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.
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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
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.
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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…
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