COURTESY THE ROTHKO CHAPEL
Courtesy the Rothko Chapel
Monumentality
Here’s a nice paean to the Rothko Chapel in Houston. A taste: “Sitting there alone, I suddenly felt happy for everyone around me, moved by the tenderness I knew was inside them. I was glad for what they could see, even if it was hidden from me. I think this gentle affection for not knowing might be what we really mean by empathy.” [The New York Times]
Spencer Finch has made a new work tallying colors seen in the landscape around Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake. The piece will appear soon at the newly refurbished Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City. [The Art Newspaper]
Upstate
Nancy Princenthal went on a jaunt in New York’s idyllic Hudson Valley to check out art—by Kiki Smith, Alighiero Boetti, Paa Joe, and many more—in towns like Catskill, Cold Spring, and Kinderhook. [The New York Times]
A bird photographer got into an insane fight with a rabid coyote recently on the Fort Edward canal path, near Saratoga Springs, New York. Here is part of Rita Sweenor’s heroic story: “The third time, he had his mouth around my hand, and I reached around and grabbed its rear leg, I don’t know which one, and tried to throw him in the canal, but we both fell in. . . .” [Glen Falls Chronicle]
Museums
Here’s a Q&A with Cathleen Chaffee, a “curator rethinking painting” at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. [Garage/Vice]
The Palestinian Museum, in Palestine’s West Bank, is opening this weekend with a show focused on the city of Jerusalem. [The Art Newspaper]
In Tribute
Jack Pierson’s The Hungry Years, a book of photos from the early years of the AIDS crisis in New York in the 1980s, is being published by Damiani this fall. Here’s the intro to it written by his friend Eileen Myles. [The Paris Review]
Today marks the launch of Guy Kozak’s Picture Show, a new series of mini-documentaries on artists. It comes packaged in a cool website care of Jon Lucas, who has designed sites in the past for the likes of Hood by Air and Bjarne Melgaard. [Picture Show]
Here’s an appreciation of spiritual music composed and played by Alice Coltrane. [The New York Review of Books]
Market
“Why do investors like ‘street’ art? Because $200 can turn into half a million.” [CNBC]
Gallery 1957 opened a second space—this one with 24,000 square feet—in Accra, the capital of Ghana. [Artforum]
Think Tanks
Philantrhopist Nicolas Berggruen revealed plans for an ambitious new home, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, for his Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles. [Los Angeles Times]
A museum-going family in Britain mucked up an 800-year-old coffin by putting a kid in it for a picture. [The New York Times]