Martha Beck, New York curator and founder of the Drawing Center, has passed away at the age of 75.  Ms. Beck, a champion of  both emerging artists and the more rugged, experimental drawing works of masters like Michelangelo and architect Antonio Gaudi, established the Drawing Center in the late 1970’s, using a small, publicly-funded budget to put on world-class shows of drawings and works on paper that earned her museum a reputation of quality and adventurousness.  “Amazingly, she would ask the most important museums all over the world to lend their precious rare old master drawings to this funky warehouse space in Lower Manhattan — and they would — because its reputation for innovation, connoisseurship and excellence preceded it,” says Ann Philbin, a former director of the museum. (more…)

The Drawing Center is set to open next week with a postponment date of Wednesday November 7th in its new space across the street at 35 Wooster with three shows: Guillermo Kuitca: Diarios, José António Suárez Londoño: The Yearbooks and In Deed: Certificates of Authenticity in Art. (more…)

Installation view: Richard Tuttle’s “Village V”. All images courtesy of Tom Powel Imaging for Sperone Westwater Gallery.

Currently on view at Sperone Westwater Gallery through May 22, 2010, is Richard Tuttle‘s “Village V”. The exhibition is composed of 26 drawings and one sculpture against stenciled walls. It seeks to expand the concept of drawing, investigate color and line, question ideas of composition and frame, and merge the mystical with the tangible. The work was one of Tuttle’s six “Villages” shown in “Richard Tuttle: It’s a Room for 3 People” at the Drawing Center in 2005.

Richard Tuttle, “Village V, No. II, 9”, 2004, balsa wood, sawdust, acrylic and graphite on paper, 14 x 16 7/8 inches (35,6 x 42,9 cm)

More text and images after the jump… (more…)