The Museum of Modern Art has announced that Stuart Corner, former Curator of Film at the Tate Modern, London since 2004, will take over as the Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at the Museum.  Mr. Corner is also a co-curator for the 2014 Whitney Biennal.  “Artists working across time-based media—from performance to the moving image and all of the many permutations in between—continue to push and reshape artistic practice in fundamentally challenging and exciting ways,” say Mr. Comer. “I look forward to exploring this dynamic field and its rich history by continuing the development and exhibition of MoMA’s distinguished collection.” (more…)

When the Whitney Museum set out to restore artist Douglas Davis’s early collaborative, online art piece the World’s First Collaborative Sentence, few could foresee the challenges that digital and internet-based art posed for repair and maintenance.  Based on constantly shifting programming languages and operating systems, digital art often offers complex restoration problems, forcing curators and experts to evaluate the degradation of web sites, coding and software updates against the original authenticity of the piece to properly exhibit it.  “We’re working on constantly shifting grounds,” said Rudolf Frieling, of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “Whatever hardware, platform or device we’re using is not going to be there tomorrow.” (more…)

Prior to his death in February, American artist Richard Artschwager designed four elevators for the Whitney Museum’s new museum space in Chelsea, currently under construction.  The four designs, titled Six in Four, are designed around the reoccurring motifs of doors, windows, tables, baskets, mirrors and rugs that appear in Artschwager’s work.  “The idea was to have something that immediately gives you a sense of place, an identity, so that this isn’t just another generic museum,” Whitney Director Adam D. Weinberg said. (more…)

Moving towards a sleeker, stripped-down brand identity, the Whitney Museum of American Art has unveiled its new logo and site design, making reference to the Whitney Museum’s new Chelsea location and its jagged architectural facade.  Designed by Experimental Jetset Studios, the museum is currently hosting a video documenting the process of creating the new identity on its website. (more…)

Jay DeFeo, The Rose, (1958-66), via The Whitney

The story of painter Jay DeFeo, and her landmark work The Rose, has become something of a legend in the annals of American contemporary art.  The work took over 8 years to complete, constructed through the continuous process of painting and chiseling at the canvas until its weight reached nearly one ton, and its removal from her apartment necessitated the removal of an exterior wall.  Buried in storage for years at the Pasadena Museum of Art, the piece was nearly lost to antiquity before being rediscovered behind a hastily erected wall, and rushed to preservation.  Now The Rose has returned to the spotlight, the centerpiece of a massive retrospective of the work of DeFeo, currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. (more…)

New York Gallery Mitchell-Innes and Nash has announced that it will represent late artist Jay DeFeo through the Jay DeFeo trust, seeking to bring a new perspective on the artist to the East Coast following her landmark exhibition at The Whitney Museum.  The gallery is planning its own retrospective of DeFeo’s work for next year.  “Her work intersects three areas of interest to us,” said gallery founder Lucy Mitchell-Innes. “Abstract Expressionism; European art from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s; and women artists.” (more…)

Members of the now-defunct hip-hop group Das Racist will perform at The Whitney Museum on Sunday, in conjunction with member Himanshu Suri’s Greedhead Music record label.  The event, part of the programming for The Whitney’s current Blues for Smoke exhibition, will feature several musical performances, as well as several installations by Suri, including “hippie culture and spiritual tourism, the films and life of Guru Dutt, the skin lightening cosmetic industry in India, Air India, the Indian diaspora and immigration, South Asian visibility in Western pop culture, international working class labor politics, and much more.” (more…)

Gagosian Gallery has just announced the death of Richard Artschwager, mere days after the closing of his retrospective exhibition at The Whitney Museum in New York City.  He was 89.  Artschwager’s unique path helped to define the perceptual and spatial explorations of conceptual and minimalist art while retaining the artist’s personal aesthetic.  Often utilizing objects from the everyday, he continually sought to explore the interaction between object and space, notably in his reworkings of chairs, pianos, and tables.   The artist’s work had been the subject of several major exhibitions worldwide, including shows at the Centre Pompidou, Deutsche Guggenheim, and the aforementioned Whitney Museum.  (more…)

The WSJ examines current exhibitions and works that blur the line between — and explore the intricate relationship of — painting and photography; among them is the Whitney’s popular Wade Guyton midcareer retrospective, where the artist prints images directly onto canvas using an inkjet printer; as well as Gerhard Richter’s strip pieces, “paintings” made with machines . (more…)

Liliana Porter (right) and Ana Tiscornia, photo by ArtObserved

The following an interview with Liliana Porter, November 14th, 2012, by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand for Art Observed:

As Liliana Porter received me in her West Village pied-a-terre for our interview, she asks, “hablas español?” The apartment is light, airy and sparsely decorated with objects such as a Claes Oldenburg pretzel on a shelf and a Richard Artschwager exclamation mark on a wall. As we walk to the window, Porter points out highlights of the view; the Chrysler building to the left and perhaps of more interest the rooftops and a garden beneath, belonging to Donna Karan “where she throws crazy parties”. Looking down it feels like we are on the balcony of a theater.

Liliana Porter, Man with Axe, 2011 courtesy Hosfelt Gallery New York and Pinta

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Yayoi Kusama to cover condo construction site in the Meatpacking District with ‘Yellow Trees,’ a familiar black and yellow design that was prominently featured in an advertising campaign for her current exhibition at the Whitney. Part of the Urban Canvas project, the costly installation opens this week and will remain on the West 14th Street building facade until September 30th of this year.

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All photographs taken by Zoe Zabor for Art Observed

Coinciding with the recent unveiling of her newly designed Louis Vuitton displays and last week’s opening of her Retrospective at the Whitney, Yayoi Kusama has spread her signature red and white dots to the lawn of Hudson River Park. Presented by the Gagosian Gallery and the Hudson River Park Trust,  “Guidepost to the New Space” (2004) features unique, amoeba-shaped forms at Pier 45 on West 10th Street, close to the Whitney’s future location in the Meatpacking District.

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Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water (2002) – Whitney Museum

Multi-media artist Yayoi Kusama has been creating immersive, otherworldly paintings, video, sculpture and large-scale installation environments for over 50 years, both in the United States and her home country of Japan.  Now, the Whitney Museum in New York is exhibiting a retrospective selection of works spanning her career as a preeminent voice in Japanese contemporary art.

Yayoi Kusama, A Flower (1952)- Whitney Museum

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‪‬The Whitney Museum and Centre Pompidou announce promised gift of over 800 American and international artists’ works from collectors Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, with 500 American works entering the collection of the Whitney, to be exhibited first in 2015, and 300 European and international works going to the Pompidou for a later exhibition [AO Newslink]

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Tate Modern’s Chief Curator Sheena Wagstaff moves to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum Board, in anticipation of appropriating the former Whitney Building on Madison Avenue for contemporary art exhibitions in 2015. [AO Newslink]

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