Here are a few of the most recent articles I’ve written for adobeairstream.com. Click on the headline to link to the full article.

A Chicken Coop in Every Yard: Save Me the Chicken Neck

Sustainable living and art collide in Boulder where a cooperative group of art students under the guidance of visiting Dutch and Slovenian artists designed the “Chicken Shack Village.”

Are the chicken coops art?

One student added: “It doesn’t matter if its art, it’s the dialogue that’s important. The art will follow.”

Christoph Heinrich named Denver Art Museum Director: Succeeds Lewis Sharp

Heinrich was named assistant director in January and his Embrace! exhibition opens Nov. 14, featuring 17 artists from around the world who were invited to create site specific works that react to or embrace the Libeskind designed Hamilton building. Heinrich may be asking artist’s to embrace the angular building, but can we expect more dynamic programming in the future?

“We’re not competing,” he said. “We [DAM] don’t have to be cutting edge. We can be broader in our appeal.”

Heinrich also said DAM is committed to being an encyclopedic museum, and mentioned the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA Denver), as if to suggest the cutting-edge programming belongs at the smaller museum of Denver whose simpler building, by architect David Adjaye, has proven a galvanizing space for public gatherings.

Heinrich’s apparent challenge is to determine what DAM has to offer that can be found nowhere else in the world. His Embrace! seems to be a step in that direction.

Art Shows in Review: Durango and Marfa

Critic Neal Brown writing in Frieze in 1999 crafted this phrase that applies to two art shows that recently crossed my desk and attention: “fetishistic attention to detail with grotesque error.” He was talking about J.D. Ingres, the French neoclassical painter, and how the level of meticulousness found, say, in Ingres’ Grand Odalisque, joined his work “spiritually” to current art practice. So have a look at these two: Tom Palmore at Sorrel Sky Gallery and Julie Speed at Galleri Urbane.

Chinati: Judd’s Concrete’s Re open

“Society is basically not interested in art,” Donald Judd said. “Art has a purpose of its own.”

That purpose can be discovered in Marfa, Texas, where this weekend marks the annual celebration of Judd and lectures about Judd’s re-opened works in concrete that will be live-streamed from the Chinati website.  Marfa, a remote town, with a rundown ex-Army base and old Army barracks, specifically, is where Judd installed 100 sculptures in aluminum and 15 works in concrete. He transformed Fort Marfa into a seminal location to display his own art and building-sized installations by his friends and admired peers including Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Carl Andre, Ingolfur Arnarsson, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Long, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, David Rabinowitch and John Wesley.

Viewing the concrete works from a distance is not the same as wandering along a path near them, meandering in between them, looking through them at the way the sky is framed. Feeling the dry heat of the desert plain, the dust kicking up around your feet, listening to the cacophony of grasshoppers and reaching out to touch the stiff golden grass that reaches nearly thigh high, ears attuned for the sound of rattle snakes coiled up and hiding in the cool shadows cast by the objects as one experiences time and space from a new perspective.