Posts archive: September 2007

Congratulations to the 2009/9/10 recipients of the Fleishhacker Foundation’s Eureka Fellowship:

Tauba Auerbach
Adriane Colburn
Binh Danh
Amy Ellingson
Kota Ezawa
Karen Hampton
David Huffman
Martin McMurray
Kate Pocrass
June Schwarcz
Leslie Shows
Jenifer Wofford

- amy berk [Monday, September 24th, 2007]

Curator Renè de Guzman is moving from San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) to the Oakland Museum of California (OAM), where he will be senior curator of art. One of the first staff at YBCA, de Guzman helped establish its artistic vision and an audience for the start-up arts organization.

A longtime Bay Area resident, de Guzman, 43, immigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines in 1968 and grew up in Piedmont, CA. After earning a BFA in art practice at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987, he worked as an individual artist before deciding to pursue a full-time curatorial career. De Guzman’s mixed media sculptures are in private and public collections, including the Berkeley Art Museum and the San Jose Museum of Art.

- Meredith Tromble [Thursday, September 20th, 2007]

The novel experience (for me) of chatting with BMW execs at the press review for Olafur Eliasson’s dual SFMOMA exhibitions was one of the highlights of “taking my time” to view the show. An artist who is not afraid to enter the mainstream, Eliasson purposefully engages our dominant culture and its relationship with the natural world.

In addition to the wonderful survey show curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn, senior curator of painting and sculpture, entitled Take your time, Eliasson exhibits a frozen BMW hydrogen car in a custom industrial freezer presented by SFMOMA’s curator of architecture and design, Henry Urbach, entitled Your tempo.   Outside of the freezer are Eliasson’s series of color photographs of Icelandic ice holes, or glacier mill, the increasing number and size of which spell a massive increase in the melt off of the largest glacier in the world. I found it poignant to encounter the following exhibition text in relation to these images, “from Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, written nearly one hundred and fifty years ago at the dawn of the Industrial Age, “All is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Imagine my pleasure in being able to personally ask a BMW executive about how BMW expects to create the hydrogen to power the car of the future. Imagine my feelings about his answer that all car companies are trying to figure out how cars will be powered after “peak oil”, which he put at 10 or more years off.

- Cheryl Meeker [Thursday, September 6th, 2007]

From the editors