OLD NEWS

BLACK BEARS EMERGING FROM HIBERNATION by Mary Holland
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Black Bears in northern New England have started emerging from hibernation, with males usually becoming active before females and their cubs. You might think that they would be ravenous upon waking from a four- or five-month period of no eating or drinking, but it takes two to three weeks for their metabolism to return to normal. During this time of “walking hibernation” bears eat and drink much less than normal. Many have lost a significant amount of body fat, and they are sluggish with reduced appetites. When their appetite returns, Black Bears typically head for forested wetlands, beaver ponds, and along streams and riverbanks where tender new grasses, sedges and a variety of succulent plants can be found.
(Photo: Black Bear mother and three yearlings shelter at the base of a large White Pine shortly after emerging from hibernation. Black Bear young stay with their mother until they are nearly a year and a half old. In May or June of the year after their birth they disperse and she mates.) _NaturallyCurious

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MEN
<https://tinyurl.com/mrusds2c> _DavidShrigley

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RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA IN MILANO by greg
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The Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in BF industrial Milan [but in a different BF industrial Milan from the Fondazione Prada, so plan accordingly] is about to open a show of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s architectural projects.
The pic above is from Untitled, 1995, which was a half-scale version of a modernist house by Sigurd Lewerentz which Tiravanija built at the Rooseum in Malmö. MoMA’s 1997 caption described the interior decorations as “by the children of the Storken day care center ages 5-7,” but that was clearly preceded by a trip to Ikea.
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Which makes Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad, whose connections to the nazis were first disclosed in 1994, a more tangential nazi than Philip Johnson, who designed both the Glass House Tiravanija replicated at half-scale and MoMA’s sculpture garden where he put it <https://tinyurl.com/482mp82w> , but anyway. I’m excited to see the show. _greg.org

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/4nvje3xy> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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LAURA AGUILAR AT THE HUNTINGTON by William Poundstone
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Laura Aguilar (1959–2018) got only modest museum attention during her short, subversive career. Since her death, Aguilar has become popular with curators on both coasts. The Huntington and the Getty have each added substantial holdings of Aguilar's work. The Huntington is debuting its collection in a one-room exhibition, "Laura Aguilar: Body and Landscape," in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries for American Art.
Installation view, "Laura Aguilar: Body and Landscape"
Aguilar was big, Chicana, and queer. Her B&W self-portrait In Sandy's Room is big, nearly 50 inches wide. Aguilar was house-sitting at a friend's home in Pasadena, perusing a selection of vintage glamour magazines. Aguilar portrays herself nude and abundant, with a fan and a Diet Coke—a riposte to the Condé Nast vision of svelte, ice-queen beauty. In Sandy's Room recalls Diana Arbus' nudist colony pictures, but with the difference that the "other" is the artist and perhaps, the viewer.
After In Sandy's Room, nudity—nudes of sizes, shapes, and colors rarely seen in art—became part of the Aguilar brand. The Huntington selection feature nudes in the U.S. Western landscape, a subject dating at least back to Anne Brigman. Another inevitable comparison is Edward Weston. Aguilar's work builds on Weston's abstracted back studies with invisible head and limbs. Weston made conventionally beautiful bodies into something monstrous. Aguilar finds austere beauty in bodies and perspectives outside the media mainstream. The show includes a 1929 Weston Pepper that rhymes with some of Aguilar's visual explorations of her own body.
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The "Grounded" series, shot in Joshua Tree National Park in 2006–2007, trades in visual puns that veer into the metaphysical. In an untitled color print, the artist moons the camera, mimicking a geologic butt crack. In #106, Aguilar's body merges with the landscape, like some kind of evolutionary camouflage.
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Also newly on view in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries is "Mercedes Dorame—Deliquescence: Sites of Transformation," starting a three-year residency in the glass-enclosed Loggia An adjacent gallery displays "Sandy Rodriguez: Book 13"
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<http://tiny.cc/jir0101> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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CORNELIS NORBERTUS GIJSBRECHTS, "THE REVERSE OF A FRAMED PAINTING," C. 1670
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Roy Lichtenstein, "Stretcher Frame with Cross Bars III," 1968
<https://tinyurl.com/bz6f635t> _MichaelLobel

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57. EDMONIA LEWIS, THE DEATH OF CLEOPATRA by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/342hneaa>
Artists had always depicted Cleopatra sighing with existential fatalism, the deadly asp nearby. They showed her contemplating death; they didn’t show her actually dead. Edmonia Lewis’ Cleopatra—disheveled, collapsed against her throne—was a tremendous scandal. Lewis labored on the work for four years in her Rome studio and shipped it for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The artist William J. Clark lambasted, “The effects of death are represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellent—and it is a question whether a statue of the ghastly characteristics of this one does not overstep the bounds of legitimate art.” Crowds flocked to see it.
Lewis was born in 1844 and began her education at Oberlin College during the Civil War. She decamped for Rome, telling The New York Times, “I was practically driven to Rome, to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color. The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.”
No buyer emerged for The Death of Cleopatra in Philadelphia. Lewis returned to Europe and the three-ton sculpture began a wild life, decorating a Chicago saloon, then purchased by a gambler, “Blind John” Condon, to mark the grave of a racehorse of the same name. A century later, Cleopatra was located, badly damaged, in a storage facility. She underwent extensive restoration and entered the Smithsonian Institution collection in 1994. Lewis died impoverished in London in 1907, her grave only recently rediscovered. Artist and sculpture alike, rescued from obscurity. _TheImpatientReader

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LOVE MORE SAGUACHE, CO
<https://tinyurl.com/5c7pddp4> _RuralIndexingProject

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JOEL MEYEROWITZ ON PHOTOGRAPHING GIORGIO MORANDI’S STUDIO
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Photographer Joel Meyerowitz identifies as “an outside guy.” Known for his pioneering New York City street photography that advanced the belief that color film can indeed be artistically serious, Meyerowitz tended to never shoot still lifes, except for the occasional post-dinner-party tablescape.
But with Morandi’s Objects: The Complete Archive of Casa Morandi (April 2026), we get a whole book documenting what happens when Meyerowitz sits still in a studio — the Bologna studio of the master of the still life, painter Giorgio Morandi, no less. Originally published in 2016 with essays by Meyerowitz and his wife, writer and artist Maggie Barrett, this month, Damiani Books updated the second edition with more than 130 additional photos. Against a backdrop of peeling paint, the color of a cortado, a parade of humble votives pose in their chipped, dusty, jewel-toned glory.
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“He was assembling a force field of geometric objects: circles, cylinders, cubes, rectangles, boxes, ovals,” Meyerowitz said in a call . “I think he was really meditating on the way these objects were blended into each other, with some kind of indefinite relationship that he created or muted between the near and the far.”
When Meyerowitz and Barrett lived in Tuscany in the 2010s, they organized to spend time at Casa Morandi, where most rooms are not normally on public view. Meyerowitz had fallen in love with Morandi’s angles and shadows when he himself studied painting, and he fell all over again with the remnants of the man left behind in the space. He felt him when he sat at his tall desk — “He was six-foot-four, so really big guy” — and tried on the hat and the double-breasted suit jacket he painted in.
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“He would wipe his brushes on his sleeves,” Meyerowitz continued. “So here was this beautiful, elegant, hand-tailored Italian suit, and it was as stiff as a board with tiny color patches, each one the size of your fingernail, hundreds of them. It was beautiful.”
Like Meyerowitz, Morandi arguably did not see beauty as the objective of his art practice. It’s more about understanding or unlocking the rules of how the world works, from physics to the unspoken laws of a crowd. “I like to think that there was a similar quality in these two men that attracted me to them; a quality of stillness imbued with the latent energy of time,” Barrett writes in an essay for the book.
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She is frank about the fact that Morandi is dead and that her 88-year-old husband is “very much alive.” Still, the invocation of natura morta reminds everyone of the eventual. Morandi’s Objects is an attempt to capture the anima, or the soul, of Morandi’s inspiration. The book may live on as a document of Meyerowitz’s ability to find the punctum — the detail that pricks us in an image, revealing that we and it are real.
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Meyerowitz may have “let go of painting” in the 1960s to pursue the athleticism and rhythm of photography, but he is happy to engage with his first medium in his preferred way.
“Sitting in Morandi’s studio and studying the objects was so satisfying with the camera, just to be searching,” Meyerowitz said. “I was trying to stay open in my response, so that if there was a flicker of recognition — that something in the object was animated — I would get it. That was enough. It was as if I closed in on his territory just a little bit. You could never be Morandi, let’s face it. He was the mystery, and that’s why we love him.” _Greta Rainbow_Hyperallergic

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ASKING CHATGPT TO EVALUATE MY RESEARCH IDEA
<https://tinyurl.com/2k7uaw58> _‪JohnAttridge‬

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AGOSTO MACHADO, ARTIST AND ACTIVIST HAS DIED
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Agosto Machado, an artist and activist associated with the Downtown New York art scene whose altar sculptures currently appear in the Whitney Biennial, died on Saturday following a brief illness.
In keeping with his own wishes, his gallery, did not announce Machado’s age in the obituary it sent out on Sunday. Speaking of his decision never to publicly share his birth year last year, Machado said, “A lady never tells.”
Within the art world, Machado is now recognized as an artist, though he has also been described variously as an archivist and an activist. In interviews, he opted for a different descriptor: “pre-Stonewall street queen.”
An active participant in the Stonewall uprising of 1969 and the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s that followed, Machado was part of a circle
An active participant in the Stonewall uprising of 1969 and the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s that followed, Machado was part of a circle that included activists such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera; artists such as Peter Hujar, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol; and multi-hyphenates such as Candy Darling, Mario Montez, and Stephen Varble. Through his performances at venues such as La MaMa and the Pyramid Club, Machado established himself as one of the essential figures of the Downtown New York scene.
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His act of collecting all this ephemera was often read as a means of preserving queer history when it was under attack. In 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, spurring an array of demonstrations from the queer community. “It wasn’t the first time Stonewall, or any of the gay bars, had a raid except the situation at hand was like a magnet,” Machado said in a 2019 oral history conducted by the LGBTQ History Project. “With street kids like me, we had nothing to lose.” _Alex Greenberger_ARTnews

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THINGS I FOUND ON MY LAPTOP,
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Spring edition
<https://tinyurl.com/3ehrww9r> _JesseLocker

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THE UNSETTLING MUSEUM
Why do we need museums at all? Who decides what counts as worthy of preservation, to be collected, and moreover who benefits from it? For centuries, the museum claimed authority as the arbiter of value. That authority once felt permanent and unassailable. Today, it wobbles. Comparative modernities. Restitution claims. Alienated audiences. Scholars who refuse the canon. Collecting through extraction. Artists from other parts of the world whose work refuses hierarchies, whose practices capsize assumptions, whose languages demand space. Whose space speaks in other languages. Other parts of the world, where the so-called global minorities live. Who really wants to be global? And who wants to be a minority? The predicaments, and the questions that museums find themselves in today, are grand, rousing and above all unavoidable. Within that precarity, museums of the future will be made.
Museums do more than preserve. They produce public knowledge. Or at least they should. Over the next few decades, the museums that will thrive will be those that give rise to exhibitions that address art historical ruptures, absorbing new curators, researchers, archivists and operations teams that challenge inherited models of display, access and meaning-making. Museums that rely only on English risk reproducing colonial hierarchies and being left behind by the conversations circulating in Arabic, Cantonese, Hindi, Tamil, Mandarin, etc. These multiple perspectives will in time remove the monopoly over meaning-making in one language. It remains to be seen how English will operate within a new epistemic order where multiple languages frame meaning.
One debate surrounding all museums that has not let up is whether or not museums should be free. Museum access, though, is not just about free entry. It is also about letting those from other local and regional contexts partake in broadening conversations about the purpose of the museum. Creating the conditions for this kind of conversational and skills access involves addressing uneven infrastructures, elitism and the mighty challenge of creating opportunities that address socioeconomic inequalities. Entry to the back end of museums is just as important to think about as the front-of-house side of things.
Ultimately, to determine the purpose of museums is to wrestle with how audiences use them. Museum leaders have already discovered that exhibitions alone are not sufficient and that audiences increasingly expect eating, drinking, shopping, spaces of well-being and entertainment as part of the experience. But let’s pause. Before trying to become everything at once, especially when the skill sets of most museum professionals cover none of the above, we should ask ourselves if all this distracts us from doing the real work. Sorting out our own house, reckoning with difficult histories, confronting systems of power and facing the precarity we inhabit. The world is neither calm nor contained. Maybe the museum that truly matters is one that unsettles. That challenges audiences, artists and staff alike. That embraces multiplicity and friction. The museum restaurant can wait. Along with all the other ‘restful’ spaces of quiet contemplation and reflective labels. For now, the task is to act, to witness, to build, to train, to question and to make possible what was previously denied. If this is not our purpose, then we are failing those whose histories demand care, whose voices demand space, whose futures demand possibility. _Sharmini Pereira _ArtReview

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SO MUCH HAPPENING ON THE BACK
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of Bonnard's The Cab Horse:
<https://tinyurl.com/bdhbr9j9> _JesseLocker

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THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL IS FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED
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You’re likely to walk out of the show feeling that something’s rotten in the United States. Fear and inhibition are humming like drones beneath the surface. Otherwise, why so somber and moody? Why so meek and joyless?
Barring a few exceptions — Ali Eyal’s Ferris wheel of horrors from his war-torn childhood in Baghdad;i — I got the sense that the Whitney Biennial is hiding from the world today instead of reflecting on it.
This biennial is neither bad, nor “safe,” nor “weird.” It’s not even apolitical — it couldn’t be, even if it tried. It’s just frightened.
Even while it avoids addressing the current political moment, the show makes sure to tick many seemingly progressive boxes. It’s more inclusive than ever,
.It turns an analytical gaze onto systems of surveillance, extractivism, and oppression, as well as the infrastructures that sustain them. _Hakim Bishara_Hyperallergic

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THE GREAT GOETHE DIED ON THIS DAY 1832.
Among his many contributions across a dizzying array of fields is his work on colour, synthesised in his Theory of Colours (1810). More on the influence of his colour theory in Eugene Thacker's "Black on Black"
<https://tinyurl.com/3js4924s> _PublicDomainReview

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RED ALERT:
I have just discovered that art critic Brian Sewell's 'Grand Tour' TV miniseries is now available online. An absolutely deranged program. They do not make TV like this anymore (maybe for the better). My highest recommendation
<https://tinyurl.com/3n43dkzv> _AndrewRusseth

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JUST OUTSIDE JOSHUA TREE, THIS ART FAIR SET IN A DESERT MOTEL IS BUILDING SOMETHING
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Now in its fifth year, the High Desert Art Fair transforms the rooms of the historic Pioneertown Motel into exhibition spaces for 20 galleries and publishers, while expanding into a broader mix of programming — something akin to a mini Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. This year’s edition includes an opening night party with a DJ set by street artist Shepard Fairey, panel discussions, guided meditation and even a sound bath.
Vision is unapologetically big: He wants the region to become the “Marfa or the Hamptons of L.A.” — wealthy enclaves where art and tourism converge. Long term, the pair hope the fair will expand beyond visual art to include film and other media, becoming a permanent fixture on the desert arts calendar alongside events like Modernism Week and Desert X.
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“The high desert has a fascinating blend of hippie and libertarian sensibilities,” he wrote in an email. “It’s more affordable [than L.A.] and a peaceful, inspiring environment for creative work.”
“We needed to give them a reason to come here,”
The programming extends well beyond the gallery rooms. Panels on collecting and arts institutions in the desert will feature speakers including Jenny Gil, executive director of Desert X, the biennial exhibition of large-scale artworks installed across the Coachella Valley and in AlUla, Saudi Arabia.
“I think it adds a very interesting layer to creating a destination,”
Gallerist, who is participating for the first time, summed up the event’s appeal. “They’re creating a cultural experience,” she said. “You can dip a toe into art or music, do yoga or go to Palm Springs.”
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Joshua Tree remains “more independent,” he said, in part because it is an unincorporated community. At the same time, rising real estate prices have made affordable studio space harder to find. _LATimes

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HASIDIM VS CATHOLIC CHESS SET
<https://tinyurl.com/f9va42fn> _RabihAlameddine

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AS WARMING CLIMATE BRINGS BEARS OUT OF HIBERNATION EARLIER
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Vermonters usually put out bird feeders to attract winged visitors who fill their yards with song and color. But they could attract a far less dainty visitor: black bears.
As bears emerge from their dens in early spring, they’re on the search for food. That can lead them to backyard beehives, birdfeeders, compost piles and even chicken coops.
“They’re super adaptable, they’re very curious, they’re always looking for the next best meal,” said Jaclyn Comeau, bear biologist at the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department.
Reports of bear incidents in Vermont have grown steeply over the past decade, according to department data. While some of that increase can be attributed to changes that made reporting incidents easier, the rise is related to an interconnected set of factors, including changes in the state’s bear population and in human development,
“We have slowly been teaching our bears that our backyards are a good place to find high-calorie, easily accessible foods, They have figured that out, they’re not forgetting it, and we continue to keep reinforcing that behavior.”
The state’s bear population has grown over recent years, from between 4,000 and 6,000 bears in 2018 to between 6,500 and 8,000 bears in 2024, according to population estimates by the state. The latest count is nearly double the objective of 3,500 to 5,500 bears, as outlined by a Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department population model.
The time of year that bears emerge from their dens has also crept earlier and earlier over past decades, Comeau said, likely driven in part by a changing climate that has made Vermont winters shorter and less severe. In Vermont, the emergence has shifted about two weeks earlier over the past 15 or so years, she said, from around April 1 to mid-March.
That means Vermonters need to take steps earlier in the season to prevent bears from making a meal in their backyards, by removing or bear-proofing potential food sources.
When bears get food from human sources, they often keep coming back for more _VtDigger