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Christian Boltanski No Man's Land
As Christian Boltanski was making final preparations for his installation No Man’s Land at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, the artist met with A.i.A. to discuss the piece. On view May 14 to June 13, it’s the second contemporary art commission for the 55,000-square-foot Drill Hall in the Armory (Ernesto Neto’s was the first). An earlier version of Boltanski’s work, titled Personnes, was on view at the Grand Palais in Paris in January as part of its Monumenta commissioning program. Comprising many of the same components—a 25-foot-tall pile of used clothing, a mechanical claw on a crane and the sound of heartbeats—it will be slightly reconfigured in New York. According to Rebecca Robertson, president and CEO of the Armory, the soundtrack here will create a more rhythmic roar, because the Armory’s reverberation time is slower than that of the Grand Palais, where the echoing heartbeats overlapped.Read More
Starry Night on the Lower East Side
Kiki Smith is nearing the completion of a stained-glass window commissioned for the 1887 Eldridge Street Synagogue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Designed with architect Deborah Gans, the 16-foot-diameter window will occupy the eastern wall, the direction faced during prayer. Inspired by existing painted elements in the sanctuary domes and on the wall surrounding the window, Smith and Gans came up with a design featuring a constellation of gold stars on a blue firmament. The window’s ribs radiate from a Star of David at the center. Since 1945, the space that held the original window, which was damaged and for which there is no known documentation, has been filled in with masonry and four vertical columns of glass blocks.
The stil… Read More
A Breath of Fresh Art
The summer months always see a spike in outdoor art events. This year, two museum rooftops and a courtyard offer just a few among many opportunities to get your culture in the sun.Read More
Seeing Beauty in Venice's Pollution
While most visitors to Venice simply gape at the dazzling array of Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture, architect Jorge Otero-Pailos sees something more: the layers of history that have accrued on the buildings' surfaces. His project, The Ethics of Dust: Doge's Palace, Venice 2009, on view in the Arsenale as part of Daniel Birnbaum's "Making Worlds" exhibition at the Venice Biennale, takes as its primary material the strata of grime and pollution detached from an exterior wall behind the loggia of the city's iconic Doge's Palace beside Piazza San Marco. The work consists of a 40-by-23-foot sheet of mottled latex hung on scaffolding. To create it, the architect and theorist, a professor of historic preservation at… Read More
Bay Area Conceptual Artist David Ireland Dies at 78
Bay Area conceptual artist David Ireland died of pneumonia Sunday after suffering from dementia with Lewy bodies for several years. He was 78. Born in Bellingham, Washington in 1930, he was educated at Western Washington University in Bellingham, the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland, and San Francisco Art Institute, where he received his graduate degree in the mid-1970s. In 1975, Ireland purchased a house at 500 Capp Street, in San Francisco. He spent decades renovating the space using many of the methods and motifs he employed in his artistic practice. In 1979, he bought a second home at 65 Capp Street, which later became home to Capp Street Projects following is purchase by CCA board member Ann Hatch; the two co-founded the highly regarded artist residency program in 1983. Ireland's work was featured in a 30-year retrospective at the Oakland Museum of California in 2003-4, "The Way Things Are."Read More
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Oil on Canvas, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
The colorful, phantasmagorical canvases of Jakub Julian Ziolkowski are full of imaginar
