Jenelle Porter, photo: Aaron Igler

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

Beantown’s contemporary art clout expands with two new appointments at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art.

Jenelle Porter has been named senior curator. She was previously a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Pedro Alonzo, a Boston based independent curator, has been named adjunct curator.

They join a team led by Helen Molesworth, former head of modern and contemporary art at the Harvard Art Museum, appointed chief curator at ICA Boston earlier this year.

Porter has been at the ICA UPenn since 2005. There she  helped to organize a number of notable exhibitions, including Trisha Donnelly’s first museum show in 2008, Dirt on Delight: Impulses that Form Clay in 2009, and Mineral Spirits: Anne Chu and Matthew Monahan mounted earlier this year. At the ICA, she will develop exhibitions, programming and grow the museum’s permanent collection.

Prior to ICA, Porter served at various curatorial positions at Artists Space in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Whitney. Porter received her Masters in Critical and Curatorial Studies from UCLA in 2004. She starts work…

Potrait d'homme de profil (Roger Bernard), 1946 Charcoal © 2010 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York courtesy, NYU website / press release

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

The first exhibition devoted to Henri Matisse’s drawings of men opened this week at NYU’s Maison Française.

Several works in Henri Matisse – Writers on Paper: Selected Drawings and Prints from the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation are being shown for the first time.

Though better known for the female form, the show’s 1937-1946 prints and drawings chronicle the male writers who were part of Matisse’s world.

The show includes seven large pen-and-ink portraits of French Surrealist poet, and zealous Matisse biographer, Louis Aragon. Other drawings and lithographs portray novelist Henri de Montherlant, dramatist Paul Léautaud, and Matisse’s reclusive neighbor, Franz Thomassin, a writer who published under the pseudonym Franz Viller.

The show, curated by Martin Fisher and Martin Mullin, will be on view from Nov. 2 to Dec. 21. La Maison Française, located on the cobblestoned Washington Mews in Greenwich Village, is NYU’s French cultural center. The gallery is open Monday through Friday 10am – 6pm.

New Museum facade with Ugo Rondinone's soon to to "Hell, Yes" sculpture

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

Ugo Rondinone’s rainbow exhortation, “Hell, Yes!” will exit the second floor facade of the New Museum’s Bowery building. A twenty-eight foot tall red rose will replace Ugo’s peppy chant, which was installed in December 2007 at the New Museum’s opening.

German-born sculptor Isa Genzken’s 3-D floral installation was originally created in 1993 and reprised in 2008.

Genzken was married to Gerhard Richter for thirteen years. She is represented in New York by David Zwirner.

“Rose II” will be on display at the end of November. The New Museum plans to reinstall the “Hell, Yes!” in another location.

Maria Muller, MFA, Boston's New Deputy Director via Arts & Business website

Maria Muller, director of development at the British Museum since 2006, has been hired as deputy director, external relations for Boston’s MFA. She reports to director Malcolm Rogers, at the helm of one of New England’s most prominent museums.

Muller replaces Patricia Jacoby, who retires after nineteen years as deputy director. She was responsible for overseeing the construction of the museum’s new American wing and fundraising campaign which raised $504 million by 2008. The new wing opens later this month.

Prior to joining the British Museum, Muller worked for seven years at London’s National Gallery, as head of corporate fundraising and then as deputy head of the development office. Muller starts at the MFA in mid-February.  An interview with Muller can be found here.

Muller was selected following an international search by museum trustees including: Barbara Alfond, Susan Donahue, Steve Fine, Ann Gund, Susan Kaplan, Richard Lubin, Sandra Moose, Tim Phillips and Stokley Towles.

Photo courtesy National Academy Museum and School

New York’s National Academy Museum and School has inducted 18 American artists and architects as members of the 185-year old institution.

The freshman class of Academicians, as they are called:

Janine Antoni, Adam Anuszkiewicz, Willard Boepple, Donna Dennis, Carroll Dunham, Garth Evans, Nancy Friese, Ann Gale, Ann Hamilton, Glenn Ligon, Melissa Meyer, Dana Schutz, Shahzia Sikander, Amy Sillman, Lee Tribe, Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, and Don Voisine.

From left: James Meyer, Laura Hoptman, Verne Dawso. Photo courtesy of Porter Hovey via Flickr, taken September 30, 2009 at X Initiative Benefit

The New Museum‘s curatorial shuffle continues.

Senior curator Laura Hoptman will be leaving her post for a job at MoMA in the painting and sculpture department, according to two sources with knowledge of the move.

This news comes days after the New Museum announced a promotion for curator Massimiliano Gioni who was elevated to oversee and direct the museum’s exhibition program and lead the curatorial department. Richard Flood, who had previously served as the museum’s chief curator was named director of special projects and curator at large. The Oct. 1 press release made no mention of Hoptman.

Hoptman came to the New Museum in 2006 from the Carnegie Museum of Art. She was previously a curator of drawing at MoMA for six years. At the New Museum, Hoptman curated Elizabeth Peyton and co-curated Unmonumental among other shows.

Andy Warhol "Dolly Parton," 1985 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas 42 x 42 in. (106.7 x 106.7 cm) Courtesy Sotheby's

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

Alice Walton is not only interested in dusty colonial portraiture and early American art. In June she snagged a suite of Jackson Pollock prints at Art Basel, revealing a penchant for postwar American art.

The latest acquisitions on the part of her Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art include Andy Warhol’s 1985 portrait of busty, big-haired crooner Dolly Parton (purchased at Sotheby’s in May for $914,500) and Roy Lichtenstein’s 1966 bursting gun-shot like sculpture, Standing Explosion (Red) (acquired at Christie’s in May for $722,500).

The under construction museum, located in downtown Bentonville, Arkansas (Wal-Mart’s headquarters, of course!) is slated to open at some point in the near future. Walton, a Wal-Mart heiress (worth an estimated $20 billion) is a devoted American art champion.

While Crystal Bridges has been relatively quiet over the past few years, the museum made a rare cameo in our email in-box yesterday, delivering not just the news of the museum’s newest acquisitions, but other tidbits.

Announcements ranged from the important acquisitions, to the appointment of a  deputy director, a rendering of their museum store design, and even…

Nara's Park Avenue Armory studio. © Photo Mackie Healy

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s retrospective has just opened at the Asia Society, and a pair of his spooky milky white statues overlook a fancy stretch of Park Avenue. But before this Nara invasion was mounted, I was invited to watch the man in action.

It didn’t turn out quite that way.

On the appointed August afternoon, I was given a yellow hardhat and guided through the Park Avenue Armory where workers were wielding power drills, part of a restoration of the soaring ceiling of the drill hall.

Nara, known to be reclusive, was MIA. The PR folks were apologetic.

The Neo-Pop meister had rigged a makeshift studio on site. Disorder reigned. Paper litter abounded. Pencil shavings and errant pieces of clothing tossed about indicated that Nara had indeed been hard at work–at least before I arrived.

The temporary workspace was visible through the glass where I was able to view his pencil drawings of youngsters pinned up on the walls.

An electric guitar sat on a refrigerator-sized wooden table. Nara is a rock music fiend and borrows titles from…

Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguay, 1874-1949), "New York Docks," 1920. Oil and gouache on cardboard. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Collection Société Anonyme.

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

The New-York Historical Society and El Museo del Barrio unite to present a joint history lesson this fall.

Nueva York (1613-1945) examines New York’s long term romance with Spain and Latin America, and how those countries have helped shape Manhattan’s cultural character.

Combining the resources of New York’s oldest museum and its leading Latino cultural institution, the show highlights three centuries of history.

Using interactive displays, listening stations, video and over two hundred rare and historic maps, letters, and drawings, the exhibition spans from the founding of New Amsterdam in the 1600s as a bastion against the Spanish empire, to the present day.

Works by New York artists and writers influenced by travels to Spain and South America such as Washington Irving, Frederic Church and William Merritt Chase will be on display.  Reflections of New York in paintings by modern Latin American artists including Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and Joaquin Torres-Garcia, are also featured.

Documentary filmmaker Ric Burns, best known for his eight-part PBS series New York: A Documentary Film, has created a film for the exhibition, to…

Jack Tworkov (American, born Poland, 1900–1982) "West 23rd." 1963 Oil on canvas, 60" x 6' 8" (152.6 x 203.3 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase © Estate of Jack Tworkov, courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

This fall, for the first time in over forty years, MoMA is flaunting its Abstract Expressionist holdings. In The Big Picture: Abstract Expressionist New York, curator Ann Temkin features lesser-known Ab-Ex works from the collection alongside the old familiars.

The exhibition traces  the movement’s development from its origins in the 1940s through its height in the late 1960s. In a complete re-installation of the fourth floor, the show will feature approximately 300 works in a variety of mediums by about 40 artists. The big guns are amply represented with no shortage of examples by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko,  David Smith, Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning. Women artists are also given their due, including Grace Hartigan, Louise Nevelson, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell.

Temkin rounds up some lesser known lights including George McNeil and Bradley Walker Tomlin.

There is also a healthy dose of photography, including Minor White, Frederick Sommer, Aaron Siskind, Robert Frank and Harry Callahan.

The Big Pictures: Abstract Expressionist New York will be on view from October 3, 2010 through April 25, 2011.

Here is a list of…