From the Archive: Dike Blair's Good Year

Last year on the ocassion of Dike Blair's show at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, in Greensboro, North Caroline, we announced that the installation and multi-media artist "is having a good year." Said year pales in comparison to his fall 2010, when the artist, born in 1952, shows for the first time at Gagosian. In this exhibition, Blair has constructed an ambulatory installation that links the aspects of his inter-related sculptures and paintings. Here is an excerpt of our Steel Stillman's studio visit with the artist, last year:

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Fact Sheet: Adolf Dietrich

Adolf Dietrich (1877–1957), one of the most reknowned Swiss artists of the 20th Century, focused his work on his own surroundings, rendering rural landscapes, portraits, animals, and still lives, with an extreme amount of precision and detail, strong use of color, and a striking sense of materiality. Dietrich's largest audience during his lifetime was in Germany, and he was included in exhibitions of New Romanticism and New Objectivity there as well as in France and Switzerland. Yet, with the rise of National Socialism, Dietrich's market, and thus his fame, became more localized to Switzerland. In his ongoing interest in the contructions of art history, and in homage to the techniques he admires, Richard Phillips curated the elder painted into a recent show at the Swiss Institute, called "Painting and Misappropriation." Here are the facts on Dietrich, with invaluable help from Phillips:
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What Can't He Do?

James Franco, movie star and America's best-known MFA student, has opened his first solo art show. Curated by P.S. 1 and Art International Radio founder Alanna Heiss, The Dangerous Book Four Boys at Clocktower Gallery features Franco's short films, photographs, drawings and sculpture. It's on view through September.

The title is a play on Conn and Hal Iggulden's guide to mischief, The Dangerous Book For Boys, a gift to Franco from a friend. Scrawled-on pages of the book, framed in plexiglass, constitute the drawing portion of the show. As a whole, the show can be seen as a grown-up interpretation of boyhood interests: Violence and sight gags are key, with a strain of sexual confusion. In one film, an anonymous young man smashes apart a plywood house; another film, the self-explanatory Dicknose in Paris, stars Franco with a rubber penis tied to his face. A window at the gallery entrance reveals a Little Tikes log cabin scored with bullet holes.
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Curator of Accidents

Stephen Hannock says that when he paints landscapes he's not painting mountains, water, and trees so much as he's painting light itself.
 
Hannock's most recent work, the large-format landscape (80" x 128") Mt. Blanca with Ute Creek at Dawn, is the latest addition to the Denver Art Museum's Western American art collection. For the past twenty years, the museum's Contemporary Realism Group has helped the museum to collect contemporary Colorado landscapes. "The landscape of the west is still a viable subject—as relevant now as it was in the 19th century," says Thomas Brent Smith, Director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum.

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