What We're Reading: 5/8/24
Federal Court Bars Des Moines Art Center from Destroying Mary Miss Land Art Installation
A federal judge on May 3 issued a preliminary injunction preventing the Des Moines Art Center from dismantling a major Land art installation that it commissioned from artist Mary Miss decades ago. In regard to the contested work, Miss’s 1989–96 environment Greenwood Pond: Double Site, Judge Stephen Locher of the US District Court for the Southern District of Iowa ruled that “the Art Center cannot demolish the artwork without Miss’s consent (which she will not grant) because the Art Center promised in a contract not to do so.” Locher noted, however, that Miss could not force the museum to restore the work, which it has said it cannot afford to do, saying, “The end result is therefore an unsatisfying status quo: the artwork will remain standing (for now) despite being in a condition that no one likes but that the court cannot order anyone to change.”
Via Art Forum
As universities across the US continue to crack down on campus protests and encampments in support of Palestine, 68 protesters at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and around 50 at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York were arrested on 4 May and 7 May, respectively.
Protesters from SAIC and Columbia College Chicago had set up an encampment in the North Garden of the Art Institute of Chicago, renaming it “Hind’s Garden” in honour of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed along with her family by Israeli forces in Gaza. The protesters told Axios that the SAIC administration initially agreed to let them stay in the garden until the morning of 5 May if the encampment subsequently moved to an academic building. While the protesters were discussing the offer, they said, the school's administration informed them that police were en route.
Via The Art Newspaper
Frank Stella Went From Bauhaus to Fun House
Frank Stella, who died on Saturday at age 87, once joked that he harbored only one regret. We were sitting in his scruffy studio in the East Village, and he said he was sorry that he had failed to take legal action when the men's wear store bearing his name opened in New York in the mid-70s. “People call here all the time asking for cashmere coats,” he said.
Stella, it can safely be said, was not a fashion plate. To the end of his life, he had the aura of a nervous whiz kid with oversize glasses and frizzy hair. He counted himself among the socially marginalized and once joked in a personal letter about “all us miscreants who drifted into the Bowery of Life, the art world.”
Via NYTimes
Thumbnail: School of the Art Institute of Chicago students and other pro-Palestine protesters are arrested at the Art Institute of Chicago on 4 May David Jank / Alamy Stock Photo