the studio is being ... More


PhotoGalleries

Imants Tillers

Le Design Pour Tous

New Galleries of Dutch and Flemish Art

Cassi Namoda


Flashback
On a day like today, art collector Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was born
January 09, 1875. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (January 9, 1875 - April 18, 1942) was an American sculptor, art patron and collector, and founder in 1931 of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. She was a prominent social figure and hostess, who was born into the wealthy Vanderbilt family and married into the Whitney family.

  
© 1996 - 2021
Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez