Jori Finkel

Recently she brought fireworks to the small town of Belen, New Mexico, where she has lived since 1996. The pyrotechnics celebrated the opening of a new public space for her nonprofit arts organization, Through the Flower — and her 80th birthday. Last month at her first event there, Chicago spoke about a source of inspiration for her own work: female pioneers of abstract painting, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton. Of the three, Pelton (1981-1961), is still on history’s sidelines, but that is changing: A major survey, “Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist,” travels from the Phoenix Art Museum to the New Mexico Museum of Art on Oct. 5 and arrives next spring in New York, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Why does Agnes Pelton’s work speak to you?

A: I love her work. She was a contemporary of Georgia O’Keeffe who worked in New Mexico and then retreated to the desert in California. She was part of the Transcendental Painting Group, painters very interested in inflecting their work with spirituality. Whenever I saw a Pelton painting — which was rare, actually; one here, one there — I was always drawn to the luminosity: a sense of light and inner light that I have also attempted to bring into my work.

Q: You’ve been a fan of her “Awakening(Memory of Father),” from 1943, for years now.

A: My reading of the painting is that it’s a dreamlike scene, an abstracted landscape with day and night present at once. It has this form in the sky that’s been described as a golden trumpet. But if you look closely, underneath that shape and also on top, is a faint texture that makes it feel like it’s moving. For me that form is a luminous symbol of death. Agnes Pelton’s father died when she was 10 years old. My father died when I was 13, and I also dealt with his death through abstraction. Pelton used abstraction to convey personal meaning as opposed to just dripping paint on canvas, like Jackson Pollock, or making abstract forms, like Ellsworth Kelly. One of my theories is that until the advent of abstraction, women artists were not free to convey their experiences directly. Abstraction opened up the visual landscape for us to invent forms to convey our internal reality.

Q: Besides Pelton, which other artists are you thinking of?

A: Natalia Goncharova, Sonia Delaunay, Georgia O’Keeffe, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, starting from the early 20th century when abstraction became a possible mode of expression. Earlier, women artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi had to fit their forms into an art historical tradition created by men, like the way she used [her rendering of] the biblical theme of Judith beheading Holofernes to express the violence of being raped.

Q: Hilma af Klint has also been a real revelation in the art world lately since her recent show at the Guggenheim.

A: That’s an understatement [laughs].

Q: Usually we tell the history of abstraction by identifying three or four men who invented abstraction around the same time in 1913: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky and Frantisek Kupka. Seeing Hilma af Klint’s “Paintings for the Temple” at the Guggenheim, which she began in 1906 as a result of her séances, just upended this history.

A: This show was momentous for art history because this has been an agreed-upon narrative promoted by the Museum of Modern Art all over the world: Modern art was invented by four male artists. Nope.

Q: Even recently, in a 2013 show called “Inventing Abstraction” that tried to complicate the story of abstraction with over 80 artists, MoMA didn’t include Hilma af Klint. Their reasoning was that she wasn’t a truly abstract artist because she was representing the spiritual realm.And now Agnes Pelton is being called by critics the new Hilma af Klint.

A: Historically there’s a precedent for that. There was a woman named Hildegard of Bingen, for example, from the High Middle Ages, who was an abbot and then two centuries later, some other religious mystic would be called the Hildegard of Bingen of the 14th century. So now we have the Hilma af Klint category into which all these other women are slotted. No, just let Agnes Pelton be Agnes Pelton.

Q: Sonia Delaunay, who with her husband, Robert Delaunay, developed this colorful, symphonic sort of abstraction called Orphism, has an interesting history. It was in 1911 that her painting went from figurative to abstract. She always said the turning point was making a patchwork quilt for her infant son. And she went on to work as a designer in fashion, costumes, stage sets and books. Could design and craft be one root of abstract painting?

A: That’s very interesting. I remember many years ago there was an article in an art magazine about the artist Liza Lou, who does beaded work, and instead of placing her work in the context of the history of beading, like Native American beading or women’s crafts, they put her in the tradition of Andy Warhol. Because the way to validate an artist, particularly a woman artist, is to put them in the context of the important male art. What you’re talking about now opens up the possibility of starting to see women in our own tradition. I’ve looked at so much work by other women to validate my own sense of form and also color. When I look at Hilma af Klint’s paintings and see all those pastels, I’m like: Whoa, I love that kind of color.

Q: Pelton, Hilma af Klint, Delaunay and O’Keeffe were all bold colorists, although in her first group of abstractions O’Keeffe deliberately avoided color.

A: I did that too in my first decade of creative practice, because in graduate school they gave me so much grief about my choice of colors. They hated my colors. So for a time my work was monochrome, like with the “10 Part Cylinders” at Jeffrey’s show [which Chicago made from fiberglass in 1966 with the help of boatbuilders — and remade for the Deitch show]. It allowed me to focus on form, so I can see why she did that.

Q: Barbara Haskell, a curator at the Whitney, talks about the art nouveau origins of O’Keeffe’s abstracted forms: They’re spirals, snails, tendrils and snaking forms — natural forms, not mechanical.

A: One reason I selected O’Keeffe and Virginia Woolf to add to “The Dinner Party” table is that I believe these two women began to forge a female-centered language in both art and literature that became a foundation for countless women artists. I used to talk to Anaïs Nin, my mentor, in the early ’70s. Could there be a ‘female form language’ in art? At that time it was completely outside the art dialogue. The biggest compliment you could give a woman artist then was to say she paints like a man.

In the ’60s my LA gallerist Rolf Nelson had a 24-foot cloud painting by O’Keeffe hanging in his gallery for sale for $35,000, and no one was interested. People don’t remember when O’Keeffe was dismissed or when Frida Kahlo was referred to as “Diego Rivera’s wife, who also paints.” All of that changed because of the feminist art movement, and now we’re seeing decades of scholarship beginning to bring new understanding to a lot of this work.

“Judy Chicago: Los Angeles”

Through Nov. 2, Jeffrey Deitch, 925 N. Orange Drive, Los Angeles; deitch.com.

“Judy Chicago — The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction”

Through Jan. 20, 2020, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW, Washington; 202-783-5000.

This article originally appeared in

Judy Chicago on Rescuing Women From Art History's Sidelines

Judy Chicago, the feminist artist and author, is playing to the coasts this month. There is a show of her important early work at Jeffrey Deitch’s gallery in Los Angeles through Nov. 2, and a new series done in painted porcelain and glass called “The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction,” opening Thursday at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington. Her most famous work, “The Dinner Party,” an epic 1979 installation that imagined a gathering of 39 important women sidelined ...

But when these eight models — a mix of cisgender women and trans performers of different races — walked out past a large scrim and drifted onto an island of white sand to pose near colorful steel sculptures, they moved extremely slowly, with no hint of a runway swagger. And they wore body paint in place of clothes: a blue bikini-like form here, a green chaps-like shape there. The only tangible garments were see-through vinyl and molded-plastic pieces worn for warmth.

It’s a new twist by Berlin-based artist Donna Huanca on the work of Yves Klein, who drenched nude models in his bright blue paint starting in the late 1950s. And it’s a new use for a space that, pre-Marciano, was a 2,400-seat theater where male members of the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple staged their own plays to attain higher levels of initiation or “education.”

“The Masonic theater only allowed women inside on certain occasions,” Huanca, 38, said while installing her new show, “Obsidian Ladder,” at the Marciano. “So it feels very powerful to take up space in this architecture with femme mark-making and with models who represent a range of femininity.”

She has installed nine of her cubist-looking steel sculptures and a large photo-based canvas in the cavernous space, making it seem less imposing with scrims and bright lighting. The air is filled with a soundtrack of natural noises like fire and water and a pungent scent that smells like burned wood. (“To me it smells like a witchcraft market I like in Mexico City — burnt feathers and bleach,” she said.) The slow-moving models will appear, two at a time, in the exhibition every Saturday for the show’s run, through Dec. 1.

“The previous shows here played with the darkness of the theater,” said Huanca, wearing a paint-splattered black jumper and some fierce-looking talon-shaped red nails. “With the light, the models, the scent and sounds, you’re entering a whole new landscape.”

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, an independent curator not connected to the show, calls it a “ritualistic landscape where she explores the fluidity and complexity of identity, femininity, nature, culture.” She relates Huanca to a previous generation of Latin American artists interested in the female body, including Cecilia Vicuña, Ana Mendieta and María Evelia Marmolejo. “She belongs to the tradition of body art, showing how the body, the subject of so much political violence, is a creative space that can be reclaimed by artists,” she said.

So this isn’t the same as Klein’s directing women to smash their painted breasts against large sheets of paper to make artworks. But isn’t it still at some level exploitative to ask women to pose naked before strangers?

“That’s such a natural reaction because women have been exposed in art, exploited by artists, for so long,” Huanca said. “But these models have complete agency. They have the right to take breaks or leave whenever they want. I’m paying everyone above an average ‘life model’ wage. Their voices are included in the catalog we’re making. Their names are on the walls. I want them to be collaborators.”

One model, Iiia Anxelin Eleuia Xochipilli, who identified herself as a performance artist of Apache descent, said: “I think it’s really cool that she’s working with models of different shapes who are trans, cisgender, nonbinary. There are no men allowed, even among the security guards. She keeps it really safe for us.”

Huanca noted that no photography would be allowed at ground level and that security guards had been trained to follow each model. “These performances trigger reactions in people ranging from crying to masturbation, so we want security to understand what to look out for,” she said.

Olivia Marciano, the institution’s artistic director and daughter of the museum co-founder Maurice Marciano, added that she found Huanca’s work “meditative,” not sexual. After seeing a similar installation by Huanca at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna last year, she invited her to take over the Marciano project space for her first big museum show in the United States.

Huanca grew up in Chicago with Bolivian immigrant parents: Her father worked as a Berlitz language teacher, her mother as a travel agent. She spent summers in Bolivia, until the family decamped to Houston when she was 15. “My older brother was in a gang in Chicago and we had to duck to get him out,” she said.

Before she painted skin, she liked to paint clothes. In Texas she discovered both an underground music scene, playing the drums in various bands, and contemporary art. She studied painting at the University of Houston, getting her BFA in 2004, but wasn’t, to the dismay of her teachers, interested in canvases — “too expensive,” she said. Instead she bought thrift-store garments to cut up and turn into collages or rub with pigment.

In 2006 she did the summer program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, starting what she calls “my hobo life of residencies and finding ways to work with nothing” — moving between New York and Berlin with a stay in Mexico City as well. There, in 2012, she dipped garments like a velvet dress and leather shorts into paint and hung them on the wall for a show at the Preteen Gallery. A couple of years later, in Brooklyn, she began experimenting with painting directly on the skin of friends.

Her biggest attention-getter came in 2017 at Art Basel, when her gallery, Peres Projects, presented her work in the Unlimited section, devoted to venturesome artists. For an eight-day, eight-hours-a-day performance, she painted the skin of two nude models and set them adrift in her own sculptural installation. Sabine Schaschl, director at Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, was among many who shared images on Instagram, writing, “Lock eyes with a model and the lines between looking and being looked at begin to bend.”

At the time the artist was painting skin by hand, waking up around 5 a.m. to create a new pair of body paintings every day. For the Marciano show she is using machine sprayers, giving each model a set pattern and palette to be replicated through the show. Some are painted to match the sculptures they stand near — more or less camouflaged.

Huanca likes to include natural materials like turmeric and coffee grounds in her canvases, body paintings and sculptures alike. This time, she dusted turmeric on the models’ shoulders. For the hair extensions, she initially used horsehair but switched to synthetics a couple of years ago. “I got an extension where some pieces of skin were left on,” she said, “and I said: ‘I’m done with this.’ It felt cruel and abusive.”

It wasn’t the right visual, to say the least, for art that celebrates the flesh.

Donna Huanca: Obsidian Ladder

Through Dec. 1, Marciano Art Foundation, 4357 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, marcianoartfoundation.org. Timed tickets are available online.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/arts/design/body-art-paint-donna-huanca.html" id="1d4fe9ef-2cf4-3bfc-a452-665b72562ee0">The New York Times</a>.

LOS ANGELES — For the first time in its history, the recessed, ground-floor gallery at the Marciano Art Foundation looked like the backstage of a women’s fashion show. A clothing rack held odd garments and hair extensions, a model sat having her makeup touched up, and others shuffled around in white robes.

Bare skin is the canvas for Donna Huanca

The museum’s director, Klaus Biesenbach, called the decision a “step toward being more porous, more welcoming and more open.” Asked whether he was inspired by the example of other museums in town, he said he was an advocate of free museum entry long before he moved to Los Angeles last year, noting that he instituted free admission at MoMA PS1 for New Yorkers in 2015 when he ran that museum.

“I think many of us are at a point where we understand that museums should not be ivory towers,” he said. “MOCA should feel like a public library where you can go and have access to culture.” Biesenbach noted that Powers’ gift would enable the museum to offset the loss of its $15 general admission fee (there will still be fees for special exhibitions) and to expand its educational programs and visitor services staff.

“This is not a badge for me,” Powers said in a statement. “Rather, it’s a way for me to support the museum and be of service to the Los Angeles community,” she said, describing “diversity, inclusiveness and openness of spirit” as museum priorities. “Charging admission is counterintuitive to art’s ability and purpose to connect, inspire, and heal people,” she said.

While some New York museums have increased their fees and the Metropolitan Museum of Art switched last year from a suggested to mandatory payment for most out-of-state visitors, the contemporary art museums in Los Angeles, where cultural tourism is not as strong, have been going the other direction in an attempt to broaden their audiences.

The Broad, across the street from MOCA, has been free for all but special exhibitions since opening in September 2015 and has consistently drawn more than 750,000 visitors annually. The Hammer, affiliated with the University of California at Los Angeles, stopped charging in 2014 and has seen a boost of about 25 percent over that period, drawing 251,943 visitors last year.

MOCA had 284,160 visitors in 2018. Biesenbach said he does not have specific projections for future attendance. “I’m not counting on the audience doubling or tripling, I think that would be the wrong goal. If we have 5,000 people come who wouldn’t come otherwise, that is important,” he said.

He said he did not have a date yet for when the museum would initiate the new admission policy but would “work on the rollout immediately.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="f02f1cb5-6648-3f5d-a650-fea991780dcf" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/arts/design/los-angeles-moca-admissions-fee.html">The New York Times</a>.

LOS ANGELES — The Museum of Contemporary Art here is planning to eliminate general ticket charges, aligning it with the Broad and the Hammer Museum, which already offer free admission. The policy is being made possible by a $10 million donation by the board president, Carolyn Clark Powers, which was announced at the museum’s Saturday night benefit party.

MOCA Los Angeles to end admissions fee

“Mia is a very engaged and research-driven curator who works closely with artists and is interested in how museums can reach out and address issues of social justice, environmental justice, the urgent questions of our time,” said Biesenbach, who has run the institution for six months after a long tenure at MoMA PS1. “For us this was very important.”

Locks had worked at MOCA once before, starting her career there as a curatorial assistant in 2010 before joining MoMA PS1 in 2013, where she was an assistant curator. In 2015, she was one of four curators to organize “Greater New York” for that museum. In 2017, as an independent curator working in New York, she teamed up with Christopher Y. Lew to organize the Whitney Biennial, which was acclaimed for its formal and racial diversity but also attacked for its inclusion of Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till.

Biesenbach praised her handling of the controversy. “She’s a great mediator, a great communicator,” he said. “I thought she did a good job of keeping conversation going and supporting both sides.”

Locks will join two other senior-level curatorial staff members at the museum: Bennett Simpson, who has been promoted to senior curator and administrative head, and Amanda Hunt, who now has the dual roles of director of education and senior curator of programs.

Their work is already reflected in the museum’s exhibition schedule for the next two years, which has just been released. Most notably, Simpson is the curator of a 25-year retrospective of painter Henry Taylor, celebrated for unpredictable and unfussy portraits from black urban life. Set to open by the end of 2020, the show may travel afterward. “We have just reached out to other museums,” Biesenbach said.

Other confirmed exhibitions include a retrospective of the wildly expressive Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist opening in spring 2020 and a show of the often-satiric drawings, paintings and animations of Tala Madani, a Los Angeles-based artist born in Tehran, opening that fall.

The hiring of Locks signals that Biesenbach is not appointing a chief curator. “Not for now,” anyway, he said, noting that he expects a team approach to invite more collaboration inside and outside the museum.

He also sees it as a return to the early strengths of the museum. “When I took this job I met with some of MOCA’s founders,” he said, singling out one conversation he had with the museum’s longest-serving director, Richard Koshalek. “It became clear to me that having a multiplicity of viewpoints and voices was so important to MOCA’s history. We’re trying to re-establish that.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/arts/design/moca-mia-locks-senior-curator.html" id="b90b8dc8-98cf-3816-a49e-54f29c04dc7a">The New York Times</a>.

LOS ANGELES — Klaus Biesenbach, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, has just made his first major curatorial hire. Mia Locks, best known as co-organizer of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, will join his team as a senior curator in July.

MOCA in Los Angeles Appoints Mia Locks as Senior Curator

The sculpture, “Declaration,” was originally installed in 2001 in honor of the nonprofit Venice Family Clinic, which runs a popular “art walk” benefit. Now, after failed attempts to persuade the city of Los Angeles to help acquire the work, the gallery’s plan is to move it to the artist’s Petaluma, California, studio and find another public site for it.

Normally based in New York, di Suvero, 85, was reached by phone this week while traveling in Michigan. “The piece seemed to me very natural there on Venice Beach,” he said, sounding a bit wistful. “I think about how you go down one highway after another watching the rear ends of cars, and the handling of steel in cars. But here I tried to give people a feeling of open space — a sense of spirit and capacity.”

Peter Goulds, founder of L.A. Louver, described the work as a symbol of the bustling artistic community in Los Angeles, where di Suvero had a studio for a few years in the 1960s.

“I see it as one of the main cultural icons representing creative life in L.A.,” Goulds said, noting that its steel arms, made of I-beams, do not extend toward the ocean but “embrace” the city.

Goulds said the gallery paid for the original installation of the work and had since covered insurance to indemnify the city as well as maintenance, such as repainting after graffiti tagging. He added that di Suvero “had loaned this work for almost 20 years with no fee to the city — he has not received a penny for this.”

The sculpture is worth about $6 million today, according to Goulds, but he said the gallery had offered it to the city “on favorable terms” and volunteered to help line up private donors “within the framework of the tax code.”

“We reached out to philanthropists who could be involved, but it requires the city to step up, and that is not happening,” he said, citing “numerous discussions” with Los Angeles City Council member Mike Bonin.

Bonin countered in an email that the meetings had “always boiled down to ‘find us $2 million to $4 million,’” which he noted was not realistic.

“It is a beautiful and iconic piece of art,” Bonin said, “but even art lovers in Venice would be furious if the city spent several million dollars on the sculpture when we have so many other pressing demands and urgent needs that are underfunded: homelessness, public safety, and keeping our streets, beaches and parks clean.”

Di Suvero said he did not know the details of those meetings, but he said he had not entirely given up hope of an acquisition. Another large steel sculpture of his, “Orion,” which had been on long-term loan to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, was just acquired by the university after being removed for several months for repainting.

“After ‘Orion’ was taken down, I think people realized what they were missing,” di Suvero said. “The university pulled everything together with donors and decided to keep it.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="069e51f0-1730-3739-a21f-4c40e01138fb" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/arts/venice-beach-mark-di-suvero-sculpture.html">The New York Times</a>.

Venice Beach may lose a landmark: A Mark di Suvero sculpture

The most visible and recognizable artwork on Venice Beach, a 60-foot-tall steel sculpture by Mark di Suvero that has been a popular meeting point for nearly two decades, will be dismantled and trucked to Northern California by the end of this year, according to the artist and his gallery, L.A. Louver.

The county board of supervisors voted Tuesday to approve the current plan and release $117.5 million in taxpayer funding for it, despite last-minute entreaties from some art and architecture critics who urged the board to vote against the project.

Michael Govan, the museum’s director, in turn, took to the Opinion page of The Los Angeles Times to present his case.

“This is the big green light everybody has been waiting for,” Govan said after the meeting, where leaders of neighboring museums and celebrities like Brad Pitt and Diane Keaton made short public comments of support. “Now we can go ahead with construction drawings and go raise the rest of the funds with the assurance this is going forward.”

In the week running up to the vote, the $650 million project, which is mainly privately funded, received its sharpest criticisms yet. Independent architecture critic Joseph Giovannini and The Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight both described problems with the Zumthor design — a sweeping, one-level structure perched on pavilions that will replace four ailing structures.

They both referred to the county’s final environmental impact report, issued last month, which noted that the proposed building offers only 110,000 square feet for galleries — less space than previous designs — and 10,000 fewer square feet of gallery space than in the buildings slated for demolition. (Giovannini, who said that he had hired an architect to analyze the original buildings, put the loss of gallery space at 53,000 square feet.)

Both critics also wrote that they feared the architecture would undermine the purpose of an encyclopedic museum like LACMA by integrating different collections — from Mesopotamian antiquities to contemporary art — in uniform galleries. (Govan recently decided to merge American art and European painting and sculpture, two major departments, upsetting the critics.)

In one column, Knight called the project “the incredible shrinking museum,” noting that he “couldn’t name another art museum anywhere that has ever raised hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on reducing its collection space.”

Including the county’s contribution of $117.5 million, the museum has raised $560 million. The county plans to issue a $300 million bond to loan money to LACMA, which Govan explained would cover expenses until the pledges come in. (The museum also receives about 25 percent of its operating costs from the county.)

Giovannini wrote that the museum would be assuming an “unprecedented and unconscionable” amount of debt. In his fourth article on the subject in the Los Angeles Review of Books, he notes that LACMA already carries $343 million in debt.

Addressing the question of how much debt is too much, Govan cited the institution’s “A3 stable rating by Moody’s.”

“All big, ambitious architectural projects are controversial,” Govan said in an interview. “But the county has done its due diligence. This project has already been through the fire of scrutiny by so many experts and consultants.”

Responding to complaints about the future of permanent collection galleries, Govan confirmed that the Zumthor plan does not include “purpose-built collection galleries” designed to showcase objects from a particular culture or period but rather seeks to create spaces that are “good for different kinds of art.” Then, he said, “we can move the art as needed over time as our collections and needs change.” He called the decision a philosophical as well as a practical one: “The categories museums and universities use for art are not sacred; they are conveniences and need re-evaluation all the time.”

On the issue of shrinking square footage, he countered that he has expanded gallery space significantly with the addition of two exhibition halls designed by Renzo Piano (the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, known as BCAM, and the Resnick Pavilion) that were built on the campus during his tenure. He also cited recent measurements his staff made of the original four buildings that found the new plan decreases gallery space by only 4,000 square feet.

Nicolas Berggruen, a museum trustee, who is also building a research group known as the Berggruen Institute near the Getty Center, said focusing on square footage — which shifted over time, in part because of environmental concerns — missed the point.

“The truth is, something a bit bigger might be better, but it would be a shame not to go ahead with the building,” he said. “Stopping this project would be bad for the museum and bad for the civic fabric of L.A.; it would show that L.A. can’t get its act together in terms of its cultural future.”

One reason the stakes are so high is that Los Angeles has historically been home to few great examples of public architecture. Many of its most important innovations have been residential, including homes by Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph M. Schindler and Richard Neutra. Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall, a widely celebrated building that gives Angelenos an image of their own city beyond the Hollywood sign, took over a decade to complete. And Rem Koolhaas’ proposal to overhaul the LACMA campus failed because of funding challenges.

Diana Thater, an artist who has exhibited at the museum, said the Zumthor building, which bridges Wilshire Boulevard, could become a major tourist destination. “I want L.A. to have this building,” she said. “The city needs a beautiful, memorable museum that people will flock to visit,” she added, praising the design for potentially unifying the campus, creating a more expansive, parklike setting and establishing “a horizontality where art from different cultures can be considered simultaneously.”

These days, when she brings her students from ArtCenter College of Design to visit, she said: “I’m always apologizing for the condition of things. I’m sorry it’s not beautiful like Bilbao or the Met. I’m sorry the ceilings are cracking.”

Even opponents of the plan agree that the four buildings slated for demolition, three of which were designed by William Pereira in the 1960s, need to be replaced.

Zumthor, a Pritzker-winning architect, earns accolades for the restrained quality of his buildings and his sensitivity to materials. But some say that his strengths could be a weakness at such a large scale and that he has not built in the United States before.

The architect has not spoken out much about the project, leaving Govan to play the advocacy role. “He makes extremely beautiful buildings,” the museum director said. “People say that he doesn’t know American building systems, but actually he does. And Skidmore Owings &amp; Merrill, who we’ve hired as the project architects, really know them.”

Demolition of the old buildings is set for early 2020, with the opening of the new building planned for 2024.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/arts/design/lacma-design-peter-zumthor.html" id="c390d5c9-0518-39cb-a871-5894bc71e7bf">The New York Times</a>.

LOS ANGELES — The ever-evolving Los Angeles County Museum of Art has cleared its biggest hurdle to erecting a radical building by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor that represents one of the country’s most ambitious museum transformations.

A $650 Million Building Jumps a Hurdle

Addressing the question of how much debt is too much, Govan cited the institution’s “A2 stable rating by Moody’s.”

One reason the stakes are so high is that Los Angeles has historically been home to few great examples of public architecture. Many of its most important innovations have been residential, including homes by Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph M. Schindler and Richard Neutra. Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall, a widely celebrated building that gives Angelenos an image of their own city beyond the Hollywood sign, took over a decade to complete and almost wasn’t built for lack of funding. And Rem Koolhaas’ proposal to overhaul the LACMA campus, which won a 2001 design competition, failed because of funding challenges.

LOS ANGELES — The ever-evolving Los Angeles County Museum of Art has cleared its biggest hurdle to erecting a radical new building by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor that represents one of the country’s most ambitious museum transformations.

LACMA's $650 Million Building by Peter Zumthor Is Approved

You might wonder if the museum has designed a show for the sake of Instagram or Facebook likes. The cat-in-hole is a recognizable internet meme, while the show’s title is itself a clear play on Snapchat, the messaging and photo-sharing app. And the museum, a short walk from Twitter headquarters, is actively competing with other cultural institutions to reach the local technology community, for both funding and audience.

But the exhibition offers more than opportunities for selfies (there are two or three). Clément Chéroux, the museum’s senior photography curator (who said he received no financial support from the industry), is exploring how the transmission of images has evolved from analog to digital times. In particular, he makes a compelling argument for the serious art-historical lineage of social media photo sharing.

The show questions the common mythology that the internet has radically changed the way we share pictures of ourselves, our pets and our vacations, and created “an entirely new kind of dialogue,” as technology reporter Nick Bilton wrote. Instead, it proposes that the roots for this kind of sharing came decades earlier, making for an evolution, not a revolution.

“We have been sending postcards and snapshots since the early time of photography,” Chéroux said, although noting that the volume and intensity of communication have of course grown with social media. “The whole exhibition is playing with this tension,” he said. “It’s new — and not so new.”

The show makes its argument most dramatically with its focus on “mail art” of the 1960s and ’70s, artists’ projects that used the Postal Service as an unwitting collaborator. Ray Johnson, for instance, sent a photographic self-portrait to Joseph Cornell in 1966 in hopes of establishing a relationship with one of his artistic heroes. And Lynn Hershman Leeson made postage stamps in 1972 with images of her face partly obscured, challenging the U.S. government to stamp them and further obliterate her identity.

Other mail artists in the show include On Kawara, a Japanese conceptual artist; Jan Dibbets, a Dutch artist who experimented with color photography and perspective; and Endre Tót, a Hungarian artist affiliated with the fluxus group. Examples by dozens of lesser-known practitioners are featured in a large window display of mail art sent to San Francisco artist and archivist John Held.

Chéroux’s premise that mail art prefigured social media is debatable. The form was one of the 20th-century’s most subversive modes of art-making, with roots in the anti-art and anti-commodity movements of dada and fluxus — in contrast with the commercial DNA of image-sharing today. And mail artists were typically sending postcards, letters and packages to select, hand-picked recipients, networks far from the enormous reach and popularity of social media.

Why not look back to other historical moments when photography was transmitted through mass media, such as the rise of photography magazines or photo books? Chéroux said his interest was more in the intimate, “person-to-person exchange of images, the gestures that say, ‘I am here,’ or, ‘This is me,’” an impulse he said mail art and social media share.

Jeff Guess, a Paris-based artist in the show, finds the argument oddly persuasive. “I have made mail art before, and it seems to me like an amorous relationship with someone, where you spend a lot of time making art for that person. But you can also see social media as a form of interpersonal communication using images, just on a much more massive scale.”

For his computer animation “Addressability” in the contemporary section of the show, Guess developed a program that takes images posted on Twitter under the hashtag “selfie” and disintegrates each of them into a galaxy of pixels that float in space. The shards get pieced back together into one legible image, only to explode.

While internet or digital art is still a relatively rare subject for museum exhibitions, a growing number of shows are looking into the historical roots of the field. “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, through April 14, shows how early instruction-driven conceptual art by Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and others anticipated works that were programmed by computer. “The Body Electric,” which opened recently at the Walker Art Center, takes the past 50 years of virtual life as its domain. And the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany — a leader in this field — just closed “100 Masterpieces With and Through Media,” a century-spanning show that also happened to include some examples of mail art.

“In the age of Snapchat, mail art becomes more interesting again,” said Peter Weibel, the artist-theorist who runs ZKM. Weibel said mail art fulfills two of his three criteria for “media art:” by using an “apparatus” for production (such as a typewriter) and one for distribution (such as a truck or plane) — it only lacks an apparatus for reception.

In “Snap+Share,” perhaps the most prescient example of mail art is Kawara’s “I Got Up ... ,” a set of touristy picture postcards he mailed on a daily basis to friends or colleagues from different locations. He stamped each card with the time that he got up each morning. The series seems made for posting on Twitter or Facebook, although it began in 1968. Running over 10 years, it explored the themes of image overload and information saturation that marks the current cultural moment.

The last half of “Snap+Share” shows artists today responding to this image overflow. Erik Kessels’ installation “24HRS in Photos,” first realized in 2011, takes the form of a mountain of photographic prints filling an entire gallery, meant to evoke the hundreds of thousands of images uploaded to Flickr in one 24-hour-period that year. Corinne Vionnet’s series “Photo Opportunities” features tourist sites like the Eiffel Tour and the Golden Gate Bridge. But instead of showing one image of a famous landmark, she makes a blurry (but still intelligible) composite out of dozens she found online — documenting what she calls “tourist clichés.”

Chéroux decided against including made-for-Instagram work by artists like Stephen Shore and Cindy Sherman. “You don’t need to go to a museum to see it,” he said. “You can see it on your own cellphone at home.”

The museum does stage a selfie opportunity, making available a refrigerator where people can pose with their heads in the freezer, following the instructions of artist David Horvitz. He first posted them on social media in 2009 and the work has been generating goofy images ever since.

Another experiment in meme-making, the cat at the entrance to the exhibition returns in the very last gallery. Only now instead of a photo reproduction on the wall, the creature takes the form of a taxidermied cat poking out of a hole in the museum ceiling, its pale green eyes glinting from above. This work was made by artists Eva and Franco Mattes, who were riffing on the famous “ceiling cat” image first posted online in 2006. They took the weightless creature looking at us looking at it — some see it as a symbol of the internet itself — and transformed it intoa three-dimensional sculpture.

And it could, in our age of image acceleration, morph again in a nanosecond. Now that this cat has reached such a high perch in the museum sphere, it is bound to be photographed and posted by visitors, sending it back into the vast digital stream. In this way, the ending of the show marks another beginning, with the old-school, art-world divisions between high and low culture collapsing along the way.

“What we see today is a loop from popular culture to art back to popular culture,” Chéroux said. “And that’s the reason we encourage photography by visitors in the show, not just because it’s trendy, but because it also says something about the real reciprocity of the art being made today.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/arts/design/selfies-snap-share-san-francisco-museum-of-modern-art-.html" id="7d5968a8-8fe0-36d3-a1c9-73a91f923ee2">The New York Times</a>.

SAN FRANCISCO — The image of a bright-eyed cat with many online lives peers out from a hole in the wall as you enter the new exhibition “Snap+Share” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Photo Sharing, Before Instagram

<h1>LOS ANGELES — The great mystery of who stole the Willem de Kooning painting “Woman-Ochre” by cutting the canvas out of its frame at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1985 has still not been solved.</h1>

But the issue of where the painting has been — and why it has been out of public view since its 2017 discovery by a New Mexico antiques dealer, has become clearer. It turns out that the work, said to be worth at least $100 million, has been in museum storage for months, awaiting approval from the FBI to send it for restoration.

“The FBI has kept this an open case,” Olivia Miller, the Arizona museum’s curator of exhibitions, explained. “The painting has been at the museum but it was still considered evidence, so it wasn’t allowed to leave until this past November.”

Now, the museum, in Tucson, is staging a coming-out-of-storage cocktail party on Sunday, with the first public viewing of the painting since 1985, before sending it to the Getty Center in Los Angeles in April for conservation. The Getty plans to exhibit the painting during the summer of 2020, after treatment, before returning it to the Arizona institution.

The challenge is bringing the 1955 canvas — an example from de Kooning’s celebrated but also contested “Woman” series, known for their grotesque, even savage renderings of the female nude — back to near-original condition. Ulrich Birkmaier, the Getty Museum’s senior paintings conservator, and Tom Learner, the Getty Conservation Institute’s head of science, have teamed up for the project. They expect the process to take at least a year.

“Unfortunately, the painting suffered considerable damage as a result of the theft,” Birkmaier said. “In 1985 when the painting was cut out of its frame — actually a very clean cut — the thief ripped it off the lining, which caused a lot of horizontal cracks.”

He believes the cracking was exacerbated by another action the thief possibly took: rolling up the canvas tight enough to tuck it under a coat.

Birkmaier described paint “lifting off” from the cracked areas, which will need to be secured, and noted that the original canvas border wrapped around the stretcher was left behind during the theft. “The treatment will most likely involve a relining of the canvas during which it can be reunited” with its border, he said.

“Once the painting is consolidated, cleaned and restretched, there will be endless debates with my team and Arizona about retouching,” Learner said, adding, “My instinct is that we are going to err toward maintaining the existing condition because that’s where conservation is at the moment.”

The Getty team also plans to analyze the artist’s choice of materials. In her book on de Kooning, Susan Lake, a conservator, showed that starting in the 1940s he worked with glossy house paints as well as artists’ oils. It appears he might have used both in “Woman-Ochre.”

The Getty Museum exhibition will feature the painting and the restoration process. In 2012, the Getty struck a similar agreement with the University of Iowa for Jackson Pollock’s 1943 painting “Mural.”

Miller, the Arizona curator, said the Getty beat out other teams because of its “cutting-edge science” and commitment to educating the public. “We were looking at the work they did in collaboration with University of Iowa on the Jackson Pollock painting, which produced this incredible research, as a model,” she noted.

Miller vividly remembers receiving the phone call in August 2017 from David Van Auker, an antiques store owner in Silver City, New Mexico. He had bought “Woman-Ochre” from the estate of Jerry and RitaAlter, not recognizing it as a de Kooning, let alone as stolen property, until he put it on display and some customers took immediate interest. “He was super calm,” Miller said. “He introduced himself and said: I bought some items from an estate and I have your stolen de Kooning.”

She did not disclose the insurance value for the painting today, and it’s hard to say how much its damage would dampen a price or its dramatic back story would aid it. An earlier “Woman” painting brought $137.5 million in a private sale.

As for the unveiling Sunday, Miller was reluctant to reveal details: “The painting will not be left alone, that’s for sure. We’re hiring extra security.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="de1a6d1c-bbb0-44ac-a3b7-9870cdbcb05e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/arts/design/willem-de-kooning-stolen-painting-arizona.html">The New York Times</a>.

Stolen-and-found de Kooning to be shown off before restoration

“The FBI has kept this an open case,” Olivia Miller, the Arizona museum’s curator of exhibitions, explained.

The snake isn’t scary — but has alarmingly low production values, being handmade out of papier-mâché and studded with colorful aquarium pebbles. And the artist behind it, Trulee Hall, has underscored the unsophisticated nature of her beast in an accompanying claymation video, complete with that horror-movie trope of a screaming woman in a bathtub.

“I love the fakeness of it all,” Hall said cheerfully this week on the SoHo set, where Paramount workers on a cherry picker were securing the creature, which she called “phallic and umbilical,” to the fire escape of a cast-iron building. “The entire Paramount lot is beautifully fake in a really safe way, like an adult Disney World.”

Now it’s about to become an amusement park of another sort — for art collectors.

Hall’s work is one of 16 artist projects commissioned for the debut edition of Frieze Los Angeles, taking place at Paramount from Friday through Sunday. A group of art fairs started by the publishers of an art magazine in 2003 in London, Frieze has long been known for its curated projects as well as its customized gallery tents. The LA edition has both, with a tent behind the artist projects designed by architect Kulapat Yantrasast, of the firm wHY, that will house 70 galleries, from homegrown LA success stories like Regen Projects and David Kordansky to international powerhouses like Hauser &amp; Wirth and Pace. (Still, this iteration is less than half the size of Frieze’s London or New York editions.)

The hope is that the novelty of this setting will help the fair succeed where others have failed. In 2011, the organizers of New York’s Armory Show held an LA fair downtown; it survived only two years. A spinoff of Paris Photo, also at Paramount, lasted three. But Frieze Los Angeles has already generated more momentum than those events, with five smaller fairs piggybacking on it and more than three dozen museum-affiliated collector groups flying into town.

Victoria Siddall, director of Frieze Fairs, thinks the timing is finally right. “It’s similar to the situation in London when Frieze launched there,” she said. “LA has all the ingredients that make it a city you want to visit: museums, galleries, artists living here, art schools. The only thing missing was one moment when everyone wanted to come.”

Her colleagues at the talent agency Endeavor, an investor in Frieze, suggested the Paramount location. “It was because of the location that I couldn’t say no,” said Ali Subotnick, a former Hammer Museum curator who has organized the 16 new artist projects. “I loved the idea of working out in the real world, out of the white cube, out of the white tent, though of course this has an extra layer because it is a fake world within the real world.”

Just around the corner from Hall’s serpent, Cayetano Ferrer has installed on an exterior brick wall an assemblage of neon signs bought from a Burbank prop shop. He superimposed “Sin Club” on “Legal Charity” and “Adult Movies” on “Kids Games.” Together the signage forms a head-like shape that nods to Freud’s classic diagram of the human psyche. “I’m using the language of this prop city to make a concrete poem,” he offered.

His sculpture had been moved last minute to a more protected location because of forecasts of rain. But otherwise Subotnick didn’t sound worried. “The artists knew to make their works weatherproof and waterproof,” she said. “And the interiors of the brownstones stay dry.”

Sarah Cain’s installation could seem cozy even on a bleak day. She has taken over the shallow interior of a New York-style brownstone, painting doors, floors and even a sofa where visitors can sit, as well as hanging canvases and installing a stained glass artwork in the window. She worked with andSons Chocolatiers of Beverly Hills to create an Earl Grey-infused, vegan dark chocolate that she planned to serve throughout the preview period Thursday and offer around teatime after that.

Nearby, Lisa Anne Auerbach is also making a participatory work, creating “Psychic Art Advisor” as a shop in a brownstone marked by a neon sign in the window where those words flash in different combinations. She has brought in performer Estela Sanchez, also known as Alpine Moon, to serve as the spiritual-aesthetic guide.

“I was thinking about the overlap between psychics and art advisers,” Auerbach said, sitting in an Eames office chair that was meant to signal the moneyed art-world presence and holding tarot cards she made for the occasion. “The shops are often run by women,” she explained. “They are often sole proprietorships, and they may be unlicensed or unaccredited — they can just put a shingle out.” She added, “We’re hoping people come in with questions about collecting, curating and creativity.”

Kori Newkirk’s work “Signal” also touches on cosmic communication. He has planted on city sidewalks two spiky sculptures, each made of old-school television antennas bunched together at the end of a pole. Looking like robotic hands, the antennas seem futuristic. “I was born analog, but I will die digital, and my experience is of both,” the 48-year-old artist said.

As the antennas of one sculpture swayed close to a window during installation, Newkirk told a grip, “We can definitely bend them to get that thing snug.” A few minutes later he said in a stage whisper: “I actually wouldn’t mind breaking a window. It would give more fake-real authenticity to this fake-real place.”

Frieze Los Angeles

Friday through Sunday at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles; frieze.com.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/arts/design/frieze-los-angeles.html" id="3ab32612-dae9-38f9-acaf-3e5e48a92ebe">The New York Times</a>.

LOS ANGELES — The New York back lot of Paramount Studios, where fake brownstones and town houses mimic city streets, has been invaded by aliens before. But it has never seen anything quite like the bright green serpent that winds all the way from a “SoHo subway station” up through several apartment windows.

Frieze Los Angeles: Lights, Camera, Art!

<h1>The government shutdown has caused museums in Washington to close and has put exhibitions like the National Gallery of Art’s Tintoretto show, originally scheduled to open March 10, at risk. It has also endangered an artist’s project nowhere near the Beltway: “Orbital Reflector,” a sculpture by Trevor Paglen that was recently launched into orbit.</h1>

The sculpture is not lost in space as much as stuck in a holding pattern before activation, pending clearance by the Federal Communications Commission. According to the artist, it might not survive the wait while FCC workers are on furlough.

A 100-foot-long mylar balloon coated with titanium oxide, “Orbital Reflector” was designed to be visible to the naked eye at twilight or dawn while in orbit for a couple of months. It would then incinerate upon entering the Earth’s thicker atmosphere.

But although it was sent to space, the balloon was never inflated as planned. The small satellite carrying the sculpture and its inflation mechanism went into orbit Dec. 3 as part of a larger load launched by the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Paglen said that afterward, his team did extensive “orbital analysis” to ensure a collision-free trajectory and secure FCC clearance to inflate. But communication from the FCC soon ceased because of the shutdown.

“What we’re concerned about,” Paglen said, “is that every time the satellite goes into sunlight, the entire thing heats up, and then in Earth’s shadow it gets really cold and contracts. If you let this process go on too long, it can damage the electronics.”

“It’s not designed to live indefinitely,” he said, adding, “We would really like to deploy this.”

While at one level “Orbital Reflector” recalls the simple gesture of a child releasing a balloon into the sky, Paglen’s project has been challenging from the start, with engineering and production costs over three years running about $1.5 million and SpaceX delaying the rocket launch several times last year.

The idea behind “Orbital Reflector,” Paglen said, is to explore who controls outer space by creating a satellite with “no militaristic or commercial ties” and with its only purpose being visibility.

“It’s ironic and sad,” he said, “but not nearly as sad as the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of people not being paid.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="8a8bd2d0-a74b-4b00-98bd-e3bc87cd6a07" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/arts/design/government-shutdown-art-orbit-trevor-paglen.html">The New York Times</a>.

Shutdown leaves uninflated space sculpture circling in orbit

The sculpture is not lost in space as much as stuck in a holding pattern before activation, pending clearance by the Federal Communications Commission. According to the artist, it might not survive the wait while FCC workers are on furlough.

While at one level “Orbital Reflector” recalls the simple gesture of a child releasing a balloon into the sky, Paglen’s project has been challenging from the start, with engineering and production costs over three years running about $1.5 million and SpaceX delaying the rocket launch several times last year. (Coincidentally, the same SpaceX rocket also carried into orbit a sculpture-satellite by Tavares Strachan called “Enoch,” which he reports is functioning as planned.) And there’s an ambitious art-world context for Paglen’s project, with the Nevada Museum of Art acting as a co-producer and showing models of it in their galleries.

The idea behind “Orbital Reflector,” Paglen said, is to explore who controls outer space by creating a satellite with “no militaristic or commercial ties” and with its only purpose being visibility. “It’s about who gets to do what in space,” he said, which makes the fact that a political standoff has endangered the project more pointed.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/arts/design/government-shutdown-art-orbit-trevor-paglen.html" id="865aa86f-5587-3ce7-add7-da6c09e34ebb">The New York Times</a>.

The government shutdown has caused museums in Washington to close and has put exhibitions like the National Gallery of Art’s Tintoretto show, originally scheduled to open March 10, at risk. It has also endangered an artist’s project nowhere near the Beltway: “Orbital Reflector,” a sculpture by Trevor Paglen that was recently launched into orbit.

Jori Finkel

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Shutdown leaves uninflated space sculpture circling in orbit

Shutdown Leaves Uninflated Space Sculpture Circling in Orbit