Hasta La Ideas

An installation view of Amie Siegel’s “Black Moon” (2010), now view at the ICA in Boston.

The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (they of the smashing Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed building and multi-layered Mark Bradford exhibition) has named Amie Siegel the winner of the $25,000 James and Audrey Foster Prize, a biennial award recognizing a Boston-area artist of exceptional promise. Siegel’s award-winning film, “Black Moon” (2010) is on view at the ICA along with the work of the eight other finalists: Robert de Saint Phalle, Eirik Johnson, Fred Liang, Rebecca Meyers, Matthew Rich, Daniela Rivera, Evelyn Rydz, and Steve Tourlentes. The exhibition runs through January 17.

Another biennial award exhibition is in the works on the other side of the country, where the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has announced that artists Mauricio Ancalmo, Colter Jacobsen, Ruth Laskey, and Kamau Amu Patton have been selected for its biennial Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Art Award. The award honors Bay Area artists “who are working independently at a high level of artistic maturity but who have not yet received substantial recognition.” Recipients are chosen during a 10-month process involving the local arts community, artists, SECA members, and museum staff. After making studio visits to the 30 finalists, SFMOMA assistant curators Apsara DiQuinzio (painting and sculpture), and Tanya Zimbardo (media arts) selected the four winners. Each will receive a cash prize and will be featured in an exhibition that will open at SFMOMA in the fall of 2011.

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Fresh off his turn as a songwriter, legendary architect Oscar Niemeyer celebrated his 103rd birthday this week and received perhaps his best present yet: the opening of the Oscar Niemeyer Foundation just outside his home city of Rio de Janeiro. As reported by the BBC, the new institution will feature a large collection of the architect’s drawings and models from his incredibly lengthy 70+ years in the business. Though certainly the most recent, this isn’t the first location dedicated to honoring the architect. The first, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, opened in 2002 in Curitiba, Brazil, and just this year the Centro Cultural Internacional Oscar Niemeyer started wrapping up construction in Aviles, Spain. In celebration of his birthday, the latter also used the day for an opening of their own: allowing public access to its newly finished main dome (which, of course, Niemeyer designed). Here’s a bit about the new Foundation:

“My friends have come to see me, how nice,” Mr Niemeyer told reporters at the inauguration of his foundation in the city of Niteroi, outside Rio de Janeiro.

Designed by Mr Niemeyer himself, the museum building boasts the sensuous concrete curves that define his distinctive modernist style and have made him one of the world’s most famous architects.

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While the uproar in DC continues unabated, on the other site of the country, new Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art director, Jeffrey Deitch, could perhaps be soon facing his own pulled-art uproar. Art Info reports that after commissioning street artist Blu, the museum decided its image of “a massive panorama of coffins draped in one dollar bills” would be too controversial and almost immediately had it painted over. And while the museum issued a statement that said it acted as such because it didn’t want to stir up any controversy, if the Streisand Effect has taught us anything, it’s that if you try to very-publicly hide something, it often don’t usually work out as such. What’s more, when they said they’d asked the artist to return to paint something else, he quickly fired back, essentially saying no way. This seems particularly awkward for Deitch, who just months ago was getting Shepard Fairey to paint a mural for him in New York. Here’s video of the MOCA take-down:

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The
“>controversy over the National Portrait Gallery‘s decision to pull a piece by artist David Wojnarowicz just got a bit more interesting with this story filed by Kriston Capps at the Washington City Paper. Digging into the origins of the story, wherein an unlikely piece of art, considered “fairly minor” and “not even the most prominent piece by the artist on display” at the Gallery’s new exhibition “Hide/Seek,” became such a hot button issue, Capps tracks the whole thing back to conservative advocate and writer Penny Starr, who not only published the first outcry about it but used her political contacts to help push it into becoming the gigantic story it’s become. He further reveals that Starr was able to get John Boehner and Eric Cantor on board by saying she was on deadline and needed their responses immediately, with Boehner in particular never even having seen Wojnarowicz’s piece or any of the exhibition in the first place. From there, all the pieces fell into place, the Smithsonian believing “that the outrage was organic”, the Catholic League (also likely never having seen the piece before) got involved, the art was pulled, and the rest is history and still a batch of awkwardness for the Smithsonian and its higher-ups. It’s a fascinating read, seeing how just one agenda-backed writer can stir the pot so successfully.

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While there’s been all this largely-negative and/or tense talk about the Smithsonian of late, concerning the National Portrait Gallery‘s controversial move to pull a controversial piece of art (if you’re just joining us today, see our previous post for a treasure trove of links about this story), we have a soft spot for others inside the collection of museums whose work and announcements have perhaps been overshadowed by that other, high-profile story for the last week or so. During the fracas, some good people at the organization dropped us a line about the recent launch of the Smithsonian Snapshot, an online project that offers “a weekly peek into the Smithsonian’s collection.” Every week, the site “will highlight a behind-the-scenes object or tell you an unusual story about a popular object in our collection.” Of the more than 137 million objects the organization has in its collection, there clearly have to be some interesting and unusual treasures in there. Though it’s just been an accessible feature for about a month now, and posts seem to appear once per week, all four of the pieces have been interesting, ranging from a scan of the envelope Harry Winston used to mail the Hope Diamond to a list Pablo Picasso put together of artists he was recommending for the very first Armory Show held in 1913. We think it’s a great idea, a fun feature, and something we didn’t want to get lost in all the hubbub over the past couple of week.

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