News from Around the Art World: August 28, 2017
As Harvey Hits Texas, Art Museums Shutter
"On Friday morning, as Hurricane Harvey approached the Gulf Coast of Texas, museums in the region closed, saying that they would keep their doors closed for the weekend... Among the institutions that closed early or completely on Friday were the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Galveston Arts Center, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont, and the Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, which is near where Harvey made landfall on Friday evening." -ARTnews
This post (Via ARTnews) is being continuously updated with details about Harvey’s effects on Texas’s art community.
Here’s the latest site plan for the Obama Presidential Center
The Obama Foundation has just released the most detailed look at its plan for Jackson Park yet. An aerial illustration depicting the Obama Presidential Center has been sent along with a formal announcement regarding the planned parking garage for the new South Side campus. The new site map is a refinement to the original which was unveiled in May. -Curbed
Ettore Sottsass: The Met Breuer looks back at the colorful work of the late postmodern designer.
"Serious fun. That’s what the disruptive design genius Ettore Sottsass was up to with his furniture, ceramics, buildings, glassware, textiles, jewelry, and photographs—in other words, with his life, which ended on New Year’s Eve in 2007, at the age of ninety. For all the sensuous whimsy and nose-thumbing irreverence of his best-known work—the lipstick-red plastic Valentine typewriter for Olivetti, from 1968; the more-is-more pile on of color and form of the “Carlton” Room Divider, from 1981—Sottsass was at heart a philosopher, with a deep faith in the power of objects. As he told Charlie Rose in 2004, “If you have good design, you will have a better society.”" -4Columns
Four Uncompromising Finnish Women Artists
"The story of the Finnish modernist painter Helene Schjerfbeck is a fascinating one, which was first told in America in 1992, 25 years ago, when she was the subject of an exhibition at the National Academy of Design. Writing for The New York Times (November 27, 1992), Roberta Smith characterized the exhibition of this neglected artist as “revelatory [and] bittersweet.” Smith’s observation still holds true, perhaps even more so, in the exhibition Independent Visions: Helene Schjerfbeck and Her Contemporaries at Scandinavia House (April 29 – October 7, 2017), which fleshes out a story of independence and perseverance that keeps needing to be told, if only to remind us how complicated and chaotic history is." -Hyperallergic
STEINBERG: ‘Wall of Respect’ less remembered but more significant
"The Wall is important, not as enduring artwork — the building burned in 1971, the murals are gone — but as a statement that people who are routinely ignored can still manifest themselves, at least in their own neighborhood. The Wall was influential; hundreds of similar displays of pride went up in cities across the country." -Sun Times
Top Image: A satellite view of Harvey as it neared Texas on Thursday. COURTESY NASA