RUBELLS TO OPEN D.C. MUSEUM

Looks like Mera and Don Rubell are set to open a new, 20,000-square-foot private museum, this one in Washington D.C. The art power-couple’s CACG Holdings partnered with development firm Telesis to snag a vacant building in Southwest Washington for $6.5 million, according to the Washington Post. The new development, which sits across the street from the Rubell-owned Capitol Skyline Hotel, will include a hotel and residencies, in addition to the museum.

The site was formerly owned by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, which had plans to move its College of Art and Design to the location. According to the Corcoran’s chief operating officer Fred Bollerer, the sale became necessary when a deal with a developer fell through. The location had been purchased by the Corcoran in 2006 for $6.2 million. The search for a suitable location for its art school continues.

ICI Curatorial Intensive

A training intensive for aspiring curators
Building on its history as a hub for curatorial ideas, ICI is supporting a new generation of curators to develop exhibition proposals. The Curatorial Intensive is a short-term, low-cost program taking place this June in New York for emerging curators across North America. From an open competition, 6-10 individuals will be selected to come to New York and work with some of today’s leading curators and artists. Through a rigorous schedule of workshops, discussions and critiques, as well as site visits to local institutions and artist’s studios, each participant will be led through the process of developing an idea for an exhibition into a full exhibition proposal.

After the New York phase of the project is complete, ICI will continue working with participants long-distance to finalize their proposals. The Curatorial Intensive has been organized in partnership with the CUE Art Foundation, who will provide their virtual gallery as a platform for participants to publish their proposals online so that broad publics, as well as the hundreds of institutions with which ICI works, can view the final proposals.ICI is uniquely positioned to establish The Curatorial Intensive, having worked with a wide range of curators to develop innovative traveling exhibitions. In 35 years ICI has organized 116 shows, which have been presented in 570 institutions in 47 states and 23 countries worldwide, and experienced by nearly 6 million people.

The Curatorial Intensive was developed by ICI’s Executive Director, Kate Fowle, who recently joined ICI after working as the International Curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Prior to her time in China, Fowle spent 6 years in San Francisco at the California College of the Arts, where she was the director of the MA Program in Curatorial Practice, which she founded in 2002 with Ralph Rugoff.

Teachers & Advisors
Dan Cameron (Founding Director, Prospect New Orleans); Kate Fowle (Executive Director, ICI); Matthew Higgs (Director and Chief Curator, White Columns); Eungie Joo (Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs, New Museum); Maria Lind (Director, CCS Bard); Nicola Trezzi (US Editor, Flash Art); and Fred Wilson (artist).

Program Timeline
Application Deadline: March 12, 2010
New York Program: June 6-15, 2010
Proposals Published: July 15, 2010

Application Guidelines
Applications must include a 300-word description of an exhibition idea the applicant would like help in developing. Submissions should include an exhibition concept or key idea, and any artists that the applicant is considering.

Also required is a current resume, plus a 1-2 page letter of intent that outlines why applicants want to participate in The Curatorial Intensive, as well as an example of a recent exhibition that has made an impact on the applicants.

Applicants must be over the age of 21. Current graduate students are not eligible to apply for The Curatorial Intensive.

Fees & Scholarships
The program fee is $1,500. This covers local travel and admissions to museums and other institutions. Participants will be responsible for covering their travel expenses to and from New York as well as accommodation. In its commitment to make The Curatorial Intensive accessible to individuals from diverse economic backgrounds, ICI will offer full or partial scholarship packages to several program participants.

Individuals interested in applying for scholarships will need to submit an additional letter which addresses the following questions: 1. What are your future educational and career goals? 2. How specifically would The Curatorial Intensive help you to achieve those future educational and career goals? 3. Because this scholarship is partially awarded on need-based criteria, please explain the specific nature of your past or current financial challenges.

For More Information / To Send Application Materials
ICI (Independent Curators International)
799 Broadway, Suite 205
New York, NY 10003
T: 212.254.8200 x 26
F: 212.477.4781
education -at- ici-exhibitions.org

Research Residency at the MACBA Study Center

Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona



Apply for a MACBA Study Center Research Residency. From Curating.info:

In order to foster research in the field of contemporary artistic practices, the Study Center of MACBA has established four work stations for guest researchers, addressed to academic researchers, artists and other specialists in contemporary art, which are available in residency periods of three to six months. To apply for a residency, please send the following documents to centredestudis -at- macba.cat:

- letter of application, stating the desired dates for starting and concluding the residency.
- description of the project you wish to pursue during their residency, demonstrating the appropriateness of the Study Center for your research (maximum 3,000 characters).
- academic and professional curriculum.

Residency periods can last between one and three months. Exceptionally, these periods be prolonged, should this be justified by the nature of the candidate and the project submitted. However, in no case may the residency period exceed six months.

New in the PEI Reading Room

Come on in and READ ‘EM!

The PEI library is available to constituents of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, by appointment only, 9am – 5pm, Monday – Friday. To make an appointment call 267.350.4930 or e-mail pei@pcah.us.



For The Blind Man In The Dark Room Looking For The Black Cat That Isn't There
Curated by Anthony Huberman at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the group exhibition explores the speculative nature of knowledge and insists on the importance of curiosity and the things we don't understand. Arranged around the premise that the world--and art--is not a code that needs cracking, the works in the exhibition center on the fruitfulness of not-knowing, un-learning, and productive confusion. David Hullfish Bailey, Marcel Broodthaers, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Fischli & Weiss, Rachel Harrison, Giorgio Morandi, Matt Mullican, Rosalind Nashashibi & Lucy Skaer, Frances Stark, Rosemarie Trockel and others present explanations that playfully don't explain. Dedicated to the inquisitive mind, For The Blind Man celebrates our ability to get lost and the stories we use to find our way in the dark.



Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection
A heroine of American Minimalism, an increasingly admired artist whose journals (Daybook, Prospect, Turn) have a longstanding and devoted readership, but whose art has not previously been the subject of a substantial monograph. Perception and Reflection remedies this historical oversight superbly and decisively. The evolution of Truitt's sensibility is at once a classic Minimalist story and the tale of a truly independent spirit: following an encounter with the black paintings of Ad Reinhardt at the Guggenheim in 1961, she abandoned her earlier sculptural style and began to make stark, columnar works inscribed with bands of sometimes bright and sometimes quiet color.



Art and Text
Art and Text covers the development of the textual medium in art from the early combinations of text, lettering and image in the work of seminal artists such as El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters right up to the present day. The use of written language has been one of the most defining developments in visual art of the twentieth century. Art and Text is a unique and timely survey of this most contemporary and relevant artistic tool. The work of some of the most famous conceptual artists of the 1960s began to use written language as an artwork in itself. The expansive Art & Language group of artists and theorists, including Joseph Kosuth, also reconsidered the possibilities of ‘linguistic art.’



Piero Manzoni
Piero Manzoni was the enfant terrible of the post-war Italian avant-garde before his untimely death in Milan in 1963 at the age of just twenty-nine. Curated by Germano Celant, the artist’s premier scholar and author of the two editions of the Manzoni catalogues raisonné’s, this stunning catalogue spans Manzoni’s entire oeuvre, including works belonging to the Manzoni archives as well as several international museums and private collections. In addition, it presents several works by Manzoni’s American and European contemporaries. Manzoni’s alignments and responses to other artists active at the time, from Robert Rauschenberg to Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana to Robert Ryman, and Cy Twombly to Jasper Johns, demonstrate his own decisive contribution to the art of the late fifties and early sixties.


All book descriptions are from Amazon.com except Art & Text which is from blackdogonline.com.

PEI January Exhibitions Picks

Time for the first 2010 installment of PEI's Exhibitions Picks, our monthly feature highlighting exhibitions of exceptional interest. This month's picks are all within a day's trip of Philadelphia.

Sculpture Center
Long Island City, NY
Leopards in the Temple
January 10 - March 30, 2010
Leopards in the Temple is a parable by Franz Kafka. The group exhibition of the same name focuses on moments of metamorphosis, paradox, and formal adjacency, borrowing from the parable an ability to promote multiple readings of succinct forms and extraordinary occurrences. Gathering together an international group of artists, the works in this exhibition share an extra-linguistic interest in moments of translation and a resistance to fixed forms. The exhibition represents the first New York exhibition for a number of the participating artists. -e-flux.com



Guggenheim Museum
New York, NY
Tino Sehgal
January 29 - March 10, 2010
Tino Sehgal constructs situations that defy the traditional context of museum and gallery environments, focusing on the fleeting gestures and social subtleties of lived experience rather than on material objects. Relying exclusively on the human voice, bodily movement, and social interaction, Sehgal’s works nevertheless fulfill all the parameters of a traditional artwork with the exception of its inanimate materiality. The fact that Sehgal’s works are produced in this way elicits a different kind of viewer: a visitor is no longer only a passive spectator, but one who bears a responsibility to shape and at times to even contribute to the actual realization of the piece. Presented as part of the Guggenheim’s 50th Anniversary celebrations, Sehgal’s exhibition comprises a mise-en-scène that occupies the entire Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda. In dialogue with Wright’s all-encompassing aesthetic, Sehgal fills the rotunda floor and the spiraling ramps with two major works that encapsulate the poles of his practice: conversational and choreographic. To create the context for the exhibition, the entire Guggenheim rotunda is cleared of art objects for the first time in the museum’s history. -nyspacesmag.com



Whitney Museum of American Art
Collecting Biennials
January 16 -November 28, 2010
As a prelude, counterpoint, and coda to the Biennial, the Museum’s fifth floor is devoted to artists in the Whitney’s collection whose works were shown in Biennials over the past eight decades. Collecting Biennials is installed as a kind of historical survey within the Biennial, underscoring the importance of previous Biennial exhibitions in the Museum’s history and the formation of its collection. Work by one of the artists in 2010, George Condo, is included in the mix. Collecting Biennials begins nearly six weeks before the rest of the Biennial. -Whitney.org



Neuberger Museum of Art
Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary
January 28 - April 11, 2010
Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary is the first survey of the artist's interdisciplinary work focusing on the relationship among art, politics, and life. The exhibition features her powerful, innovative installation and performance work created for international venues over the past twenty years and will include multiple daily performances throughout the run of the show. The artist combines personal experience with a broad social and historical perspective to explore a range of issues including exile, displacement, endurance, and survival to create ephemeral, experiential works that are strongly visceral and highly poetic.-neuberger.org

Paddy Johnson documents the Art World Trends for 2010

Check out Paddy Johnson's Art World Trends for 2010 over at The L Magazine website. Frame art, apartment shows, the possibility of intelligent thought on the Internet(!), and the imminent death of “Crap on Crap”!

Call for Papers

Call for papers for an interesting conference at UC Santa Cruz (from the UC Santa Cruz Museum and Curatorial Studies website):

ACADEMIC CONFERENCE -- FRIDAY, MAY 14 2010
THE TASK OF THE CURATOR:
TRANSLATION, INTERVENTION, AND INNOVATION
IN EXHIBITIONARY PRACTICE

This one-day event will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss the role of the curator in relation to how objects are displayed in museums and galleries. The title, inspired by Walter Benjamin's theories of translation, brings attention to the often overlooked or naturalized labor of curators, which involves subtle but nonetheless transformative acts of framing and poetic interpretation. Presenters are encouraged to "look outside of the white box" toward new and alternative display methods. Proposals are due on February 5th, 2010.