The art: Teresita Fernandez, Fire, 2005.
The news: “The Fires This Time,” by Timothy Egan for the New York Times.
The source: Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
By some odd quirk of art purchase-and-distribution, Richard Diebenkorn’s great Ocean Park paintings are pretty evenly scattered around America. Only two art museums have more than one: the Milwaukee Art Museum has two and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art effectively has four. Throughout the day I’ll be sharing Ocean Parks from SFMOMA’s collection, including this stunner, Ocean Park #67 (1973, click to expand). To see more images of the Ocean Park works discussed on the show, click here.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast is all about Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series, which is surveyed in a major exhibition that is on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. First, exhibition curator Sarah Bancroft talks about how the work came to be and what makes it great; next, conservator Ana Alba discusses her new research into the Ocean Park series — and why some of the paintings from certain parts of the series are having condition issues.
Alba is a conservation fellow in modern paintings at the National Gallery of Art. She started her work on Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings while at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden when she was a paintings conservation intern. In May she presented her research on the Ocean Park series at the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works’s annual conference in Albuquerque.
To download the program directly, click here. To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. To see lots of images of the works discussed on the show, click here.
By some odd quirk of art purchase-and-distribution, Richard Diebenkorn’s great Ocean Park paintings are pretty evenly scattered around America. Only two art museums have more than one: the Milwaukee Art Museum has two and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art effectively has four. Throughout the day I’ll be sharing Ocean Parks from SFMOMA’s collection, including this stunner, Ocean Park #54 (1972, click to expand). To see more images of the Ocean Park works discussed on the show, click here.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast is all about Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series, which is surveyed in a major exhibition that is on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. First, exhibition curator Sarah Bancroft talks about how the work came to be and what makes it great; next, conservator Ana Alba discusses her new research into the Ocean Park series — and why some of the paintings from certain parts of the series are having condition issues.
Alba is a conservation fellow in modern paintings at the National Gallery of Art. She started her work on Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings while at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden when she was a paintings conservation intern. In May she presented her research on the Ocean Park series at the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works’s annual conference in Albuquerque.
To download the program directly, click here. To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. To see lots of images of the works discussed on the show, click here.
The art: Ralston Crawford, Vertical Building, 1934.
The news: “Google Tries Something Retro: Made in the USA,” by John Markoff for the New York Times.
The source: Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The art: Deborah Luster, Ebony Ellis from the “One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana” project, 1998.
The news: “How Louisiana Became the World’s Prison Capital,” on NPR’s Fresh Air.
The source: Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. More information at DeborahLuster.com.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas. An exhibition of Thomas’s recent paintings, “Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe,” is on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art through August 19.
Thomas’s work is in the collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
Photographer Marco Breuer, whose latest work is on view now at Chelsea’s Von Lintel Gallery, is the second guest. Breuer’s manipulations of photographic paper create fantastic, often surprising abstractions.
His most recent museum exhibition was last year’s“Marco Breuer: Line of Sight,” which was organized by Julian Cox at the de Young in San Francisco.His work is in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, MoMA, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Harvard Art Museums and SFMOMA.
To download the program directly to your PC/mobile device, click here. To subscribe to To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. Images of artworks discussed on the program are here.
Image: Mickalene Thomas, Sista Sista Lady Blue, 2007. Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The last stop of the Wexner-organized Mark Bradford survey is the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the show has just over a month left to run. On the occasion of the show’s arrival in San Francisco, I talked with Bradford on The Modern Art Notes Podcast. I think it’s one of the very best episodes of the show yet: Bradford opened up about his life and work in strikingly personal, even emotional ways. Don’t miss it.
Click here to download the show directly to your PC/mobile device. Click here to access The MAN Podcast in iTunes, where the Bradford show is Episode No. 19. Click here to see images of works discussed on the program.
Image: Mark Bradford, Scorched Earth, 2006.
One of the best pictures of the 2000s.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Mitch Epstein.
For me, this picture from Epstein’s “American Power” series and in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is one the best photographs of the 2000s. We discuss it at length on this week’s show, especially how it relates to Epstein’s new pictures of New York City trees.
Epstein is one of America’s most prominent and most honored photographers. His work is in the collection of virtually every major museum in the world. He was the winner of the 2011 Prix Pictet for his series “American Power.” His most recent work, an examination of the trees of New York City, is on view now at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in Chelsea.
On the second segment of this week’s MAN Podcast, Denver Art Museum curator Eric Paddock and I discuss work by Epstein’s teacher, Garry Winogrand. Fifty photographs from Winogrand’s “Women are Beautiful” series are on view now at the Denver Art Museum.
Click here to download this week’s show directly to your PC/mobile device.
The art: Top: Pirkle Jones, Town of Monticello, Early Spring, 1956, from the series “Death of a Valley,” 1956. Bottom: Unknown photographer for Eastman’s Originals, Berryessa Lake, Monticello Dam, California, 1960.
The news: “The Green Elite: The Top 10 States for Renewable Power,” by Jordan Weissmann for TheAtlantic.com. Each of the top 10’s leading source of power is hydroconventional.
The source: The Pirkle Jones picture is from the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The photo from the Eastman’s Originals Collection is in the special collections of the University of California, Davis, and was accessed via the indispensable Calisphere.
Critical note: In 1956 Pirkle Jones and Dorothea Lange collaborated on one of most underrated documentary projects of the post-war era: The evacuation and subsequent destruction of the Napa County town of Monticello, Calif. so that the federal Bureau of Reclamation could build Monticello Dam and create Lake Berryessa. Today the dam provides electricity to northern counties of the San Francisco Bay Area.
The Jones-Lange project, titled “Death of a Valley,” was featured in a special issue of Aperture magazine in 1960.
The art: Ed Ruscha, Parking Lots #23 (Century City, 1800 Avenue of the Stars), 1967/99.
The news: “When a Parking Lot is So Much More,” by Eran Ben-Joseph for the New York Times opinion page.
The source: Collection of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Above: Mark Bradford, Taking Up the Cross, 2009. Below: Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 54, 1972. Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
On his week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast, artist Mark Bradford and I discuss his engagement with post-war abstract painting. Bradford told me that painter Richard Diebenkorn, whose studio was in Santa Monica, the Los Angeles suburb in which Bradford grew up, was a key influence. The influence Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings had on Bradford is especially clear in Bradford’s 2009 white-string-on-white pieces.
A mid-career survey of Bradford’s work is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (Also, a couple of large-scale works are installed across the street from SFMOMA, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.) The exhibition was curated for the Wexner Center for the Arts by Christopher Bedford in 2010. San Francisco is its final stop.
To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly, click here (or click on the image). To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. You can stream the program and see images of the artworks Bradford and I discuss by clicking here.
A mid-career survey of Bradford’s work is now at SFMOMA.
Check out Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes Podcast today, which features artist Mark Bradford!
The art: Karen Halverson, Cosumnes River Preserve, 2000. The Cosumnes River Preserve, a tiny little silver of protected land that sits between Sacramento and Stockton, Calif., protects the only remaining unregulated river that flows west out of the Sierra Nevada.
The news: “The Trees Are All Right,” a defense of public lands for the New York Times’ Opinionator section by Timothy Egan, one of my favorite writers on the American West.
The source: Collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The art: Charles Sheeler, Aerial Gyrations, 1953.
The news: “Is Manufacturing Really Back?” by Rana Foroohar for Time.com.
The source: Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Today on Modern Art Notes: I review “Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series” at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The exhibition was co-organized by the Orange County Museum of Art.
I rave about the show and find that it confirms that Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings are the apex of 20th-century abstract painting.
Image: Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #54, 1972. Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. SFMOMA has three Ocean Park paintings, the most of any art museum.
