The Whitney Opens Exhibition of Highlights from Emily Fisher Landau's Collection

Nan Goldin. Self-Portrait with milagro, The Lodge, Belmont, MA 1988, 1988. Silver dye bleach print, 27 3/8 x 40in. (69.5 x 101.6 cm). Edition no. 6/25. Promised gift of Emily Fisher Landau P.2010.87. © Nan Goldin/Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art.com

Via Art Daily.org

NEW YORK, NY.- Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection, an exhibition of a selection of works from the historic gift of art pledged to the Museum in May 2010 by longtime trustee Emily Fisher Landau, is open at the Whitney Museum of American Art, from February 10 through May 1, 2011. Co-curated by Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs, and David Kiehl, the Museum’s curator of prints and special collections, the exhibition, which includes more than eighty works, are presented in the Museum’s fourth-floor galleries, which are named for Emily Fisher Landau.

Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection is the culmination of a single collector’s enduring commitment to contemporary artists and to sharing a love of art,” said Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director. “The gift goes beyond showcasing the best of American art to demonstrate a sense of adventure and a willingness to challenge conventional taste and fashion.”

Emily Fisher Landau’s gift to the Whitney comprises 419 works by nearly one hundred key figures in American art. It is one of the most important gifts the institution has ever received. De Salvo noted, “We are privileged to be the recipient of this exceptional gift, a testament to Mrs. Landau’s enterprising vision and longtime support of artists, often from the start of their careers. It’s a great honor to present a selection of these works to the public.”

Emily Fisher Landau began collecting art in the late 1960s and since the early 1980s she has focused on building an important collection of contemporary American art. Legacy traces many of the ideas that have preoccupied artists in the United States since the late 1960s. Questions about the relevance of painting in the aftermath of Minimalism, debates about representation, “culture wars,” and a revived interest in personal narratives are driving forces in the Emily Fisher Landau collection. Legacy allows these questions, as well as the question of what it means to collect contemporary art, to unfold in the galleries.

One section of Legacy focuses on Minimalism, broadly defined, with seminal works by artists such as Carl Andre and Agnes Martin as well as works by John McLaughlin, Rodney Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Martin Puryear, and Al Taylor. Another section of the exhibition signals a return by artists to representational and other subjects generally associated with painting by artists such as John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Mark Tansey, Peter Cain, and Susan Rothenberg, as well as paintings by Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly.

Legacy highlights Landau’s support of a younger group of artists who engaged in the political and social dialogue that came to the forefront in the vibrant downtown New York scene in the 1980s, a period when Landau began in earnest exploring downtown galleries and artists’ studios. Important works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, and Lorna Simpson deal with AIDS, issues of politics and gender, and race.

Legacy also shows the long-standing commitment Landau made to several artists. Here, Richard Artschwager and Ed Ruscha are each represented by works spanning their entire careers. Also, a number of works by Jasper Johns, including a painting from the Catenary series and a selection from the gift’s complete set of the artist’s screenprints made between 1968 and 1982, provide an in-depth look at Johns’s career and mastery of this printing process.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ladder to the Moon (1958) and James Rosenquist’s House of Fire II (1982), other works from the Emily Fisher Landau gift, may be seen in the exhibition Singular Visions on the Museum’s fifth floor.

Among the highlights of the gift to be presented in Legacy are the following:

• Works by Carl Andre, including seminal typewriter drawings and poems of the early 1960s and the large-scale sculpture 28 Lead Rectangle (1968);

• Works by Richard Artschwager, including his monumental painting City of Man (1981), which spans almost fifteen feet;

• Works by John Baldessari, including What This Painting Aims to Do (1967), a prime example of his important early text paintings;

• Photographs by Peter Hujar from the 1970s and 80s, including iconic portraits of Andy Warhol, Diana Vreeland, Divine, Lola Pashalinski, Susan Sontag, and David Wojnarowicz;

• Works by Jasper Johns, including the first of the artist’s important Catenary paintings to enter the museum’s comprehensive holdings of his work;

• Two works by Willem de Kooning, a 1952 Woman drawing and a noteworthy 1987 painting, Untitled, which is the latest de Kooning canvas in the Whitney’s collection;

• Works by Agnes Martin, including important drawings from the 1960s and an early painting, This Rain (c. 1960);

• A work by Glenn Ligon, who is the subject of a Whitney retrospective opening on March 10, 2011;

• Works by Ed Ruscha, ranging in date from 1965 to 2002, among them two important canvases, Give Him Anything and He’ll Sign It (1965), one of his wry bird paintings, and Lion in Oil (2002), from the artist’s recent series of mountain paintings.

In addition to the works mentioned above, the exhibition includes significant paintings by Susan Rothenberg and Andy Warhol; and the earliest Robert Gober sculpture to enter in the Whitney’s collection.

Emily Fisher Landau became a trustee of the Whitney in 1990. At the Whitney, she has served as co-chair of the Contemporary Committee; a member of the Library Fellows; a member of the Chairman’s Council; and has participated on several other Museum committees. In 1995, she generously established an endowment to support the Biennial, the Whitney’s signature contemporary exhibition. That same year, the fourth floor galleries at the Whitney were named in her honor. In recognition of her many years of generosity, she was honored at the Whitney’s 2006 annual fall Gala. Her daughter, Candia Fisher, has served on the Whitney’s Print Committee (1996–2000) and Photography Committee (since 2007), continuing the family’s tradition of generous support for the Whitney Museum.

Emily Fisher Landau has shared her time and generosity beyond the walls of the Whitney. In 1991, the Fisher Landau Center for Art was established in Long Island City, housed in a former parachute harness factory. The Center, designed by Max Gordon in association with Bill Katz, is devoted to art education and the exhibition and study of the Fisher Landau collection of contemporary art and stages regular exhibitions drawn from its important holdings. She has served as a trustee of SITE Santa Fe and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, both in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has also served on acquisition committees at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for several decades. In 1999, she established the Fisher Landau Center for the Treatment of Learning Disabilities at Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University and has supported a program at Columbia University Teachers College and New York University that has helped New York City private-school students with learning disabilities. She was made a Chevalier, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, by the government of France in 1986, received the Haym Solomon Award from the Anti-Defamation League in 2006, and was honored with the 2008 CITYarts Making a Difference through the Arts Award.

Lee Friedlander: America by Car (D.A.P./Fraenkel, 2010)

Lee Friedlander- America By Car-Exhibition Dates: September 4 - November 28, 2010
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York to mount first major exhibition of master photographer Lee Friedlander's new series.

I am not missing this show and must buy this book!

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008

Photo-William Eggleston- An untitled and undated photograph

Photo- William Eggleston-An untitled 1973 print.

This show is a must see for ARTmostfierce and you .

Please read show review by Holland Cotter of the NY Times.

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: November 6, 2008
Thirty years ago photography was art if it was black and white. Color pictures were tacky and cheap, the stuff of cigarette ads and snapshot albums. So in 1976, when William Eggleston had a solo show of full-color snapshotlike photographs at the august Museum of Modern Art, critics squawked.


It didn’t help that Mr. Eggleston’s pictures, shot in the Mississippi Delta, where he lived, were of nothings and nobodies: a child’s tricycle, a dinner table set for a meal, an unnamed woman perched on a suburban curb, an old man chatting up the photographer from his bed.

That MoMA’s curator of photography, John Szarkowski, had declared Mr. Eggleston’s work perfect was the last straw. “Perfectly banal, perfectly boring,” sniffed one writer; “erratic and ramshackle,” snapped another; “a mess,” declared a third.

Perfect or not, the images quickly became influential classics. And that’s how they look in “William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008,” a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art that is this artist’s first New York museum solo since his seditious debut.

Naturally we see the work more clearly now. We know that it was not cheap. The dye transfer printing Mr. Eggleston used, adapted from advertising, was the most expensive color process then available. It produced hues of almost hallucinatory intensity, from a custard-yellow sunset glow slanting across a wall to high-noon whiteness bleaching a landscape to pink lamplight suffusing a room.

And compositions that at first seemed bland and random proved not to be on a 2nd, 3rd and 20th look. The tricycle was shot from a supine position so as to appear colossal. The woman on the curb sits next to a knot of heavy chains that echoes her steel-mesh bouffant. The affable guy on the bed holds a revolver, its barrel resting on his vintage country quilt.

Although unidentified, these people and others were part of Mr. Eggleston’s life: family, friends and neighbors. The retrospective — organized by Elisabeth Sussman, curator of photography at the Whitney, and Thomas Weski, deputy director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich — takes us through that life, or what the pictures reveal of it, on a tour that is a combination joy ride, funeral march and bad-trip bender. Patches of it feel pretty tame now, but whole stretches still have the morning-after wooziness of three decades ago.

Mr. Eggleston is a child of the American South. He was born in Memphis in 1939 and spent part of his childhood living with grandparents on a Mississippi cotton plantation. His family was moneyed gentry; he has never had to work for a living. Self-taught, he was already seriously taking pictures by the time he got to college (he went first to Vanderbilt, later to the University of Mississippi); his encounter with the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans pushed him along.

By his own account, unless he is working on commission his choice of subjects for pictures is happenstantial. He shoots whatever or whoever is at hand. The earliest picture in the show, from 1961, is of a prison farm adjoining his family’s plantation. Murky and grainy, it could be a scene from the 19th century; the prisoners are all black. Then come any-old-thing images of post-World War II strip malls and suburbs; almost everyone is white.

Although Mr. Eggleston rejects the label of regional photographer, he was, at least initially, dealing with the complicated subject of a traditional Old South (he says the compositions in his early pictures were based on the design of the Confederate flag) meeting a speeded-up New South, which he tended to observe from a distance, shooting fast-food joints and drive-ins almost surreptitiously, as if from the dashboard of a car.

Around 1965 he started to use color film, and his range expanded. He moved in close. The first picture he considers a success is in the show. It’s of a teenage boy standing about arm’s length from the camera. He’s seen in profile, pushing carts at a supermarket. His face is slack, his eyes a little glazed, his body bent in an effortful crouch. He’s ordinary, but the golden sunlight that falls on him is not: it turns his red hair lustrous and gilds his skin. A prosaic subject is transformed but unromantically; lifted up, but just a little, just enough.

In 1967 Mr. Eggleston made a trip to New York, where he met other photographers, important ones, like Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, learning something from each. Although he has a reputation for being remote, even reclusive, he also has a public persona as a dandyish hell raiser, a kind of exemplar of baronial boho. In any case he has never lacked for art-world connections. Mr. Szarkowski was one; another was the curator Walter Hopps, who became a friend and traveling companion beginning in the 1960s and ’70s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/arts/design/07eggl.html?pagewanted=2&th&emc=th

Whitney Museum Downtown

The Meatpacking District promises to be one of the most exciting areas of Manhattan in just a matter of time.

Thanks to designs of the extremely talent architect Renzo Piano (also working in a major expansion of Columbia University) the Whitney Museum Downtown will be part of the wonderful High Line Redevelopment.

The photo is a computer rendering of Renzo Piano Building Workshop proposal for the downtown annex of the Whitney Museum.

Mr. Piano’s project for a site on Gansevoort Street, west of Washington Street, is a striking departure from the ethereal glass creations that have made him a favorite of the art-world cognoscenti. Its bold chiseled form won’t appeal to those who prefer architecture to be unobtrusive

Rising among the derelict warehouses and hip boutiques of the rapidly changing neighborhood, the museum’s monumental exterior forms are conceived as a barrier against the area’s increasingly amusement-park atmosphere. It makes a powerful statement about the encroaching effects of the global consumer society. Inside, Mr. Piano has created a contemplative sanctuary where art reasserts its primary place in the cultural hierarchy.

The feat is especially impressive given the obstacles Mr. Piano and the Whitney have overcome. Mr. Piano’s design is certainly distinct from Breuer’s, presenting a strange, even forbidding aura. The design is preliminary, and needs more work. But Mr. Piano has laid the groundwork for a serious work of architecture. The bold form expresses a level of experimental courage that he hasn’t shown in years. This is a building that could revive the Whitney, and inject welcome creative energy into the city’s cultural life.

Whitney Museum Biennial 2008

Rita Ackermann, Nun/Mother/Whore,2006 Collage on plexiglass, double sided, 83 x 43 in. (210.8 x 109.2 cm) Collection of the artist.

ARTmostfierce wants everybody to start getting prepared for this event.
Get your Prada or Nada ready ! . Let's hope we see something as dramatic and spectacular as Terence Koh bliding light, Marilyn Minter Stiletto's paintings or Mark Bradford Paintings

MARCH 6 - JUNE 1From March 6-23, Biennial extends to Park Avenue Armory

See Article written by Carly Berwik of New York Magazine

The Facebook Biennial
How social networks have taken over this year’s Whitney festivities.
By Carly Berwick
Published Feb 29, 2008

Whitney curator Shamim Momin is walking the West 22nd Street gauntlet. She nods and waves and touches cheeks in the Continental manner to a succession of doe-eyed bearded men and slim-hipped men in large sneakers loitering outside Friedrich Petzel Gallery. It’s not true that Momin knows everyone in contemporary art in New York, but it’s as close to true as can be said of anyone.
Inside, people are drinking beer in celebration of Seth Price’s new wood-veneer-and-plastic wall pieces: enlarged found images of basic human interactions represented via negative space; in other words, the outlines of hand pictures grabbed online. Momin, petite in heels and a tightly belted long sweater over a dark green baby-doll dress, greets Price, a lanky 34-year-old New York artist, then walks up to a tall blonde woman standing in the center gallery. It’s Henriette Huldisch, her co-curator for this year’s Whitney Biennial. Price is one of the 81 artists in the Biennial, and, a few weeks before the show is to open on March 6, his curators have come out to support him. With Huldisch is her taller, blonder husband, Andy Graydon, a film editor and sound artist. It’s past eight and Huldisch, who has an infant at home, is giving Graydon the look that means it’s time to leave. It’s barely perceptible, a flattening of the lips and an intensity about the eyes.
There are other Biennial artists here, too: conceptual provocateur Fia Backström, printmaker Matthew Brannon, sculptor Heather Rowe. The new walls are up on the Whitney’s fourth floor, the curators tell Rowe, and it’s time to install her art—itself a series of drywall supports marking out unbuilt walls. Momin speaks in fast, gushing, interlinked sentences, while Huldisch, who is German, picks her words carefully.
For the rest of the article see link below.

http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/44650/

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/29/arts/design/29voge.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin

http://http://whitney.org/www/2008biennial/