New York Academy of Art Names New Dean
David Kratz, president of the New York Academy of Art, announced today that Peter Drake will become the academy's new dean of academic affairs effective January 10, 2010. Kratz said, “After a thorough search which included many outstanding candidates, we felt that Drake was the ideal choice for the position based on his standing in the contemporary art world, his long history as a member of the academy's faculty, and his support of the school's unique mission.”
At the Drawing Center Drake was an artist and curator from 1985 until 1989. From 1987 until 1989, he wrote reviews for _FlashArt Magazine_. For the past nineteen years, he has been an adjunct faculty member at Parsons the New School for Design where he participated on every level of the BFA and MFA programs.
November 30, 2009
Bill DiPaola’s "Time's Up" Archive Moves To NYU Library
More than twenty years ago a Lower East Side plumber turned environmental apostle named Bill DiPaola founded an activist group called Time’s Up and began organizing parties meant to publicize the dangers of acid rain, nuclear power, and pesticides, according to the
New York Times.
DiPaola spread word of the events with wheat paste and photocopied fliers, converting lampposts on Avenue B and St. Mark’s Place into billboards upon which to promote events like bike rides and Earth Day parades. Over the years, DiPaola held on to those fliers. He also collected posters and communiqués from other local groups—many of them long vanished—that meshed with his conservationist agenda.
There were squatters who used sweat equity to make abandoned buildings habitable. There were the men and women who carted rubble from empty plots and then returned to plant trees and flowering shrubs. And there were groups like the Lower East Side Collective and Reclaim the Streets, that organized public spectacles, replete with fire breathers and stilt walkers, in an effort to provoke questions about ownership of public space.
Now the old fliers and other material, including correspondence, photographs, and videotapes, are about to become part of a collection run by the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, which record labor history and radical politics, at New York University. In mid-November DiPaola signed an agreement to begin transferring items there.
“I call this the true history project,” he said recently as he stood in his Lower East Side apartment, where volunteers helped sift through the collection. “The body of work we saved shows a side of things that not everybody knows about.”
Tamiment seemed like a natural home for the items, DiPaola said, so he contacted Dr. Michael Nash, the director of the library, and offered to donate his collection. Dr. Nash said he quickly became interested in the Time’s Up material, which sheds light on issues and groups that helped shape the Lower East Side in the last quarter century.
“Time’s Up has, in many ways, defined the ways in which environmentalism challenges our economic, political, and social system that has been built around the automobile, private space, and policies that undermine our ecology,” Dr. Nash wrote in an e-mail message, adding: “Time’s Up has been at the center of a new generation of activist politics in New York.”
November 30, 2009
Kansas's Nerman Museum Receives $1 Million
A suburban Kansas City philanthropist and art collector is donating one million dollars to the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, reports the
Associated Press.
The gift, from Mary Cohen, will allow the museum at Johnson County Community College to add to its collection of more than 850 works. An endowment will be named for the donor and her late husband, Johnson County banker Barton P. Cohen.
Before the Overland Park museum opened, the Cohens donated money to establish project space for area artists. Museum director Bruce Hartman says the Cohens have long championed artists in the region, and his purchases will reflect this.
November 23, 2009
University of Illinois Art Program Could Be Cut
A two-million-dollar University of Illinois art program that has educated only a few dozen students in the last four years is under review after the resignation of its champion, former chancellor Richard Herman, according to the
Chicago Tribune.
Supporters say the unique program, based at the Phillips Collection modern art museum in Washington, gives students from art-starved central Illinois an opportunity to take classes and get internship experience surrounded by the works of Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, and Georgia O’Keeffe.
But the program, known as Illinois at the Phillips, has fallen short of enrollment goals, with about forty-five of the program’s undergraduate and graduate students having participated. Herman paid for the program primarily through a general campus fund he controlled, instead of through the College of Fine and Applied Arts, with the idea that it would become self-supporting through private giving and tuition revenue from Washington residents who can also take the classes. That hasn’t happened.
“The chancellor is gone. The program exists because he was a very, very strong supporter of it and saw great value,” said vice provost Richard Wheeler, chair of the three-member committee reviewing whether it should continue. “It was put in place at a time of less financial constraint than we have now.... At a time when people are scanning budgets, this is one that jumps off the page.”
November 16, 2009
Getty Leadership Institute Moves to Claremont Graduate University
The Getty Leadership Institute, largely devoted to the professional development of museum executives, is moving from Los Angeles to Claremont Graduate University, reports the
Los Angeles Times. Funded by a renewable three-year, $2.2 million grant and renamed the Getty Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University, the collaborative venture will be run by the university’s School of Arts and Humanities and Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management.
The grant will fund the museum Leadership Institute, a popular program of intensive three-week summer courses, and an additional, yet-to-be-determined program, said Deborah Marrow, director of the Getty Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Funds will be raised for other projects as plans develop.
The move was sparked by an effort to operate the institute more efficiently and cost-effectively, but it evolved into a search for a partnership that would lead to new opportunities, said institute director Phil Nowlen. Claremont got the nod because of its educational mission, recently established arts management program, and proximity to Los Angeles.
Joseph C. Hough, the university’s interim president, called the new relationship “one of those serendipitous events where both parties will benefit quite handsomely.”
Founded in 1979, the Getty Leadership Institute was originally headquartered in New Year and offered its programs at UC Berkeley. The institute has been located at the Getty Center since 1999. The museum Leadership Institute, which admits applicants through a competitive process, has offered courses to more than one thousand participants from the US and twenty other countries. Additional programs include Next Generation, designed to help emerging museum leaders, and courses attended by museum directors and their board presidents.
November 12, 2009
Getty Conservation Institute and Egypt to Conserve King Tut's Tomb
The tomb of Egypt's Tutankhamen—better known as King Tut—is coming under new management, reports the
Los Angeles Times.
In a five-year partnership that was formally announced yesterday, the J. Paul Getty Trust said it will work with Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities to draft and implement a conservation and management plan of the tomb and its wall paintings.
The partnership will involve the Getty Conservation Institute, which is based in Los Angeles, and the SCA, which is located in Cairo.
The tomb of Tutankhamen is one of the most popular attractions in Egypt. The new project will determine how to safeguard the site's treasures and slow the rate of deterioration.
The project is expected to cost the Getty about $1.5 million over the five years, according to Tim Whalen, director of the Getty Conservation Institute. The Getty's team will be led by Jeanne Marie Teutonico and will comprise six other specialists.
The $1.5 million figure does not include staff and other labor expenses, Whalen said.
Egypt's SCA is also expected to contribute as-yet-undetermined financial resources and personnel to the project.
"I want to stress the comprehensive nature of this project," Whalen said.
November 11, 2009
Architect Peter Eisenman Named Charles Gwathmey Professor of Architecture at Yale
Starting in January, architect Peter Eisenman will be the first Charles Gwathmey Professor of Architecture at Yale University. He has thus far served as Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor of Architectural Design.
According to the
Yale Daily News, university president Richard Levin announced on Friday that American fashion designer Ralph Lauren endowed a permanent professorship in honor of the late architect Charles Gwathmey, whose last project was the renovation of Rudolph Hall and the design of the Loria Center last fall. Eisenman will be the first appointee to the position. The university did not disclose the amount of Lauren’s donation, but the minimum required for a permanent professorship is three million dollars, according to the Yale Tomorrow Fundraising Campaign’s website.
Eisenman said “there was an immediate void” last August 3, when Gwathmey passed away.
“It felt like we had to do something,” Eisenman added.
Robert Siegel, Gwathmey’s partner at the architecture firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, took the initiative. He began creating a list of potential donors who could help create a professorship in Gwathmey’s name at the Yale School of Architecture. At the top of the list were designer Ralph Lauren and his wife, Ricky Lauren—close friends of the Gwathmeys. Bette-Ann worked for Lauren as the vice president of corporate affairs and philanthropy.
As soon as Siegel called the Laurens to discuss the possibility of contributing along with five other donors to the founding of the professorship, the Laurens immediately said they would fund the entirety of the position, regardless of costs, Eisenman said.
Lauren called the Charles Gwathmey professorship “a tribute we pay to an extraordinary artist and a dear friend,” in a press release.
Eisenman said he is honored to be appointed. “I was always a Jiminy Cricket on Charles’s shoulder, telling him ‘Charlie do this’ or ‘Charlie don’t do this,’ Eisenman said. “But now that I’m carrying his name, he’s sort of become my conscience.”
November 09, 2009
CalArts Launches New Art and Technology Degree Program
The California Institute of the Arts in Valencia is revving up a new program and a new degree—master of fine arts in art and technology, reports the
Los Angeles Times.
When the school launched its Center for Integrated Media about fifteen years ago, as “a place to investigate art-making with computers…we were pretty far ahead of the curve,” says Tom Leeser, who has directed that center for eight years and will head the new master’s degree program that’s branching off from it. “All the other institutions have caught up with us…. Now it’s evaluating these new technologies critically” that seems to be the next step forward.
Leeser said students in the two-year program will get plenty of the how-to’s of applying whatever the world’s tech genies come up with next to visual art, performance art, and art that intersects with the Internet’s social-networking possibilities. But, writes the
Times' Mike Boehm, the plan is to interweave the making of art very closely with the critical thinking that goes into art theory, so that graduates will not only know what they’re doing, but also how it fits into the world of ideas about art and society.
November 05, 2009
In Wake of Art Professor's Fabricated Resume, Legal Battle Ensues Between Dongguk University and Yale
A major Korean university is engaged in a heated legal battle with Yale University, according to the
New York Times.
Dongguk University, a 103-year-old Buddhist institution based in Seoul, has accused Yale of negligence and a cover-up after the American university mistakenly confirmed a Dongguk art professor’s claims of having a Ph.D. from Yale. Robert A. Weiner, the lead lawyer for Dongguk, said Yale’s response to the ensuing scandal added insult to the injury, and he denounced “the cultural arrogance of not recognizing the harm you’re doing in Korean culture.”
Yale argues that while it had made mistakes, it did nothing that merited court action.
The controversy began in 2005, when Dongguk hired Shin Jeong-ah, a rising star in the art world, as a professor. Shortly after her hiring, questions about her credentials arose and Dongguk sent a letter to Yale asking for authentication of a document provided by Shin. The document, which appeared to have been signed by a Yale administrator, stated that Shin had earned the doctoral degree.
The confirmation letter was a fake, but the Yale administrator whose name was on it confirmed its authenticity in a fax to Dongguk, apparently not checking the university’s records or even noticing that the administrator’s name had been misspelled.
Dongguk officials and Korean reporters pressed Yale on the question of Shin’s degree again in 2007 as rumors persisted. After checking its records, Yale announced that Shin had no degree but also initially denied having received the original inquiry from Dongguk and said documents suggesting otherwise had been forged.
The growing scandal made headlines in Korea and became known there as Shin-gate. Shin resigned and was eventually convicted of falsifying records and of embezzlement. Yale did not reveal its mistake in confirming the 2005 letter until later that year, saying the error had occurred “in the rush of business.” Yale issued an apology to Dongguk on December 29, 2007.
Dongguk filed suit for fifty million dollars the next year in Federal District Court in Connecticut, saying Yale had engaged in “reckless” and “wanton” conduct, and had defamed Dongguk, which “was publicly humiliated and deeply shamed in the eyes of the Korean population.” the university said it lost millions in contributions and the opportunity to build a new law school.
Yale fought back with briefs arguing that despite the error, it had caused no harm. “Instead of facing up to its own responsibility for hiring such a person,” the university argued, “Dongguk seeks to shift the blame for its own inadequate efforts on to Yale.”
November 03, 2009
