Your Cultural Concierge! VoCA offers critical commentary on the Canadian art scene, with a focus on Toronto. Featuring exhibition previews, critics picks, interviews and in-depth articles on art in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Halifax.
VoCA is very sad about a rumour that we hope isn’t true.
YDESSA HENDELES IS CLOSING HER ART FOUNDATION.
One of Canada’s finest curators - if not the finest - has, apparently decided to focus her energies on curating in Europe, saying that it’s too expensive to maintain her eponymous foundation and to keep collecting.
We can only hope that she continues to curate in this country, and that she changes her mind.
Visit now (Saturdays only or by appointment) before it’s too late at 778 King St. West Toronto. Phone: (416) 413-9400.
The National Gallery of Canada is proud to announce that Marc Mayer, current Director of the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal, has been named Director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada.
New National Gallery director Marc Mayer. Image: gallery.ca
Born in Sudbury, Ontario Marc Mayer earned a degree in art history at McGill University. In 2004, Marc Mayer became the Director of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal where he has organized exhibitions such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Acquisitions récentes and is currently working on an exhibitions featuring Thomas Nozkoski and Claude Tousignant.
From 2001 to 2004, he was Deputy Director for Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, where he has organized exhibitions such as Judy Chicago: The Dinner Party and led preparations for the Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective and catalogue in 2005, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museums of Fine Arts, Houston. He was also involved in establishing the Elizabeth A. Sackler Centre for Feminist Art which accompanies the gift of Judy Chicago’s work.
Plus - As featured in the November 2008 issue of W magazine: The CANADIAN premiere of Herb and Dorothy, a documentary by Megumi Sasaki about a postal clerk and a librarian who built one of the most important contemporary art collections in history.
BAILOUT: The 2008 Members’ Exhibition & Sale
Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Art, Toronto
9 - 18 December, 2008
Sale: Thursday, December 18, 8 pm
Mercer Union’s “stimulus package to put the US bailout to shame” includes drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures and multiples all priced at $149.99 from hot Canadian artists including several VoCA favorites:
Dealer Angela Westwater offers her thoughts at Art Basel Miami Beach. From a recent issue of the Art Newspaper:
“The art market is only part of the art world. The turmoil in the global economy distracts us from where the true value of art really resides – its sustaining benefits as spiritual sustenancy and cultural legacy.”
– Angela Westwater, Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has been elected the Artistic Director of the documenta 13, which is scheduled to take place from June 9th, 2012 to September 16th, 2012 in Kassel, Germany.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Image: Ryszard Kasiewicz/documenta13.de
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev works as a curator and writer in Rome, Turin and New York. She is currently the Chief Curator at one of VoCA’s favorite museums, the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin and was the Artistic Director for the 16th Sydney Biennale (2008).
From 1999 to 2001 she was Senior Curator of Exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center – a MoMA Affiliate. Previously, she organized exhibitions as an independent curator in different countries.
Pieces from Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, on until January 26, 2009 at P.S.1 in New York.
Check back here for updates on how she plans to shape the next Documenta, in 2012.
VoCA’s favorite retail design guru Murray Moss speaks to the New York Times as Design Miami opens in tandem with Art Basel Miami Beach et al, which the Times appropriately calls “a cultural caviar-stuffed buffet.”
Studio Job, Bavaria Screen, 2008, (Courtesy of Moss Gallery, New York). Image: nytimes.com
Incidentally, Studio Job, the cutting-edge Dutch designers who designed the screen above, will speak in Toronto on February 6, 2009 as part of the Azure Trade Talks. Please click HERE.
He exhibited alongside Damien Hirst in the 1990 New Contemporaries exhibition at the ICA but afterwards dropped from view, before making a “comeback” with Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore in 1999.
Mark Leckey, Felix Gets Broadcasted 2007. Image: guardian.co.uk
Jonathan Jones of the Guardian loves this guy: “Mark Leckey is a fantastically creative example of this method. There’s a quality of William Burroughs’s cut-ups to his remorseless, frantic hybrid works of art, like his Soundsystem, which splices together fragments of high and low culture and everyday life, and his brilliant video The March of the Big White Barbarians, which weaves images of London’s 20th-century public art - all those clunking metal sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi - into a hypnotic, endlessly fascinating dream of the city’s secret life.”
This Thursday, Art Basel Miami Beach gets under way, as do the vast number of alternate fairs, and the entire design section that has emerged as a compliment to all the art.
It remains to be seen what the effects of the economic downturn will have on the fairs - and the hype. Stay tuned.
Tim Noble and Sue Webster, $, 2001. Image: ps1.org
‘‘Today I’m standing in a house full of art,” says Alan Roth, 33, publisher of 944 Magazine and president of TAI Entertainment, a party promoting and marketing company. “I can’t believe I have all this work.‘
Check out this article from the Miami Herald on local “starry-eyed” collectors HERE.
Andrea Carson writes on contemporary art, architecture and design...