George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "More Public Art for Governors Island" @nytimes by CAROL VOGEL
“Painted Phone,” one of Mark Handforth’s works to be shown on Governors Island. Credit Timothy Schenck Photography/The Trust for Governors Island
When a new 30-acre park opens at the southern end of Governors Island on May 24, it will boast a grove of hammocks, two ball fields, a formal garden and play areas with climbable structures and spray showers. It will also be part of an ambitious backdrop for a new public art program taking shape on this 172-acre island, the former Army and Coast Guard base in New York Harbor. The city took control of Governors Island in 2010, and each year there’s more to do and see, attracting thousands of visitors during the summer months.
The new Governors Island Park, with sweeping views of New York Harbor, Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, will be a canvas for artists to create site-specific installations. Susan Philipsz has composed a sound piece inspired by the island’s military history. Based on the notes of the taps military bugle call, it will be played every day at 6 p.m. “It’s like the ghost of the former military base,” said Tom Eccles, who is organizing the island’s public art program.
Mr. Eccles, director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., said he was trying to create “a sense of journey and discovery which is uniquely suitable to finding works of art in the landscape.” He asked the sculptor Mark Handforth to create an exhibition consisting of four totem-like sculptures, surreal works that include “Painted Phone,” a 30-foot bronze tree with lopped-off limbs cradling a blue phone. The works by Mr. Handforth will be in place for about two years. Ms. Philipsz’s sound composition is permanent.
The British artist Rachel Whiteread is creating a cast concrete structure resembling an abandoned shed, to be placed permanently on Discovery Hill, south of the new park. Set for completion in 2015, it will look like a found yet familiar object hidden in the woods.
A BARNETT NEWMAN FOR SALE
Being able to say that an artwork has been on “long-term loan” to a major museum can be an irresistible sales pitch for an auction house. Ask the experts in Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department about “Black Fire I,” a 1961 canvas by Barnett Newman to be auctioned there on May 13, and they will immediately note that it has been at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1985.
A seminal example of Abstract Expressionism, it pairs Newman’s luminous use of a black palette with his signature device: the zip, a feathery band of a contrasting color used to define the composition of a canvas. The work, with an estimate of about $50 million, is being sold by the Daniel W. Dietrich II trust, named for a Philadelphia collector.
Just a year ago, Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, sold Newman’s “Onement VI,” from 1953, at Sotheby’s in New York. It fetched $43.8 million.
JEWISH MUSEUM’S NEW LOGO
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Delving back to ancient sacred geometries and that most ubiquitous of forms, the Star of David, may seem too obvious a reference for the Jewish Museum, which was faced with the task of designing a new graphic identity. But the design, below, to be introduced on Tuesday, seems both familiar and modern. Sagmeister & Walsh, the New York design firm, has created graphics that will appear on the museum’s admissions tickets and banners, signs, gallery guides, gift wrap and even the menu in the museum’s cafe. By June they will also grace a revamped website.
“The old identity didn’t work anymore — it wasn’t adaptable,” Claudia Gould, who has been the Jewish Museum’s director for nearly three years, said of the current logo, featuring the museum’s name in a red box.
Stefan Sagmeister, one of the firm’s partners, said that it had approached “a lot of people involved with the museum — board members, employees, the director — and asked them what they thought the Jewish Museum should be.” Several similar adjectives emerged: intimate, inclusive (meaning multigenerational) and elegant.
“The new logo may be based on a hidden sliver of imagery that comes out of history,” Mr. Sagmeister said, describing the hexagram shape, a sign of Jewish identity since the Middle Ages but also a symbol used by other cultures. “But it has a contemporary look. It’s very necessary to attract a younger audience, and with this design I think you can feel the difference.”
A JUDD FOR ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
When it came to filling a gap in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the single greatest priority for James Rondeau, its chairman of contemporary art, has been to find a 1960s stack, one of those serial boxlike units that are perhaps Donald Judd’s most popular works. “It’s something I knew we had to have since I arrived here in 1998, and probably curators before me were on the lookout for one too,” Mr. Rondeau said.
Through the Mnuchin Gallery in New York, the Art Institute was able to acquire “Untitled (DSS 120)” from 1968, what Mr. Rondeau believes is among the last of the artist’s 1960s stacks still in private hands. Judd, who died in 1994, created his first stack in 1965. This one, measuring 10 feet from floor to ceiling, consists of identical stainless steel and Plexiglas boxes cantilevered from the wall at regular intervals so they form a column of alternating solids and voids.
The work was included in exhibitions of Judd stacks at the Art Institute earlier this year and the Mnuchin Gallery last year. Like many museums, the Art Institute does not disclose what it pays for acquisitions. But this stack was offered at a Christie’s auction in 2009, when it sold for nearly $4.9 million.
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the design firm working with the Jewish Museum. It is Sagmeister & Walsh, not Sagmeister & Walch.