Los Angeles Museum to Oversee Watts Towers

December 23, 2010, 4:13 pm

By RANDY KENNEDY

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art said on Thursday that it had completed an agreement with the City of Los Angeles that puts the museum in charge of efforts to repair and preserve the Watts Towers, the cathedral-like spires and crockery-encrusted forms built by the self-taught artist Simon Rodia in his spare time over more than three decades. The towers, which were once almost demolished by the city and then later designated a national landmark, were damaged slightly in the 1994 earthquake and again during a 2008 windstorm.

The museum, with $150,000 supplied by the city’s department of cultural affairs, will collaborate with other art institutions and with community groups in the Watts neighborhood to assess the site’s condition and make a plan for repairs and conservation. The hope is that the effort will lead to greater philanthropic attention and a source of long-term financing to maintain the towers, two of which soar more than 90 feet and have become symbols of Los Angeles’s cultural history.

Rodia, an immigrant from Italy who died in 1965, used basic tools and found or donated materials (scrap iron, mesh, shells, broken glass and tile) to build the massive artwork, which he described as a monument to America and to the human spirit. “I had it in mind to do something big,” he once said, “and I did it.”

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Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art Paints Over Mural

December 13, 2010, 3:45 pm

By RANDY KENNEDY

Street art – graffiti, uncommissioned public art, call it what you will – has found greater acceptance in the gallery and museum world over the last several years but the fit hasn’t always been comfortable. Anyone looking for evidence of the tensions now has a marquee example. The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, run by the former New York gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch – a longtime champion of street art – late last week ordered a wall mural it had commissioned by Blu, an Italian graffiti artist, to be whitewashed because it found the artwork inappropriate. The mural, on a wall of the museum’s Geffen Contemporary wing, was planned as a kind of advertisement for an ambitious exhibition focusing on street art that the museum will open in April. But as Blu neared completion of the mural – which conveyed a strident antiwar message, showing rows of caskets draped with one-dollar bills instead of flags – the museum changed its mind and began painting it over on Thursday.

The decision, reported by the Los Angeles Downtown News, was made because the mural wall faces an ambulatory care center for veterans and a monument honoring Japanese-American soldiers in World War II. “The museum’s director explained to Blu that in this context, where MOCA is a guest among this historic Japanese-American community, the work was inappropriate,” the museum said in an e-mail, adding that Mr. Deitch had invited the artist to paint another mural.

In an e-mail to the Web site Animal New York, Blu described the incident as a “sad story” and told friends in the street-art world that he had no plans to return to Los Angeles before the exhibition opens.

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Peter C. Marzio, Director of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Dies

December 10, 2010, 5:25 pm

By KATE TAYLOR

Peter C. Marzio, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, for the last 28 years, died this morning of cancer, the museum announced. He was 67. During his tenure, the museum’s attendance increased from 380,000 people annually to over 2 million, and its endowment grew from $25 million to over $700 million. A full obituary will follow.

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Director of Jewish Museum to Step Down

November 30, 2010, 4:30 pm

By ROBIN POGREBIN

Joan Rosenbaum, who has led the Jewish Museum since 1981, will step down as director at the end of June, the museum plans to announce on Wednesday.

“Thirty years is a very good run,” Ms. Rosenbaum, 67, said in an interview. “The museum is well-positioned now to take on the next stage of its life.” The board of the museum, which is on Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, has formed a search committee to find a successor. Under Ms. Rosenbaum the museum’s collection has grown to 26,000 objects, its endowment to more than $92 million and its annual operating budget to $15 million from $1 million in 1981.

“Joan Rosenbaum is the most influential leader this institution has had in its 106-year history,” Joshua Nash, the museum’s chairman, said in a statement. “She has served longer than any other director and has shaped the museum more than any other individual.”

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Ex-Director of Miami Art Museum to Curate Biennale in China

November 18, 2010, 8:00 pm

By ROBIN POGREBIN

Terence Riley, the former director of the Miami Art Museum, has been appointed chief curator for the 2011 edition of the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture. The appointment makes Mr. Riley the first non-Chinese curator for the event, which started in 2005.

“Our idea is to create a paradigm that considers the cyclical growth pattern of urban sites such as Shenzhen, where cities create architecture, architecture creates cities, and how this process continues without end,” Mr. Riley said in a statement.

Before leading the Miami Museum Mr. Riley was the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He is a founding partner of the architecture firm K/R.

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Museum of arts and design see will linger in the air.

October 17, 2010, 10: 01 a.m.

By RANDY KENNEDY

An exhibition in which there is virtually nothing to see, hear or touch? what remains?

Museum of arts and design in Columbus Circle is announced on Monday it intends to show to open next November, in which one senses - a poorly served in the museum - world will be: smell."The art of fragrance: 1889-2011" will present examples of more than a dozen of fragrances that have helped define the industry lucrative ar?me.Les scents will be blown around floor galleries of the Museum by atomizers in space designed by the architect Toshiko Mori, and they will be presented with labels identifying their creators and the years that they were made. "" Packaging and brand names usually in association with them - Chanel No. 5 will be among the greatest hits - is not visible.

"There will be a minimum highly visual environment," said Holly Hotchner, Director of the Museum."It is really going to focus on your nose."

Chandler Burr, the exhibition curator and writer on perfumes to the New York Times Syndicate, said invited would be able to trace the evolution of modern perfume "whenever visitors generally follow the trajectory of modern art, displaying a series of tables."The lesson of design will reach in the 19th century with Jicky, a French perfume was one of the first to use synthetic ingredients, and will include Germaine Cellier from 1948 crash, Mr. Burr described as "one of the defining works of midcentury olfactory Brutalism."Catalogue of the exhibition will include small flasks of the scents of Pioneer 10.

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