More than 50 artworks were donated for the 19th edition of the event by contemporary artists including Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Allison Katz, Emma McIntyre, Shota Nakamura, and Marina Perez Simao. The ArtCrush Gala, slated for August 2nd, is the museum’s largest annual fundraiser, generating support for the museum’s exhibitions and educational programs. In celebration of the Aspen Art Museum 45th anniversary, the artists for the first time have been invited to retain up to 30% of the proceeds from their works sold during the auction. 

“As an artist-founded institution, artists are centered within all we do, and the fulfilment of our mission depends on their trust,” Nicola Lees, the museum’s director, said in a statement shared with ARTnews. “This year’s outstanding ArtCrush auction is a testament to the remarkable artists and supporters within our community…and we invite artists to retain a portion of the proceeds of their donated works, thereby promoting continuity, equitability, and sustainability. It is a policy we will be proud to implement long into the future.”

In the lead-up to the gala, the ArtCrush 2024 Auction Exhibition will be on display at the museum starting July 17. For the first time, the museum is partnering with Design Miami to include an array of design works in the auction, broadening the scope of the event. 

Christie’s, the museum’s auction partner, will conduct two auctions for the event. The first will be a live auction during the gala, led by Adrien Meyer, Christie’s global head of private sales and co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art. The second auction will take place virtually, with online bidding opening on Christie’s website on July 25. 

The question lingered. Zuckerman knew she would end up discussing art, but how to go about it? After some thinking, she settled on talking about a Javier Téllez film, Oedipus Marshal (2006), that was commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum while she was there. In the work, Téllez restages the tale of Oedipus Rex using non-professional actors from a facility for patients with mental illness in Grand Junction, Colorado. The actors wear Noh-style masks that obscure their features, and according to Zuckerman, when they removed them, the patients were not the same.

“Their doctors said that, when they came back to Grand Junction, they were alive in a way they had never been before,” she said. “We started talking about this idea of art saving lives at the museum. As I started thinking more and more about it, I realized my commitment is really to connect people to artists who make their lives better in the broadest possible way.”

Ultimately, for Zuckerman, that entailed leaving the museum world altogether. After 14 years, she departed the Aspen Art Museum as its director last fall. Having organized a closely watched program at the institution—as well as others over the course of several decades at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California and the Jewish Museum in New York—Zuckerman had established herself as a major talent. The announcement came as a surprise to many. And her next move surprised many more: the founding of HiZ.art, a personal platform of events, talks, and books that—with a certain freedom and evangelical zeal that she is proud to defend—Zuckerman believes can reach an audience of a scale larger than that of a museum.

“My first curatorial projects were in these small artist-run spaces,” Zuckerman recalled of the beginning of her career while on a recent visit to New York, where she was in town to give a talk as part of her platform with artist Richard Phillips at the swanky co-working space Spring Place. “The audience was very specific—it was people who already liked art. Then I took a job at the Jewish Museum because I wanted to get a broader audience. Then I realized that, within the platform of a contemporary art museum, I achieved every goal I could have ever dreamed of. And even still, it’s a limited scope.”

At the Aspen Art Museum, Zuckerman made major strides—and faced adversity as a result. During her tenure, the museum developed a reputation as a destination for contemporary art in a city that had not been especially amenable before. Among those lured to show at the institution over her 14 years were Vik Muniz, Yto Barrada, Ernesto Neto, Danh Vo, and Amy Sillman. There was also a redesign by Shigeru Ban, a Pritzker Prize–winning architect, and a dramatic uptick in attendance. But some in Aspen felt that Zuckerman’s program was out of touch with what locals wanted. In 2014, the Denver Post reported that such resistance was emblematic of an “identity crisis” facing Aspen at the time.

Zuckerman views her time at the museum as a success—both for the art she showed and the figure she presented. When she began, it was unusual for a woman to be so high-ranking at a museum. “I’ve had younger female curators say, ‘Thank you so much. I don’t think you know the impact you had,’” she said.

Now, with HiZ.art—which comprises a podcast, an invite-only talks series, and a series of books called “Conversations with Artists” whose participants have included Glenn Ligon, Darren Bader, Anicka Yi, and others—she’s hoping to bring her vision to a wider audience that she hopes will include people who don’t yet know they might be interested in art. For one of the inaugural episodes of her podcast, she chatted with bicyclist Lance Armstrong about collecting art by Rob Pruitt, and in another, she spoke with John Hickenlooper, a former Democratic candidate in the U.S. Presidential race, about how art can create peace. “If there’s a possibility of putting a pause or interruption,” Zuckerman said, “it’s there that you get people’s curiosity and make a difference.”

There will be cases in which art-world insiders will join her for discussions, too. She brought up the example of a recent podcast with Helen Molesworth, the former curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. “We were talking about the notion of what happens when you’re standing in front of an artwork and you’re moved to tears,” Zuckerman said. A description of that episode targets listeners who want to “make their lives better!”—a phrase that could apply to many of Zuckerman’s offerings, which verge on tapping into the vein of wellness culture so pervasive today.

“A lot of people have found a sense of the divine in nature or through spirituality,” Zuckerman said. She hopes her platform might do the same by “setting up a parallel structure, so that people can understand what that’s felt like. It’s a vehicle to associate with art.”

She added, with a smile, “I used to joke that I was a matcha proselytizer because I was an early matcha drinker. [HiZ.art] is kind of evangelizing—that’s the goal, and I think I’m just going to be honest about it.”

Heidi Zuckerman.

KARL WOLFGANG

Heidi Zuckerman, the CEO and director of the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, is stepping down. She will depart the museum at the end of her contracted period, on September 30, after more than 14 years in the top position. The reason for her departure has not been specified.

Asked for comment from Zuckerman, a museum spokesperson referred ARTnews to a news release. In an accompanying statement, she said that “it has been my distinct privilege and pleasure to serve as CEO and director of the Aspen Art Museum.” After referring to the museum’s board, staffers, and other members of its community, she said, “Together, we have made the AAM into the vibrant, thriving, and globally facing international institution it is today.”

Zuckerman has been at the museum since 2005, and helped the museum dramatically increase its attendance figures. When she began, the museum received 12,000 visitors annually; last year, 100,000 people came to the institution. She also grew the museum’s budget and redefined its programming to focus on solo exhibitions by contemporary artists well known to international audiences.

Some locals have criticized the museum’s programming shift away from artists working in the region, according to the Denver Post. A redesign of the museum’s building by the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Shigeru Ban, completed in 2014, likewise courted the ire of some residents in Aspen and the surrounding region.

“Heidi is a visionary director who has turned this museum into a global leader in contemporary art, and we wish her the best in all her future plans,” the museum’s board said in a statement given to the Aspen Daily News.

The news comes as the museum is gearing up to host its annual ArtCrush benefit—an important source of funds for the institution—in August and as it approaches its 40th anniversary.

Prior to joining the Aspen Art Museum, Zuckerman had previously been a curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California and an assistant curator at the Jewish Museum in New York.

Installation view of “Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.,” 2019, at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado.

TONY PRIKRYL

Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday.

Today’s show: “Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.” is on view at the Aspen Art Museum in Aspen, Colorado, through Sunday, June 16. The solo exhibition is the late Bay Area artist’s first museum show since her death at 33 in 2001.

01

Installation view of "Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.," 2019, at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado.

TONY PRIKRYL

Installation view of "Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.," 2019, at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado.

TONY PRIKRYL

Installation view of "Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.," 2019, at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado.

TONY PRIKRYL

Installation view of "Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.," 2019, at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado.

TONY PRIKRYL

Installation view of "Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.," 2019, at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado.

TONY PRIKRYL

Installation view of "Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.," 2019, at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado.

TONY PRIKRYL

Installation view of "Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.," 2019, at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado.

TONY PRIKRYL

Installation view of "Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.," 2019, at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado.

TONY PRIKRYL

Installation view of "Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.," 2019, at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado.

TONY PRIKRYL

Max Weintraub.

COURTESY MAX WEINTRAUB

The Aspen Art Museum in Colorado has found a new senior curator: Max Weintraub, who most recently served as director and chief curator of the art galleries at Indiana University’s Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis.

Weintraub has previously worked in the curatorial and educational departments of the Denver Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. He has also taught art history at Hunter College in New York.

Some of his curatorial credits include “Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley: The Minotaur Trilogy” (2018), “Kenneth Tyler: The Art of Collaboration” (2018), and “Cynthia Daignault: Light Atlas” (2017), all of which were staged at the Herron School.

Weintraub said in a statement, “Through its dynamic exhibition programming and outstanding work with schools, the AAM is at the forefront of many of the urgent and transformative conversations of our time. I am thrilled and honored to be joining in the effort.”

Heidi Zuckerman, director of Aspen Art Museum, added, “[Weintraub’s] impressive, extensive past experiences assure that we will continue to provide programming that is both responsive to the global dialogue in which we are engaged, and relevant to the diversity of audiences we welcome throughout each year.”

Judy Chicago, Driving the World to Destruction, from the series “PowerPlay,” 1985.

PHOTO: ©DONALD WOODMAN/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK; ART: ©JUDY CHICAGO AND ARS, NY/COURTESY THE ARTIST; SALON 94, NEW YORK; AND JESSICA SILVERMAN GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO

This season brings long-overdue surveys for artists like Vija Celmins, Graciela Iturbide, Zilia Sánchez, Judy Chicago, Hans Hofmann, and Margaret Kilgallen, as well as the latest editions of major international exhibitions like the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the Guangzhou Triennial. It’s also a winter of firsts. The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea will stage the biggest Marcel Duchamp show to date in Asia, with many of the objects on view having been drawn from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s world-class collection of the artist’s work, while America will get its first-ever Sri Lankan art survey this December in the form of a 250-work exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Below, a look at the winter’s most promising shows.

NATIONAL

December

“Judy Chicago: A Reckoning”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
December 4, 2018–April 21, 2019

Many know Chicago solely for The Dinner Party (1974–79), a landmark installation now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum that creates the setting for an imagined gathering of 39 historical female figures, from Boudica to Frida Kahlo. In the intervening years, Chicago has produced a formidable body of work, however, much of it dealing with the representation of women and rituals throughout art history. This full-career survey, which will bring together works from her early days as a feminist-art pioneer as well as more recent figurative paintings, includes Purple Poem (for Miami), a brand-new site-specific smoke piece. —Alex Greenberger

Scowen & Co., Entrance to the Buddhist Temple, Kandy (Ceylon), ca. 1880–90, albumen silver print.

©MUSEUM ASSOCIATES, LACMA/LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART, GIFT OF GLORIA KATZ AND WILLARD HUYCK

“The Jeweled Isle: Art from Sri Lanka”
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
December 9, 2018–June 23, 2019

No American museum has ever put on a survey of Sri Lankan art before, so LACMA is breaking new ground by bringing together 250 artworks spanning nearly 2,000 years of the country’s history. The show will feature precious decorative objects, 19th-century photographs depicting the South Asian country’s scenery and monuments. These, along with ivories and textiles, reflect Sri Lankan exchanges and interactions with European colonizers. The show draws on LACMA’s own rarely displayed collection of Sri Lankan art. —Claire Selvin

“Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory”
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
December 15, 2018–March 31, 2019

Celmins is best known for her photorealistic paintings that depict natural environments—the sea, for instance, or the moon’s cratered surface—with a masterful level of detail that can at times border on abstraction. The artist’s first North American retrospective in 25 years will feature around 150 paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Next fall the exhibition travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Breuer building in New York—as it happens, the very same building where Celmins had a major traveling exhibition in 1992, when it was home to the Whitney Museum. Celmins’s celebrated seascapes will appear alongside her Pop-inflected paintings of consumer goods. —John Chiaverina

January

Margaret Kilgallen, Untitled, ca. 2000, acrylic on paper.

COURTESY RATIO 3

“Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is.”
Aspen Art Museum, Colorado
January 12, 2019–June 16, 2019

Kilgallen, who died at age 33 in 2001, was of the main artists associated with the Mission School, a loose group based in California’s Bay Area known for its work made using humble materials that drew inspiration from all kinds of countercultural activity in 1990s America. This retrospective is the largest presentation of Kilgallen’s work since 2005, and it will use the artist’s exhibition history as a compass to explore her wide-ranging influences, which include the history of printmaking, American folk art, and feminist theory. The exhibition’s title is drawn from a quote from Kilgallen in which she discussed her disinterest in mechanical work and instead opted for something different and entirely handmade. —J.C.

Graciela Iturbide, ¡México…Quiero Conocerte! (Mexico…I want to get to know you!), Chiapas, México, 1975, gelatin silver print.

©GRACIELA ITURBIDE/MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON, GIFT OF THE ARTIST

“Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico”
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
January 19, 2019–May 12, 2019

Iturbide has long trained her lens on the contrasts she has observed in Mexico, with particular attention to seemingly opposing forces that coexist—ancient traditions and contemporary culture, life and death—and the rituals related to them. This exhibition will feature 125 photographs from throughout Iturbide’s five-decade career, among them her intimate documentary-style images of indigenous peoples in Mexico, including the Seri in the Sonora Desert and the women of the Juchitán people (part of the Zapotec culture) in Oaxaca, as well as recent work depicting items in Frida Kahlo’s bathroom and plants at the Oaxaca Ethnobotanical Gardens. —Maximilíano Durón

“Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold”
Met Breuer, New York
January 23, 2019–April 14, 2019

There are few more iconic photographs of an artist at work than the one of Fontana holding the knife he’d just used slash one of his paintings. His slashed paintings reflected the traumatic violence in Italy, where he was based, following World War II, yet they also served as dramatic experiments that questioned whether painting really was a two-dimensional medium at all. Those works rightfully garnered him acclaim, but he produced much more than that, making room-size light installations and abstract sculpture alongside his paintings. This retrospective aims to show the full scope of his work, and the exhibition will emphasize the role Fontana’s birth country, Argentina, played in his practice. —A.G.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Candy Darling, 1973, four dye-diffusion transfer prints (Polaroid), in painted plastic mounts and acrylic frame.

©ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION, USED BY PERMISSION/SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, GIFT OF THE ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION

“Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now”
Guggenheim Museum, New York
January 25, 2019–July 10, 2019; July 24, 2019–January 5, 2020

The two-venue retrospective at the Getty Center and LACMA made 2016 the year of Robert Mapplethorpe in Los Angeles. This year Mapplethorpe mania comes to New York. To mark the 30th anniversary of the artist’s 1989 death from AIDS-related causes at the age of 42, the Guggenheim will present a yearlong, two-part exhibition of his work. Drawn primarily from a 1993 gift of 200 photographs from his estate, the show’s first part will bring together a variety of works—celebrity portraits, nudes, flowers, self-portraits, and images of the S&M community, as well as collages and mixed-media constructions. The second part will explore Mapplethorpe’s lasting influence on contemporary art, pairing his work with that of others in the museum’s collection, such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Lyle Ashton Harris, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Catherine Opie. —M.D.

“Liz Magor: BLOWOUT”
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 30, 2019–March 24, 2019

Best known for her sculptures and assemblages of dissimilar materials, Magor has made a new body of work for this show incorporating Mylar, which is often used to create transparent commercial packaging. The Canadian artist introduced what she has called “agents” to her materials, causing them to slowly deteriorate in various ways. In April, the show, Magor’s first in a museum on America’s East Coast, will travel to the Renaissance Society in Chicago, the exhibition’s co-organizer. —C.S.

February

Kevin Jerome Everson, IFO (still), 2017, film.

©KEVIN JEROME EVERSON/COURTESY THE ARTIST, TRILOBITE-ARTS DAC, PICTURE PALACE PICTURES, AND THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

“Colored People Time: Mundane Futures”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
February 1, 2019–March 31, 2019

The three-show series “Colored People Time” will examine ways in which slavery and colonialism affect the present and the years to come. “Mundane Futures,” the series’ first exhibition, will feature work by Martine Syms, Kevin Jerome Everson, Aria Dean, and Dave McKenzie, with a focus on the future of black cultural production. The show will position Syms’s film The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto (2015), in which the artist reads a text about a new kind of black aesthetics for the 21st century, with two different historic texts: Sutton Griggs’s 1899 black dystopian novel Imperium in Imperio and the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program from 1972. “Mundane Futures” will be followed by installments called ”Quotidian Pasts” and “Banal Presents.” —C.S.

Frida Kahlo, Appearances Can Be Deceiving, n.d., charcoal and colored pencil on paper.

©2018 BANCO DE MÉXICO DIEGO RIVERA FRIDA KAHLO MUSEUMS TRUST, MEXICO, D.F. / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

“Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving”
Brooklyn Museum, New York
February 8, 2019–May 12, 2019

In 2014, curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm told ARTnews that Kahlo has “been so overshadowed by her celebrity that her work has become lost.” Could this be the exhibition that finally saves the Mexican Surrealist painter from her own celebrity? For what is being billed as the largest Kahlo show in America in a decade, the Brooklyn Museum will home in on how the artist carefully crafted her identity. The show will include her clothes, personal possessions, and examples of contemporaneous films and propaganda, as well as works from the museum’s Mesoamerican holdings. If the show’s title is any proof, it will shed light on never-before-seen aspects of Kahlo, whose work frequently dealt with the complexities of being a female artist in the first half of the 20th century. —A.G.

“Maryam Jafri: I Drank the Kool-Aid But I Didn’t Inhale”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
February 10, 2018–June 23, 2019

How or why some consumer products fail to sell is the subject of Jafri’s 2014–15 series “Product Recall: An Index of Innovation,” a grouping of appropriated advertisements alongside ad copy and information that came with these goods. (One work in the series includes boxes from a line of frozen vegetables that were advertised using language that urged consumers not to buy them; the reasons why they never found their audience are obvious.) This show, Jafri’s first museum show in the U.S., will include a new version of that series, which the artist has called an “alternative history” of consumer culture. —A.G.

“Nari Ward: We the People”
New Museum, New York
February 13, 2019–May 26, 2019

Bringing together over 30 sculptures, paintings, videos, and installations, this show, Ward’s first New York museum survey, traces the artist’s 25-year career. The show will present some of Ward’s early sculptures—including the large-scale environments Amazing Grace (1993) and Hunger Cradle (1993)—made with materials the artist found in Harlem. The exhibition takes its name from Ward’s 2011 piece of the same title, in which the opening words of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution are rendered in hand-dyed shoelaces—a way of reclaiming the text, the artist has said. —C.S.

Zilia Sánchez, Amazonas (Amazons), from the series “Topologías eróticas” (Erotic Topologies), 1978, Acrylic on stretched canvas.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM, NEW JERSEY

“Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla (I Am an Island)”
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
February 16, 2019–May 19, 2019

One highlight of the 2017 Venice Biennale was a suite of shaped canvases by Cuban-born artist Zilia Sánchez. This show, Sánchez’s first-ever retrospective, will feature some 65 paintings, sculptures, sketches, and other pieces made over the course of her seven-decade career. The works often tackle metaphysical themes, employing geometries and imagery related to female mythological figures, including the Amazonians and Antigone. Sánchez has discussed her work in terms that refer to her alienation—both as a Latin American artist and as a woman—hence the show’s title. —Shirley Nwangwa

“Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction”
February 27, 2019–July 21, 2019
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California

It’s impossible to imagine a history of American abstract art in the postwar era without Hofmann, who taught many budding New York painters of the time—including Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner—in the ways of color theory and modernist styles. Hofmann’s work, with its juxtaposed swatches of opposing colors and uneven textures, is lesser known than that of his students, so this show will bring together nearly 70 works to spotlight how he translated European techniques for American audiences. The show will travel in the fall to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. —A.G.

Hans Hofmann, The Vanquished, 1959, oil on canvas.

JONATHAN BLOOM/©THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA/UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE, BEQUEST OF THE ARTIST

INTERNATIONAL

December

Jaume Plensa
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
December 1, 2018–April 22, 2019

Curated by Ferran Barrenblit, this show will provide a comprehensive view of Plensa’s work from the 1980s to the present. The artist’s koanic work plays on the yin and yang of various phenomena—how darkness can accentuate light (and vice versa), and how silence can emphasize noise. Plensa’s fantastical, oversized sculptures, in which human forms appear to materialize from amalgams of text, have forged his reputation as one of Spain’s foremost artists. Because Plensa hails from Barcelona, the MACBA show will act as a homecoming of sorts. —Annie Armstrong

Alex Katz, Paul Taylor Dance Company, 1963–64, oil on canvas.

BAYERISCHE STAATSGEMÄLDESAMMLUNGEN, MUNICH/UDO AND ANETTE BRANDHORST COLLECTION

Alex Katz
Museum Brandhorst, Munich
December 6, 2018–April 22, 2019

“Sincere art is art that relies on subject matter to carry it,” Katz told Calvin Tomkins in a New Yorker profile earlier this year. “An honest painter is one who doesn’t paint very well.” Included in this show will be Katz’s stylized portraits of notables from the New York art world, among them the late dancer Paul Taylor, whom Katz painted as a stark white figure against an all-black background. As part of the show, alongside Katz’s portraits and landscapes, the museum will premiere a new documentary about the artist. —S.N.

“The Street: Where the World Is Made”
MAXXI, Rome
December 7, 2018–April 28, 2019

Street scenes are among the most pervasive subjects in art history, having appeared in everything from ancient Roman frescoes to Romare Bearden paintings. But what value do they have for artists today? That query formed the basis for this exhibition, curated by Hou Hanru. Included will be work by Gimhongsok, Francis Alÿs, and Yael Bartana, among many others. —A.G.

Rosana Paulino, Geometria à brasileira (Brazilian Geometry), 2018, digital printing, collage and monotype on paper.

PRIVATE COLLECTION

“Rosana Paulino: The Sewing of Memory”
Pinacoteca Estado de São Paulo
December 8, 2018–March 4, 2019

Concerns regarding the status of black women in Brazil run through much of Paulino’s output, which will be surveyed here in this 140-work show, the largest devoted to the artist in her home country. Spanning the last three decades, the show will feature works that recontextualize images created by European colonialists and scientific practitioners. Fabric will appear throughout these works; the artist has said that the material is a symbol of how men and women might be able to heal themselves following intense trauma. —A.A.

“Pedro Figari: African Nostalgias”
Museu de Arte de São Paulo
December 12, 2018–February 10, 2019

Figari’s work has rarely been surveyed despite his having long been considered one of the most notable modernists in Latin America. This show will span the full breadth of the Uruguayan artist’s career, with a focus on how his background as a human rights lawyer influenced his paintings. Many of his subjects were black Uruguayans, whom he depicted performing quotidian activities, such as dancing or honoring the dead. Though he transitioned from law to art late into his career, he produced some 4,000 Impressionism-inspired pictures in just 15 years; the MASP show will offer a sampler of them. —S.N.

Pedro Figari, Candombe, n.d., oil on card.

MUSEO BLANES, MONTEVIDEO, URUGUAY

Kochi-Muziris Biennale
Various venues, Kochi and Kerala, India
December 12, 2018–March 29, 2019

For the fourth edition of this biennial, curated by artist Anita Dube, the Pavilion at Cabral Yard, which acts as the show’s central space, will host both physical and digital programming. In addition to talks, screenings, and performances, the venue will hold public displays of online content in a “web-integrated space.” Dube has called her show a “knowledge laboratory”; among the artists she has selected to participate are Barthélémy Toguo, the Guerrilla Girls, Shirin Neshat, and William Kentridge. —C.S.

Oskar Kokoschka, Flute Player and Bats (Wiener Werkstätte postcard no. 73), 1907, color lithograph.

©2018 FONDATION OSKAR KOKOSCHKA AND PROLITTERIS, ZURICH/ALBERTINA, VIENNA

Oskar Kokoschka
Kunsthaus Zurich
December 14, 2018–March 10, 2019

Kokoschka created much of his energetic, sometimes humorous figurative work in direct opposition to the wave of state-sanctioned art that took hold throughout Europe during World War II. This has made him a peculiar figure in art history—the late Austrian artist is famous for his contribution to German Expressionist painting, for example, even though he intentionally kept some distance from the movement during its heyday, in the 1920s. This retrospective aims to better situate Kokoschka in the art world of his time; it includes around 200 works that cover the full spectrum of his output, from paintings to prints. —J.C.

Guangzhou Triennial
Guangdong Museum of Art, China
December 21, 2018–March 10, 2019

The sixth edition of the Guangzhou Triennial, titled “As We May Think: Feedforward,” will investigate ideas related to technology, machines, and humanity. The triennial will include an archival exhibition, curated by Wang Shaoqiang, the director of the Guangdong Museum of Art, as well as a three-part themed exhibition organized by Philipp Ziegler, Angelique Spaninks, and Zhang Ga. Work by 49 artists, including Gilberto Esparza, Tomás Saraceno, and Liu Wa, will be featured. —C.S.

“The Essential Duchamp”
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul,
December 22, 2018–April 7, 2019

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the death of the pioneering conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea is mounting the most comprehensive exhibition of his work in the Asia-Pacific region to date. Comprising some 150 works, many of them sourced from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the show will include the artist’s famous Fountain (1917/50) sculpture—a readymade constructed from a urinal tipped on its side—and other groundbreaking “readymades” alongside archival materials. There will also be a digital replication of Etant donnés (1946–66), the artist’s final major work. —J.C.

January

Pierre Bonnard, The Fourteenth of July, 1918, oil paint on canvas.

PRIVATE COLLECTION

“Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory”
Tate Modern, London
January 23, 2019–May 6, 2019

Back in 2006, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman waited in line for 20 minutes just to get to the front door of the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris’s Pierre Bonnard retrospective. It was worth it, he wrote: “the show is sublime.” Now Bonnard is set to draw crowds at Tate Modern. Spanning nearly 40 years of the French artist’s career, this show will feature close to 100 works, and will highlight Bonnard’s expert use of brilliant color in his intimate, melancholy paintings. In his landscapes and scenes of domestic life, he evoked the passage of time through experiments in color. Included will be some of his most famous works, among them depictions of his wife, Marthe de Méligny, in various states of undress. —S.N.

Morag Keil
Institute of Contemporary Art, London
January 30, 2019–April 14, 2019

For her first major institutional show, the Scottish artist Morag Keil will present a grouping of new and existing works, all of them restructured specifically for this exhibition. Keil works in a variety of mediums, including film, installation, painting, and drawing, and often investigates how technological change, branding tactics, and media platforms affect our everyday lives. Included in the show will be a remodeled version of her 2016 video Passive Aggressive, which appropriates clips from animations, reality TV, and footage of motorcycling, and explores the blurred boundaries between fantasy, technology, and surveillance. —J.C.

Morag Keil, passive aggressive, 2016, installation view at Eden Eden, Berlin.

HENRY TRUMBLE/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALERIE ISABELLA BORTOLOZZI, BERLIN

February

“Victor Vasarely: The Sharing of Forms”
Centre Pompidou, Paris
February 6, 2019–May 6, 2019

With recent major exhibitions of artists like Julio Le Parc and Bridget Riley, Op art is back in the spotlight. Widely regarded as the movement’s grandfather, Vasarely is finally getting his first retrospective in the city he called home after 1930. The show spans the full arc of the Hungarian-born artist’s career, starting in the 1930s with his proto-Op experiments. Also included will be examples of Vasarely’s eye-popping abstractions, which appear to warp before one’s eyes, and his later works, from the ’60s and ’70s, which responded to the look of advertising and mass media from the era. —A.A.

Victor Vasarely, Re.Na II A, 1968, oil and acrylic on canvas.

PHOTO: CENTRE POMPIDOU, MNAM-CCI/BERTRAND PREVOST/DIST. RMN-GP; ART: ©ADAGP, PARIS/COLLECTION CENTRE POMPIDOU, PARIS, GIFT OF THE ARTIST

“Roppongi Crossing 2019”
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
February 9, 2019–May 26, 2019

The theme for the 2019 edition of “Roppongi Crossing”—a triennial held by the Mori Art Museum that offers something of a scene report on the Japanese contemporary art world—is “Connexions,” a reference to how artists are attempting to find points of unity in an increasingly fractured cultural and political landscape. More than 20 artists have been selected for this year’s edition. Their contributions will include Aono Fumiaki’s junk assemblages, ANREALAGE’s “form-changing clothes,” and Takekawa Nobuaki’s Cat Olympics, a sculpture that ponders the hype surrounding the 2020 Tokyo games through an absurdist feline lens. —J.C.

Bruno Gironcoli
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
February 14, 2019–May 12, 2019

After years of relative obscurity, Gironcoli’s work has recently seen a revival, thanks to a major show of the late Austrian sculptor’s work earlier this year at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna. Now the Schirn Kunsthalle will offer its own survey of Gironcoli’s metal sculptures, which resemble nightmarish versions of sci-fi machines. Their allusions to technology spiraling out of control have proven influential for young artists. The Schirn show will focus specifically on Gironcoli’s late works, from 1990s and 2000s. —S.N.

Mary Maggic, Housewives Making Drugs (still), 2017, video.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

“Producing Futures—An Exhibition on Post-Cyber-Feminisms”
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich
February 16, 2019–May 12, 2019

Ever since 1991, when the collective VNS Matrix disseminated its Cyberfeminist Manifesto both on- and offline, artists have envisioned a number of ways technology might disrupt our relatively conservative understandings of gender binaries and norms. But what is the state of cyberfeminism today? With this show, the Migros Museum will survey artists concerned with digital technology’s impact on the body—and consider the relevance of cyberfeminism in the present. The show’s artist list includes Guan Xiao, Tabita Rezaire, Anicka Yi, Juliana Huxtable, Wu Tsang, and more. —A.G.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Winter 2019 issue of ARTnews on page 22 under the title “Editors’ Picks.”

Julian Schnabel photographed in Paris, France on October 20, 2016.

LOUISE KUGELBERG/© JULIAN SCHNABEL, PACE GALLERY

“Julian Schnabel: Plate Paintings 1978–86” is on view at Aspen Art Museum until February 19, 2017. Schnabel’s upcoming solo exhibition at the Pace Gallery in New York will run from February 24 through March 25.

Bill Powers: We’re looking at new plate paintings in your outdoor studio. One narrative appears to be a woman on the beach wrestling a giant lobster.

Julian Schnabel: It’s from an image I found at the Fish Farm in Napeague taped up on their refrigerator.

BP: Two other paintings are cropped landscapes with flowers. Does working outside have a direct impact on the imagery?

JS: Well, I can turn around, and I’m confronted by nature. You see all the holes between the branches and the way the light hits the leaves. You realize it’s not just one green. It’s a million different versions of green and the organized chaos of nature.

BP: To me, your new flower paintings hover between the feeling of a Japanese garden and Monet’s water lilies.

JS: These flowers are in the graveyard where van Gogh is buried. The black and white marks are from the wall behind it, the little stones. You don’t see the sky, which is interesting, just the roses inside this enclosed space.

BP: Does that convey a sense of entrapment?

JS: I wouldn’t call it claustrophobia, but they are relentless in a way where there’s no escape.

BP: When you visit van Gogh’s grave, do you get a spirit hit from that proximity?

JS: I’ve been thinking about making a movie about van Gogh. I’ve got about sixty pages. I’m working with Jean-Claude Carrière. I think it’s interesting to see what van Gogh was thinking about. He would go into a museum and act as if no one else was there. He’d walk right up to a painting and block other people’s view. He didn’t care.

BP: Paintings by which artists?

JS: It’s obvious he was looking at Goya and Velázquez and Rubens and Franz Hals. When you look at light hitting someone’s face, it’s just one mark. He understood that paintings have to be done quickly as opposed to Gauguin, who believed in planning everything out. If you look at the straw hat in Saint Sulpice, it looks like a van Gogh hat, but it was painted by Delacroix. I’m sure he saw that hat.

BP: There have been a couple of van Gogh biopics already.

JS: I love Kirk Douglas, but that movie (Lust for Life, 1956) was terrible. It’s just one cliché after another. He’s crying all the time.

BP: And then Tim Roth played him in Vincent & Theo (1990).

JS: Which starts with an auction scene where his painting goes for $36 million, as if that justifies his life somehow.

BP: Have you ever heard the theory that Gauguin actually cut off van Gogh’s ear and that’s why he split town so soon after?

JS: If you were living with a guy who just cut his ear off, you might leave town, too.

BP: I’m reminded now that one of the opening lines in your Basquiat movie is “everybody wants to get on the van Gogh boat.”

JS: “There’s no trip so horrible that someone won’t take it. The idea of the unrecognized genius slaving away in his garret is a deliciously foolish one. We must credit the life of Vincent van Gogh for really sending this myth into orbit.” That was written by Rene Ricard.

BP: As you get older, do your ideas about spirituality change?

JS: When Héctor Babenco died last month, I wrote an obituary about him in the New York Times.

BP: That distillation of remembrances can be a curious process.

JS: There’s a new documentary Pappi Corsicato made about me that hasn’t come out yet. He did a great job, but there are other people talking about me and you realize that history is not true. Everyone has their own version of it.

BP: Does that make you question your own sanity?

JS: It’s just funny how people remember things that never happened. My daughter Lola is in the documentary talking about these sculptures of mine in St. Moritz and how they were dropped out of a helicopter. Or my sister telling a story about my Uncle Charlie, who was already dead at the time it allegedly happened. People imagine things.

BP: I’m fascinated by all the moments lost to history. For instance, I remember being at Pace Gallery for your opening in 2004, and seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman there. I asked him how he was handling the news of Richard Avedon’s passing, only to realize he hadn’t heard about it yet . . . so, in a moment of shock, he rushed outside.

JS: It was amazing to know Phil. I made four paintings for him in Mexico after he died. We always wanted to work together. He was going to play a role in [my 2010 film] Miral, but the timing didn’t work out. The first time he got a little money, Phil bought two paintings of mine, which was a real compliment.

Julian Schnabel’s Divan, 1979, is on view at Aspen Art Museum show “Julian Schnabel Plate Paintings 1978–86” until February 19, 2017.

BP: I also heard a story that when John Currin was a grad student at Yale, you went as a visiting artist and, during the studio critiques, you told him that his work (he was making abstract paintings at the time) had something hard to find in painting: they had poverty.

JS: I remember going to Yale, and all the artists had submitted one painting each, to which I said, “How the hell can I tell anything about a person’s work from one painting? If I’m going to help, I need to see where you’re going.” They all went back to their studios and brought two more pieces. So now all of a sudden I’m looking at three hundred paintings and out of all of them, the one I chose to single out for discussion was John Currin’s.

BP: Do you believe that spaces and objects house memory?

JS: Well, I live in a Stanford White house in Montauk. The details of what goes on, the choices he made about ceilings or walls are just so human. It’s not erased by Sheetrock or people trying to do something modern or practical afterward. I’m pretty allergic to most modern architecture. When I built my house in the city, I wanted it to look like Venice.

BP: Your indoor pool in the city reminds me of the pool at San Simeon. In fact, you share another passion with William Randolph Hearst in that he loved tapestries, because he thought of them as the headlines of yesteryear.

JS: All these things transport you to other places. The way paintings bring you into their present, even if they were made three hundred years ago. It’s very easy to get bogged down in the ordinariness of the everyday. So much activity in life can be like static on the radio. You want some visual feed to make you feel alive or engaged. The Ahab sculpture I have on my front lawn does that when I’m sitting on my porch. It jars the rational.

BP: You mentioned Stanford White, whom I always thought would be a fantastic subject for a movie, the way he was shot at Madison Square Garden for sleeping with another man’s wife.

JS: Well, that’s in the movie Ragtime (1981), where Norman Mailer played Stanford White. It’s a good movie.

BP: Is it true that you own a pair of boxing gloves that belonged to Marlon Brando?

JS: Yes. I just wanted to put my hands in them. If you don’t feel good, just slip on Marlon Brando’s boxing gloves for a little while. They’re very talismanic. I don’t wear them often enough probably. Have you ever seen the documentary Listen to Me Marlon (2015), where he speaks from the grave? It’s amazing . . . and heartbreaking. Or have you ever seen Missouri Breaks (1976)?

BP: I haven’t.

JS: It’s a very interesting idiosyncratic movie. Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando in a cowboy movie. Arthur Penn directed it. I’ll lend it to you.

BP: I only recently watched the Wim Wenders movie, The American Friend (1977), where Dennis Hopper plays a cowboy-type art dealer abroad.

JS: Dennis is great in it. Bruno Ganz is terrific, too.

BP: I find that artists often fall into two different camps. Someone like Richard Prince will skip his own opening, especially if it’s out of town, because he feels like, “hey, I made the work. Isn’t that enough?” But then, conversely, Jeff Koons feels a responsibility to contextualize the work with his presence.

JS: I figure while I’m alive, I go. Also, I like to hang my paintings. I like hanging other people’s work, too. In fact, I’m hanging all the Clyfford Still paintings in Denver for a show next January.

BP: At his museum there?

JS: Yes, they’re letting me hang the whole museum. I selected thirty big paintings and thirty small paintings.

BP: Do you think about how he would want the work to be shown?

JS: Well, I knew Clyfford. He came to my studio once and I always felt a kinship with him.

BP: Did you learn something new about him?

JS: They’re just so odd and unique, these Grand Canyons he painted, the ravines. It’s like Thelonious Monk or Albert Ayler, he’s really out there.

BP: You were saying that Still’s use of brown is way more interesting than if he’d chosen black.

JS: Because you’re looking for the darkest value in a painting, the heaviest element. A guy once said to me, “Try to make a black painting with bright colors.” And I thought, what? Or when Ornette Coleman said to me, “Can you sing ‘Apartment #9,’ only without the melody?” It took me a minute to wrap my mind around that. What Still did with brown, I’m not sure people understand it even now. It’s like picking the ugliest shirt in your wardrobe to put on and then making a big deal about it. Brown is less obvious than black and it ups the ante into seeing his sensibility.

BP: Do you try to find the representational aspects in his work? For instance, the Still painting we look at now is like an impossibly configured castle with a tiny door.

JS: Or the Le Corbusier church? But, no, I don’t want to think about that at all. And as soon as he sees it becoming too much of a boat or another shape, he changes direction. He made such excellent decisions about light and dark. In some of his work I see Marsden Hartley or even El Greco, or Philip Guston’s “Ku Klux Klan” paintings. Or I’ll see another Still painting from 1945 and think of Sigmar Polke’s Moderne Kunst. Modern art! And then you factor in Still’s pronouncements about not wanting to make bourgeois paintings pandering to rich people.

BP: Is that why you don’t really see his paintings in collectors’ homes?

JS: I think at some point he opted out of the game and stepped into eternity.

BP: Are we too precious about chronology in a way where it colors the artist’s work? For example, in the Jackson Pollock show at MoMA you saw him abandon the drip paintings toward the end of his life and almost revert back to what he was searching for as a young painter.

JS: I go to shows and walk in backward all the time. The Matisse show, for instance, it was much more interesting to see the last paper cutouts at the beginning and then see the early work at the end. You’re not waiting to find out what will be, instead you’re tracing things back to the seed.

BP: In your own work, you have been on a big violet kick lately, is that fair to say?

JS: Yeah, for what . . . the last 20 years? One year I bought all the purple in New York City. Actually it was mineral violet. It seems to be a very succinct color. Purple covers a lot of ground.

BP: Often in your paintings I’ll notice a big white gesture that reminds me of an abstracted Artschwager blip or a dried riverbed. Do you have language in the studio for these recurring symbols?

JS: I think of it as an intervention upon the temporality of what’s already there. It’s a way of pinpointing something. For instance, the old map of Montauk you gave me this morning. The previous owner drew red marks around different areas of the coastline that stand out. You realize that someone else touched that map at another moment well after it was made. And I think when you look at my paintings with the white marks you see that, a complicity in what already existed.

BP: You often work on the road, be it Spain or Mexico or Australia. Is there a foreign quality that you hope to capture in your painting?

JS: Yes, traveling has been a big part of my work. I remember when someone complained about my defacing Japanese kabuki backdrops. And I thought, “If you go somewhere and don’t bring anything back with you, what’s the point of going?” Whether it’s something you bring back in your head or something physical. For all the materiality of things, ultimately it’s about something invisible . . . it’s about a feeling. It’s about traveling, either geographically or in time.

With restrained typography and dynamic forms, innovative museum website designs convey the nuances of institutional identity.

UPON ARRIVAL at the website of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, visitors are greeted by clusters of dancing punctuation marks scattered across the page. A comma appears, only to be quickly replaced by a period, followed by a colon, a parenthesis, a plus sign, and an asterisk. Aside from these dynamic, pulsing punctuation marks, only a handful of horizontal lines, a name (The Wattis Institute), and several social media icons are visible at first. Still, this sparse black-and-white home page feels alive.

Clicking anywhere on the page reveals the text, all of it rendered in the widely available Times New Roman font. Complete sentences, many written in the first person plural, convey basic information about the institution and its programming: “We’re in San Francisco, a few blocks away from California College of the Arts” and “The Wattis is currently closed for install.” But the text further down the page takes a more personal tone. One sentence encountered on a recent visit was repeated as if it were a mantra or a hex: “Andrea Fraser is on our mind. Andrea Fraser is on our mind. Andrea Fraser is on our mind.”

This spring, Fraser presented a series of exhibitions, performances, and public programs at the Wattis, a nonprofit affiliated with the CCA that specializes in presenting various facets of a single artist’s work over an extended period of time. But the strange repetition raises questions about how the institution presents itself. How many minds are at work here? Who is the “we” contemplating Fraser?

These questions underscore a conceptual challenge inherent in designing any institution’s graphic identity: how to create a visual language for a single entity with a coherent mission that is, at the same time, a collection of individuals. The design of the Wattis site seems like a metaphor for this condition. A generic font unifies the frantic, dispersed activity of the blinking punctuation. Despite its austere look, the Wattis website feels quirky and intimate, an effect amplified by the text. At the very end of the page is a personal aside, a bit of insider advice from this “tour guide” behind the website, that has little to do with the Wattis’s programming: “Meanwhile, every living artist really needs to see the Picabia retrospective now on view in Zurich.”

Websites are, of course, standard for art institutions. It’s difficult to imagine a museum or gallery without one. The Museum of Modern Art in New York launched its website in 1995, two years before Google was founded. Over the decades, its site has assumed increased importance beyond announcing exhibitions and providing visitor information. MoMA has built a reputation for employing cutting-edge technologies to produce elaborate Web environments for many special exhibitions. The 2013 Webby Award-nominated site for “Century of the Child,” utilized advanced (for the time) motion graphics-interactive animations-to create a rich virtual version of an exhibition about modern design for children.[pq]Websites are an integral part of the museum experience, yet they tend to be treated as matter-of-fact supplements or neutral platforms.[/pq]

Websites are an integral part of the museum experience, both for audiences who want to learn more about work encountered in a physical gallery and those “digital non-visitors” who explore exhibitions and collections remotely. Yet the sites themselves tend to be treated as matter-of-fact supplements, even neutral platforms, that merely direct attention to a “real” experience in the gallery. For that reason, few museums have devoted resources to preserving their websites for posterity. Given the rapid rate of obsolescence for Web technologies, the full experience of many of these sites is likely lost for good. Indeed, one foundation seeking to counter this trend by funding initiatives to archive art institution websites describes an imminent “digital black hole” in the art historical record of the last twenty years. ¹

This neglect is surprising because, over the same historical period, work by Fraser and many other prominent artists has focused attention on the context in which art is viewed. As critic and artist Brian O’Doherty argued in Inside the White Cube (1976), the apparent neutrality of the modernist gallery space is an ideological construct that is essential to the identity of modern art. “Context becomes content,” as he wrote. ² Websites present a digital version of this problem. They can be dynamic, interactive environments for viewing artwork, or at least representations of it. And yet many of the most trafficked art sites adhere to design conventions borrowed from the modernist gallery. The influential Contemporary Art Daily (CAD) publishes installation images from a single gallery exhibition every day. The website design-spare borders, minimal text, white background-echoes gallery architecture. CAD essentially presents images of white cubes within a digital white cube. The design choice projects authority, but it also obscures the role of the individual taste preferences that determine the featured exhibitions.

BUT IT DOESN’T have to be this way. Critic Orit Gat recently urged artists in particular to consider their websites as integral to their work. According to Gat, the Web offers an exhibition venue in which artists can exercise more or less total creative freedom:

Though the state and place of art on the internet is a matter of concern for all artists, critics, curators, dealers, and viewers, direct engagement via personal websites is at the moment undertaken by younger or emerging artists who are more likely to contribute to-and control-the presentation of their works online. These artists can change the way we look at art online. ³

There is an element of resistance in Gat’s formulation. By “curating” in the controlled environment online, artists can hope to provide a counterweight to the dominant tendencies in the internet’s image economy, by which JPEGs appear on various social media platforms, often without credit and disconnected from their source.

Institutions, which are embedded in the art economy and dependent on donors, may have a harder time striking any kind of oppositional stance. But some, like the Wattis, conceive of their website design as conceptually integral to their programming. David Reinfurt, a founder of the influential design collective Dexter Sinister, built the Wattis website as part of a broader graphic design identity project for the institution. According to a statement published on the site, Reinfurt sought to create “a language that narrates all of the Wattis’s activities in real time.” Reinfurt characterized the system he devised as “fluid, spontaneous, moody, challenging, and precise-fully consistent with the spirit of the [institution’s] program itself.” ⁴

This program aims to slow down the pace of the art world by keeping a single artist on the minds of Wattis curators and audiences. Recent subjects include David Hammons, Laura Owens, and Joan Jonas. As Wattis director Anthony Huberman put it to me in an email: “The entire ‘on our mind’ series is about a certain kind of stubbornness . . . while most institutional programming is always moving on to a ‘next’ artist or a ‘next’ exhibition, we are sticking to our guns and repeating ourselves. . . . The idea is that we are sending out emails every month saying ‘yes, we are STILL thinking about Andrea Fraser.'” ⁵ This stubbornness is also evident in the site’s lack of images-unusual for a nonprofit focused on visual art-and in the opacity of the home page, which requires a viewer to become engaged (at least with a click) before anything is legible. And the visitor must click at least twice before any gallery installation image is revealed.

But it is perhaps Reinfurt’s invocation of a “moody” sensibility in the design that best captures the provocation at the heart of the Wattis project. Lecturing this summer at the San Francisco bookstore and art space Kiria Koula, Huberman emphasized the role of the institution as a “collaborator” with the featured artist. Instead of running away from this reality, he argued that art institutions should embrace this role, making it transparent. One way of doing this is by establishing a personal voice for the institution, complete with a moody temperament. The feeling that the website is alive highlights this sense of personality. With this subtle anthropomorphic tint, the institution can be understood not just as a frame for an artist’s work, but as an agent in its production.

The Wattis has made this aspect of their Web presence explicit, and other institutions are pursuing flexible, dynamic typography on their websites to similar, if less pronounced, ends. The Whitney Museum’s “Responsive W” identity by Experimental Jetset, for example, is a system that allows the museum’s initial to flex and stretch around reproductions from its collection on advertising material. The design suggests an institution grappling with the particularities of the artwork on display inside. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s grid identity, conceived by Mevis & van Deursen, provides a stable framework within which a suite of typefaces can appear, ranging from stoic to playful. Through this design, the institution comes across as multifaceted: scholarly on some occasions, quirky and fun on others. The Aspen Art Museum recently introduced seasonally shifting typefaces by Radim Pesko that rebrand the institution over the course of the year, linking its graphic identity to the earth’s natural cycles. One of the first institutions to launch a website designed for constant change was Istanbul’s SALT. In 2011, the New York firm Project Projects (with whom Art in America has also collaborated) built a flexible, multilingual platform, and every four months a new designer is invited to create his or her own version of the institution’s typeface, Kraliçe.

This trend toward dynamism in museum website design counters the static logos that convey authority, stability, and timelessness. If the museum appears to be changing with the seasons, flexible yet opinionated like a living thing, then perhaps its authority can be viewed as provisional and context-specific rather than monolithic. Likewise, dynamic designs foreground the museum’s role as a producer of art and culture, not just a frozen frame for it.

LAUREL SCHWULST is a graphic designer and writer based in New York.

Endnotes

1. Seth Persons, “MoMA.org Turns 20: Archiving Two Decades of Exhibition Sites,” May 25, 2015, moma.org.

2. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1976, p. 15.

3. Orit Gat, “Scroll, Skim, Stare,” The White Review, April 2016, thewhitereview.org.

4. David Reinfurt, “A New Identity and a Website,” cca.edu.

5. Anthony Huberman, email to the author, April 2016.

New artwork by Takashi Murakami created for the 2015–16 Aspen Snowmass lift ticket.

©2015 TAKASHI MURAKAMI/KAIKAI KIKI CO., LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Japanese artist, known best to the American public for collaborating with Louis Vuitton and marching in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as a flower, now joins Mark Grotjahn, Karen Kilimnik, David Shrigley, and others who have designed lift tickets in collaboration with the Aspen Skiing Company and the Aspen Art Museum. The lift-ticket program is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, which explains the participation of an artist as major as Murakami. Before any of these artists were commissioned, the lift tickets at Buttermilk were plain—two-by-three-inch “blank slates,” as Paula Crown, an owner of the Aspen Skiing Company, explained.

A little over ten years ago, Heidi Zuckerman, the director of the Aspen Art Museum, came up with a remedy to their ordinariness. “I saw people walking around town with these lift tickets, and they just looked like a generic mountain landscape,” Zuckerman said. “It seemed like to not use that space for commissioned work by an important artist, it would be a missed opportunity.”

Zuckerman approached Crown with the idea of asking artists to design the tickets. The response at the Skiing Company was overwhelmingly positive, and in 2005 Yutaka Sone became the first artist in what would become an ongoing collaboration. Sone’s wintry design is filled with bursts of light that abstract the image, making it more exciting than just another picture of a person flying down the slopes.

The choice to work with Sone, who also threw oversize dice down the mountain as a performance that year, was a way of linking art and business. As Crown explained, that connection has always been important to the ski company, whose founder, Walter Paepcke, commissioned Willem de Kooning and Jacob Lawrence to do packaging graphics for the Container Corporation of America. “[Paepcke] knew that art and design were integral to the success of a company,” Crown said. “I think art and business go together, and I think it’s essential that they go together…. Art can’t be an add-on. It can’t be a second thought. It has to be integral to the process.”

According to Zuckerman, the museum and the Skiing Company’s collaboration also has an educational component. Zuckerman recounted inviting the sound artist Susan Philipsz to create a work for Buttermilk and pitching it to Mike Kaplan, the ski company’s CEO. “What is this?” Kaplan asked when he heard Philipsz’s work for the first time. Zuckerman explained performance and sound art to him—an informal lesson about contemporary art, and a sign that the collaboration was serving its purpose.

“One of the great powers of art is . . . [that it] really opens up the possibilities of self-knowledge of the world—a broader life experience,” Zuckerman said. “That kind of openness to adventure is something that captures who we are in Aspen.”

A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2015 issue of ARTnews on page 36 under the title “Ticket Masters.”

Aspen Art Museum, Grand Stair.

©MICHAEL MORAN/OTTO/COURTESY ASPEN ART MUSEUM

Kunsthalles throughout Germany, Austria, and Switzerland play an important role in defining and animating their local art scenes, with kunsthals in Norway and konsthalls in Sweden serving the same purpose. Some are nearly two centuries old.

Yet in the United States, where so many museums have been founded without much government aid but by private individuals, these noncollecting spaces are relatively rare. The Association of Art Museum Directors reports that only eleven of its 222 United States–based members run kunsthalles, including Aspen, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, the Drawing Center in New York, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

And over the last decade some prominent noncollecting institutions have turned away from the kunsthalle model and begun acquiring as they have grown larger in scale and ambition.

The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston acquired its first work (a video by Christian Jankowski) in 2005, the year before its new waterfront building opened. It now has 142 pieces, primarily gifts. Around the same time, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, home of Armand Hammer’s Old Masters and Impressionist paintings, began collecting in its main field of contemporary art, setting up an acquisitions fund for that purpose. With an emphasis that has evolved from drawings to artworks made in Los Angeles, the collection now has about 2,000 works.

Meanwhile, PS1 in New York gained access to the mother of all modern-art collections through its merger with the Museum of Modern Art, while the New Museum has made it clear that its ultra-flexibility as an institution should extend to collecting: it can acquire works, especially commissions, when it sees fit.

It would be melodramatic to say that the American kunsthalle is in danger of extinction, but it does face challenges distinct from those faced by its collection-proud counterparts. Most urgently, how do you raise money for a museum whose mission is decidedly fluid with a collection that is conspicuously absent? How do you court trustee-collectors when you can’t offer them a home for their beloved objects? And, in the case of Aspen, how does an architect design a building without a group of artworks or artists in mind?

Mel Chin’s sculpture The Manila Palm, 1978, installed on the lawn of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

RICK GARDNER/COURTESY CONTEMPORARY ARTS MUSEUM HOUSTON

“A kunsthalle is a place where ideas can germinate and grow, flourish or fail,” she says. “We can be a kind of engine for cultural exploration and discovery.”

Neil Benezra, director of the collection-driven San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, agrees that this sort of experimental impulse is harder to preserve in a larger institution devoted to object stewardship. “A collection requires more resources, whether human or financial, dedicated to its oversight,” he says. “Smaller institutions that do not have collections can have a smaller budget, smaller staff, and be entirely focused on their program. There’s something quite wonderful about that.”

Lisa Melandri, director of the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, says she enjoys the fast-changing nature of a kunsthalle. But she adds that fundraising can prove tricky for that reason.

Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis.

HELEN BINET/COURTESY CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM SAINT LOUIS

Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum, says that the desire to support emerging artists directly was one reason for forming a cutting-edge collection there. Then there is the appeal to patrons. “There are many donors who don’t want to write checks but would love to buy or give you art,” she says. “Watching a museum collection being built is not just exciting for museum directors and curators, it’s exciting for donors too.”

Philbin also identifies practical advantages to having a collection, such as the ability to secure loans from other museums. “A lot of museums will tell you that’s one thing collecting gives them: leverage for borrowing from other institutions.”

Zuckerman Jacobson, however, has a firm answer to the question of whether the Aspen museum would consider starting a collection. “No, we don’t need to,” she answers. She says that reading the ARTnews top 200 collectors list this year, she identified 22 who have a home in Aspen and “another 15 to 17 [who] come here regularly. We have access to the best collections in the world and also to other great museums because our donors sit on their boards or councils too.”

Sure enough, while some kunsthalles struggle to arrange loans from major museums, Zuckerman Jacobson has secured prized works with the help of her trustees. For instance, for the current Yves Klein–meets–David Hammons exhibition, the late Aspen trustee Frances Dittmer helped secure three Klein loans, including one of his “Anthropometries,” or body stamps, from another museum she supported, the Menil Collection in Houston.

Black Lightning, an explosion event by Cai Guo-Qiang commissioned for the opening of the Aspen Art Museum, August 2, 2014.

DAVID X. PRUTTING/BFANYC.COM

Zuckerman Jacobson credits dozens of these donors with helping her raise an impressive $75 million for the new building and endowment. She adds that the kunsthalle model helped, offering a way to differentiate the museum from its competition, something she recognized soon after her 2005 arrival. “My first idea was that we could be the best mid-sized museum in America, but that’s not so sexy. Then I realized we could be the best noncollecting institution and write our mission around it,” she says.

Zuckerman Jacobson used the kunsthalle distinction to woo trustees who already had ties to major museums. “I started to make the case to some donors: you can give those museums artwork, and you can give us money,” she says.

Other museum leaders say this focus has helped the Aspen Art Museum gain wide art-world support. One sign is the number of museum directors and curators who flew to Aspen for the inauguration of the Shigeru Ban building in August.

“It’s very easy to be supportive of the Aspen Art Museum—it enhances the ecology of the art world instead of directly competing with most museums,” says Philbin. It also works out well for the Hammer, which is set to receive a sizable, drawings-rich collection from Aspen residents Larry and Susan Marx, who also have a home in Los Angeles.

“If we weren’t a collecting institution, we wouldn’t be receiving this very remarkable gift of artwork from the Marxes,” says Philbin. “And if Aspen were a collecting institution, we probably wouldn’t be getting it either, because that is their hometown museum.”

But, as it stands, the Aspen museum did get quite a munificent gift from its donors: the new building, paid for entirely with private funds. And the Shigeru Ban design reflects the adaptable nature of the institution.

The six exhibition galleries are all 14 feet tall, a requirement that Zuckerman Jacobson had in mind for consistency and “to make sure the galleries feel flexible and wide open.” One of the galleries doubles as a black box for video screenings. “That was easy—a white cube is very close to a black box,” Ban explains.

Ban also discusses the importance of designing a building that could accommodate any sort of artwork. Yes, he admits, Calder has been his favorite artist since he attended high school in Tokyo, when he checked out a book on the artist from the library and conveniently forgot to return it. But the architect adds that he wasn’t really designing the museum’s roof-deck or galleries around Calder’s work as much as using the sculptures as a point of reference. “I always put his work in my spaces just to understand scale,” he says.

Otherwise, he says, his main preoccupation was the new building’s relationship to the site—the view of the mountain shaping the experience of ascending the grand staircase, and the color and texture of local buildings (mainly brick or wood) informing his decision to wrap the building in a wood-veneer basket-weave-style structure.

Aspen Art Museum, Roof Deck Sculpture Garden.

©MICHAEL MORAN/OTTO/COURTESY ASPEN ART MUSEUM

Dean Maltz, Ban’s United States partner, adds that the Aspen museum’s nonhierarchical approach, along with its decision to offer free admission to the public, did influence their building design in another way. It shaped their plans for visitor circulation.

“Most buildings are repositories of precious objects, so you are watched wherever you go. But here you are free to enter the museum from different locations, from top or bottom,” Maltz says. The lack of a permanent collection, he suggests, allows for a less linear viewing experience.

The notion of an open-ended building designed for an open-ended program hints at another possibility. In the absence of a permanent collection or a single compelling masterpiece to show off, the architecture of a kunsthalle can become an especially important image for and symbol of the institution itself.

This has been the case with other kunsthalles as well, such as the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati with its energetic and edgy building by Zaha Hadid, and the more subtle David Adjaye structure for the MCA Denver.

Then there’s the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, which opened its new space in 2012. Designed by London architect Farshid Moussavi, the four-story, hyperangular, stainless-steel, gem-shaped building is, if anything, a monument to dynamism.

As Moussavi told Steven Litt of the Plain Dealer, “Monuments normally try to freeze reality.” She sought the opposite. “We’ve been trying to embed time and to show that time changes,” she said. “Whether it’s the shape of the building that changes as you move around it or the reflections that change.”

Back in Aspen, Shigeru Ban expects the architecture, which essentially takes the form of a box, to be dynamic in one other way. He recognizes that his most distinctive design element, the woven screen that wraps around the building, also creates odd, leftover spaces for artist interventions.

“I wanted to prepare a provocative space for artists to do something. Even the space between the frame and the glass could be a stage for artists,” he says.

And in this way, a sense of experimentation and a focus on living artists is written into the skin as well as the guts of the building.

Jori Finkel is a writer based in Los Angeles where she covers art for the New York Times.

A version of this story originally appeared in the October 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 80 under the title “The Future of the American Kunsthalle.”