Bernard Langlais, Thirteen Cats, ca. 1967, wood and paint, 48 x 96 x 2 inches. Courtesy of Alexandre Gallery

New York’s American Art Week is dominated by the auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s taking place May 17-26.  To coincide with the week’s theme, fourteen dealers team together for their own event, Just Off Madison: An Open House. Spanning the blocks between 67th-80th streets along Madison Avenue, these private dealers are rarely open to the public.  So it’s worthwhile to make your way over for three hours this Wednesday.

These specialists in American art will mostly be showing paintings and works on paper dating from the mid-1800′s through present day.  One example is Al Held’s Untitled (1961) at Betty Krulick Fine Art. Ltd.  The other participants are Avery Galleries, Jonathan Boos, Connor – Rosenkranz, LLC, Debra Force, Fine Arts, Inc, Graham, Kraushaar Galleries, Menconi & Schoelkopf Fine Art, LLC, MME Fine Art, LLC, James Reinish & Associates, Inc, Franklin Riehlman Fine Art, Gavin Spanierman, Ltd, Lois Wagner Fine Arts, Inc and Meredith Ward Fine Art.

Also in the neighborhood, Alexandre Gallery, very much open to th public as a matter of course, acknowledge American Art Week with a special display of members of the Stieglitz Group along with their current exhibition, the redoubtable Bernard Langlais, as Americana as they come.

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Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation
20 Jay Street, Suite 720, Brooklyn, NY, 11201
(718) 858-2244

Amy Feldman, Show & Tell, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 80 x 80 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Blackston gallery.

The Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program has been going strong since 1991. Each year 16 artists (ranging from emerging to more established) are selected for one year of free studio space in Dumbo, Brooklyn. 2013 marks the 5th anniversary of the Space Program’s relocation across the river to Brooklyn – for 17 years the studios were housed in Tribeca. This year is no exception to the eclectic mix of painters, sculptors, video, and performance artists. The artists participating in the 2012-13 Space Program are: Lisa Beck, Pam Butler, Kris Chatterson, N. Dash, Amy Feldman, Robert Green, Vit Horejs, Gilbert Hsiao, Liz Magic Laser, Beverly McIver, Sam Messer, Douglas Melini, Jennifer Nuss, Erika Ranee, Hadieh Shafie, David Simons, Didier William, and Randy Wray.

N. Dash, Amy Feldman, and Douglas Melini are three Sharpe artists working at the limits of abstraction and the painted image. All three were included in the Abrons Art Center exhibition Decenter, a contemporary valentine to the radical spirit of the 1913 Armory Show. Dash is a formal maverick who moves between mediums with precision and wit; she works with photography, homemade dyes, graphite, linen, jute, and found objects. Her spartan minimalism and mystical/scientific approach to materials is reminiscent of the early 1970s work of Dorothea Rockburne. Recent group shows include Zach Feuer, Room East, and Gallery Joe in Philadelphia, and she will participate in Painting in Place, opening May 22 at the Famers and Merchants Bank in Los Angeles.

Douglas Melini, Vanishing Violet, 2013, acrylic paint on canvas with hand painted frame, 53.5 x 45.5 x 1.754 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Feature Inc.

Feldman is also a devotee of the reduced palette – her sizable paintings are at once goofy and sturdy, like signs for an alien city glimpsed in passing on the highway. There is a rorschach test quality to her forms and muted grayscale; anything can appear if you look hard enough. Feldman’s new work will be on view with Blackston gallery at NADA NYC, May 10-12. Melini pursues a personal geometry that is both decorative and mandala-like. A self-described “hard-edge” painter, there is nonetheless a lot of soft fun to be had in his hypnotic blend of rich color and tight lines. All three, in their own language, are pursuing an approach to the two-dimensional surface that is  open-ended and very receptive to the viewer’s visual meditation.

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Jene Highstein, Grey Clam, 1990/2001. Site specific sculpture. The Wanås Foundation, Sweden Photo: Anders Norrsell

Jene Highstein died April 27 at his farm in upstate New York.  He was 70.  The cause was lung cancer, diagnosed this past January.  A postminimalist sculptor of elegance and idiosyncrasy with a keen interest in architecture, Highstein was part of the storied alternative space 112 Greene Street in the 1970s.  He went on to show widely in the United States, Europe and recently in Asia.  Following his well-received exhibition of towers and elliptical forms at Danese Gallery in 2011, Highstein’s  most recent exhibition was of drawings from Cape Breton at 56 Bogart in Bushwick this past winter.  An exhibition of early works is now being planned at the Clocktower in Lower Manhattan.

A tribute to the artist will be posted here later this week.

Jene Highstein with his sculpture, Totem, 1980, installed that year in downtown Manhattan. Courtesy of Public Art Fund.

Cora Cohen, Small Creature, 2012, 16 x 21 inches, acrylic mediums, Flashe, pigment, water color on linen. Courtesy of the Artist

This year’s fellowship awards from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation were presented to a total of 24 artists working in the field of Fine Arts; 14 artists in the category of Film-Video; 11 in Photography. The Fine Arts fellows include seven diverse painters, all women: Leigh Behnke, Cora Cohen, Harriet Korman, Carrie Moyer, Ann Pibal, Susan Wanklyn, and Elena Sisto. Cohen and Korman have been active since the 1960s. Cohen, known for her large-scale, dense and washy, mixed-media oil paintings, also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award in 2012. The Responsibility of Forms, an exhibition of her new paintings was recently at Guided By Invoices in New York, reviewed in these pages by David Rhodes.  Sisto, a long-time teacher at the School of Visual Arts, opens an exhibition of new work on April 25, titled Between Silver Light and Orange Shadow, at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, her first show with that gallery.  She describes her recent paintings as “centering around the artist’s experience of being in the studio, and the passage into adulthood of young women artists.”

Philip Kennicott chief art critic for The Washington Post, has received the Pulitzer Prize in the category of criticism this year for two long-format reviews of exhibitions, and one personal essay, all written in 2012. The three highlighted articles are: a critical analysis of the photography of Taryn Simon at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, a review of an exhibition at the National Building Museum devoted to the architect Kevin Roche, and an essay, titled “What Are We Losing in the Web’s Images of Suffering and Schadenfreude?” that examines our relationship to the over-abundance of disturbing and grotesque imagery found online and in-print. Kennicott, a finalist for last year’s Pulitzer, has been a critic for the Post since 1999.

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Amadeo Modigliani, Seated Man in a Chair, 1918.

The Nahmad family, a fixture at auction houses and New York society gatherings, are estimated by Forbes to have a total net worth of more than $3 billion. The quietly elegant exhibitions that the gallery mounted, most recently Soutine/Bacon, and Alexander Calder: the Painter, evoke tasteful privilege and old-world money, but nevertheless also communicate an underlying fixation on the art object as supreme luxury investment. The current crisis is not their first brush with the law. Earlier this year it was reported that the family was being sued for the return of a Modigliani painting, Seated Man on a Chair (1918) that had been reportedly stolen by the Nazis from its original owner. The Nahmads’ found a legal loophole to keep possession of the painting by claiming that the work was in fact owned by the International Art Center—a company that the painting’s original owners claim is an off-shore holding site for the Nahmads’ vast collection.

Reached in London, David Nahmad expressed surprise and disbelief over the current claims leveled against his son’s gallery, calling the FBI’s allegation of a close-knit relationship between his family business and the Russian mob “totally stupid.” The federal investigation of the Nahmad Gallery is ongoing, and is an important link in a sweeping, $100+ million money-laundering case against gambling dens. Other arrests include a cadre of colorfully named characters: Molly (“Poker Princess”) Bloom; Joseph (“Joe the Hammer”) Mancuso; Stan (“Slava”) Greenberg; and Noah (“The Oracle”) Siegel. On Friday, April 19 thirty-odd individuals, including Helly Nahmad, were arraigned in a Manhattan court. All suspects took the same plea: “not guilty.”

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Walter Richard Sickert, Visions, Volumes and Recessions, ca.1928/29. Etching.

David Cohen, founder and editor of artcritical.com, has been invited to deliver the inaugural lecture on April 16, at the gallery, 530 West 25th, 4th floor, at 7PM.

His title is “Canons for Contrarians” and offers something of a personal manifesto, he tells artcritical.  “I have often felt a particular kind of heat when it comes to juggling certain anti-establishment, personal tastes I have with what I’d call civic responsibilities, whether as critic, educator and publisher.  You want to tell it as you see it but you have to give an accurate, fair picture of the way things stand.”   The lecture also draws on what he feels are paired lectures he has delivered in the last few years on his maverick painter heroes, Walter Sickert and André Derain, as well as his ongoing fascination with the influence and reputation of Alex Katz, “an artist caught between the stools of established and alternative taste.”

The second lecture in the series is to be given next year by Jennifer Samet, and fund raising is ongoing for the series, as their website explains.  Revisionism is a gradual process, as is – be warned – taking the elevator to the fourth floor of 530 West 25th Street when there is a crowd!

Chantal Akerman
Photo Courtesy of the Artist

On the eve of Chantal Akerman’s solo exhibition of new video works at The Kitchen, the Belgian avant-garde filmmaker will read from a new autobiographical text, My Mother Laughs. The story is centered around the artist’s aging mother, and promises to be a distillation of the major themes of her career: memory, family, and the complexities of narrative. Akerman’s most recent film is Almayer’s Folly (2011) based on the Joseph Conrad novel of the same title.

Chantal Akerman: Maniac Shadows, curated by Tim Griffin and Lumi Tan, opens on Friday, April 12, and will be on view until May 11, 2013

The Kitchen is located at 512 West 19 Street, New York, NY 10011

(212) 255-5793

CRAIG WARGA / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

BROOKLYN, FEBRUARY 15, 3013 A fire raged in the early hours of the morning on the top floor of the historic main building of Pratt Institute in Fort Green, destroying the roof and sixth floor student studios and causing significant smoke and water damage throughout the rest of the building. There were no reported injuries beyond minor injuries to firefighters on the scene.

Reports confirm that senior-year undergraduate fine art students have been the heaviest hit in the catastrophe, with devastating losses of thesis show work in the top floor studios.

The cause of the fire remains under investigation, but in a message to the Pratt community the Institute’s President, Thomas F. Schutte reported that that “at this time there is no indication as to any specific cause, despite press reports that may indicate otherwise.”

The Daily News, however, quoted fire marshals as investigating the fire as suspicious due to the volume of flame and that the building is typically unoccupied after 9 p.m.

A work by Marina Adams (left) on view at the Painting Center in their exhibition, Wit, 2013

Wit is a group show organized by Joanne Freeman, on view at the Painting Center through February 23. On St Valentine’s Day, Ms Freeman moderates a panel with participating artists Marina Adams, Doreen McCarthy, and Stephen Westfall. 6 PM, 547 West 27th Street, Suite 500

Gelah Penn, The Big Heat, 2011-12. Installation, dimensions variable, installed her at Lori Bookstein Fine Art. Courtesy of the Artist

There are two reasons you are likely to see a lot of people in black around midtown Manhattan through the weekend: Dazed and confused visitors not sure if Fashion Week is over yet, still hoping to be snapped by Bill Cunningham; and an influx of artists and art historians attending CAA.

CAA being, of course, the College Art Association.  Its 2013 convention is taking place, as the annual event does every other year, at the Hilton Hotel in New York.

The convention is many things to many people: a learned colloquium of myriad topics, esoteric or timely; business meetings for specialist professions, caucuses, interest groups; a meat market for would-be hires in art history and fine art departments, with interviews taking place in the cramped quarters of hotel rooms and corners of the lobby; showcases and debate forums for artists; a book fair; a place to browse art magazines or view electronic artwork displays.

What catches artcritical’s not-so-critical eye upon a cursory glance at the quite exhaustive program?

Wednesday Evening: Robert Storr is to present the keynote address at convocation, the academic side of the art world’s closest thing to the Oscars at which prizes are handed out for lifetime achievement awards.  The Frank Jewett Mather Award, for instance, that has in past years gone to the likes of Clement Greenberg, Barbara Rose, Rosalind E. Krauss, Linda Nochlin, Dave Hickey, Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz, this year is divided between two scholar-critics on the more trendy end of the profession, Hal Foster and Claire Bishop.

Thursday Lunchtime: An open session, meaning the public is welcome and it is free, addresses the future of art magazines.  The moderator is Editor-in-Chief of Art in America Lindsay Pollock whose guests include  Ben Davis of Artinfo.com and Anton Vikokle, the founder of e-flux.  Trianon Ballroom, Third Floor, Hilton Hotel, 1335 Sixth Avenue at 12:30 PM

Thursday Afternoon: Distinguished Scholar Session, another of the set-piece events at CAA, this year honors the great Princeton Sinologist and scholar of calligraphy Wen C. Fong, with papers that include Amy McNair of the University of Kansas on “Brushwork and Beyond: The Study of Chinese Calligraphy in America and Europe” and Columbia’s David Rosand on “Brushes East and West”. The honoree offers concluding remarks. Also at the Trianon Ballroom, but this is not an open session – a day pass or convention ticket will be required.

Hal Foster

As it will, it appears, and despite its remit, for Thursday Evening: The National Coalition Against Censorship’s panel, Art Institutions Facing Controversy: Fear, Self-Censorship, and the Commitment to Curatorial and Artistic Freedom, moderated by Carol Becker, Dean of the Columbia University School of the Arts. Murray Hill Suite, 2nd Floor.

Friday Morning: The CAA Services to Artists Committee offers an intriguingly-titled panel, Meta-Mentors: Double Duty, whose participants include Brooklyn Rail publisher Phong Bui, artcritical.com regular contributor David Brody,  and Christopher Joy of the documentary art project, Gorky’s Granddaughter.

Saturday Afternoon: Studio Art Open Session, titled Painting:The Elastic Frontier at 2:30 PM at the Trianon Ballroom.  Moderated by Anna Kunz of Columbia College, Chicago, the panel includes Nicole Awai, Dan Levenson, artcritical contributing editor Stephen Maine, Gelah Penn (see picture, above) and Dannielle Tegeder.

But this is the tip of the iceberg.  As the iceberg itself, see here.