From Robert Cozzolino
[We've been hearing that PAFA's Robert Cozzolino and Alex Baker have been all around town looking at art and thinking about purchases. So I asked Cozzolino what they were up to. Here's his answer, which includes some local names, some not so local names and some stuff we've already reported:]
...As for purchases -- all I can tell you is that we have been buying some very exciting things at PAFA lately; and we've received some super-delightful gifts. We really hope the latter keeps happening because money runs out, and quickly (image, Vik Muniz' "Charles Willson Peale").
We recently bought three drawings by Huston Ripley, a major Alice Neel painting of Clement Greenberg's daughter, and received gifts of work by Vik Muniz (the Peale), Edwin Dickinson (a 1950s chair painting that was in the big show), an early Thomas Chimes, and Sylvia Fein (two major works by her -- one of which you'll hear about on Wednesday if you come). There are others but they escape me at the moment. [The Wednesday reference is to Cozzolino's talk Dec. 7].
There's another major purchase that will have to await a press release. I can't scoop our PR guy. It's good.
So -- it's not exactly a spree but it has changed things in the collection. We've talked about doing some sort of new acquisitions exhibition to assess how we three curators have managed to change things in the last two years through strategic acquisitions -- but there's no official word on when or in what way we'd do an exhibition of this sort.
One way that would make a cohesive exhibition in this area would be to show what's been accomplished with Alex's Contemporary Art Development Fund [Baker is PAFA's curator of contemporary art]. I have been adding drawings with it (Rob Matthews--see Roberta's post here, Huston) and plan to keep doing so; but he's bought some stellar paintings (Jim Houser, Jane Irish, Monique van Genderen) and a Virgil Marti installation with its largess.
Over the past year Alex, myself and our senior curator, Lynn Marsden-Atlass have been engaged in intensive discussions with other members of the PAFA community about prioritizing which gaps we can and need to fill first in our collection. Part of this had to do with strategizing how best to use and stretch our limited acquisition funds. We have been able to purchase some strong important work in this way (a Jim Nutt painting from 1969 that will be up in February is one of my favorites), including the Neel mentioned above, a Jess painting and an Adolph Gottlieb pictograph too. I'd throw things you already know about in there like the Kara Walker that was in Light Line and Color
and a couple of John Wilde drawings from the 1940s. Before I arrived I know Derek bought two Leon Golub paintings -- one early and one later and Lynn selected the Elizabeth Murray painting that is currently in the MoMA retrospective; at least I think it is -- my head is spinning. It's hard to get a handle on what we've managed to do in the last year and so it would be good to take stock in some public way. It may be a matter of highlighting a "new acquisition" on our website every month like other museums do. But I'd rather put them on view.
Hopefully in the next six months we'll have further exciting things to
announce.
Yes we were at the Spector opening but I can't say anything more than
it was a great and thrilling show.
--Post by PAFA Associate Curator Robert Cozzolino
Sometimes I just reject art that's difficult, but sometimes it makes me want to think and dig all the harder. Dig I did for 
The delicate tints add an otherworldly glow to these images; the manilla paper on which the photos are printed seem nostalgic, like dusty archive files. The aesthetics of these material choices oppose the brutishness of the photographed objects, which land with a Minimalist, anti-gestural thud. The art historical references turn leaden concrete blocks into Suprematist Soviet thankas 
Many of the pictures suggest grand public works (see steps below). The arrangement of some of the objects suggest fallen bodies and lopped off heads 
The whole enterprise drips with Post-Modern cynicism and jokiness. After all, Muellner never shows his hand on what or who he admires. He's more about what he sees as human shortcomings--politics, the self-delusion of the state rewriting its own history and abandoning the past, the heroic Social Realist vocabulary of the worker's state in disarray.
An offbeat group show at 
She confessed in an email that she was taken aback by the art she got back, much of it quite different from what she expected. At some point, she said, she realized she had lost control of the exhibit, which turned out to be as much an exhibit on American values as on Romanian propaganda 
Hasnas Pascal grew up in Romania under its most repressive, most controlling regime (in our conversation, never once did she name former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu by name). So her own feeling of the need to control the show upset her. As the works of art came in, she threw final control aside and decided to put everything up and to ignore issues of quality in the hanging. A week after the opening, while she was talking to me in the gallery, a tardy piece of art arrived for inclusion. But for all the frustrations, the show intrigued me 
I was interested in the multiplicity of ideas, the very real issues of propaganda and lies, and the multi-cultural points of view taking us beyond our own little corner of the world. Among the contributors are several people born in Romania, immigrants from elsewhere, and a mix of local artists, familiar and unfamiliar to me--for a list of contributors plus some Romanian music, go 
So many of the photos artists chose to work with were photos showing productivity, infrastructure and commerce, some of the things that were completely inadequate in Ceausescu's Romania. This image is 
Josan's sister 
The shadowy state and its power also transform shadows into ominous presences in a couple of pieces by 
But the largest shadow is cast by Hasnas Paschal herself, whose toss-off labels identify the artist of each piece. The labels are of an old photo of herself and a friend as schoolgirls in uniform. The friend's face is cut out of the picture, speaking of loss and the past and its ghosts and also speaking of an empty slot waiting to be filled with new faces and a new Romania. The show remains up until Dec. 2.
Every once in a while, someone writes in about a shipping disaster or problem, but today, I'm writing about one woman's solution.
By the way, "7000 Q-Tips" was a 2004 Fringe Festival project, with Pannepacker weaving it right near the box office (here's a link to a photo of 
Transforming Escher's hard-edged Mobian space into decaying organic, biological fantasies, dense grottos and paths that suggest a map of Middle Earth, Santoleri deftly shifts from tiny scale to mural scale. Making all those marks, covering all that space in less than two weeks is also amazing. And coming out with something not just coherent but energetic and beautiful and all-encompassing --well!!! 
The work even spreads across the floor, and goes three-D on the top floor. It offers nodules of densely figurative riffs of imagination --little cities, groves of plant life-- and nodules of electric mark-making that's ultimately unreadable but that suggests force-fields of matter, almost knowable yet elusive.
Santoleri, who is one of the city's great muralists, in this less public sphere shows where the wild things are. Gotta see it and gotta love it. 
A cast -paper installation, "Paradise," by 
The ephemeral nature of all this material got me thinking about how ephemeral the myths of our culture are in the larger scheme of things. The croc and the clouds stole the show for me, but the tree and the apples were also pretty nice.
We weren't the only ones who came to hear 
Holzer, it turns out, was a lot funnier than her art, which sometimes barely cracks a smile (the antithesis of mr. ho-ho himself, conceptualist 
Some highlights included a t-shirt modeled by grafitti artist 
And speaking of collaboration, in some sense all of her work requires it. She gets lots of help from people with technological knowledge, horticultural advice, research and various forms of fabrication support. You gotta admire an artist for acknowledging her posse of helpers. Well I admire her for it 
I loved her saying the projection of words on architecture gives her words a sculptural shape. See 
There's a political edge to Holzer's work that's really great. "I've always been interested in what is not spoken about but should be," she said, vis a vis the projection of declassified government documents about torture on the side of the NYU library. I think that quote covers a lot of the territory she hoes 
She also said she didn't have much of an art education and went to a lot of different schools--Duke, University of Chicago and Rhode Island School of Design, for "more of a Liberal Arts than an art education" 
An architect in the audience was concerned that she was using the architect's creativity without getting permission, without the architect getting enough credit. She said, however that she only used buildings when she had permission. "I'm a bit of a coward," she confessed, and added that in Berlin, the authorities tried to arrest her, but she had the permission document with her 
