OLD NEWS

PRELUDE 2
<https://tinyurl.com/fdd59kjz> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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AMERICA’S VENICE BIENNALE ARTIST SAYS HE’S MISUNDERSTOOD by Julia Halperin
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Last autumn, the American artist Alma Allen received a phone call that changed his life. The curator Jeffrey Uslip rang Allen in Mexico, where the 55-year-old sculptor has lived since 2017, to ask if he would represent the US at the Venice Biennale.
Allen is, in some ways, an unlikely choice for the world’s most prominent international art festival. Born in Utah, he ran away from his religious Mormon family at 16, experienced homelessness, and bounced around the world doing odd jobs. While many previous representatives in Venice have MFAs from top art schools and extensive institutional exhibition histories, Allen is self-taught, and has been the subject of only one major American museum show, which opened at the Palm Springs Art Museum in 2018.
The artist’s unorthodox rise began in the 1990s, after a broken leg left him unable to work. Desperate for money, he began hawking wooden figurines on an ironing board in SoHo. The sculptures developed a cult following; collectors “chose me to be an artist as much as I chose myself,” Allen says. As his profile grew, Allen’s biomorphic forms became larger and more ambitious. An undulating marble sculpture looks as if Medusa turned flowing liquid to stone; a bulbous wooden totem appears to have been moulded, like clay, by hand.
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Now, the once-niche artist is preparing to show that work to hundreds of thousands of art pilgrims who flock to the Venice Biennale — not to mention allies of the US president Donald Trump. In an unusual move, this year’s pavilion has been organised by the American Arts Conservancy (AAC), a nonprofit set up last year by Jenni Parido, the founder of a pet supply store in Tampa, Florida, who has no documented career in the art world. (Typically, the US pavilion commissioner is an established museum or arts organisation that has an existing relationship with the artist they apply to present.) Sources say Parido landed the job through her friend Erin Scavino, head of the State Department’s Art in Embassies programme and the wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment; AAC declined to comment.)
Any artist who accepted the invitation would have faced scrutiny from the left-leaning art world. Donald Trump has worked relentlessly during his second term to reshape culture in his image, putting unprecedented pressure on institutions including the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian. Before posting the Venice Biennale application, the State Department, which manages the US pavilion, scrubbed references to diversity, equity, and inclusion and added that the chosen artist must create “works of art that reflect and promote American values”.
This year’s US pavilion has reignited long-running questions about the ties that bind art and politics. Is representing the US at this year’s biennale tantamount to an endorsement of its government? Is Allen, a white male sculptor of abstract forms that do not directly engage with themes of identity or politics, an inherently conservative choice? At its core, all the discourse boils down to a perennial debate: what, exactly, is art for?
When I reach Allen by phone, he is at his 12,000-square-foot studio in Tepoztlán, an hour’s drive from Mexico City. (Described by one friend as “painfully shy”, he turned down my request for a video call.) Asked how he felt when he heard from Uslip — whom he had never met or worked with, but who had been a fan of his work for more than a decade — Allen is measured. “I’m excited by any opportunity to engage,” he says softly.
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While most artists have at least a year to develop their Venice presentations, Allen and his 15 assistants began working in earnest only in January. When we speak, he is preparing to ship around 10 new sculptures to Italy; several will be installed in the courtyard of the US’s Palladian-style pavilion. The rest of the Venice presentation comprises work from the past 20 years. The production schedule was so compressed that “I couldn’t even order a new stone,” Allen says.
One reason for the short timeline is that Allen wasn’t the commissioner’s first choice. Two widely celebrated 86-year-old artists — American photographer William Eggleston and American-French sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud — were invited first. Eggleston turned down the offer, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiations (Eggleston did not respond to a request for comment.)
Chase-Riboud also turned down the offer. “Participating in the 61st Venice Biennale would have been splendid,” says Chase-Riboud, who was the subject of an exhibition across eight major Paris museums in 2024. “Art is the only thing that proves that anything has ever happened in the world. For me, as a world citizen, this was not the moment.”
The State Department later extended — and then revoked — an invitation to the American sculptor Robert Lazzarini, who makes distorted sculptures of familiar objects like guns and chairs.
A spokesperson for AAC declined to disclose the budget for this year’s pavilion or identify any of its funders. (Recent US pavilions have cost between $5mn and $7mn, but major supporters like the Ford Foundation did not return this time around.) Uslip and Allen say they had complete independence in developing the presentation. “No one has told me what to make in any circumstance,” the artist says.
Those who know Allen weren’t surprised that he accepted the invitation to Venice. He is unafraid of big swings. In 2010, when arm and hand injuries left him unable to sculpt, he took the unusual step of securing a loan from a collector to buy a robot. The 2300kg machine serves as a kind of extended arm, carving large versions of miniature forms he develops in clay and wax.
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Back then, Allen was living in Joshua Tree, selling art out of his studio and designing furniture for the likes of Katy Perry and Beyoncé. His big break came in 2014, when the artist Michelle Grabner included his marble and walnut sculptures in the Whitney Biennial in New York. Allen “really understands material and form,” Grabner says. “He doesn’t have an agenda or artist statement that has to be executed.”
When Allen’s selection for Venice was announced in November, however, few tastemakers were enthused. New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz took to Instagram with a backhanded assessment of the artist’s “perfectly respectable career making so-so work.” ARTnews’s Alex Greenberger wrote that Allen’s art “has nothing to say about the state of our country at the moment.” Critics weren’t the only voices of dissent. Allen parted ways with his galleries amid pushback from other artists over his decision to accept the Venice commission.
Allen remains undeterred. “I’m an artist, and an artist doesn’t turn down this kind of thing,” he says. By March, the blue-chip gallery Perrotin had stepped in to represent him. Yet the response to his selection made Allen realise that “people really don’t understand what I’m doing.” The biggest misconception, he says, is that he makes art for art’s sake. He maintains that he uses form and material as a means to explore shifting psychological states in the vein of his artistic hero (and former US representative in Venice) Louise Bourgeois.
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Allen thinks that he has been misunderstood, at least in part, because of his own reluctance to discuss the meaning behind his work and his political views. (He gives every sculpture the same evasive title: “Not Yet Titled.”) “Everyone gets upset at me, ‘cause I haven’t told them exactly what I think [so] they can judge whether I’m right or wrong,” he says. The orthodoxy “reminds me of my religious family, which is not a great feeling”.
Allen’s commitment to keeping his work open-ended has led others to fill the void with interpretations that align with their world views. In a statement, Parido, the pavilion’s commissioner, described the artist as a “self-taught American success story” who “embodies the qualities of America’s best and brightest.” Uslip highlighted Allen’s use of Colorado Yule marble, which also appears in historic monuments like the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. (The official press release does not mention that, in addition to Yule marble, the Venice presentation will include a new sculpture made from green marble sourced from Guatemala.)
Jeff Poe, cofounder of the now-shuttered Blum & Poe gallery, which began representing the artist in 2014, contends that Allen’s work has little to do with America. “It has no truly deep American stance,” he says.
Poe and others also point out the irony of an artist who has made his artistic home in Mexico representing the US amid the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on immigration. Allen has “built a strong community of artists and artisans in Mexico,” says Eric Gleason of Olney Gleason, one of the artist’s former galleries. “The work’s dialogue with pre-modern forms and Alma’s deep appreciation for materials native to the area are some of the most interesting aspects of his practice.”
No one I spoke to believes that Allen is a bad artist. But they disagree about whether his enigmatic work is suited to represent the US on the international stage at this fraught moment. “We’re going to get this vanilla, modernist, lovely work that doesn’t speak to anything that’s happening,” Poe says.
For Uslip, the exhibition is nothing more — and nothing less — than “a proposal for self-reflection, renewal, and unity”. He says he is “embarrassed” on behalf of critics sceptical of Allen’s selection because they do not consider his abstract work explicitly political. “Have you given up on the agency and promise of art? On what art can do, uniquely to itself?” he asks. “I’m sad for them. Because you know who hasn’t given up on art? Alma and I.” _FinancialTimes

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LIKE
<https://tinyurl.com/53ye65d3> _DavidShrigley

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TRUMP WANTS A SCULPTURE GARDEN IT’S UNLIKELY EVEN ONE STATUE WILL BE READY.
It was envisioned as an expansive sculpture garden to honor America’s 250th birthday, with 250 statues of figures like Kobe Bryant, Elvis Presley and Rosa Parks.
But with July 4th rapidly approaching, it’s unlikely that even one statue for President Donald Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes will be erected in time,
Foundries and artists from across the country who applied to work on the massive, classical-style, sculptures – which would take months to build – haven’t heard from the Trump administration.
And plans for the garden haven’t been submitted to the Commission of Fine Arts or the National Capital Planning Commission — two government agencies whose approval is needed before it can be built.
“It has not been formally reviewed,” a person familiar with planning efforts said. “Based on my experience in prior approvals in the District, I don’t see how this could be in place in time by July.”
There has been some progress. The White House has zeroed in on West Potomac Park – a picturesque plot of land along the Potomac River popular for viewing Washington’s cherry blossoms – as the site for the garden, _CNN

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/243jdbdk> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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76. SALIDA SMOKESTACK by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/mv9e28ej>
By the early 20th century, it was obvious that smelting was not only a filthy business, it was deadly. In Salida, Colorado, the smelter’s clouds of arsenic and lead killed trees and crops downwind. Ranchers filed lawsuits over sickened animals. At night the white-hot molten mass poured over the bank of the Arkansas River, “a most impressive sight.”1
But it was 1916—the country was about to enter WWI, and the war effort needed metal. And so the Ohio and Colorado Smelting and Refining Company built a taller smokestack: 365 feet tall, twice as high as the Leaning Tower of Pisa. By elevating the exhaust, pollution drifted farther downwind, displacing the problem.
After the war, the smokestack was abandoned but not demolished, left like a beacon in the landscape. In 1972, the county wanted to demolish it, but locals organized a Save Our Stack (SOS) coalition. They succeeded, and the towering old chimney entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, which stated: “[It] serves as a monument to those who worked at the smelter. Here they came—from Austria, from Greece, from Ireland, from Italy. Many of these families still reside in the Salida area and are counted among its finest citizens.”
And there it sits. Built to make pollution disappear, it’s now the most visible thing for miles, reaching for the heavens like an obelisk. It organizes the surrounding valley, drawing the eye upward. A tower engineered to disperse harm became a landmark that concentrates meaning.
<https://tinyurl.com/3ts6ey55> _TheImpatientReader

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HOW YOUR EMAIL FOUND ME.
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Detail of a forest spirit figure carved by an Ijo artist (Nigeria) in the early 19th century _CarolinaAMiranda

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IS ART GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH? by J.J. Charlesworth
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I’ve been looking at art for decades. Although it’s probably made me somewhat happier, having an ‘arts experience’ (as scientist Daisy Fancourt calls it) hasn’t rescued me from moments of depression or, for that matter, done much for my blood pressure. Maybe this writer is not the best person to review Art Cure, Fancourt’s enthusiastic, true-believer exposition of how the arts can make a positive effect on health, both mental and physical.
But then, it could also be that my health would have been worse had I not had all that arts experience. Fancourt, a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology, insists that this is so and marshals a dizzying edifice of studies, research and other factoids to prove it. ‘From preventing suicides to helping stop epidemics to even increasing our life expectancy, the arts can be the difference between life and death,’ she declares.
So over seven chapters Fancourt focuses on the various situations in which engaging in arts activities can have positive impacts on peoples’ health. This goes from ameliorating incidence of depression in large sample groups, to being an effective therapeutic intervention for people who have experienced trauma and abuse, to enhancing neuroplasticity, to restoring function after brain damage, to staving off the onset of neurodegenerative disease, to managing pain and stress.
The problem with Art Cure is not so much that one might criticise the research methodologies, or the data (that would be the responsible job of scientists, not some art critic), but that the concept of ‘health’ Fanshaw adopts is so wide as to encompass what are really questions about the conduct of social life and even politics, ethics and morality. In her penultimate chapter, on ‘arts for healthy behaviours’, Fancourt starts with the example of East Los High (2013–17), a US TV high school drama created to target and modify the sexual-health behaviours of Latino teens. She then asserts that ‘just engaging in arts day-to-day… can also help us to act more healthily’, citing research that supposedly shows that ‘those who were more creative and culturally engaged were nearly twice as likely to also eat their five-a-day of fruit and veg’. There’s an element of unconscious class snobbery embedded in such apparently scientific observations; it just so happens that those ‘disengaged from arts groups and cultural activities… are more likely to also engage in other behaviours that can put their health at risk’. Fancourt might contend that class prejudice has nothing to do with it, but the technocratic outlook – of scientists, experts and policymakers figuring out what’s ‘best’ for us (though Fancourt never couches it so paternalistically) – is really the outlook of the ‘sensible’ managerial class as it seeks to govern everyone else.
Of course, that dynamic tends not to be seen as a problem in a culture in which individuals are obsessed with their health, while governments are obsessed with manipulating the behaviours of the apparently feckless masses. There is, however, a positive political aspect within Fancourt’s narrative, though her ‘arts for health’ optics cannot fulfil it. Fancourt regularly notes that the arts offer people a greater sense of control and agency through participating in cultural life, and that this agency leads to a better sense of self and active engagement. But correlating this truth with statistics on how people live marginally more healthy lives overwrites a health/illness paradigm onto what is really a moral and political imperative: that living an isolated, trammelled, overworked and joyless life will probably be bad for you, in all sorts of ways. Benevolent health-modification is no substitute for individual freedom and social prosperity. Art Cure reduces the value of the arts to that of a physiological pusher of happiness-buttons at the most individual level (Fancourt is always going on about dopamine released into the brain), and to propaganda at the social level.
In the end – as Fancourt’s glum graph shows – we all die, even though there may be a slight difference between those dying at eighty or ninety depending on how frequently we ‘engage’ with the arts. In truth the arts could never do much about longevity. In the Renaissance, most people didn’t live to see their fifties, however great the art was. _ArtReview

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SOME TREMENDOUS PAINTINGS FROM BENNY ANDREWS'S "MIGRANT" SERIES,
the artist's last major body of work before his death in 2006
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Benny Andrews, "Desert Flat," from the Migrant Series: Dust Bowl, 2004
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Benny Andrews, "Self-Portrait Doing the Migrant Series," 2004
<https://tinyurl.com/ymcyv8nv> _MichaelLobel

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NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN CALDER SCULPTURE EMERGES
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Last week, American sculptor Alexander Calder became the latest creative legend to receive a sprawling retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris. Auction house will commemorate the occasion by offering a never-before-seen Calder mobile
Calder created this five-and-a-half inch tall metallic mobile just two years before his death in 1976—and 43 years after making his first mechanized mobile. Several years after this initial foray, Calder traded motors for kinetic energy, letting wind and gentle touches from viewers make his artwork move instead.
In accordance with its name, works like this Stabile-mobile blend Calder’s two best-known series—the artist’s standing, stationary stabiles, named by his friend, the German-French Dadaist Jean Arp, and the swaying, suspended mobiles named by another colleague, the famed French father of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp.
As such, Stabile-mobile both stands and hangs. Any pressure applied to the horizontal arm perched atop the work’s red-lacquered sheet metal base causes the whole thing to spin, including the extra three-pronged wire appendage bearing three more white-lacquered discs, which rotates on its own axis, to mesmerizing effect.
Stabile-mobile culminates the abstract, metallic weightlessness that Calder is best known for today.
Calder created approximately 22,000 works of sculpture, painting, jewelry and more throughout his life. His iconic mobiles, which comprise just a fraction of these, remain his most coveted creations.
<https://tinyurl.com/9xec92hz> _artnet

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BOB’S STEAK HOUSE PANA, IL
<https://tinyurl.com/bdh2sp7t> _RuralIndexingProject

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RENOIR NOT SEEN IN PUBLIC FOR 97 YEARS
<https://tinyurl.com/ycy44pzs>
A Renoir that hasn’t been seen in public in ninety-seven years due to the fact that it’s been ensconced in the private collection of the Whitney Payson family is going up for auction. La femme aux lilas (Portrait de Nini Lopez) (Woman with Lilacs [Portrait of Nine Lopez]), 1876–77, is a defining Impressionist masterpiece depicting the artist’s favorite muse and model—it’s the largest portrait of Lopez that’s remained in private hands
Rendered with a deep blue backdrop and whorls of soft spring colors, La femme finds Lopez staring peaceably into the middle distance, holding a bouquet of flowers.
The painting comes from the collection of Lorinda Payson de Roulet, whose mother, Joan Whitney Payson, was the co-founder and majority owner of the New York Mets. Joan Whitney Payson originally bought the Renoir in 1929 and eventually passed it down to her daughter _Artforum

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LIONELLO SPADA’S ST. JEROME, WEARING SOME VERY MODERN SPECTACLES. 1610S,
<https://tinyurl.com/469dsv45> _JesseLocker

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2026 COLLECTORS COMMITTEE GIFTS by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/a272101>
In the midst of the Geffen hoopla, LACMA's Collectors Committee has met for the 40th time. This year museum supporters have purchased three works for the permanent collection, and all are now on view in the Geffen Galleries.
Tablón 32 is from a series of hard-edge abstractions in acrylic lacquer by Venezuelan artist Alejandro Otero (1921–1990). It's a highlight of one of everyone's favorite Geffen rooms, "Turmoil and Optimism in Latin America."
LACMA's Unframed blog is posting on the acquisitions this week.
<http://tiny.cc/b272101>
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Tangata Tonga artist, Ngatu (barkcloth), about 1820–1860.
This anonymous was a woman, as it seems that all Tongan ngatu are by female makers. The size and early date of this example are exceptional among American museums.
<http://tiny.cc/e272101>
Luis Jiménez's Vaquero predates by 12 years the artist's best-known work, the monumental Vaquero in front of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It's cast fiberglass and automotive paint with epoxy coating. _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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FINLAND’S POLITICAL LEADERSHIP WILL NOT ATTEND THE VENICE BIENNALE THIS YEAR
if the Russian Pavilion goes on view as planned. _ARTnews

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MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY TO ‘PAUSE’ OPERATIONS IN LOS ANGELES
<https://tinyurl.com/5995r4ym>
Marian Goodman Gallery will pause operations at its Los Angeles outpost after two and a half years at the conclusion of its current solo show “The Partners of Marian Goodman Gallery are consolidating programming to our historic homes in New York and Paris. Our programming will continue to be anchored in these two global art capitals, advancing the transatlantic dialogue between the United States and Europe that has been foundational to our gallery since its inception in 1977.”
The gallery avoided saying that it would definitely cease operations in LA, stating instead that the partners would “evaluate the next phase for the space” and “maintain our presence in Los Angeles and in cities internationally through special projects, art fairs, and museum exhibitions in support of our artists and clients.”
In a follow-up email, Lord and Teng, the gallery’s two managing partners, said that Marian Goodman Gallery was not immune to market forces, much like its colleagues. “While this was not an easy decision to make, it was a strategic one. We are facing the same conditions as every gallery. The ongoing market volatility has forced many galleries to take a hard look at how they allocate their resources,” they wrote. _ARTnews

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MA YUAN'S STUDIES OF THE PROPERTIES OF WATER, SOUTHERN SONG DYNASTY CHINA, CA. 1190 - 1225 CE
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<https://tinyurl.com/vy8mae8x> _RabihAlameddine