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From: Sal Reda <salvatorereda@gmail.com>

Date: March 13, 2009 11:07:51 AM PDT

To: Sal Reda <salvatorereda@gmail.com>

you have to see this….. make sure you watch the first 10 minutes john stewart makes some great points on mass media and the market followers of market shows (i watched it twice!)

Sal,

I’ve read recently that the art fairs are being abandoned. Matthew Marks is not doing the Armory Show, for example. They have four gallery spaces that stretch nearly an entire NYC block, and when the recession is over they will have more space most likely, since they are rich and will be able to buy the now much cheaper buildings. People without money will not be able to do this no matter how cool or smart they are. Most of the top LA galleries are not doing any NYC fair next month, and LA Art in NYC is canceled for this year, yet the Armory Show is going to be bigger than ever this year, with a full second Pier for Modernism galleries. Yet I’ve also read about a handful of new galleries in NYC being opened by wealthy people, and then of course there is the 9 story gallery being built in the Bowery, that will have moveable floors to adjust to different gallery heights. There is also the world’s first all glass condo being built in downtown NYC right now. And their are now over two dozen Japanese noodle bars in the East Village. No where else could support such playful experiences.

If I look back to 1997, when China Art Objects was the best young gallery in LA, I remember both their endless publicity and their great success, even after Giovanni passed away. Yet I also remember when Peres Projects opened in Chinatown. Peres had much deeper and far greater connections than CAO, and since he was rich and had been to Basel since he was a child, he knew the whole artworld without having to go to art school. His family sold Picasso’s in Spain as well as other old masterworks, so he could easily have moved from being a lawyer to being a secondary market dealer. What has happened since PP arrived in LA is that he has created a tremendous global brand, which gets international press coverage, none of it coming out of LA. His artists are not better than CAO’s, but he has unbelievable resources and has positioned his galleries in LA, NYC, Berlin and Athens to deal directly with collectors who will place the works in museum collections. CAO still has one space. Only the most powerful galleries are in a position to demand and cause their artists works to be placed in the world’s most important contemporary museums and private collections. CAO does this too but is no longer getting much press nowadays whereas PP is the party of the hour of the week and of the month and of the moment. The are the only LA gallery other than Steve Turner Contemporary to cook food and offer good strong drinks at their free bar, the other galleries offer bad beer or nothing at all.

By comparison, in NYC in the Soho 80’s, when I was a painting student at Pratt, the rich galleries en mass flew cheese and wine in from Paris, had varieties of beer, food, etc., and we young art students would eat dinner at these places and take a few beers home for the weekend. That has never happened in LA even when times were incredible for art money. Even after NYC completely collapsed after Black Monday in 1987, with the collapse of the art market in 1990, it was NYC that came roaring back and Chelsea alone had far more galleries than all of NYC did during the 80’s. The major gallery exhibitions in 1980’s Soho were event scenes, with Leo Castelli and Mary Boone galleries being cavernous platforms of total cultural spectacle. 

Since Peres and galleries like PP are still rich, (he could sell one of his family’s Picasso’s and have more money to play) it will be pretty difficult to catch them even if the market collapses. Yet I do believe like you that there will be some fresh faces out there who will have their day in the sun. 

The other thing that concerns me is travel. Trustafarian artists have always had art parties with their counterparts in Mexico and beyond, which was a way of separating out those who have from those who don’t. Far more importantly is the fact that during the 1990’s, most of the world’s most important museum shows were not in the US, but were reported in US art magazines. This means that most American artists were again reduced to reading about art as versus directly experiencing it. There is no doubt in my mind that this will again be the case for American artists who do not travel frequently to see the current major contemporary shows, whether they be in London, Paris, Berlin or somewhere more far afield. 

You saw the link I sent to you about the Cassandra cinema apartment complex opening in Williamsburg. There is no such showcase anywhere else in the US. 

What has been happening in LA recently are lots of one week and one night shows in non gallery spaces. While this is a form of fun art activity, it does not compare to the Berlin scene, which is taking over warehouses and other buildings and having all night art parties, something that most American artists know nothing of if they are not living in New York. When you add to this the incomparable culture cornucopia that is Berlin, no wonder why even Quentin Tarrantino is holding court in that city.

Whatever happened to the New Art Examiner magazine in Chicago and that city being the alternative to New York?

all for now

Vince 

 

Another great space bites the dust.

Its really a re-boot of the gallery system. You will see the younger galleries with the smaller overhead rising through the ranks.

There is going to be more room at the top to play in the game. 

Sal

CULTURE:

 

Las Vegas Art Museum closing next week

Museum officials hope to reopen when economy turns around

Steve Marcus

“Smoke Signal, Rope Umbilical” is acrylic on canvas by Wendell Gladstone that is part of “L.A. Now,” an exhibit of emerging artists’ work that opened in December at the Las Vegas Art Museum.

By Kristen Peterson

Fri, Feb 20, 2009 (5:20 p.m.)

Sun Archives

• Beyond the Sun

• Las Vegas Art Museum

The Las Vegas Art Museum is closing its doors.

The museum will close Feb. 28. Staff and board members say the museum will remain an entity and keep its name so that it can possibly reemerge when the economy improves. Members and docents were notified this afternoon.

“We’ve tried everything to keep this afloat. It’s just a challenging time,” says Patrick Duffy, president to the museum’s board. “The economic climate has eliminated several of our donations and or reduced them significantly.”

The decision comes less than three months after executive director Libby Lumpkin resigned because the board announced that budget cuts would affect salaries and result in possible layoffs.

Lumpkin joined the museum in 2005 and with the board took the institution from a community art center to a contemporary art museum, featuring exhibits that included “Southern California Minimalism,” including work by Robert Irwin, John McCracken and James Turrell; a Frank Gehry exhibit; and “Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland.”

“Las Vegas Diaspora” featured the work of artists who had studied at UNLV with Dave Hickey.

It’s current exhibit “L.A. Now,” curated by art critic David Pagel, features work by Los Angeles contemporary artists.

The museum formed 59 years ago as an art league. In 1974 it became a fine art museum and in 1997 it moved into the Sahara West Library on 9600 W. Sahara Ave

 

---

February 23, 2009, 10:46 am

Las Vegas Art Museum to Close

By Dave Itzkoff

Las Vegas Art Museum Christine Nguyen’s “Emergence of the Kelp Deer” is one of the featured artworks at L.A. Now, an exhibit cut short by the closure of the Las Vegas Art Museum.

The Las Vegas Art Museum has joined the growing roster of cultural institutions that have suspended their operations in the face of a weakening economy; it will close on Saturday, The Las Vegas Sun reported. The museum, which since 1997 has operated from the city’s Sahara West Library, lost its executive director, Libby Lumpkin, in December; she resigned when the museum’s board said that its budget cuts would result in reduced salaries and possible layoffs. Under her tenure the museum has featured exhibitions on Frank Gehry and the Southern California artists Robert Irwin, John McCracken and James Turrell. But the president of the museum’s board, Patrick Duffy, said the museum had seen a substantial decrease in donations amid the financial downturn. “We’ve tried everything to keep this afloat,” Mr. Duffy said, according to The Sun. “It’s just a challenging time.”

 

http://www.rocksboxfineart.com

Sal-

Thanks for coming.

Attached are some screen images of 3 of the works. There are actually more than in the show, but we only produced some. Modou is working on an LA showing in July.

Thanks,
Damien

 

 

SHOOT YOU – SHOOT ME
Modou Dieng & Damien Gilley
02.14.09 – 03.01.09
Opening reception for the artists: Saturday, February 14, 2009 | 7-11 p.m.

 

 

 

ROCKSBOXFINEART

6540 N. INTERSTATE AVE. @ PORTLAND BLVD. | ROSA PARKS WAY

e: rocksbox@comcast.net | ph: 503.516.4777

web: www.rocksboxfineart.com | pub: www.rocksbooks.com

gallery hours: sat-sun 12-6 p.m. | or by appointment

 

 

In the exhibition SHOOT YOU – SHOOT ME artists Modou Dieng and Damien Gilley will
examine the relationship between contemporary guerilla warfare, high fashion, and the
artists approach to the creative process, while attempting to breakdown the
predictability of perceived artistic production, display, and the consumption of mass
imagery. The artists of SHOOT YOU – SHOOT ME will serve as rebellious infiltrators,
presenting work through a process that mirrors the stages of the marketing of
culturally consumable imagery to the en masse public. Their work explores the concept
of passive sociological complicity through the exploration of warfare, advertising, role-
playing, and the activities of leisure as critique of contemporary culture. 
 
Artists Bio’s:
 
Dieng earned his BFA from the Dakar School of Fine Art and his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Dieng has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Africa, Europe, and the United States, including Flow - Studio Museum (NYC), Pascal Polar Gallery (Brussels), Art Paris-Carroussel du Louvre (Paris), Here and There - Casa Encendida (Madrid), Efface - Steve Turner Contemporary (Los Angeles), Salon Del Mobile (Milan). He is Co-founder and curator of visual arts at Worksound and faculty at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland.
 
Damien Gilley is currently an MFA candidate at Portland State University. He received his BFA in New Media from the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. His work was included in New American Talent 22 an annual exhibit originating from Arthouse in Austin, Texas. In 2006, he received a Best of Show Award for the Las Vegas County Art Competition and Best New Media for an exhibition at the Las Vegas Museum of Art. In Portland, he has exhibited his work at Worksound, Disjecta, Portland State University’s MK Gallery and Autzen Gallery, White Elephant, and the Portland Building. He is Co-founder and curator of Igloo gallery.

 
ROCKSBOXFINEART
6540 N. INTERSTATE AVE. @ PORTLAND BLVD. | ROSA PARKS WAY | YELLOW LINE MAX STOP                          

WWW.ROCKSBOXFINEART.COM |                          
GALLERY HOURS: SATURDAY-SUNDAY: 12-6 P.M. | OR BY APPOINTMENT

From: vincent johnson <lanyartiststudio@gmail.com>

Date: February 4, 2009 10:45:05 AM PST

To: Sal Reda <salvatorereda@gmail.com>

Subject: Fwd: Henry Taylor articles + images

 

Hello Sal,

 

I just got my February Artforum and I saw the ad for Henry Taylor, who is havint three one man shows at the same time in LA, NYC and Paris galleries.

 

He is 51 years old. His career started in 2005. He graduated from Cal Arts in 1995 and worked in a psychiatric center for a decade.

 

he is in Saatchi’s next painting show, in the Rubell show in Miami that is going to East Africa, and a lot more.

 

He never had lots of people around him until he became an Art Star.

 

all for now 

Vince

The Studio Museum in Harlem

144 West 125th Street, New York, New York

Henry Taylor: Sis and Bra

April 11, 2007—July 1, 2007

Henry Taylor, Sis and Bra, 2004

NEW YORK, NY, March 15, 2007 - After years of working odd jobs-including a ten-year stint as a psychiatric technician-the painter Henry Taylor is finally receiving acclaim as one of today’s most engaging emerging artists. The Studio Museum in Harlem is proud to present his first museum solo exhibition, Sis and Bra, an exploration of economic and racial disparities of the United States through portraiture. Taylor, who finds inspiration in just about everything around him, has a refreshing, idiosyncratic perspective on the American cultural landscape.

“Taylor started his formal art training later in life,” explains Associate Curator Christine Y. Kim. “While considered by some to be an ‘outsider artist’ because of his work’s aesthetics and biographical background, he focuses on the intimate and familiar world for inspiration, and situates these experiences within the living trajectory of contemporary American painting.”

The exhibition will feature a selection of Taylor’s recent figurative paintings. While his pieces come in a variety of sizes and are often made on a wide range of found materials, including cigarette and cereal boxes, cutting boards and suitcases, these works are primarily on traditional canvases. Taylor frequently depicts friends, family members and acquaintances at barbecues, sporting events and other neighborhood activities. A perceptive portraitist, he captures nuances of expression and mood in his subjects, including his former hospital patients (Tasered, 2005) and family members such as his son Noah. In Homage to a Brother (2007), a portrait of Sean Bell, the African-American man recently shot and killed by plainclothes detectives on the eve of his wedding in Queens–Taylor utilizes found images of Bell’s neighborhood and environment to comment on the larger issues the killing brought up.

Organized by Christine Y. Kim, Associate Curator, Henry Taylor: Sis and Bra will be on display from April 11, 2007 through July 1, 2007.

About the Artist

Henry Taylor was born in Oxnard, California in 1958 and drew and painted throughout his teens. One of eight children raised by a single mother, he worked odd jobs throughout his career, including a full time job as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Hospital from 1984 to 1994. He received a BA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1995, and his work has been featured in solo gallery shows on both coasts.

————

The Buzz

• 5 like it

posted by: Alexandra

Henry Taylor: GIRRRRRL! (Event Over)

• When:Fri 9/12/08 (6PM)
• Where: Santa Monica Museum of Art
• Address: 2525 Michigan Ave. Santa Monica, CA   Map
• Cost: FREE!

Added to My Events Event Over

SANTA MONICA MUSEUM OF ART

PRESENTS

PROJECT ROOM 1: HENRY TAYLOR: GIRRRRRL!

SEPTEMBER 13 – DECEMBER 13, 2008

Opening reception: Friday, September 12, 7 to 9 p.m.

 

————–

ART LA 2009

Mesler & Hug will bring Henry Taylor’s first West Coast museum exhibition, Girrrrrl! to ART LA 2009. Taylor’s paintings poignantly examine the social, political, and racial disparities that persist in the United States, and includes four new works depicting scenes from Taylor’s personal life and urban community. Taylor uses lush strokes, an exuberant color palette, and the language and logos from products of pop culture in his vivid portrayals of friends, loved ones, local characters, childhood memories, and neighborhood landscapes.

 

 

 

 

 

I thought about the Gulag Archipelago and also Tarkofsky’s film SOLARIS, both of which are incredible indictments of the Soviet system. Solzhenitsyn went into exile, his typist was tortured and soon thereafter hung herselg. Tarkofsky, whoses dad was also a great Russian poet, worked in exile in Paris. So the most damning criticism can be created as art, and yes, there is hell to pay. 

Hopefully the Russian scholar whose book is reviewed by the Wall Street Journal is a madman. Otherwise….

From Wikipedia:

Solzhenitsyn argued that the Soviet government in fact could not govern without the very real threat of imprisonment, and that the Soviet economy depended on the productivity of the forced labor camps, especially insofar as the development and construction of public works and infrastructure were concerned.

This put into doubt the entire moral standing of the Soviet system. In Western Europe the book came, in time, to force a rethinking of the historical role of Lenin. With The Gulag Archipelago, Lenin’s political and historical legacy became problematic, and the fractions of Western communist parties who still based their economic and political ideology on Lenin were left with a heavy burden of proof against them. George F. Kennan, perhaps the most influential of U.S. diplomats, called The Gulag Archipelago, “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times.”^[2

s shorter, anyway, in Russian tradition than in many Western European literatures, although an analogy might be drawn between Russian and French-Enlightened publishing traditions by public intellectuals). However, with the possible exception of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, it is his best-known and most popular work, at least in the West.

Finished in 1968, The Gulag Archipelago was microfilmed and smuggled out to Solzhenitsyn’s main legal representative, Dr Kurt Heeb of Zürich, to await publication (a later paper copy, also smuggled out, was signed by Heinrich Böll at the foot of each page to prove against possible accusations of a falsified work).