SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- From January 16 to June 27, 2010, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present Ewan Gibbs: San Francisco. Made up of works commissioned for the museum’s 75th anniversary, the exhibition premieres 18 of Gibbs’s urban portraits—drawn by hand—that depict views of the city familiar to visitors and residents alike. Using his signature visual language of marks derived from knitting patterns, Gibbs produces drawings that challenge the recognizability of their subject matter by reducing the image to something more pixilated, abstract, and nearly absent. Throughout the anniversary season, SFMOMA will present a series of exhibitions, including a number of special commissions and acquisitions, under the heading 75 Years of Looking Forward illustrating the story of the artists, collectors, cultural mavericks, and San Francisco leaders who founded, built, and have animated the museum.
Ewan Gibbs: San Francisco is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. The work has been commissioned by SFMOMA and curated by Henry Urbach, SFMOMA Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design. The drawings are based on snapshots the artist took while visiting San Francisco last year and feature well-known landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and Coit Tower seen within their urban context.
Urbach states, “Gibbs’s delicate and dense drawings present iconic, postcardlike images of cityscapes we all know. But rendered through his singular technique of using marks that are almost not there, they hover between photography and drawing, between the documented and the half remembered. His work brings us towards the artist’s own absorption in translating an image into something ineffable.”
Approximately 11 by 8 inches each, the pencil drawings are entirely composed of knitting pattern symbols—miniscule slashes or circles—on paper marked with a faint grid. Working from a photograph, Gibbs translates the image into delicate, discrete pencil strokes. The result is an image that is almost recognizable from a distance, yet significantly more abstract—almost invisible—at close range. Gibbs’s way of working appears, on the surface, to be a kind of neo-pointillism or Impressionism, while, in fact, his interests and the work’s visual effects owe more to the legacy of Minimalism and Conceptualism.
“When I first came across the knitting charts at a London flea market,” Gibbs explains, referring to his discovery more than 15 years ago, “they made perfect sense to me as a functional language and a practical means of depicting an image. Each code represents a different color or type of stitch. I also love the fact that the patterns are based on a grid, which has served artists for hundreds of years as a way of breaking down an image. By using the grid I discovered I could work my way along, row by row, in much the same way a computer printer works. This, in turn, solved one of the biggest anxieties that I and perhaps most artists have: knowing when a work is finished.”
Gibbs, who was the featured artist in the 2009 Armory Show in New York, initially became known for his drawings of hotel room interiors, which were inspired by pictures found in travel brochures. Since then he has completed numerous series of drawings based on hotel facades, baseball, urban street scenes, and major landmarks in New York, London, and Paris.
Born in 1973, Gibbs graduated from Goldsmiths College of Art in 1996 and currently lives and works outside of London. He has exhibited internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago (2010); Baldwin Gallery, Aspen (2009); Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2008); Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin (2008); and Paul Morris Gallery, New York (2007). Group exhibitions include: The Armory Show (2009); Attention to Detail (curated by Chuck Close), The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2008); Agnes Martin, Vija Celmins, and Ewan Gibbs, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2006); Originality and Repetition: The Grid in Contemporary Works on Paper, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2005); and Surfacing: Contemporary Drawing, ICA, London (1998). His work is in the collections of major institutions including SFMOMA; MoMA, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

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Cai Guo-Qiang created visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing

PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fabric Workshop and Museum will present a multi-site exhibition of the work of Cai Guo-Qiang, one of the most prominent contemporary artists on the international art scene. Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms consists of a poetic meditation on the passing of time, memory, and memorializing. One of the artist’s signature “explosion events,” Fallen Blossoms: Explosion Project has been specifically commissioned for the exhibition and will take place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; a second explosion event will follow at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Inspired by the memory of Anne d'Harnoncourt (1943-2008), late director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and her long friendship with the founder and artistic director of the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Marion Boulton Stroud, Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms addresses themes of memory, loss and renewal on a personal and public level. It is Cai's first solo exhibition in Philadelphia and the first in the United States since his retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in early 2008.
Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms includes four components, distributed between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fabric Workshop and Museum. In addition to the explosion event on December 11, a series of four gunpowder drawings and a sculptural installation will be on view inside the Museum in a presentation titled Light Passage. Two newly commissioned works, Time Flies Like a Weaving Shuttle and Time Scroll, will be on display on the seventh and eighth floor of the Fabric Workshop and Museum.
“The concept for this collaborative exhibition actually began in a conversation between Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kippy Stroud several years ago, and it has now become, in part, a memorial to Anne,” said Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Museum. “We are grateful to Kippy Stroud for her commitment to realize the exhibition, both in appreciation of the Museum’s extraordinary late director and as a reflection on universal themes.”
“Anne d’Harnoncourt and I were friends for more than 40 years,” said Ms. Stroud. “Among the things we had in common were a shared commitment to public service in the arts, to Philadelphia, and to Pennsylvania. Before she died we both had in mind doing an exhibition devoted to Cai Guo-Qiang in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Afterward, in discussions with the artist I began to see that in his hands a larger meditation embracing the memory of Anne d’Harnoncourt might emerge, something that would find in the expression of the momentary something infinite.”

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART (December 11, 2009 – March 21, 2010)
Fallen Blossoms: Explosion Project will occur in front of the Museum's East Façade, where the image of a blossoming flower will appear at sunset, suggesting the ephemeral beauty of a spring blossom as the sky darkens behind it. The December 11 event is open to the public, beginning with remarks at 4 p.m.
Inside the Museum, an exhibition of four gunpowder drawings will be on view in the Honickman Gallery 172. The drawings, which follow the cycle of the four seasons, were created by igniting patterns of gunpowder on paper, evoking and renewing the spirit and tradition of Chinese literati ink painting. In the same gallery will be 99 Golden Boats (2002), an installation consisting of leaf-shaped boats made of gold and suspended as if floating on an invisible river.
“It is a testimony to Cai Guo-Qiang’s sensibility and perceptiveness that this overall project is so particularly appropriate to its setting in Philadelphia, where history and reflection have always played such an important role in civic life,” said Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Contemporary Art. “It explores and represents its themes so precisely, in a manner that is at once public and intimate.”

FABRIC WORKSHOP AND MUSEUM (December 11, 2009 – March 1, 2010) Themes of friendship, the passage of time, and loss will be reflected at the Fabric Workshop and Museum through its presentations incorporating textiles, fibers, and other media. An audio recording of Stroud’s reminiscences of her friend Anne d'Harnoncourt, which the artist used to create the exhibition’s works, will be heard in the galleries where Cai Guo-Qiang’s work is on view.
Second Floor:
The passage of time will be slowed on the second floor, where the explosion event realized at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will be shown in a high-definition video that will stretch the 10-second explosion event to several minutes.
Seventh Floor:
Time Flies Like a Weaving Shuttle This newly commissioned work involves the participation of five weavers from the Tu Family clan of the Xiangxi region in Hunan province, China, who will take up residence in Philadelphia for three months, and will work daily in the galleries on a series of tapestries inspired by Stroud’s remembrances of Anne d’Harnoncourt. Over the course of the exhibition, the weavers will create five tapestries to illustrate the accumulation of memories and the endurance of friendship. Visitors are invited to watch the process as it takes place in the gallery.

Eighth Floor: Time Scroll
In this installation, an artificial river constructed of metal panels will flow through the length of the gallery. In a live public event at 6 p.m. on December 11, a 120-foot-long gunpowder drawing on silk will be ignited on site by Cai, and then submerged into the river, where the scorched imprints will be slowly washed away.

Cai Guo-Qiang
Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. He initially began working with gunpowder to foster spontaneity and confront the suppression that he felt from the controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China at the time. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, he explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, which led to the development of his signature explosion events. His installation works draw upon feng shui, philosophy, Chinese medicine and history, employing a site-specific, interdisciplinary approach that cuts across diverse mediums including drawing, painting, video and performance art. Cai was awarded the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007, and the 20th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2009. He was Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In 2008, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. He has lived in New York since 1995.

SWANSEA, Wales, PRNewswire -- David Gill, archaeologist, reflects on the impact of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) policy on the acquisition of antiquities.
In June 2008 the AAMD adopted a "New Report on Acquisition of Archaeological Materials and Ancient Art". The reports stated that AAMD members -- 193 at present -- "should not acquire a work unless research substantiates that the work was outside its country of probable modern discovery before 1970 or was legally exported from its probable country of modern discovery after 1970". The choice of 1970 is significant because this coincides with the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.
The position was in part prompted by the recent return to Italy of more than 100 antiquities -- among them the Euphronios krater showing the dead Sarpedon -- from several North American museums. Five AAMD institutions were among them.
The AAMD strengthened its position by launching an "Object Registry" that would place in the public domain "all relevant information" about newly acquired antiquities that had no recorded collecting histories prior to 1970.
The AAMD's position seems to be causing concern. The Cultural Property Research Institute, based in Santa Fe (NM), has launched a project to determine "the number of artistically and academically significant, privately-owned objects in the United States that are currently excluded from acquisition by US museums."
This suggests that a number of private collectors in the United States feel that archaeological items that they presently own would no longer be welcomed either as gifts, purchases, or bequests. The AAMD's concerns are probably well-founded: a number of high profile collectors were represented among the returns to Italy (and also to Greece).
The CPRI has raised an important issue. Have private collectors in North America been continuing to acquire recently surfaced antiquities in spite of high profile publicity given to the looting of archaeological sites?
But what will happen to those objects that do not have a documented collecting history that can be traced back to before 1970? Would private collectors consider donating them to museums in the countries where the pieces are likely to have been found or made?

WILMINGTON, Del., PRNewswire-USNewswire – Delaware’s Acting U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss announced today the unsealing of an indictment charging Marcus Patmon with wire fraud in the attempted sale of a stolen Pablo Picasso etching entitled "Le Repas Frugal."

The indictment charges that Patmon devised a scheme to defraud a victim identified as "C.E.B." by falsely claiming to be the true owner of "Le Repas Frugal" in connection with its attempted sale. In fact, as Patmon knew, "Le Repas Frugal" had been previously stolen from a West Palm Beach, Fla., art gallery, on May 22, 2008. From July through September 2008, an FBI special agent, acting in an undercover capacity, engaged Patmon in negotiations concerning the sale of the etching, which has an estimated value of $300,000.

Patmon, 38, is a resident of Miami, Fla. He faces a maximum statutory sentence of 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine, three years of supervised release, restitution, and a $100 mandatory special assessment.

Acting U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss said, "This investigation and prosecution demonstrate our commitment to addressing the illicit sale of stolen art, a problem that is international in scope. I applaud our law enforcement partners, the FBI Art Crime Team and the Palm Beach Police Department, for the thorough investigation that exposed this scheme. Our office will continue to vigorously investigate and prosecute art crime in the future."

An estate auction starting Monday in Paris is being described as the "sale of the century", but is generating political waves after China demanded the return of a pair of bronze animal statues. We have more on the controversy surrounding the sale from the French capital.
The auction taking place between February 25 and 27 involves a staggering collection of prized paintings, furniture, knick-knacks and other cultural objects belonging to deceased French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Berger.
Christie's auction house will be selling more than 700 art objects to some of the world's top buyers - museums and wealthy collectors. Experts say the three-day auction could make nearly $400 million.
But the auction has political undertones, notably a pair of bronze busts of a rabbit and a rat believed to have been looted by British and French troops in China 150 years ago.
Beijing wants the two pieces to be returned China and Chinese lawyers recently launched legal action to stop the auction. Christie's says the sale is legal and will go on.
French businessman Berger, who collected the artwork with Saint Laurent over the years, says he would return the bronzes to China if Beijing recognizes human-rights issues.
The political wrangling has not prevented thousands of people from flocking to the Grand Palais museum in Paris, where the items were on display until midnight Saturday and Sunday.
Kouma Kouanvih waited 2.5 hours in line to get in Saturday night, but she said it was worth it.
Kouanvih did not see the bronzes, but she believes China is wrong to be asking for their return. She said with so many foreign artifacts acquired legally or illegally by various countries, the process of returning them would be endless.
Cecile Pascual, who also saw the display, weighed in on the debate.
"I kind of understand how the Chinese government feels about this but at the same time, if it was less money I would say they would not care about it," said Cecile Pascual.
While the Chinese dispute over the bronzes involves a personal collection, it follows several incidents straining French-Chinese relations. That includes the disruption of the Olympic torch relay through Paris last year by pro-Tibetan protesters. China also canceled a European Union summit after French President Nicolas Sarkozy met with Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

The Boston Globe

Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik.
The move drew harsh criticism from the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries.

BBC NEWS

An artist has created a usable public toilet in a glass cube to challenge the curiosity - and bravery - of people passing London's Tate Britain gallery.
Italian-born Monica Bonvicini said visitors would have to "defy their own embarrassment" to use the minimalist cubicle, made from one-way mirrored glass.

BBC NEWS

Asia's contemporary art market suffered a blow at the weekend as bidders failed to buy several paintings at a major Sotheby's auction in Hong Kong.
Nineteen of the 47 prominent works under the hammer were left unsold, while others barely hit low estimates.

Liverpool Daily Post

New Ends, Old Beginnings is on view at the Bluecoat, featuring eleven artists from Middle Eastern countries such as Morocco, Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. Can Altay, Ziad Antar, Lara Baladi, Cevdet Erek, Tarek Al Ghoussein, Chourouk Hriech, Randa Mirza, Michael Rakowitz, Hrair Sarkissian, Sharif Waked and Tarek Zaki.
Curated by November Paynter, New Ends, Old Beginnings looks at the varied and complex cultures across the cities of the Arab region. While cities like Baghdad struggle to protect their museums and architectural heritage, others like Abu Dhabi are creating a space for the arts from scratch.
New Ends, Old Beginnings investigates the region through artists' responses to the many layers of local and everyday culture, a perspective often overlooked by the world's media, which prefers instead to present images that shock and manipulate viewers.
Using photography, video, sculpture, installation and performance, the exhibiting artists question how hundreds of years of history can co-exist with current and future cultural practice, what tourism means for cities of the region, and the extent of the media's shaping of the topography of the Middle East.
New Ends, Old Beginnings closes on 3 September. Bluecoat, School Lane, Liverpool L1 3BX. Telephone 0151 709 5297.

Bluecoat