OLD NEWS

IT'S NATIONAL WICKER DAY!
Portrait of a wicker chair maker taken in the 1860s by Alex V. Olszewsky:
<https://tinyurl.com/36kuc5x2> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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FREDERICK WISEMAN, LEGENDARY DOCUMENTARIAN, DIES AT 96
<https://tinyurl.com/3zd7e6a5>
Frederick Wiseman, a preeminent documentary filmmaker, has died. He was 96.
The filmmaker’s death was announced by his family Monday in a statement released by Zipporah Films, Wiseman’s distribution company.
In a career that lasted nearly 60 years, Wiseman produced and directed 45 films beginning in 1967 with “Titicut Follies,” a documentary on the the patient-inmates of Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts, through 2023’s “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” a documentary on the Troisgros family’s Michelin three-starred restaurant in Ouches, France.
“Wiseman, whose observational approach has often been mischaracterized as objective or omniscient, here drops any pretense to neutrality, so potent and overpowering is his sense of kinship with a fellow artist,” wrote Justin Chang in his 2023 review. “The marriage of sensibilities in front of and behind the camera is the stealthiest meeting in ‘Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,’ and the most unexpectedly satisfying.”
<https://tinyurl.com/mpphup6z>
The filmmaker considered both Cambridge, Mass., and Paris his homes. His films, to an extent, reflected that transatlantic residency in their freshness of perspective. They display an innate curiosity and astonishing degrees of empathy, intelligence and perceptiveness, with subjects ranging from public and social institutions to cultural and specialized spaces and the minutiae of human interactions.
Wiseman’s other films included “High School” (1968), “Welfare” (1975), “Juvenile Court” (1973), “Public Housing” (1997), “La Danse” (2009), “National Gallery” (2014), “Ex Libris — The New York Public Library” (2017) and “City Hall” (2020).
Beyond documentaries, the director also made three fiction films, “Seraphita’s Diary” (1982), “The Last Letter” (2002) and “A Couple” (2022). In reviewing the last, Chang wrote, “I suspect [Wiseman] is no more likely to impose himself on one of his fictions than he would on one of his documentaries, which ‘A Couple’ may resemble more than it appears. Wiseman has spent a career probing the complex inner workings and painfully human errors of America’s establishments, but in marriage itself, he may have found the most fraught, mysterious and unreformable institution of all.”
<https://tinyurl.com/3jbk368t>
Wiseman was in his mid-30s before he made his first full-length movie, but was soon ranked with — and sometimes above — such notable peers as D.A. Pennebaker and Robert Drew for helping to establish the modern documentary as a vital and surprising art form.
Starting with “High School” and the scandalous “Titicut Follies,” he patented a seamless, affecting style, using a crew so tiny that Wiseman served as his own sound engineer. The results led to acclaim, amusement, head-shaking, finger-pointing and — with “Titicut Follies” — prolonged legal action.
“I don’t set out to be confrontational, but I think sometimes the content of the movie runs against people’s expectations and fantasies about the subject matter,” Wiseman told Gawker in 2013.
Wiseman’s vision was to make “as many films as possible about different aspects of American life,” and he often gave his documentaries self-explanatory titles: “Hospital,” “Public Housing,” “Basic Training,” “Boxing Gym.” But he also dramatized how people functioned within those settings: an elderly welfare applicant begging for assistance, a military trainee complaining of harassment, a doctor trying to coax coherent answers out of a dazed heroin addict, sales clerks at Neiman Marcus rehearsing their smiles.
“The institution is also just an excuse to observe human behavior in somewhat defined conditions,” Wiseman told The Associated Press in 2020. “The films are as much about that as they are about institutions.” _LATimes

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WAS
<https://tinyurl.com/44retjer> _DavidShrigley

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TRACEY EMIN: ‘I’VE DONE MORE IN MY LAST FIVE YEARS THAN IN THE WHOLE REST OF MY LIFE’
<https://tinyurl.com/35fk2vet>
Tracey Emin: For a long time there wasn’t a title, and it was only when I came up with A Second Life that we could really curate the show. We kept saying things like “old work, new work, before and after”, and I realised that the really big “before and after” in my life is before cancer and after cancer. My life changed so dramatically since my cancer: it is just so much better, so much happier, so much more fulfilling. I keep saying to myself, if I had a choice and knew what was going to happen, would I have gone for the cancer and have this wonderful, amazing life that I have? Even when I’m sad or unhappy, I’m never as sad or as unhappy as I was before—I can rectify it, I can put it right.
Having had this edge of nihilism always throughout my life, even as a child, then facing this wall of death like I did, and thinking, is this what I want?, I knew, no, it’s not what I want, I want to live! And if I want to live, what’s the point of living unless it’s worthwhile, unless you do something?
I’ve done more in my last five years than in the whole rest of my life. But I didn’t set out thinking, oh, if I survive this, I’ll open an art school and create an amazing art world in the town where I grew up. That all just came afterwards with the joy of living. It’s like I’ve been given a second chance. There was six months to live, and then it’s like someone said, “You know what? I don’t think she’s all bad. Let’s just give her one more chance to see what happens!” And it’s paid off.
<https://tinyurl.com/2zx8xvwa>
Even my first show at White Cube [My Major Retrospective, 1993], people thought that I’d made it up. But I hadn’t, it was all really sincere. It was real. I think I came about at a time when the art world wasn’t looking for sincerity, it was looking for a sort of brashness. And it wasn’t looking for the hand touch. I think that’s why me and Sarah [Lucas] united—because we were interested in things that we’d touched, that were obviously handmade and not necessarily well made. It’s more like a compulsion to create, that’s what’s driven me—the need to be hands-on with everything and touching things.
<https://tinyurl.com/22tadsfk>
A lot of people when they go to my show—and especially young people that haven't seen the bed, haven't ever seen the blankets—they'll see that these things are really made. I didn't hand them out, they’re not fabricated. Everything I do in my studio now it's just me, and Harry [Weller, creative director of the Tracey Emin Studio] occasionally comes in. I don't have any assistants. If I don't feel like working, there is no work—it’s that simple. I think now is a time where I can be more appreciated for what I do as an artist, not just for what the work is about, but also how I go about it.
<https://tinyurl.com/48y2bxvd>
I’ve been making bronzes forever, but the large figurative ones only since 2016, when I took a year’s sabbatical and learned how to make my first giant bronze. I got so much help from the people at the Louise Bourgeois foundation, working at the New York foundry. It really was amazing for me. Before I became friends with Louise, I just made really tiny bronzes. But Louise’s sense of scale was colossal, and that really inspired me: a tiny woman making giant things. She just made what she wanted to make, and it was fantastic how she took the challenge of all these different materials. _Louisa Buck _ArtNewspaper

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/4d5mx5aa> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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HOLPING, NOT HOLPING by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/3bh8b69u>
“Thak you for holping us,” I guess an Afghan child wrote in September 2021, upon arriving in the US as part of Operation Allies Welcome, the program that evacuated tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked with US and coalition occupation forces, who, along with their families, were facing imminent execution when the US began withdrawing from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. Over 73,000 folks were granted Special Immigrant Visa status and settled in the US. Operation Welcome Allies was the military/civilian/private sector support campaign while their asylum claims were being processed.
This drawing caught my attention while passing through an otherwise emptied Dulles airport late the other night. To say there’s a Twombly-esque quality to it acknowledges the all-over-ness of the composition, while not doing justice to the style of the marks. Many feel to me like abstractions of Arabic writing elements, in the same way Twombly’s loops <https://tinyurl.com/3xe7ekmw> can feel like cursive Ls or Is. The fat Arabic text, written in outline but not completely filled in, helps with that reading. I cannot get a plausible translation, though, so if you have a suggestion, hmu.
Anyway, when I saw this, I wondered if the child whose life the US government had put in mortal danger, then saved, had since been kidnapped by the US government and thrown into a concentration camp or deported back to certain death. _greg.org

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HOW YOUR EMAIL FOUND ME AFTER GOING THROUGH ALL THE FRIEZE EMAILS.
<https://tinyurl.com/278trfkn>
"Théodore Géricault on His Deathbed," 1824, by Charles Emile Callande de Champmartin _CarolinaAMiranda

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33. PENNY by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/5ce2jbk9>
For the country’s first 133 years, we never put a real person on our coins. We had worked too hard, struggled too bloodily, to get out from under the thumb of the monarchists, and we weren’t about to embrace some kingly cult of personality by putting someone’s face on a piece of money everybody touches.
But 1909 was the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, and there was strong desire in the country to honor him. The Civil War had ended just 44 years prior; Lincoln was revered for his shrewd genius and remarkable good humor, for saving the country. And so we have his penny.
There’s a poetry both beautiful and sad that he’s on our smallest, most common coin. Beautiful for the radical humility: Lincoln, who rose from nothing to become our greatest president, pictured on the smallest unit of exchange, representing government of the people, all of whom touch the penny regardless of wealth. Sad because the penny has become so devalued, a negligible nuisance to be rounded away or discarded altogether. His face has been rubbed smooth.
And now the Treasury has ceased production of pennies, inflation being what it is—a dime today is worth a penny in 1967—and mining zinc to produce the coins being an environmental nightmare, and copper being so expensive. We have to retire the penny. Everyone has known it for a long time. But it’s sad to say goodbye, as we must, to the smallest unit of our faith in union. _TheImpatientReader

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RIP JESSE JACKSON
(Jacob Lawrence's portrait of Jesse Jackson, created in 1970 for cover of Time magazine,
<https://tinyurl.com/2wm36bsh>
And here is Jacob Lawrence's portrait of Jesse Jackson
as it appeared on the cover of Time magazine, April 6, 1970
<https://tinyurl.com/49tkcsdp> _MichaelLobel

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MUSEO DE ARTE MODERNO DE BOGOTÁ DISMISSES LONGTIME ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
<https://tinyurl.com/3bckrf9b>
The Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (Mambo) has abruptly announced it will replace its artistic director, Eugenio Viola, who has been in the role for more than seven years. A spokesperson for the Colombian museum confirmed that it has already begun the search for Viola’s successor. The institution first announced the news on its social media channels, stating that the change was part of a “comprehensive review”.
“The board of directors ended my contract early, not due to any artistic or leadership deficiencies,” Viola said in a statement to The Art Newspaper. “My departure followed my decision to raise concerns with the board in September 2025 regarding the progressive deterioration of working conditions—concerns shared by several team members. Instead of conducting an internal review, the board dismissed these issues and terminated my contract.”
Viola said that the decision was made public last Friday (6 February) in social media with commenting disabled, preventing any public dialogue about the decision. “These actions do not align with the principles of transparency, due process and open exchange that any cultural institution should uphold,” he says. “I leave with my integrity intact, having acted in good faith, supported my team and consistently maintained ethical standards.” _ArtNewspaper

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SILO SAINT JACOB, IL
<https://tinyurl.com/6tjnufn7> _RuralIndexingProject

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IDENTITY CRISIS by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/sh3z001>
It's a busy time for museum branding mavens. The Getty has unveiled a new logo by Fred & Farid, replacing the Saul Bass design adopted in 1993. Last year the Huntington introduced a new "H" monogram with bespoke typography and palette. The Philadelphia Museum of Art also got a new griffin logo and name ("Philadelphia Art Museum"), only to roll back the latter after critics began calling it PhArt. That's a reminder that museums can be downstream of culture. The acronym "LACMA" was apparently invented by the public, not a branding expert.
The Philadelphia logo actually looks like something. That's rare. Museum directors tend to read more into a brand than regular civilians might. ("The Huntington's new brand visually unifies its Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, showcasing the depth of each collection and the powerful connections and cross-fertilization among them." Huh? It's an H.) The Getty's new logo is also conceived as a puzzle picture. The four quadrilaterals represent travertine blocks or mosaic tiles—and the Getty Museum, Foundation, Conservation Institute, and Research Institute.
The best logos can be appreciated as great works of design. Saul Bass' work falls into this category. Yet I've never felt that art museum logos as a group have any more visual punch than those for corporate clients. Why?
<http://tiny.cc/zh3z001>
<http://tiny.cc/1i3z001>
<http://tiny.cc/2i3z001> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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PHILIPPE ROUSSEAU, CHARDIN AND HIS MODELS, 1867,
A portrait of 18th-century French painter Jean Siméon Chardin
surrounded by some of the objects that appear in his still lifes
<https://tinyurl.com/52b4p7my> _JesseLocker

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MUSEUM ACQUISITIONS ROUND-UP
<https://tinyurl.com/nyw5rwhu>
Die Erdzeitalter (Ages of the World) (2014) by Anselm Kiefer
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
The Israel Museum has acquired a fourth work by Anselm Kiefer for its permanent collection: the 17ft-tall sculpture Die Erdzeitalter (Ages of the World), donated by the Miami property developer and collector Martin Z. Margulies. The work, which consists of stacked canvases, dried sunflowers, rubble and lead books flanked by two paintings, evokes the apocalyptic aftermath of a disaster and is described as “part totem and part funeral pyre”. It was made for Kiefer’s 2014 retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The Israel Museum’s outgoing director, who organised the institution’s first Kiefer solo exhibition in 1984, says the German artist’s work helps “process complex questions around cultural memory and life in landscapes impacted by war”.
<https://tinyurl.com/34dwvbr5>
Pachycephalosaurus dinosaur skull
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC
Excavated in South Dakota in 2024, this virtually complete skull of a Pachycephalosaurus dinosaur was donated to the National Museum of Natural History. These dome-headed bipedal herbivores lived around 67 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous Period. The skull will be CT-scanned to understand the shape and size of the dinosaur’s brain. Matthew Carrano, the museum’s dinosaurs curator, says that this is a spectacular example: “We almost never get to see the animal’s face or the teeth or other parts of the head, because they usually have broken away.”
<https://tinyurl.com/yc2m69h9>
Genre scene (around 1526-27) by Maarten van Heemskerck
Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, the Netherlands
This early genre scene by Maarten van Heemskerck (1498-1574) has been purchased by the Frans Hals Museum after it featured in a multi-venue exhibition of the Haarlem-born painter’s work in 2024-25. Haarlem painters are known for genre painting, but the style only became popular in the 17th century, so this is a particularly early example. It is also the only known genre scene by Van Heemskerck, who primarily painted portraits and biblical stories. The sitters are anonymous, and the closely cropped composition gives little context for what is going on—some art historians speculate it may have originally been part of a larger painting, with another figure on the right. Lidewij de Koekkoek, the director of the Frans Hals Museum, says the work demonstrates Van Heemskerck’s “steady hand” and “the high standard of painting in 16th-century Haarlem”. _ArtNewspaper

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DUANE KEISER. CAT ON A SCREENED PORCH. 3/9/2017
<https://tinyurl.com/a37smj5z>
Jim Holland (b. 1955). Chairs and windows.
<https://tinyurl.com/yjp5k5hw> _RabihAlameddine

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INCIDENT INVOLVING VISITORS WITH ISRAELI FLAGS
The Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, one of Spain’s top art museums, said on Monday that it was seeking an investigation into a widely publicized incident involving visitors who came to the museum with Stars of David and Israeli flags.
Video of the incident went viral after being published by Okdiario, a conservative Spanish publication. In the video, security officers appear to call for the removal of three women from the museum. As they begin the process of escorting the women out, one officer says that “some members of the public are being bothered” by these visitors.
Okdiario reported that before the incident, which the publication termed “racist harassment,” other visitors had shouted phrases such as “genocidal maniacs” at these women. The video, which runs nearly a minute and a half, does not show what preceded this incident.
The incident was also covered by conservative Israeli outlets such as Ynetnews, which also reported that the women were Israeli tourists.
Some Israeli politicians issued statements about the incident. Dana Ehrlich, an Israeli ambassador to Spain, wrote, “We have seen how three Jewish women, with a Star of David and an Israeli flag, were expelled from a museum in Madrid for carrying those symbols.” Her post also stated that the Israeli flag “represents thousands of years of history of the Jewish people.”
In a post that has gained more than 4,000 likes, the European Jewish Congress called the incident “troubling and unacceptable.” Moreover, the European Jewish Congress claimed that the incident “raises serious concerns about discrimination within a public cultural institution.” _ARTnews

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HORSE FOR LUNAR NEW YEAR.
A painting by Joris Hoefnagel, late 17th century
<https://tinyurl.com/s4un4dr2> _PublicDomainReview

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ARTIST TREVOR PAGLEN THINKS STEVEN SPIELBERG’S DISCLOSURE DAY LOOKS AWFULLY FAMILIAR
On Super Bowl Sunday, Universal Pictures debuted the first full-length trailer <https://tinyurl.com/ym76h93d> for Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s latest extraterrestrial epic. Scattered throughout the trailer are repeated references to cardinals, presented as a kind of harbinger of alien life. If that sounds a little familiar, eagle-eyed art viewer, you’re not alone.
Artist Trevor Paglen took to last week to note the visual link between his 2024 and 2025 shows —both titled “Cardinals” and exploring the history and present of UFO photography—and the new Spielberg film. “Not even mad it’s just kinda weird—I think he should buy some art 😂😂😂,” Paglen wrote.
“I saw that Spielberg trailer and there are all these cardinals showing up in different scenes. I was like, I’m pretty sure I know where this guy is getting that from,” Paglen said in a phone call last week. “I know where that metaphor comes from.”
Paglen said the idea of linking cardinals to UFOs originated in his 2023 video installation Doty, which profiled Richard Doty, an Air Force counterintelligence officer and self-described “Mirage Man” who claimed to have spread UFO lore as part of a public disinformation campaign to distract from Air Force technology programs. According to Doty, the Air Force’s unofficial code name for UFOs is “Cardinals.”
But, Paglen added, that code name was not public knowledge before Doty was exhibited in his 2024 Altman Siegel show. “It’s really hard for me to imagine that they would have gotten that image from anywhere else, because it just isn’t out there except in that body of work,” he said.
And as for whether “Cardinals” is truly an Air Force code name, it’s probably worth taking Doty’s claims with a grain of salt. In a press release for the 2024 show, Paglen noted that Doty later repositioned himself as a UFO “whistleblower,” claiming to reveal the “real” UFO programs he had supposedly helped conceal. _ARTnews

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IT'S INTERNATIONAL ZEBRA DAY!
Screenprint by John Randolph Carter, 1971:
<https://tinyurl.com/45e58nvp> _‪PeterHuestis‬