Art History

The Princeton University Art Museum offers a ten-week summer internship program for undergraduate and graduate students, running from June 6 to August 12. Interns have the opportunity to work in curatorial, education, development, information technology, marketing, office of the registrar, publications, or retail and wholesale operations. Undergraduate students are paid $13 per hour, work full-time and must be available to work the entire ten-week period, no exceptions.  Applications must include: a cover letter describing the applicant’s specific interest in the internship program and how a museum internship relates to the applicant’s larger educational or career goals; a C.V. or résumé; two letters of academic recommendation; and an official academic transcript. The deadline for receipt of all materials is 5 p.m. on Friday, February 25. Materials may be submitted electronically to [email protected] or via hardcopy to:Johanna G. Seasonwein, Ph.D., Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow for Academic Programs, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ 08544.  Applicants may be contacted for interviews, and accepted applicants will be notified by the end of March. For more information, including a list of frequently asked questions, please see our website athttp://artmuseum.princeton.edu/resources/university-students/internships/.

The Arts and Humanities Summer Institute
at the University of Delaware provides
highly motivated students with a unique
opportunity to explore their interests in pursuing graduate studies. The 2011 Institute in Art Conservation will examine the fundamental properties of artists’ materials as they relate to preventive conservation through a combination of
hands-on activities, seminars, and field trips to area conservation labs.

Art Conservation is an interdisciplinary field that builds upon a strong foundation in chemistry, studio arts, art history, history, and anthropology. The chemical properties of pigments, polymers, glass, and natural fibers influence the use of such materials as artistic media; understanding the role of these same properties in art and artifact deterioration helps to ensure
Undergraduate students in all disciplines are encouraged to apply. Participants selected for the Institute will receive a stipend; housing, transportation to an from the University of Delaware, and course
materials are covered by the program.

Application Deadline: February 14, 2011

For more details, any questions, and application instructions, visit the AHSI
website at http://www.art-sci.udel.edu/ahsi/ .

Stephen G. Rhodes, Untitled, 2010

You could have a rewarding contemporary art viewing trip to New York city this month and just see shows by artists affiliated with Bard.  One of the hottest rising art stars on the scene at the moment is Stephen G. Rhodes (BFA 1999) whose current show at Metro Pictures (519 West 24^th, through March 5) is an exhilarating mixture of chaos and control, ostensibly inspired by the philosophy and biography of Emmanuel Kant.  You enter through a ramshackle hallway festooned with crudely nailed and propped up pieces of wood, hanging vitrines with graffitied clown posters, assorted books, and shelves supporting found objects.  They lead to and from the central gallery that houses four projectors.  Fast cut sequences are projected on each wall, featuring, among other things, two guys in long blonde wigs engaged in various acts of creation and destruction:  typing on an old fashioned electric typewriter with porn images attached, dragging mugs noisily along rocky paths, setting strips of substance on fire on the floor, walking angrily on the side of a road, etc., etc.  The anarchic randomness and destruction has a wild sort of humor, and is accompanied by a loud sound track that amplifies the chaotic action on the screens.  The show is accompanied by a translation of a passage from Kant “by” Rhodes which reads as if he ran the passage through a shoddy internet translation program and printed the results:  “Doctors and logicians have for some time the opinion of the human head table is simply a drum sound that’s like nothing there.”

On the Lower East Side another Bard alum rising art star, Zak Kitnik, (Studio Art ’07), has 3 pieces in the front of a 3-artist show at Rachel Uffner Gallery (Orchard Street, through Feb. 20).  Cooler and more ironic than Rhodes, Kitnik loves to rephrase modernist geometric abstraction in post-modern ways.  The dominant work here is a construction hanging from the ceiling almost to the floor.  It’s made of thick rectangular pieces of transparent plastic suspended horizontally in tension by a complex set of wires and anchors; the support mechanism is more visually present than the material it supports.  Two other Kitnik pieces, a collage and another 3D work, are significantly different from this one, but share its purist geometry.

Across the street at the Lesley Heller Gallery (54 Orchard Street, through Feb. 20) is a 4 person show, Fractured Earth, that features Bard’s two graphic arts instructors:  Nicola Lopez exhibits dynamic printed constructions of angular modernist architecture, and Lothar Osterburg shows spooky scenes of imaginary architecture rendered in gorgeous photogravure.  While at Lesley Heller don’t miss the back gallery, which usually features a stunning, coloristically vibrant painting by Ken Buhler.

Not angry enough for you?  Walk down a couple of blocks and see/read the Readykeulous show of art and text pieces by the lesbian collective at Invisible-Exports (14A Orchard Street, through Feb. 13), including works by Bard painting prof Nicole Eisenmann and former Bard prof Louise Fishman.

Olivia Tamzarian graduated from Bard College in 2005 with a triple concentration in anthropology, art history, and Latin American studies.  She is a study abroad coordinator with LPI (Learning Programs International), Austin, TX.

Olivia will lecture at Bard High School Knowledge College Event
Saturday, February 5, 2011

Globe-Trotter Before Graduation: Everything You Need to Know About High School Study Abroad

For more information visit: http://www.bhsec1pta.org/kc2011/

June 13 to August 14, 2011. Deerfield, Massachusetts

For more information and application forms, please visit www.historic-deerfield.org/summer-fellowship-program, email [email protected], or call (413) 775-7209

The Smith College Museum of Art provides a six-week intensive summer program, The Summer Institute in Art Museum Studies. It is especially appropriate for undergraduates and recent college graduates.  The website is www.smith.edu/siams.

Application deadline: March 11, 2011, and there is “generous financial assistance.” For students contemplating a museum career, this program might be an excellent introduction.

bOb Gallery  presents: ODYSSEY

New works by:

Tom Wolf, 'Odyssey,' detail

As the winter holidays approach New York art institutions are cutting loose with scads of fascinating exhibitions to attract tourists, locals and potential shoppers.

The Kissers

At Gagosian uptown you can see John Currin’s recent paintings.  All sold, they feature finely rendered, sexually suggestive women—and sexually explicit women (with other women).  These surround the center-piece of the show, a large painting of two middle aged men in shorts, one fitting the other for a new outfit.  Currin combines Old Master technique and virtuoso rendering with bizarre subjects.  A beautiful still life of a white tea set at the lower right of The Women of Franklin Street steals the show from the erotic high jinks above. (980 Madison Ave., through December 23).  Currin is often called a Mannerist, and to see why check out the weirdly proportioned, erotic mythological nudes in the memorable exhibition of Netherlandish Mannerist painter Jan Gossart at the Metropolitan Museum.  (1000 Fifth Avenue at 82^nd Street, through January17).

Currin’s hyper-realist and fashionably decadent paintings would also fit comfortably in the major, eye-opening art historical exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, Chaos and Classicism. It surveys the artistic reaction to World War I in Europe, when avant-garde artists moved either towards a subversive Dadaism, or towards a new look at tradition.  The latter is the theme of this beautifully installed show, with works that range from the majestic (Picasso) to the unsettling:  long forgotten, or suppressed, Fascist and Nazi paintings and sculptures.

Messerschmidt Head

For some more bizarre art on the Upper East Side, check out the Franz Xaver Messerschmidt show at the wonderful Neue Gallerie.  Messerschmidt was a late 18^th century sculptor, an expert portraitist until he developed mental problems and turned to his unique 3D studies of people’s faces making extreme expressions.  This is the first U.S. exhibition of his work, and it is comfortably small, consisting of around 25 heads, upstairs from the lovely exhibition of early 20^th century Viennese art and design on the second floor.  If you visit, you might want to save some time for the truly delicious coffees and deserts available in the Café Sabarsky, which is so popular that there is usually a long line—but downstairs the same menu is available in the recreation of Viennna’s Café Fledermaus, which is much less crowded—so far.  (1048 Fifth Avenue at 86^th Street, through January 10).