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The Headlines
ARTIST MIRA LEHR, whose multifarious art tackled environmental issues, and who was involved in founding Continuum, a cooperative gallery in Miami Beach, Florida, for women artists in 1966, has died at the age of 88, Neil Genzlinger reports in the New York Times. Powerfully influenced by her participation in a 1969 experiment by inventor R. Buckminster Fuller that looked at how to allocate natural resources, Lehr made work in a variety of mediums—paint, video, gunpowder, and more—that addresses ecosystems, animal life, and other topics. While being profiled by the Times in 2020, Lehr said, “We have to think of the loss and destruction and that there is more of this to come.”
SHOWTIME. One of the most anticipated exhibitions of the season in New York has to be Sarah Sze’s outing at the Guggenheim, which will open in March. In WSJ Magazine, the wily installation artist spoke about what she has on tap—video projections on the outside of the building, for one thing—with journalist Ted Loos. “I wanted to make pieces you could only do at the Guggenheim,” Sze said. “The building became a tool for making the work.” Meanwhile, painter and musician Mike Henderson spoke with David Smith in the Guardian about his just-opened show at the University of California, Davis’s art museum. It includes his “protest paintings” from the 1960s to ‘80s, which look at racist violence in the United States. He knew they “weren’t going to hang in anybody’s living room but the paintings were coming through me,” he said. “There was a deeper calling.”
The Digest
Billionaire collector Ken Griffin wants to relocate a historic home off his Miami estate that was built for three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (of “Cross of Gold” fame). Griffin said the move could open the house to the public; some preservationists oppose the plan. [The Wall Street Journal]
In 2021, a massive solar project proposed for rural Nevada was scrapped after opposition from advocates for Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, which is nearby the proposed site, as well as environmental and tribal groups; the Land art touchstone “crystallizes the difficulties we’re going to face as a nation confronting the climate crisis,” environmental reporter Sammy Roth writes. [Los Angeles Times]
Workers repairing sewers in Rome made a startling discovery when a bulldozer tore through some old pipes: a statue that appears to depict the third-century emperor Decius posing as Hercules. The artwork had broken apart, and is now being restored. [Reuters]
The French auction house Osenat postponed a sale of modernist furniture from Chandigarh, India, that was designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret amid press stories of an investigation by Indian police that may concern export licenses. There have been cases of material being stolen from historic sites in the city. [The Art Newspaper]
The band Body/Head—comprised of Sonic Youth bassist, artist, and writer Kim Gordon and guitarist Bill Nace—will perform at Gagosian in Los Angeles on February 15, in conjunction with Jim Shaw’s show there. It is a homecoming, of sorts, for Gordon, who was Larry Gagosian’s assistant before becoming a music legend. [Vanity Fair]
The Kicker
ON THE HOME FRONT.Evan Mock—the surfer, skateboarder, and Gossip Girl actor—is promoting Hotels.com (why not?), and chatted withArchitectural Digest about his Manhattan abode. Mock has chairs by artist “Tom Sachs around my dining table, and they are really nice,” he said. “I probably shouldn’t be sitting on them, because they’re art pieces, but they are such a big part of the living room/dining table/kitchen area.” Speaking of Sachs, he just unveiled a public artwork in New Milford, Connecticut, HypeArt notes, and Nike is about to release his General Purpose Shoe in a new color, Sneaker News reports. [AD]
Source: https://www.artnews.com/
