NOTHING PERSONAL
“Nothing Personal,” an exhibition now showing at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery in the UK, borrows its title from the provocative 1964 book collaboration between famed fotog Richard Avedon and the writer James Baldwin, he of the fantastically protuberant peepers. Avedon’s images share the walls with chestnut worthies like Walker Evans’ haunting pics of neglected plantation houses in the Deep South and William Eggleston’s elegiac color tableaus of Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion. Spiced also with a dash of the again-ubiquitous Andy Warhol, the exhibition asks visitors to investigate the dark shadows of empire—a tired theme that must be quite apparent enough by now. Nevertheless, the photos here are all solicitously full compositions of emptiness, and believing afterwards that it’s nothing personal is awfully hard to do. Open until Jan. 7, 2007.
www.bpb.org.uk

GEE'S BEND
This year’s blockbuster exhibition, “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” now making its final stop at the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, has been extended through Dec. 31. Hailed by The New York Times as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced,” the more than 60 quilts were pieced together from scraps of fabric by four generations of African- American women who inhabited a strip of land formed by a deep loop in the Alabama River—Gee’s Bend. The improvisational approach to the way the fabrics are assembled produced abstract compositions more similar to the rhythms of jazz and African art than to the order and repetitiousness of many traditional American quilts. The design of each is remarkable. “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Tinwood Alliance, Atlanta. The exhibition is sponsored by Kathy Hull and Bill Grisvold and the Ross Auxiliary of the Fine Arts Museums.
www.deyoungmuseum.org

GLASER'S FLAT FILES
In October, the School of Visual Arts (SVA) opened the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives, located within the school’s newly renovated library. Perhaps America’s most prolific designer, Glaser has bequeathed approximately 700 pieces of original art, 1,700 sketches, 380 posters, 150 prints, as well as album covers and annual reports that he has designed or illustrated, to the archives to provide a complete overview of his lifetime achievements. The archives currently hold collections by other worldclass designers Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar, and Henry Wolf. Access to the Archives at the Visual Arts Library in New York is by appointment only.
www.visualartsfoundation.org

P DESIGN
Husband and wife curatorial team Paul and Pifuka Hardt aims to break down the barriers between art and craft. They opened the doors of P Design Gallery this summer—a hybrid furniture store, design gallery, and museum shop in Denver. Together they’re attracting some of the most noted contemporary designers around, including Tobias Wong, Tord Boontje, Fredrikson Stallard, and Denyse Schmidt. Their grand opening exhibition featured the dynamic work of Brooklynite Jason Miller, who was recently awarded the Bombay Sapphire Rising Star Award, and who’s known to transform discarded objects like duct taped chairs and cracked mirrors into stunning pieces of art. Or is it home décor?
www.pdesigngallery.com

PARRISH THE THOUGHT
Museum model-making superstars Herzog & de Meuron (architects of the Tate Modern, Walker Art Center, de Young) have released the design concept for the new Parrish Art Museum. Home to a stellar collection of American art with a focus on Long Island’s East End artists colony (Pollock, Krasner, de Kooning, Dan Flavin, Chuck Close), the Parrish has outgrown its original 17,000 sq. ft. in the Hamptons. Nestled on a new 14- acre site, the proposed 64,000 sq. ft. of structures might look like refugee tents from the highway, but inside the simple shapes and use of distinctive natural light (expanses of window are to provide a “remarkable sense of transparency”) are to evoke the idea of a collection of studio spaces à la an artists colony. The new Parrish is scheduled to open to the public in 2009 (just one year before the new Miami Art Museum, also designed by Herzog & de Meuron).
www.thehamptons.com/museum