OLD NEWS

METEOR DUST
<https://tinyurl.com/w87czj6j> _NASA

>>>

ELDA CERRATO, ARTIST OF THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL
<https://tinyurl.com/3py4xdej>
The path to the first show for Elda Cerrato (1930–2023), now on view, was a long and winding one. Born in Italy, Cerrato was a child when her family fled fascism in Europe for South America. Authoritarianism continued to shape her life in adulthood, as Cerrato and her husband and son were forced to leave Argentina to escape persecution at the hands of the country’s military junta in 1973.
“She was teaching at the School of Architecture at the University of Buenos Aires, which was said to have a lot of leftist people. Her best friend was disappeared at that time,”
<https://tinyurl.com/3yu2y6hs>
Living at various points during her career in São Paulo, Caracas, and Buenos Aires, Cerrato was widely celebrated in Latin America. The Argentine government honored Cerrato with the Premio Nacional a la Trayectoria Artística, or National Award for Artistic Career, in 2019.
<https://tinyurl.com/3h2xxakc>
The paintings represent two distinct bodies of work. There are Cerrato’s “cosmovision” canvases from the 1960s, which are more abstract, biomorphic compositions done in oil paint, with organic-looking shapes and patterns. These were representations of the universe’s underlying invisible energetic forces.
<https://tinyurl.com/mr29nuxy>
Then there are the acrylic paintings from the mid-to-late ’70s, which often incorporate maps of Latin America. Overlaid on top is more representational imagery based on photographs, in crisply rendered circular or rectangular insets. These can feature landscapes, or crowds of people, farm laborers, and other slightly cryptic imagery. The most overtly political one shows the outline of a young boy’s body lying across the nation of Brazil, which Cerrato painted in response to the murder of a 12-year-old accused of stealing a bicycle.
<https://tinyurl.com/mpy4tn>
Cerrato made the earlier works after a stint living in Venezuela, where she and her husband, composer Luis Zubillaga (1928–1995), traveled at the invitation of the Gurdjieff Foundation, which looks to follow the teachings of the Armenian mystic and philosopher George Gurdjieff (ca.1866–1877 – 1949). He believed that humans live their lives as if hypnotized, but can awaken to a higher state to achieve their true purposes—a path of spiritual growth he called the Fourth Way.
<https://tinyurl.com/mr2us3v8>
“Elda was very involved with consciousness, the idea of a divine which is not religious, but informs all of our interactions,” Sabbatino said. “She was a big believer in systems and diagrams, and having diagrams from consciousness. And so you see the systems in the work.”
Before taking up the paintbrush, Cerrato studied biochemistry, and an interest in science permeated her work as an artist—but melded with spirituality. When she and her husband were teaching at the National University of Tucumán, in a remote region of Argentina, the faculty believed that they were seeing an alien presence.
<https://tinyurl.com/2ktb6t4m>
“There were scientists, mathematicians, and every night, apparently, they had sightings of UFOs,” Cerrato’s son, the filmmaker Luciano Zubillaga, told me. “I was too little, so I cannot actually say they were UFOs, but these were very rational people, and everybody witnessed it.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2vssxxbh>
As a child, Zubillaga always knew there was something different about his mom compared to his friends’ mothers. “She was a feminist,” he told me, noting that Cerrato also drew inspiration from the female body. “There is a painting that more explicitly looks like a UFO. And it’s ambiguous. It’s either a UFO or a vagina!”
<https://tinyurl.com/wf3fnk37> _artnet

>>>

TAKE
<https://tinyurl.com/bdfx4fxr> _DavidShrigley

>>>

LYGIA PAPE: WEAVING SPACE INTO THOUGHT
<https://tinyurl.com/mwc5bdfp>
The first solo exhibition of Lygia Pape in France underscores the historical significance of artists from outside Europe who built intellectual foundations beyond the continent’s authority – not merely absorbing the dictates of Eurocentric modernism, but forging circuits of exchange and invention, as occurred among Pape and her peers of Grupo Frente, such as Lygia Clark. The Brazilian Pape merged social encounter and abstraction, understanding the dissolution of boundaries between spectator and work beyond discussions usually limited to phenomenology, and moving towards sociopolitical practices during years of a democratic instability in Brazil.
Weaving Space opens with text-based works, such as the typewritten visual poems of the 1960s. Here, Pape treats language not simply as medium but as matter, fusing graphic vitality and conceptual rhythm – close to Neo-Concrete peers such as Willys de Castro and Hélio Oiticica. One poem, ‘aranha / no ar / aranha’ (‘in air / spider / weaves’, c. 1960s), seems to anticipate her later Ttéia installations, begun during the late 1970s: the luminous thread-sculptures that dominate the show. Her engagement with poetry foregrounds participation and intersubjectivity, and resonates with Divisor (Divider, 1967–68), a videorecording of a performance, projected across an immense wall: in it a white sheet stretches over hundreds of people in Rio’s streets, only their heads visible, forming a living grid – an ephemeral geometry of collective motion, fostering connections between nonhabitual art audiences and the conceptual debates usually limited to erudite realms.
<https://tinyurl.com/fn7cxkrm>
<https://tinyurl.com/34mc6xan>
Nearby, Livro Noite e Dia III (Book of Night and Day III, 1963–76), a suite of 365 square variations on wooden geometrical cutouts painted black, white and grey, proliferates across Tadao Ando’s vast concave concrete wall, a striking display of work usually presented on a flat surface. Suggesting the circadian rhythms evoked by its title, the sequence morphs like folded or cut forms in motion – the iterations of squares and diagonals, folds and zigzags part algebraic, part lyrical. In a smaller room, Tecelares (Weaving, 1956), woodcuts on Japanese paper in which rectangular forms expand concentrically, articulate Pape’s thinking on cultural interconnectedness and the constructed genealogies of art; historically they succeed Josef Albers’s 1942 lithograph Sanctuary, while preceding Frank Stella’s comparable Black Paintings (1958–60). Rejecting the notion of a finished work, Pape conceived each print as a living proposition, accumulating meaning through the viewer’s reading.
The enormous and seductive Ttéia 1, C (2003/2025) occupies an entirely black room, its taut golden threads rising and descending between floor and ceiling, precisely lit by oblique spotlights, forming intersecting square-sectioned inclined columns that reveal volume as illusion – space rendered tangible by glimmer. When one looks upward and sees the black squares where the threads are tied, fastened to a white metal framework, a characteristic black-and-white geometric composition emerges – one Pape had earlier materialised in her untitled wooden reliefs of the Livro dos Caminhos (Book of Paths) series (1963–76, not included).
_Mateus Nunes _ArtReview

>>>

THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/mr2dms6j> _LisaAnneAuerbach

>>>

THE ABSENCE OF ICE by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/yzv2rnpa>
When I think about getting rid of ICE, and about the threat our country is to Greenland, our other allies, and the habitable climate of the earth, I come back to the series of sculptures Olafur Eliasson made in 2015-2016.
To make The presence of absence, Eliasson collected fragments of ice from Greenlandic glaciers floating at sea, in this case, Nuuk Kangerlua, the large western fjord by Greenland’s capital, and cast them in concrete forms in his studio. “The melting glacier produced sounds like miniature explosions.” It took about a month, and left a physical memory of the ice, a void.
There’s a great video of the void from Eliasson’s 2016 show at neugerrimschneider in Berlin. <https://tinyurl.com/mudhjxau> _greg.org

>>>

I DON’T THINK KANYE WAS DRIVEN CRAZY
by a frontal lobe injury sustained during his car accident,
but rather by his desire to create the beautiful dark twisted fantasy – to see the blue flower. _DeanKissick

>>>

20. POST-IT NOTE by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/yftd6rud>
The adhesive was invented by accident. It sat around for years at 3M, patented but unused. But the company famously encouraged “bootlegging,” allowing employees to spend some of their time on projects of their own choosing. They were permitted, encouraged even, to play. Doing work they loved so much, it didn’t feel like work.
And a seeming mistake, an unlooked-for discovery of a weak adhesive that could be used repeatedly—from that accident would emerge a improbably powerful tool for capturing ideas and experimenting with thought itself. An oddly pleasing object that records, fleetingly, something that is fleeting.
The humble Post-it Note has probably only been surpassed by the personal computer in terms of impact on our work. For how did people function before the Post-it? How many stray ideas were lost and forgotten before its invention? Like the stork delivering a baby, it’s a vessel that ferries an idea from its raw inception to, ideally, a more permanent incarnation in a breakthrough project—a book chapter, a building, new software. A mass of the notes can organize complex systems demanding spatial logic, continually rearranged, clustered, and discarded. The adhesive is strong enough to stay for a while, but weak enough to be removed without damage, allowing us to change our minds.
Digital tools have tried to replicate the Post-it, but there is no replacing the tactile, kinetic, low-tech—and far more inexpensive than any digital technology—nature of this essential tool. Like all good ideas, it’s obvious in retrospect. _TheImpatientReader

>>>

HOW YOUR EMAIL FOUND ME.
<https://tinyurl.com/mrxsehd>
It's the border of a Milanese altar cloth, c. 1725-75, _CarolinaAMiranda

>>>

HUMANS, NOT GLACIERS, MOVED ROCKS USED IN STONEHENGE’S CONSTRUCTION
Located on Salisbury Plain in the south of England, Stonehenge was built in stages by Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples between around 3000 BC and 1500 BC. It consists of an outer circle and inner horseshoe of sandstone trilithons with inner arcs of smaller bluestones.
Geological evidence has confirmed that the monument’s sandstone boulders came from the Marlborough Downs, 20 miles away, while its smaller dolomite bluestones were quarried in the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, 180 miles to the northwest. The average sarsen (sandstone block) at Stonehenge weighs 25 tons; the average bluestone ranges from 2 to 5 tons, and the largest weighs 40 tons. Stonehenge’s Altar Stone, weighing six tons, is now thought to have originated in Scotland.
Until this month, there were competing theories as to how the stones traveled such long distances, with some positing that humans moved them by land or by sea and others suggesting they were deposited by glaciers during the Ice Age.
Now it seems almost certain that the stones were moved by people. Scientists at Curtin tested sediments collected from streams around Stonehenge for mineral evidence of glacial activity. According to their findings, the area remained unglaciated during the Pleistocene, making direct glacial transport of Stonehenge’s megaliths unlikely.
Just how humans did move the stones, however, remains a mystery. “Some people say the stones might have been sailed down from Scotland or Wales, or they might have been transported over land using rolling logs, but really we might never know,” said Dr. Anthony Clarke, a geologist at Curtin’s Timescales of Minerals Systems Group and lead author of the study. “But what we do know is ice almost certainly didn’t move the[m].” _ARTnews

>>>

YOU MIGHT LIKE TO KNOW
that one of the most incisive & perceptive American painters
of the twentieth century, Alice Neel,
was born on this day in 1900.
First up, an intimate & touching 1930s pastel
of Neel & her lover José Santiago in bed
<https://tinyurl.com/bz3wn4re>
Alice Neel, Victoria and the Cat, 1980,
a portrait of Neel's granddaughter Victoria
holding her calico cat😍
<https://tinyurl.com/4sc5ze47>
While best known as a discerning portraitist,
Neel could at times find the heartbreaking beauty
in a simple interior still life,
as in her 1973 painting "Still Life, Rose of Sharon"
<https://tinyurl.com/2vnfcfyb> _MichaelLobel

>>>

FOOT VINING, MN
<https://tinyurl.com/y4ze663x> _RuralIndexingProject

>>>

LACMA GIFTS by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/vl9y001>
LACMA continues to receive gifts of modern and contemporary art in advance of April's opening of the David Geffen Galleries. While the Perenchio and Pearlman donations are getting the most attention, a big tent of museum supporters have donated or funded works by Cézanne, Matisse, Calder, Ed Ruscha, Sherrie Levine, George Condo, and Simone Leigh. At top is a classic '80s Lari Pittman, Maladies and Treatments (in oil, acrylic, and gold leaf on paper, mounted on mahogany; 53-1/2 by 108 in.) The donor has defied a town of big egos by electing to remain anonymous.
<http://tiny.cc/wl9y001>
Gven LACMA two small paintings by big names: Cézanne and Matisse. The Cézanne, Néréide et Tritons, is one of the group of dark-toned sketchy homages/satires of Romanticism that the artist produced in the mid 1860s. It becomes the earliest of a well-balanced group of five Cézanne paintings at LACMA, more than any other museum on the West Coast.
<http://tiny.cc/zl9y001>
The Matisse Nude on a Sofa (Harmony in Red), 9-1/2 by 13 in., is only the second Matisse painting in the collection, the other being the large Tea (1919).
<http://tiny.cc/0m9y001>
Alsos a 1957 Alexander Calder sculpture, Fish, and an Ed Ruscha painting, City. Calder produced fish-themed mobiles and stabiles from 1929 onward. A Flying Fish mobile, also from 1957, sold for a record $26 million in 2014. The Looker sculpture is painted sheet metal and wire, 60-in across. It joins two Calder mobiles at LACMA, the similarly scaled Little Face (1962) and Three Quintains <http://tiny.cc/2m9y001> (Hello Girls), the mega-mobile/fountain commissioned for the museum's 1965 opening. The latter is to be reinstalled on the Zumthor-transformed campus.
The Ruscha City must be related to the liquid word painting <http://tiny.cc/3m9y001> of the same name and year in Chicago. It's smaller at 20 by 24 in.
<http://tiny.cc/5m9y001>
LACMA recently added works of California assemblage by Bruce Connor and Noah Purifoy. Connor's Rat Purse is made of nylon, wax, gold leaf, a tin can, fur, sequins, string, and a cardboard box. Purifoy's Watts Uprising Remains is one of a group of burnt urban relics-as-art.
<http://tiny.cc/8m9y001>
Donated a John McLaughlin painting (#6, 1970) in honor of Stephanie Barron; a Jenny Holzer bench (1989); a set of four Sherrie Levine Number Checks paintings (1990). Sorry, no images.
<http://tiny.cc/9m9y001>
Who's bankrolled multiple strategic buys lately, supplied funds for a 1998 Ruscha on shaped canvas, Baby Jet.
<http://tiny.cc/dm9y001>
Entrance to the Void is the museum's first painting by Condo, acquired through the collective heavy lifting of a dozen donors.
<http://tiny.cc/em9y001>
Julian Schnabel's Bouquet of Mistakes is a large (27-1/2 ft. wide) ten-panel painting on velvet. The subtitle refers to Spanish-Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel and his frequent collaborator, French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière.. (A group of Jean Arp sculptures from the Janis collection are now on view in an installation in BCAM's modern galleries.)
<http://tiny.cc/hm9y001>
The purchase of Simone Leigh's Untitled (after June Jordan), a 16-ft-tall tower of porcelain cowrie shells featured in LACMA's 2024 Leigh show. The reference is to the Jamaican-American poet June Jordan, who collaborated with architect Buckminster Fuller on the design of "Skyrise to Harlem," an uptown utopia of 15 residential towers in which "every room has a view." Leigh's sculpture aptly evokes the concave-conical form of Jordan and Fuller's towers, which were never built. _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

>>>

HENDRICK BOGAERT, A MAN DANCING WITH A DOG, C. 1655-C. 1665
<https://tinyurl.com/3hcyk6y9> _JesseLocker

>>>

SFMOMA ABRUPTLY PAUSES POPULAR FREE ADMISSION PROGRAM
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has abruptly paused one of its most popular free programs.
Free First Thursday, which waives the general admission fee for all Bay Area residents from 4-8 p.m. on the first Thursday of each month, has been temporarily halted starting in February, according to a message posted to the museum's website.
A spokesperson from SFMOMA confirmed the news, explaining that the program has been temporarily paused as the institution re-examines its scope, costs, impact and long-term funding.
No return date for Free First Thursdays has been set, but SFMOMA plans to announce a new program series in the summer.
SFMOMA has faced mounting budget issues over the past few years that prompted it to raise admission prices in 2023. Its general admission fee went from $25 to $30 in October of that year, part of a 20% increase in admission prices at all levels at SFMOMA. _SFChronicle

>>>

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON TO LAY OFF OVER 30 STAFFERS
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston sent out an internal email to staffers on Wednesday notifying them of an impending layoff.
According to the email, which was obtained by Boston area NPR station WBUR, the museum said it faces “an unsustainable deficit that we have committed to resolve” and that the only move toward “financial sustainability” was to “implement a restructuring.”
The museum confirmed the layoffs to WBUR, telling the radio station that it will reduce the workforce by 6.3 percent, or around 30 staffers. The layoffs are set to take effect this Friday.
“Our challenge was to create a sustainable business model while remaining true to our mission. Leadership came to this difficult decision only after careful consideration of every available option,” the press statement said.
In a statement posted to Instagram, the MFA, Boston Union, said that it expects “to meet and bargain with the Museum” to try to avert layoffs, “retain workforce diversity,” and ensure there is “shared sacrifice from Museum leadership.”
“The Union only learned about the layoff late in the day yesterday,” the statement reads. “The Museum only just notified us about who in our union is specifically on the layoff list. We are deeply concerned to hear about the layoffs of sixteen of our members and seventeen other employees of the Museum and we have asked the Museum to provide detailed information about the reasons for the layoffs and what steps they could have taken to avoid this drastic step.
The museum previously underwent a restructuring and a series of layoffs in 2020, like many other institutions in the US. Fifty-six employees elected for voluntary early retirement, and another 57 were laid off at that time. The museum also cited financial sustainability as the rationale for that decision. _WBUR/ ARTnews

>>>

FRANCIS PICABIA - LES DEUX MASQUES - 1938
<https://tinyurl.com/5aubvej5> _RabihAlameddinea

>>>

RAPPER LEXA GATES ACCUSED OF MIMICKING MILES GREENBERG_DEITCH APOLOGIZED
<https://tinyurl.com/4za7n8am>
Rising hip-hop star Lexa Gates has been accused of imitating an acclaimed work by performance artist Miles Greenberg in order to promote her new album. Both performances were staged at Jeffrey Deitch gallery, which has issued a public apology to Greenberg for hosting an “unauthorized derivative” of his work and “failing to uphold the integrity of his work.”
The comparison between Greenberg and Gates’s work has raised questions about what constitutes authorship in performance art.
Gates’s performance The Wheel took place at Deitch’s New York gallery on January 15. It saw the 24-year-old, native New Yorker spend 10 continuous hours walking inside a spinning wheel while her new album “I Am” played on a loop.
According to a statement posted on the gallery
Greenberg, a protégée of Marina Abramović, has become something of a critical darling for bold and conceptually lively work that often requires impressive endurance. During the 18th hour of performing Oysterknife, Greenberg lost consciousness—the only pause in the 24-hour durational work before he immediately resumed walking. The artist said the work was a “love letter to Black pioneers of endurance,” citing artists Senga Nengudi, Pope.L, and David Hammons., the concept was “derived” from Greenberg’s Oysterknife (2020), for which the artist walked on a conveyor belt for 24 hours. A video of the feat was screened at the same Jeffrey Deitch location in the summer of 2021.
For Gates, meanwhile, The Wheel was a metaphor for themes of “persistence, emotional resilience, and forward motion” that are central to her new album, according to a press release.
“The gallery acknowledges that, though not part of our programming, an unauthorized derivative of Greenberg’s work took place within its walls without the artist’s knowledge of consent,” its statement read. “We sincerely apologize to Miles Greenberg and to our audience for failing to uphold the integrity of his work.”
Jeffrey Deitch gallery did not confirm what prompted its public apology.
Greenberg said in an email he was glad to see the gallery “take accountability” but added he has “no outstanding beef” with Gates.
Gates’s decision to stage The Wheel at the same location where Oysterknife had been screened, despite the striking similarities between the two works, has raised eyebrows. But an invitation to Gates’s performance cited as its precedent another of Gates’s durational performances, (Alone) In the Box from October 2024. While promoting the album “Elite Vessels,” the rapper spent ten hours inside a glass-box installed in New York’s Union Square.
That work was also reminiscent of many performances that have seen artists, actors, and musicians confine themselves before the public. In 1988, Leigh Bowery spent two hours a day for five days behind a two-way mirror at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London. In 1995, Tilda Swinton first appeared in Cornelia Parker’s The Maybe, sleeping in a glass box at London’s Serpentine Gallery. She repeated the work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2013. Two years later, the singer P.J. Harvey recorded her new album behind a sheet of glass at London’s Somerset House.
When asked by Wallpaper whether she takes inspiration from artists like Parker or Abramovič, Gates replied candidly. “Honestly, I don’t know anything about that stuff. All this is just silly, organic ideas,” she explained. “Everyone always brings up Marina [Abramovič], but I’m not that familiar with her work.” _artnet

>>>

AN ARTIFICIAL COMET
<https://tinyurl.com/3atm3faw> _NASA