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.
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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."
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Protecting Culture: Baghdad

Following the latest “reopening,” in February, of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, Stephanie Cash spoke with its former director, Donny George, and Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz, whose 2007 exhibition “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist,” at Lombard-Freid Projects in New York [see A.i.A., Apr. ’07], included paper versions of objects looted from the museum in the wake of the U.S. invasion in 2003. Rakowitz’s project also featured a series of drawings titled “The Ballad of Donny George (Recovered, Missing, Stolen Series),” which recount personal stories about George, who fled the country with his family in 2006 after receiving death threats, and who is now on the faculty at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

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