Contemporary Art

Joining three long-established auction houses in conducting early May catalog sales — Freeman's, Briggs, and Rago, in order of seniority — is an auction newcomer. Beginning at 11 a.m. Saturday at the 4700 Wissahickon Ave. business complex, where it has been a retailer for a dozen years, Material Culture will present an inaugural exhibition and auction titled "New World Orders. " The 550-lot sale will feature Asian and other ethnic, folk, and "outsider" art. Presale price estimates range from about $50 to $75 for a William H. Prestele etching to $40,000 to $60,000 for a Samuel Robb cigar store Indian that was a Pine Street "Antiques Row" fixture for decades.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the controversy over the Brooklyn Museum of Art's exhibition "Sensation" is the hostility to contemporary art that it has elicited. Long after the dust settles, there will be a lingering sense that all contemporary art is offensive, even disgusting, and unworthy of our attention. What is it about our society that makes so many of us intolerant of contemporary art? Why are we so quick to condemn that which we do not understand, to dismiss that which forces us to confront disturbing issues?

LOS ANGELES - Mike Kelley, 57, described by colleagues as an "irresistible force" in contemporary art, has died, police said Wednesday. Mr. Kelley was found at his home Tuesday, an apparent suicide, South Pasadena Police Sgt. Robert Bartl said. There was no further information on the artist's death; an autopsy was pending. "Kelley's work in the 1980s was part of how one defined the Los Angeles arts scene. He had a remarkable ability to fuse distinction between fine and popular art in ways that managed to perturb our sense of decorum," said Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A family friend, concerned about Mr. Kelley, went to his home and called 911, Bartl said.

Peter P. Rosenau, 61, a patron of contemporary art who was known for the modern art that adorned his home and his droll sense of humor, died of cancer Wednesday at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. A resident of Bryn Mawr, Mr. Rosenau was president of the Puro Filter Co. of Philadelphia, which installs and services water coolers and filters. The firm was begun by Mr. Rosenau's father, Richard P. Rosenau, 50 years ago. Mr. Rosenau was born in Philadelphia and graduated from Germantown Friends School, where he was a star athlete and earned a place on the all-Philadelphia soccer team.

Incongruity was the word University of Pennsylvania President Sheldon Hackney used, and it well captured many of the sensations at Thursday night's black-tie gathering to dedicate the Institute of Contemporary Art's new building. For, as brief speeches were made, the striking new galleries opened and dinner served, America was at war, and late arrivals at the spiffy party were bringing the news that Israel had been hit by Iraqi missiles. Incongruous perhaps, but illuminating also.

The paintings and photographs have just arrived at the ICEBOX Project Space, on a desolate stretch of American Street in Kensington, and are stacked against walls. Unassembled sculptures crowd the floors. A young woman, one of the University of Pennsylvania MFA candidates involved in the end-of-year exhibition, is told that her installation will have to be moved. Tears ensue. A pale young man sits solemn-faced on the floor, trying to figure out how he will hang his intricate cut-paper piece on a wall that will clearly not accept pushpins.

When Claudia Gould, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, began to look for a curator to succeed Judith Tannenbaum, who left the ICA last spring, she thought first of Ingrid Schaffner, a New York writer and independent curator with a number of exhibitions to her credit. However, Gould said, Shaffner didn't want to become involved with an institution full time, so she initially declined the offer to come to Philadelphia. When Gould's subsequent search for a full-time curator proved unproductive, she returned to Shaffner and suggested a part-time affiliation, an arrangement that suited her better.

Carlos Basualdo, an art historian with broad international experience that includes the Venice Biennale and Documenta XI, the two most prominent exhibitions of current art, has been appointed curator of contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, effective immediately. The hiring of the 41-year-old Basualdo, a native of Argentina, completes the restructuring of the museum department responsible for modern and contemporary art. Basualdo is responsible for art from the 1960s to the present, while colleague Michael Taylor looks after modern art, roughly the first half of the 20th century.

Robert Storr, distinguished critic and cutting-edge curator, will join the Philadelphia Museum of Art as one in a troika of curators of modern and contemporary art. Museum director Anne d'Harnoncourt is expected to announce his appointment today. An artist who during the 1990s served as curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art - where his retrospectives of Chuck Close and Elizabeth Murray (currently on view) met with international acclaim - Storr also organized The Devil on the Stairs, a landmark 1991 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Storr's title, consulting curator of modern and contemporary art, means that he will share responsibilities with Carlos Basualdo, contemporary art curator, and Michael Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman curator of modern art. (To decode museumspeak: "modern" refers to the 20th century and "contemporary" to the most recent decades.

The University of Pennsylvania has received a $2.5 million donation to support faculty and programs in its School of Design. The money will be used to raise the impact of the visual arts around Penn and the Philadelphia region, the school announced Monday. The gift from alumni Keith L. Sachs and Katherine Stein Sachs will create a visiting professorship in the fine arts and also fund fine-arts programming. As supporters of the fine arts, the Sachses previously established the Sachs Professorship in Contemporary Art in the Department of the History of Art, and the Sachs Guest Curator Program at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Keith Sachs is chief executive officer of Saxco International L.L.C., a distributor of packaging material.

This weekend, all eyes are focused on the Parkway as the Barnes Foundation marks the opening of its new building and the arrival of its extraordinary art collection to Philadelphia. Of course the biggest change for the Barnes — founded in 1922 by Albert C. Barnes as an art and education institution — is its move from a secluded residential road in Lower Merion to the city's grandest avenue. But another change has been overlooked in the excitement: The new Barnes comes with a 5,000-square-foot special-exhibition gallery that is in some ways as important as the building and the collection.

Joining three long-established auction houses in conducting early May catalog sales — Freeman's, Briggs, and Rago, in order of seniority — is an auction newcomer. Beginning at 11 a.m. Saturday at the 4700 Wissahickon Ave. business complex, where it has been a retailer for a dozen years, Material Culture will present an inaugural exhibition and auction titled "New World Orders. " The 550-lot sale will feature Asian and other ethnic, folk, and "outsider" art. Presale price estimates range from about $50 to $75 for a William H. Prestele etching to $40,000 to $60,000 for a Samuel Robb cigar store Indian that was a Pine Street "Antiques Row" fixture for decades.

FiberPhiladelphia 2012 officially launches its two-month-long celebration at an opening ceremony at Moore College of Art & Design on Saturday, but a handful of the international biennial's 40 exhibitions have jumped the gun. One in particular, "A Sense of Place," at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, is a harbinger of good things to come. Organized by FiberPhiladelphia 2012's curator Bruce D. Hoffman, "A Sense of Place" doesn't try to hammer home the point that a good deal of fiber/textile art has become nearly indistinguishable from contemporary art - or to make the case that it has stayed true to its roots.

LOS ANGELES - Mike Kelley, 57, described by colleagues as an "irresistible force" in contemporary art, has died, police said Wednesday. Mr. Kelley was found at his home Tuesday, an apparent suicide, South Pasadena Police Sgt. Robert Bartl said. There was no further information on the artist's death; an autopsy was pending. "Kelley's work in the 1980s was part of how one defined the Los Angeles arts scene. He had a remarkable ability to fuse distinction between fine and popular art in ways that managed to perturb our sense of decorum," said Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A family friend, concerned about Mr. Kelley, went to his home and called 911, Bartl said.

If you have $30,000 to spare, you can go to Lambertville on Saturday and bid on - with some assurance of success - a 67-inch-tall bronze by the Dutch artist Kees Verkade. Or you can rush down to Vineland in South Jersey and - with the same probable degree of success - bid on a 20-inch-long Marklin clockwork ocean liner. The liner, the Puritan, is one of nearly 1,500 lots in Bertoia Auctions' "Toys on World Tour" sale Friday and Saturday at the gallery at 2141 DeMarco Dr., just off Exit 35 of Route 55. And it has a presale estimate of $25,000 to $30,000, according to the auction catalog available in hard cover and online at www.bertoiaauctions.com . It is one of a dozen lots expected to bring five-figure prices.

The University of Pennsylvania has received a $2.5 million donation to support faculty and programs in its School of Design. The money will be used to raise the impact of the visual arts around Penn and the Philadelphia region, the school announced Monday. The gift from alumni Keith L. Sachs and Katherine Stein Sachs, who are married, will create a visiting professorship in the fine arts and also fund fine-arts programming. As supporters of the fine arts, the Sachses previously established the Sachs Professorship in Contemporary Art in the Department of the History of Art, and the Sachs Guest Curator Program at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Keith Sachs is chief executive officer of Saxco International L.L.C., a distributor of packaging material.

The University of Pennsylvania has received a $2.5 million donation to support faculty and programs in its School of Design. The money will be used to raise the impact of the visual arts around Penn and the Philadelphia region, the school announced Monday. The gift from alumni Keith L. Sachs and Katherine Stein Sachs will create a visiting professorship in the fine arts and also fund fine-arts programming. As supporters of the fine arts, the Sachses previously established the Sachs Professorship in Contemporary Art in the Department of the History of Art, and the Sachs Guest Curator Program at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Keith Sachs is chief executive officer of Saxco International L.L.C., a distributor of packaging material.

Robert Straight's distinguished personal approach to abstract painting - his skill, taste, and originality - is immediately present in his solo show "The Elliptical Frontiers" at Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts. Color stands its ground here, giving us almost the pure sensation of painting. So it's really an illusion that this prominent Wilmington artist, who has taught at the University of Delaware for three decades, works with serene indifference to prevailing styles. What he does, I believe, is invent problems for himself to solve, so that the differences in each of these acrylic paintings on wood panel are almost invisible, except to a questioning eye. But the problems create tensions, which give his paintings an aliveness that prevents them from being decorative.

Sheila Hicks is one of a small group of artists who, in our time, ennobled fiber as a high-art medium. They demonstrated that the aesthetic virtues associated with media such as painting and sculpture, and even emotion, could be expressed through objects made of fiber. Even though the 76-year-old Hicks has been working for more than a half-century and is internationally renowned, you might not have heard of her. That's probably because, though born and educated in the United States, she has lived mostly in France since 1964.

Louis Kahn was considered a pretty good modern architect in 1945 when Anne Griswold Tyng went to work in his office, then located in the Evening Bulletin building across from Philadelphia's City Hall. By the time they parted company two decades later, Kahn was revered for liberating architecture from its Bauhaus straitjacket and Tyng was known, if she was known at all, as his mistress. Had they embarked on their storied collaboration today, one imagines Tyng sharing the credit for their breakthrough work, especially the Yale Art Gallery and the Trenton Bath House.