Günter M. Ziegler, Professor in the Institute of Mathematics at Freie Universität Berlin, will be joining the 2011 Arts in Society Conference at Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Berlin, Germany from 9-11 May 2011.

Günter M. Ziegler was born in München, Germany, in 1963. He got a PhD at MIT with Anders Björner in 1987. Since 1995 he is a Professor of Mathematics at TU Berlin. In 2006 he became the founding chair of “Berlin Mathematical School”, where he remains active as a co-chair. He is a member of the DFG Research Center MATHEON “Mathematics for Key Technologies” since its start in 2002. In 2011 he has joined Freie Universität Berlin as a MATHEON Professor.

His interests connect discrete and computational geometry (especially polytopes), algebraic and topological methods in combinatorics, discrete mathematics and the theory of linear and integer programming. He is the author of “Lectures on Polytopes” (Springer-Verlag 1995) and of “Proofs from THE BOOK” (with Martin Aigner, Springer-Verlag 1998), which has by now appeared in 14 languages. His latest book is “Darf ich Zahlen? Geschichten aus der Mathematik” (“Do I count? Stories from Mathematics”, Piper, Munich 2010). More…

From David Kamp at Vanity Fair…

The conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark used the entropic scuzziness of 1970s-era New York as his medium. He fashioned a “garbage wall” out of debris strewn beneath a Brooklyn Bridge access ramp; planted a cherry tree in the dug-out basement of a tatty old industrial building (turned art space) in SoHo; and, wielding an acetylene torch like an X-Acto knife, cut holes in the walls and floors of an abandoned Hudson River pier to create what he called a “sun-and-water temple.” (This, decades before the High Line and similar city-sanctioned reclamations of derelict urban terrain.)

Matta-Clark, who died of pancreatic cancer in 1978 at the age of 35, is the featured artist in a collective historical show called “112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970–1974),” which opens on January 7 at the David Zwirner gallery, in Manhattan. The exhibition looks back to the beginnings of Matta-Clark’s career and SoHo’s do-it-yourself art scene, and specifically to 112 Greene, the site of a failing ragpicking business when an artist named Jeffrey Lew purchased it, in 1968. More…

From Sarah Boxer at The New York Review of Books…

In “The Last Irascible,” my new essay in the The New York Review, I write about the idiosyncratic life of the hundred-year-old artist Hedda Sterne, drawing on an interview I recorded with her in 2003. Born in Romania in 1910, Sterne fled German-occupied Bucharest and eventually settled in New York, where she became one of the few women in a circle of Abstract Expressionist painters that included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline. But Sterne thought of herself as an anti-Abstract Expressionist, someone with no use for the cult of personality and personal gesture. Rarely did she paint a pure abstraction. In the 1960s she drew lettuce heads as crazy mazes, as if she were a worm inside, investigating. She pointed out that even her webby white-on-white drawings—made in the 1990s, when she was practically blind—represented the “floaters and flashers” across her field of vision. Although major museums acquired her work, and despite having one of the longest exhibition histories of any living artist (seventy years), she is hardly well known. Here is a selection of her work. More…

From Julian Bell at London Review of Books…

The upright canvas, some 4’6’’ by 3’, stood on Salvator Rosa’s easel, prepared with a burnt umber ground. The painter first attacked it, as far as I can see, with a black-loaded brush, dragging a jagged stuttery line almost from top to bottom. That was to be the rock edge of Etna’s crater. Where the volcanic glow was to fall, Rosa slapped on a queasy mid-tone mix of sienna and smalt blue; capped it with brisk blurts of white; later, knocked the resulting rock planes back into readable order with red and yellow glazes. But that vertical divide of his, tumbling and forking in ever crazier lurches, still retains a lightning urgency. Here you meet the gestural painting of the 1660s, as vehement and imperious in its own way as the art of Clyfford Still.

There are not all that many ways in which you could call Rosa’s brushwork graceful. Slackening in pace as he dabbed in some clouds beyond the crater, it snarls up awkwardly over the canvas’s lone figure – that of the philosopher Empedocles, who is seen hurling himself, for some reason or other, from an inner ledge into the gulf of fire below. In fact one of the first things I noticed, as I went round the recent exhibition of Rosa’s work at Dulwich, was the painter’s own moth-to-the-flame impulse to tackle types of figure painting that lay beyond his grasp. More…

Jubilation is the dominant mood when- and wherever a Christo/Jeanne-Claude project is realized. I have witnessed it time and again—32 years ago, in Loose Park, Kansas City, overlooking its Wrapped Walk Ways, every inch of the winding itinerary paved with bright clinquant stuff, of which Christo remarked: “When the sunlight falls on that nylon and sets it sparkling, it’s very beautiful.” He saw no need to boast about cheerful families bestriding the luster under their feet as if walking on air.

Joy hailed the Surrounded Islands in Biscayne Bay, Miami, May 1983: eleven small isles, each in its private hug, embraced by the scandalous pink of buoyant industrial fabric.

Or, more recently in Central Park, Manhattan (2005): abundance of Gates, waving their saffron scarves, 7,503 of them, erected to host processions of walkers, whose glee reminded ambulant seniors of the smiles that lit up this same city on V-E Day, 1945—except that the present fête needed no losing side. More…

From John Richardson at Vanity Fair…

The announcement last week that Pierre Le Guennec, a 71-year-old French electrician, was the owner of 271 previously unknown or presumed missing works by Pablo Picasso, has created a furor on both sides of the Atlantic. For installing burglar alarms on Picasso’s homes, including the villas near Cannes on the French Riviera, Le Guennec claims that the artist and his second wife, Jacqueline, gave him the drawings, prints, and collages, dating from 1900 to 1932, which are estimated to be worth upward of $60 million. When shown the works, Picasso’s son Claude confirmed that they were authentic but suggested that they must have been stolen.

It is my belief that this treasure trove belonged to a massive group of some 70 portfolios of works on paper which the artist had been obliged to remove from his Paris apartment on the Rue la Boétie and his studio on the Rue des Grands Augustins after the French government enacted regulations preventing people from having multiple residencies. Picasso had tried and failed to fight this injunction, but since he had apparently forsaken his Paris properties to reside in the Villa La Californie at Cannes, he was unsuccessful. To his rage, he was forced to relinquish them and have their contents stored or sent down to Cannes. More…

From Michael Kimmelman at The New York Times…

The past still thrusts itself back into the headlines here, occasionally as an unexploded bomb turning up somewhere. Now it has reappeared as art.

In January workers digging for a new subway station near City Hall unearthed a bronze bust of a woman, rusted, filthy and almost unrecognizable. It tumbled off the shovel of their front-loader.

Researchers learned the bust was a portrait by Edwin Scharff, a nearly forgotten German modernist, from around 1920. It seemed anomalous until August, when more sculpture emerged nearby: “Standing Girl” by Otto Baum, “Dancer” by Marg Moll and the remains of a head by Otto Freundlich. Excavators also rescued another fragment, a different head, belonging to Emy Roeder’s “Pregnant Woman.” October produced yet a further batch. More…

Understanding Maria Irene Fornes’ Theatre by Mala Renganathan is now available from The Arts in Society imprint.

Understanding Maria Irene Fornes’ Theatre is a full-length critical study of Maria Irene Fornes’ plays and her dramaturgy. Maria Irene Fornes, a well-known New York – based Cuban-American dramaturge, is a versatile artist blending in her productions her talent and experience as a playwright, director, drama teacher, painter and costume designer. Despite her colossal contribution to theatre – with nine Off Broadway awards given by the Village Voice, several other prestigious award, forty plays performed worldwide and also several directorial ventures – she occupies a marginalized place in American theatre.

This book on Fornes primarily aims to discuss several rarely researched aspects of Fornes’ theatre. While the book initially started as a research monograph, it has now grown into a book based on the author’s extensive research on Fornes’ theatre, gathering evidences from video-recorded plays, viewed performances, and interviews with her theatre group.

• Improving Generalist Teacher Education in the Arts by Susanne Garvis and Rowena Riek.
• Voices and Visions: Creativity as a Transformative Process in Three Northern Contexts by Dahne Harding.
• Dancing with Mondrian by Annette Chauncy.
• Importing Arts Activism and the Culture of Dissent into the Classroom by Karen Frostig.
• The Culture Industry and Creative Economy: From an Individual Artist and Art Educator’s Perspective by Janet Stahle-Fraser.
• Expression and Repression: The Glamorous Presentation of Self by Kevin Almond.
• Dancing Faces: Why is Emotion Not a Part of the Dance Curriculum? by Kirsten Harvey.
• Community Support for Teacher Learning in Visual Art by Ian Bowell.
• (Poly)-centric Multiculturalism: A Path to Inclusive Art Curriculum and Pedagogy by Samuel Adu-Poku.
• Rethinking Design: Ethics, Sustainability, and New Practice by Lisa Graham.
• Creatics: What’s Missing in Actor-training? by Helen Trenos.
• Dying for the Cause: Choreographing the Myths of Ulrike Meinhof and Wolfgang Grams by Alexandra Kolb.
• Inclusion in Practice: Inclusive Adult Education Approaches to Performing Arts in Informal Community Education Settings by Morgan Jai-Morincome and Carolyn Broadbent.

From Susan Michals at Vanity Fair…

This year, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat would have turned 50 years old. And in half-century celebration, there are events all over the world: In Paris, you can see more than 100 of his works at the Museum of Modern Art through January 2011, as well as a special exhibition at Galerie Pascal Lansberg. In other cities, you can catch Tamra Davis’s new documentary, The Radiant Child, centered on an interview the director shot with Basquiat 20 years ago. And in New York, a Basquiat exhibition was on display for much of the fall at the Robert Miller Gallery, in Chelsea.

But in Los Angeles, there resides a much more personal collection. At LeadApron, a gallery on Melrose Place, gallerist Jonathan Brown has an unusual collection of ephemera: 112 pieces belonging to Basquiat, including self-portraits and even the signature bow tie he wore in his hair, all from the last year of his life.

Brown acquired this collection about five years ago from an old friend, Kelle Inman, Basquiat’s last girlfriend. “Kelle had a real mothering instinct; she wanted to care for you,” Brown says. “I think that may have been some of her connection to Jean-Michel, because she spent the last year of his life with him. She nursed him, cared for him, and tried to help him get off drugs.” More…