Lu Gang wins W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund

Copyright Lu Gang
From Pollution on China

NYT on New Museum's conflict of interest

Some Object as Museum Shows Its Trustee's Art
By Deborah Sontag and Robin Pogrebin for NYT
November 10, 2009

Nysocialdiary.com
From left, Lietta Joannou, Jeff Koons, Dakis Joannou and Justine Koons in a 2003 photograph. Mr. Joannou has been collecting Mr. Koons's art since before Mr. Koons was an art star.

NO MAN'S LAND @ AIB

Bonnell Robinson | Dana Mueller

November 5 to December 5, 2009

Art Institute of Boston Gallery at University Hall
1815 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA

Image on top: Bonnell Robinson, Marne, Western Front, France, 2007

Image on bottom: Dana Mueller, The Great Dismal Swamp, Virginia/ North Carolina border, 2009

Luis Gonzalez Palma @ AIB

Strauch-Mosse Lecture Series
Visiting guest artist Luiz Gonzalez Palma on October 1, 2009


Comienza entonces a llover (Then it starts to rain), 2004

LALLA ESSAYDI: Le Femme du Maroc

DECORDOVA MUSEUM & SCULPTURE PARK

Joyce and Edward Linde Gallery

September 26, 2009 - January 3, 2010

Lalla Essaydi, Le Femme du Maroc: Reclining Odalisque, 2008

Lalla Essaydi is a New York-based, Moroccan-born photographer, painter, and installation artist. Over the past decade, she has risen to international prominence with her timely and beautiful work that deals with the condition of women in Islamic society, cross-cultural identity, Orientalism, and the history of art. Like her feminist Muslim expatriate contemporaries—Ghada Amer, Ambreen Butt, Emily Jacir, Sherin Neshat, and Shahzia Sikander—Essaydi has developed a powerful and personal artistic voice that calls into question prevailing myths, power hierarchies, and traditions that limit human freedom. (press release)

Gallery Talk

Senior Curator Nick Capasso: Saturday, November 21, 3 pm

Panel Discussion
Women, Culture, and Islam: A Cultural Historian's Perspective on Lalla Essaydi's Photographs: Sunday, October 11, 1 pm
DeCordova welcomes Senior Resident Scholar Elinor Gadon from Brandeis University's Women's Studies Research Center for an afternoon discussion of Lalla Essaydi's photographs. Framed within the context of anthropology, art, and religion, Gadon brings her unique perspective as a cultural historian to this intriguing exhibition.

Alec Soth @ MassArt

Dog Days Bogotá by Alec Soth

September 9 - November 28, 2009
Stephen D. Paine Gallery
Massachusetts College of Art + Design
Boston, MA
Reception: Thursday, October 1, 6:00 - 8:00 PM

Artist Lecture: Monday, October 26, 6:00 PM


In 2002 Alec Soth traveled with his wife to Bogotá, Colombia to adopt a baby girl, Carmen. Carmen's birthmother gave her a scrapbook book with this note; "When I think about you I hope that your life is full of beautiful things." Taking this message to heart Soth set out to capture the city during the two months it took the courts to process the paperwork. As in his other series, Sleeping By the Mississippi and NIAGARA, beauty makes itself apparent through ramshackle architecture, the companionship of animals, and the complexities of human relationships. Because of the very personal nature of this journey, Dog Days Bogotá is both poetic and haunting, he says, "I wanted to share my honest impressions, including my fears." Soth has exhibitions on view this fall at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, and in 2010 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. This exhibition was organized by Magnum Photos. (excerpt MassArt press release)

BORDER @ Davis Museum

Michal Rovner: Border

DAVIS MUSEUM AND CULTURAL CENTER
Wellesley, MA
March 11 - June 14, 2009



“This is not a true story.” Thus begins the seminal art video Border, which Michal Rovner shot along the boundary between Israel and Lebanon during 1996-1997.

An Israeli commander and the artist herself are the film’s two central characters. As they attempt to enter each other’s worlds, two narratives emerge. One concerns the actual political and physical border—the beautiful, rocky landscape; soldiers and civilians who populate it; and tense atmosphere. The other follows Rovner’s relationship with the commander, whose movements she chronicles and who participates in creating the film. (press release excerpt)

Alessandra Sanguinetti visits Art in Context

In March 2009 Art in Context at the Art Institute of Boston hosted a talk with Alessandra Sanguinetti, which was one of the highlights of this year's visiting artist series. Alessandra was truly inspiring, insightful and gracious when she shared her experiences as one of the leading contemporary photographers.

She recently received the Peabody Award 2009.


Alessandra Sanguinetti speaks to Art in Context, March 2009















































Bonnie Robinson and Alessandra Sanguinetti, Art Institute of Boston, March 2009

THE EDGE OF VISION Abstraction in Contemporary Photography

Curated by Lyle Rexer

Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
Between 10th and 11th Avenues
New York, New York

May 15 to July 9, 2009



Talk and book signing with Lyle Rexer:
Tuesday, June 16, 6:30 pm

Aperture Gallery presents The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography, curated by Lyle Rexer. From the beginning, abstraction has been intrinsic to photography, and its persistent popularity reveals much about the medium. The Edge of Vision showcases the work of nineteen contemporary photographers who base their practice in some form of abstraction. Rexer defines abstraction as “a departure from or the eliding of an immediately apprehensible subject.” Within this broad definition, a host of approaches explore aspects of the photographic experience, including the chemistry of traditional photography, the mediation of lenses, the direct capture of light without a camera, temporal extensions, digital sampling of found images, radical cropping, and various deliberate destabilizations of photographic reference.

Going Softly Into a Parallel Universe / NYT

By Carol Kino for the New York Times


Claes Oldenburg at the Whitney Museum, where two exhibitions of his work are on view.
Photograph by Evan Sung/ NYT

IN 1961, early in his career, the Pop artist Claes Oldenburg wrote a manifesto: “I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all. I am for an artist who vanishes.”

+

Art Review | Claes Oldenburg
A Low-Cost Show Reinflates a Big Bag
By Kareen Rosenberg for the New York Times


Soft Shuttlecocks, Falling, Number Two, 1995
Claes Oldenburg


Giant Fagends, 1967
Claes Oldenburg

slideshow

NYT introduces LENS

Lens is a new photojournalism blog that presents some of the most interesting visual and multimedia reporting. It will be a showcase for the work of New York Times photographers, and will highlight great images from other news organizations and from around the Web.

Robert Capa/ NYT article

New Works by Photography's Old Masters

By Randy Kennedy/ New York Times

A look inside Robert Capa's Mexican Suitcase, photography from the Spanish Civil War that was long thought to be lost.


A shot of a woman and child at a Spanish refugee camp in France, taken by Robert Capa in March 1939.

Lisa Wiltse's essay on Teenage Pregnancy

BURN MAGAZINE
Photographic Essay by Lisa Wiltse, AIB Alumna


Parola Tondo District, Manila, Philippines
© Lisa Wiltse

Pregnant teenagers pass the time in the alleyways and slum of Parola Tondo district, Manila, Philippines
© Lisa Wiltse

Teenage pregnancy is widespread in the Philippines, especially amongst the poor. In Manila, this contributes to overpopulation and the vicious cycle of poverty, another child borne into the ghettos and a teenage Mom bearing the burden of raising a child before her own maturity and adulthood. An estimated 70,000 adolescent mothers die each year in developing countries.
Young mothers face enormous health risks, obstructed labor is common and results in newborn deaths and deaths or disabilities in the mother.

Children are everywhere, tangible evidence of the city’s teenage pregnancy problem. Every year, 13 out of 100 girls aged between 15 and 19 of the Filipino population get pregnant. Health care for Manila’s urban poor is almost nonexistent, while opportunities to learn about contraception in this strictly Catholic country are rare. (excerpt from burn Magazine)

Lisa Wiltse graduated from the Photography Department at the Art Institute of Boston in 1999. Lisa currently works as a freelance photographer who has generated self-funded projects focusing on humanitarian issues in countries such as Australia, Uganda, Bangladesh, Romania and most recently the Philippines. A former staff photographer for the Sydney Morning Herald, her work has been awarded several honors including first prize at PX3 Prix de la Photographie, The Oxfam Humanitarian Award, and the Gordon Parks International Photography contest, among others. Lisa was announced as one of the 2008 Magenta Flash Forward Emerging Photographers and is represented by Aurora Photos.

Sophie Calle @ Paula Cooper Gallery

Sophie Calle Take Care of Yourself

April 9 - June 6, 2009

Art Review | 'The Pictures Generation'

At the Met, Baby Boomers Leap Onstage

By Holland Cotter/ New York Times

Blue Tile Reception Area, 1983
Laurie Simmons

alter ego @ Nave Gallery

Images Made with Toy Cameras and Alternative Photographic Processes

Nave Gallery
Clarendon Hill Presbyterian Church
155 Powderhouse Blvd., Somerville, MA

May 2-21, 2009
Reception May 7, 7-9 p.m



During times of change, there are always those who rebel. In the current era of digital media, many photographers are reaching for ways to create work that is relevant in the world today, but by using manual processes that have enriched photography since it's inception. Be it with taped up plastic toy cameras from the 1970s, to making their own pinhole cameras, to creating cyanotypes outside in the sun—these are not photographers who simply want to plug in their memory card and click away to create an image. There is a lot of trial and error, duct-tape and elbow grease in making each of these images.

Many alternative photographers live by the mantra “don’t think, just shoot”. There are minimal options and settings in the cameras, and much is is left to chance, intuition and happy accidents. The process takes on a life of its own--be it light leaks in the camera, one frame overlapping to the next, or variations in environment and chemistry-- the intentional loss of control over the medium gives the artist an ability to let go of what might be sacred, as what is being captured through these mediums many times is unknown until the film is processed. It is a balance of give and take between the artist and the medium.

These photographers portray work that is whimsical, nostalgic and engrossed in their respective mediums to create the work that has been chosen to display. With polaroid, cyantope and other analogue techniques falling to the wayside in this digital age, we hope to celebrate these artists and their unique processes at the Nave.

Artists include Leslie Bastress, Heather Blakney, Kayla Brenes, Mark Richard Brown, Derrick Burbel, Christina, Myriah Leshea Douglas, Erica Frisk, Alice Grossman, Mellisa Gruntkosky, Janisha, Theresa Kelliher, Ariel Kessler, Mary Kocol, Cassandra Martin, Karen Molloy, Natasha Moustache, Dana Mueller, Denyse Murphy, Eric Nichols, Cade Overton, O Gustavo Plascencia, Serrah Russell, Shayna, Erika Sidor, Annie Smidt, Roberta Stone, David Strasburger, Andy Takats, Tricia, Molly Van Nice, V VanSant, Ann Zelle and Lexie Zippin.

Wicked Local Somerville article

Visiting artist Alessandra Sanguinetti

The Art Institute of Boston
Friday, April 17, 2009


Left:
Untitled
From On the Sixth Day
Fujiflex Print
1996–2004
Right:
Time Flies
Cibachrome Print
2005
© Alessandra Sanguinetti


The twins Ahmed and Mahmoud, Heritage Center, Bethlehem, C-Print , 2003
© Alessandra Sanguinetti

Alessandra Sanguinetti was born in New York City in 1968 and currently lives and works in both Buenos Aires and New York City. Her work has been exhibited extensively abroad, including a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires, and is part of several collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the International Center of Photography, New York. She has been awarded numerous grants and prizes, including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Hasselblad Foundation Grant, and Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award.

Ben Sloat in Taiwan/ Conference Interview

Temple Portraits, Ben Sloat

Art in Context will conduct a conference interview with Ben Sloat who is currently on a Fulbright Scholarship in Taiwan.




Photographs Ben Sloat, Taiwan 2009

Ben Sloat received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley (’99) and a MFA from the Museum School/Tufts University (’05). Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Front Gallery in Oakland, CA and Safe-T Gallery in Brooklyn NY - group shows at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Gallery 1600 in Atlanta, GA. His photographic work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Oakland Tribune, and the Boston Globe, and he has guest lectured at UC Berkeley, RISD, UC Santa Cruz, UMass Boston, Boston University, and SCAD. Having taught at Tufts University, Mass Art, and the SMFA, he currently teaches photography, digital media, and photo history at the Art Institute of Boston.

He is represented by OH+T Gallery in Boston.

NYT Art Review | Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West

Mythic West of Dreams and Nightmares

By Ken Johnson/ New York Times


c) Stephen Shore

MOMA exhibit visit here

March 29, 2009–June 8, 2009

Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West examines how photography has pictured the idea of the American West from 1850 to the present. Photography's development coincided with the exploration and the settlement of the West, and their simultaneous rise resulted in a complex association that has shaped the perception of the West's physical and social landscape to this day. For over 150 years, the image of the West has been formed and changed through a variety of photographic traditions and genres, and this exhibition considers the medium's role in shaping our collective imagination of the West. (excerpt press release)

Untitled (Cowboy), 2003
c) Richard Prince


c) Robert Adams



Marilyn, 28 Years Old, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1990-92
Philip-Lorca diCorcia

The Art of Dinh Lê/ Aidekman Arts Center/ Tufts

A Tapestry of Memories: The Art of Dinh Q. Lê
January 22-March 29, 2009
Tisch Gallery


Mot Coi Di Ve
Dinh Q.Lê

Lê’s tapestries and video installations reveal a two-decade-long introspective journey in which the artist has brought his vision to bear on the dislocation and cultural displacement he experienced, first in fleeing his homeland, then with his immersion in American culture, and ultimately upon the return to his estranged and yet familiar country. Through his art, Lê has sought to negotiate the differing perspectives he holds—Vietnamese, American-Vietnamese, and American—on Vietnam, the American-Vietnam War, and his place in the two societies in which he finds both belonging and alienation.

The Imaginary Country, 2006
Dinh Q. Lê , Three-channel video installation made in collaboration with Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Ha Thuc Phu Nam

By literally and metaphorically weaving together images that speak for his conflicted cultural identity, Dinh Q. Lê’s work allows us to experience the uncertain balance of personal memories within a collective memory forged largely by cinematic constructions. The works in this exhibition embody Lê’s vivid sense of the struggle to find one’s own place within the framework of superimposed, alien, and collective identity. (press release excerpt)

Untitled, 2008/ From the series Hill of Poisonous Trees

Cate McQuaid
Globe Correspondent
Photo tapestry explore war and identity

Visting artist LAURA MCPHEE

The Art Institute of Boston
March 24, 2009


© Laura McPhee, 2008
From the series Guardians of Solitude
On view at Bonni Benrubi, NY until April 11, 2009

Laura McPhee earned a BFA in Art History from Princeton University in 1980, where she studied with Emmet Gowin and a MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1986. McPhee was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and Fellowship in 1998 for work in India and Sri Lanka and a residency in Idaho from Alturas Foundation 2003-2005. She was also awarded a New England Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 1995 and a John Simon Guddenhaim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 1993.

Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Center, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others.

Smoke above Fisher Creek, Valley Road Wildfire
40,838 Acres Burned, Custer County, Idaho, 2005
From the series River of No Return
© Laura McPhee

She is the daughter of award winning author John McPhee and photographer Pryde Brown, sister of novelists Jenny McPhee and Martha McPhee, architectural historian Sarah McPhee, and Joan Sullivan, founding principal of the Bronx Academy of Letters.


Sluices at a reservoir, part of a two-thousand-year-old irrigation
system now updated, near Badulla, Sri Lanka 1998
From the series No Ordinary Land
© Virginia Beahan & Laura McPhee

NYTimes on Larry Gagosian

Pulling Art Sales Out of Thinning Air
By David Segal, NYT


Charlie Powell, New York Times

Bill Burke Visit to AIB on March 17th

Holzer at the Whitney

The Films of Werner Herzog @ the MFA

March 11 to 21, 2009


Aquirre: Wrath of God, 1972
Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog (b. 1942) is a director, screenwriter, and actor whose perspective on the world has earned him critical and popular acclaim. Whether shooting in Antarctica, Alaska, the Peruvian jungle, or Wisconsin, Herzog’s films often focus on characters with seemingly impossible dreams or those who have a unique and unusual talent. Since his first film Herakles in 1962, Herzog has made over 50 films. This eight-film retrospective is only a glimpse of Herzog’s extraordinary imagination and vision.

Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art/ PEM

To watch video click on image

The Peabody Essex Museum
Mahjoing: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection

(press release excerpt)
Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, an assemblage of provocative works organized by the Berkeley Art Museum. Featuring paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations and video, Mahjong reflects four decades of artistic exploration.
The last forty years of unprecedented social, political and economic transformation forged a generation of Chinese artists unlike any who came before. From times of restriction and relative obscurity, through more recent years of increased artistic freedom and record-breaking international auctions, Chinese artists observed the changes around them and navigated their own internal landscapes. Now China is home to one of the most dynamic and innovative contemporary art scenes in the world.


From Family Tree, 2000 (9 photographs)
Zhang Huan

Miracles and Exorcised Demons: “Drei” (i.e. “three”)

Roaring Twenties, Otto Dix, 1927-28

An Exhibition In Stuttgart on the Triptych in Modern Art

by Birgit Sonna in the Goethe Institut Journal/ The Arts

Boris Mikhailov - At Dusk

DEWEER Gallery
Belgium
February 22 to April 5, 2009


Untitled, 1993
From the series At Dusk
© Boris Mikhailov

At Dusk (1993) consists of 13 panoramic photographs, tinted with blue ink. The photographs remind us of the second World War. It is a dark and dramatic depiction about some of the artist's personal recollections of the war, during which Mikhailov was evacuated to the Ural. He remembers being brutally woken up in the middle of the night by wailing sirens. The dark blue tints refer to these traumatic experiences and also to the capitalist system that was rapidly taking control of his post-communist country at the time he made the series. At Dusk is one of Mikhailov's most striking body of work. (text taken from actuphoto).


Untitled, 1993
From the series At Dusk
© Boris Mikhailov

More information on Mikhailov visit HERE

David Hilliard @ Carroll and Sons

Being Like

Carroll and Sons Gallery, Boston

February 18 – March 28, 2009
Reception Friday Mar 6, 5:30–7:30

David Hilliard Photographs

"For years I have been actively documenting my life and the lives of those around me, recording events and attempting to create order in a sometimes chaotic world. While my photographs focus on the personal, the familiar and the simply ordinary, the work strikes a balance between autobiography and fiction. Within the photographs physical distance is often manipulated to represent emotional distance. The casual glances people share can take on a deeper significance, and what initially appears subjective and intimate is quite often a commentary on the larger contours of life.
For me, the construction of panoramic photographs, comprised of various single images, acts as a visual language. Focal planes shift, panel by panel. This sequencing of photographs and shifting of focal planes allows me the luxury of guiding the viewer across the photograph, directing their eye; an effect which could not be achieved through a single image.
I continually aspire to represent the spaces we inhabit, relationships we create, and the objects with which we surround ourselves. I hope the messages the photographs deliver speak to the personal as well as the universal experience. I find the enduring power and the sheer ability of a photograph to express a thought, a moment, or an idea, to be the most powerful expression of myself, both as an artist, and as an individual."