[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/210064574″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

At his Facebook page, the moderator of The Review Panel (and editor of artcritical.com) David Cohen recounted an amusing episode  last weekend when he took a class of students from the New York Studio School students to the American Academy. “I had the students play the game the panel will play next week – awarding three imaginary purchase prizes. Awarded to artists not works, no consideration of factors like ” so and so deserves a break, so and so is well known already”, purely on merit. five students, two laissez faire males and three strong willed women. From the short list of twelve after a round of general advocacy and votes taken, Harry Roseman was the clear front runner. After some debate, Brenda Goodman emerges for second place. But then there is fierce battle for the last spot. Two of the women are adamant John Walker fans, an impassioned third, an Irishwoman, argues as if her life depends upon it for Kyle Staver. The other two admire the strength of her argument, and do indeed like Staver, but won’t budge in their votes for Walker and carry the men with them.

The two shows are a contrast of medium proclivity: while new technologies predominate at the Triennial, an international survey of early-career artists filling all floors of the New Museum’s Bowery headquarters, the Invitational has a bias towards painting and artists of all career stages. The Triennial has been curated by Lauren Cornell of the New Museum and artist Ryan Trecartin while the Invitational is selected by a committee of academicians.

John Yau, the eminent poet and respected critic, has been a regular guest of The Review Panel. Our other two speakers are newcomers: Sharon Butler is the veteran blogger at Two Coats of Paint, while Noah Dillon has been Associate Editor at artcritical.com since last summer.

The post April 2015: Sharon Butler, Noah Dillon and John Yau with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

The Whitney Biennial, arguably, is an academy of the moment.  But New York hosts two venerable, national visual arts institutions that boast the word academy in their title: The National Academy of Design and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Their annual exhibitions don’t garner the press and attention of the Whitney, or even the raucous, spirited Brucennial for that matter, but the academies have a singular advantage over most institutions and festivals: selection processes (for invitationals and membership alike) rest in the hands of living artists.

The National Academy has dropped the confusing “design” from its day-to-day name—to its 19th-century founders, design meant disegno in the renaissance sense, but today most people think of teapots.  And it has been experiencing a veritable renaissance itself since the start of the 2011-12 season when its stunning program of renovations was unveiled.  Suddenly, the old warhorse looked sprightly.

Tomorrow (May 17) Arts and Letters, as it is colloquially called, will open its none-too-catchy titled “Exhibition of Work by Newly Elected Members and Recipients of Honors and Awards”.  It follows on the heels of the annual invitational that opened the same spring week as the Whitney.  Make no mistake, however: this is a show of artists more likely to persist in the consciousness of connoisseurs than many in the flashy, headline grabbing, portentous museum surveys that eclipse such an event.  In place of themes that professional curators come up with are individuals of quality selected by revered peers.  The award selection committee at the American Academy consisted of Lois Dodd, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, Malcolm Morley, Thomas Nozkowski, Judy Pfaff, Dorothea Rockburne, Peter Saul, and its chair, Joel Shapiro.

Among cash prizes of $10,000 each, to be distributed at a ceremonial at which Chuck Close will deliver the keynote address, are the Jimmy Ernst Award for a lifetime achievement, picked up by sculptor of zany furnishings and decorations Forrest Myers; the Merit Medal for Painting, awarded to Joyce Pensato; other awards to John Newman and Rebecca Smith;  prizes earmarked for young artists going to Nathlie Provosty, Elisa Soliven and Nicole Wittenberg.  The exhibition also includes artists in the invitational from whom works were purchased on behalf of American museums, among them Cora Cohen,  Suzanne McClelland and Ann Pibal. New artist and architecture members inducted this year (the academy also elects writers and musicians) include Lynda Benglis, Elizabeth Diller, Kenneth Frampton, Robert Gober and Kara Walker.

It is a matter of some pride to me personally to note artists on these lists who have also featured in the pages of this magazine, received attention at The Review Panel, or were subjects of shows that I helped organize.  I will also mention having written for the catalog of Wittenberg’s debut New York solo show opening at Freight & Volume Gallery in Chelsea next week.  Critics don’t go out of their way to cultivate academic tastes, but it is validating to find commonality with an academy as august as this one.

American Academy of Arts and Letters, 633 West 155 Street at Broadway, New York City, 212-368-5900, open Thursday to Sunday, 1 to 4 pm (closed Memorial Day)

Nicole Wittenberg, from May 24 at Freight & Volume Gallery, 530 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212-691-7700

The post When Academic Isn’t a Dirty Word appeared first on artcritical.

Growing up in small town Virginia, neighborhood children of Jewish, Armenian, Greek, Irish, you-name-it descent did everything from making mud pies, building forts in the woods, sledding, and trick-or-treating together.  We were inseparable.  Like other ethnic communities, my family also tried to assimilate: pancake dinners, the country club, carpools, leaving out cookies for Santa, etc.  I was even baptized in the local Methodist church, despite both my parents being of Druze ancestry. Unfortunately, I wasn’t taught the Arabic language and I only know the names of food and curse words as a result.  We still managed to travel a few times to Lebanon as a family and I have vivid memories of those fascinating visits.

For Arabs, hospitality lies at the heart of who they are. My father owned restaurants and nightclubs (one after another).  Number two was called The Shiek and it had a Middle Eastern theme.  My mother was known for the delicious desserts she made for this establishment.  I have fond memories of listening to great live music at my dad’s club with everyone from Chubby Checker to Fats Domino, and of meeting celebrities like Frank Zappa and the Herman’s Hermits. Pre-rocker Pat Benatar made up part of the house band along with someone accompanying her on a grand piano.  She belted out slow, beautifully pitched songs while guests dined on exquisite Italian cuisine.  On breaks from college, I enjoyed bartending, hostessing, and waiting tables at The Farmer’s Market, my father’s last restaurant.

My mother was an amazing cook and she helped plan the menus throughout my father’s career.  At home, while our neighbors were chowing down on TV dinners and tuna casseroles, the Rafeys were happily trying out the many recipes my mother had gathered from Julia Childs and others.   And my parents entertained often, which had a huge influence on me. It’s always rewarding to share food with friends and family, who appreciate my joy which is a big part of it all.

After I moved to New York in 1984 to complete my degree in Museum Studies, I began taking in my baked goods to share with colleagues at The Hispanic Society and the Cooper Hewitt Museum, where I had internships.  After 30 years, I continue to make the same chocolate cookie crusted cheesecake with its hint of Crème de Menthe and Crème de Cacao, for staff, artists, and art handlers at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Along with new artist friends, I’ve added many new recipes to the mix, exchanging recipes with artists who have come in over the years to help install their work for the Academy shows. Bob Yasuda, for instance, is one of the most inventive and adventurous cooks I have encountered.  Justen Ladda gave me a simple recipe for delicious cheese filled popovers that I continue to use; and, in exchange, I gave him seeds from my terrace for the public garden that he designed and maintains on the Lower East Side.  Just last year, Robert Chambers and Mette Tommerup, both having been included in Academy exhibitions, gave me a most unusual cake pan before they returned to Florida.

Following is the simplest recipe for a Middle Eastern dessert I know.  Some call it, Kanafa, while others say, “Kanafi”, or Knefeh…and its origin can also be disputed. Whatever they call it, everyone agrees that it’s delicious!

Ingredients

Kataifi (frozen shredded fillo dough)

2-3 bars butter

orange blossom water

sugar

water

ricotta cheese (2 small containers)

Directions

Thaw the Kataifi for an hour.

In a bowl, pull it apart and pour melted butter on top, making sure it soaks through entirely.

Heat ricotta cheese for 5 minutes in a saucepan, on low.

Add 2-3 tsp. orange blossom water and stir

Grease a glass dish or metal pan

Place one layer (1/2) of the buttered dough on the bottom.

Put the ricotta mixture over this

Place the rest of the dough on top of this

Bake at 350 for approximately 40 minutes

To crisp the top, place under the broiler for a short time

For the syrup:

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup water

1 teaspoon lemon juice

2 tsps. orange blossom water

Just as it boils, stir in the lemon juice (which prevents coagulation)

Reduce heat and stir for 5 minutes.

Pour syrup over the layered dessert.

(I like to serve this with ground pistachios on top and mixed berries on the side.)

The post The Sweetness of Arabia via Small Town Virginia and Arts and Letters appeared first on artcritical.

Each year, the American Academy of Arts and Letters honors of 50 composers, artists, architects and writers with cash awards ranging from $5000 to $75,000.  This year’s winners are to be announced in a private ceremony that takes place on May 16, 2010.  In addition, four Honorary Members will be inducted into the Academy: the actress Meryl Streep, conductor and pianist James Levine, and architects Fumihiko Maki (Japan) and Alvaro Siza (Portugal).  New members of the Academy are Tania Leon, composer and conductor; Fred Lerdahl, composer; Thom Mayne, architect; authors Thomas McGuane, Richard Powers, Francine Prose and Marilynne Robinson; visual artists Thomas Nozkowski, and Peter Saul.

The Academy is a honor society of 250 members whose purpose is to foster and sustain an interest in Literature, Music, and the Fine Arts by identifying and encouraging individual artists by administering awards and prizes, exhibiting art, funding stage projects, and purchasing works to be donated to museums.  It was modeled after the Académie française, and met for the first time in 1899.  Its initial seven members included Mark Twain, John Hay and Edward McDowell.

Visual artists receiving awards this year are Gabrielle Bakker, William Christenberry, Aaron Gilbert, John Grade, Lothar Osterburg, Julianne Swartz, Tom Uttech, and Stanley Whitney.  In addition, 16 works were chosen for purchase, to be donated to American museums. Committees, whose members are drawn from the Academy’s roster, chose the award recipients.  Candidates for awards are nominated by an Academician (with the exception of the Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater).

The Academy of Arts and Letters is located at 633 West 155 Street in buildings designed by William Mitchell Kendall, Cass Gilbert, Charles Pratt Huntington and James Vincent Czajka.  The Galleries, which exhibit works by members, are located on Audubon Terrace and may be accessed through the gates between 155 and 156 Streets on the west side of Broadway.

The post American Academy of Arts and Letters Announces New Members and Award Recipients appeared first on artcritical.

Bouvard and Pécuchet pretty much had the right idea about academies. Never miss an opportunity to ridicule them, and never turn down an invitation to join! My own “received idea” about Salon-type exhibitions is largely informed by London’s Royal Academy of Arts which every year delights ladies in tweed (plaid) from the Home Counties and embarrasses the artworld with that time-honored ritual, the Summer Exhibition. Academicians, already an odd-enough cocktail, add to the brew of their own eclecticism by opening their august walls to other talents, new or old. Nothing can be more calculated to offend a modernist sensibility than the double- and triple- hangs with a resulting visual cacophony that typify the RA Show and the comparable Salons (de Mai, d’Automne etc.) arranged periodically at the Grand Palais in Paris and indeed anywhere where exhibiting societies of yore survive. Post-modernists generally find cooler ways to overturn the applecart of modernist purism than throwing in their lot with these meat markets (though one year, as it happens, YBA Michael Landy did submit a market stall to the RA where it held pride of place under a rotunda). Anyhow, this is all by way of introduction to the totally unexpected positive feelings engendered in me by this year’s “Invitational” exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

I don’t know what others do when they receive an invitation with thirty-eight names on them, but in a mix of curiosity and vanity I like to circle any acquaintances, and to my astonishment, when this particular card arrived on my desk I soon found a baker’s dozen of haloed names. These were all artists I admired and respected; yet in my wildest dreams I would only curate them into one exhibit as a Surrealist gesture. A sewing machine and an umbrella are more likely to meet on a dissecting table than Melissa Meyer, Chakaia Booker, Amy Sillman, and Martha Diamond to exhibit together in glorious, top-lit nineteenth-century galleries in a complex of like-buildings floating as incongruously amid the northern reaches of Harlem as the Taj Mahal in modern Agra. But that’s exactly what’s going on at the Academy’s Art Galleries at Audubon Terrace at Broadway between 155 and 156 Streets til April 1. For those of us – shame on us! – who have never ventured to this neighborhood before, the delights of Velázquez and Goya and much else await at the Hispanic Society of America next door.

Of course, the Invitational follows hot on the heels of those bazaars, the Armory and Pier shows, so New Yorkers may still have the magpie sensibility needed to extract aesthetic experience from the quagmire of overload. I should say, however, that the Academy show is installed with remarkable dignity considering the number of artists included, and the depth given to each artist. The sculptor Lucky DeBellevue is given better opportunity to do his thing here than he was in the encyclopedic “Greater New York” show at P.S.1 in Queens last year. His exquisite mesh of chenille stems in the suspended canopy The Underneath made for a magisterial entrance to the South Gallery. A heightened sense of nature versus artifice is sustained as the visitor turns left, to find, framed by an alcove, a sumptuous Ena Swansea shadow painting. The annex revealed a new artist to me: Justen Ladda, whose sensationally crafted Tree of Knowledge in glass crystal beads- knowingly, wickedly kitschy – is sorely tempting.

On a similarly lapsarian note, it struck me on this occasion that Nicole Eisenman’s slick, slippery, mannerist panel paintings of mean, muscley ice-maidens (which I had actually seen already at the Jack Tilton Gallery, but needed a second viewing to be convinced by) could be the work of Adam Elsheimer angry ex-wife, Lilith! Fishing, 2000 (borrowed from a Miami Beach collection) I have now decided is a masterpiece. The gleeful, girlish illustrational quality of this image, of a surly sisterhood lounging around in tight catsuits on Giotto-like icy hillocks and presiding over the dunking of a hapless Acteon (hoisted – literally – by his own petard) compounds rather than distracts from the intensity of the whole. Sure, this is Bad Painting with a capital B, but there is real aesthetic communication here, not just art about art, which is why, in my opinion, Eisenman leaves John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage out in the cold (it’s Nicole who really “breaks the ice”!). The tight contorted awkwardness sits well with the erotic energy experienced by painter and viewer alike in this Rubenesque paean to voluptuous girl-power. But enough… this review is about to get X-rated!

Seriously, though, you can see the problem with a Salon review. There are thirty-eight artists here, and I’d like to talk in similar depth about, say, twenty-four of them. It’s tempting to delve into the revelations that arise from the juxtaposition of artists from totally different milieus. I love the way Jacqueline Humphries’s sparse, sleek drip paintings, commentaries on, as much as essays in, abstraction are on the other side of a wall with Charles Cajori’s sweaty AbEx figural abstractions, as if to say, here are two sides of one coin. And it is interesting how, out of the icebox of Mary Boone’s uptown gallery, Will Cotton’s high-end kitsch ice-cream paintings melt into the hokey academic still lives by Nancy Hogan hanging next to them. But still, there is no group aesthetic, no zeitgeist that I’m smart enough to discern. I guess this is why there’s never an effective equivalent of Ruskin’s Academy Notes or Baudelaire’s Salon Reviews for the Whitney Biennial or the Venice Biennale, the modern equivalents of those sprawling old fixtures. So, I can’t actually review the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitation Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture. But I certainly can recommend it.

The post Invitational Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture appeared first on artcritical.