Corning Museum Breaks New Ground Today

Groundbreaking is today for the new contemporary wing of the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York. Designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners, the structure will link the present museum with a renovated space for public glassmaking demonstrations (called a "hot" theater because there are furnaces involved). The new building will incorporate state-of-the-art glass technology, continuing a long tradition of similar architectural innovation on the Corning campus.

The $64-million, 100,000-square-foot expansion, scheduled for completion in 2014, will offer 26,000 square feet of gallery space for permanent and special exhibitions. Although the museum possesses the largest collection of contemporary glass art and design objects in the world, it has only been able to show a small selection at a time, in cramped quarters. Artists range from those known mainly for glass—Dale Chihuly, Lino Tagliapietra and Josiah McElheny, for example—to such figures as Tony Cragg, Robert Rauschenberg and Kiki Smith, for whom glass is one medium among many.
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Artists Toast Martin Friedman's Commitment to Clean Snow

"I swear to you I would not be here tonight if it had not been for Martin and the Walker," said Chuck Close in a ceremony at Manhattan's elegant Prince George Ballroom last night. Close was one of more than 300 guests honoring curator and writer Martin Friedman for his six-decade career supporting contemporary art. The party—a four-course dinner with plenty of booze—was being thrown by the Madison Park Conservancy, of which Friedman has been a key advisor and supporter since 2004. Artists, curators, dealers and collectors flew in from around the world to join in the tribute, which raised $1 million for Madison Park's newly established Martin Friedman Endowment Fund.
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K8 Hardy Tries On Fashion

As part of her contribution to the current Whitney Biennial, where she is also showing sculptures and photos, queer-culture icon K8 Hardy staged Fashion Show in the exhibition's fourth-floor performance space. Draping real models in her funky fashions-ingenious amalgams of thrift-store finds constituting a species of anti-couture—and sending them through a set designed by Oscar Tuazon (another Biennial artist), Hardy choreographed a fashion show that wound up straying not so very far from the genre it aimed to critique.
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Round Table: Artists on Their Settings for the Brooklyn Museum Gala

War on Women? Fuggetaboutit! Eminent women were honored in two separate ceremonies at the Brooklyn Museum on Wednesday, and women artists, exclusively, were selected to decorate tables at the second annual Brooklyn Artist's Ball, which rollicked the evening. The events marked the fifth anniversary of the museum's Sackler Center for Feminist art, where the feminist ur-table, Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, is permanently installed.
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