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Mr. Hockney’s newfound passion for English landscape painting strikes some observers as peculiarly retrograde. “I think for many people this kind of representation is something which belongs in the past,” said John Elderfield, the chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a Yorkshireman himself. “But David doesn’t give a damn.”

--NY Times

Grand Arts is a non-profit art project space in downtown Kansas City. They commission and assist artists in the production and realization of ambitious contemporary art projects. Over the past 12 years they have produced and exhibited more than 70 projects by artists including Isaac Julien, Patricia Cronin, Tim Rollins

and KOS, Roxy Paine and Alfredo Jaar.

Their mission is to provide financial, technical and logistical support to artists while encouraging conceptual risk-taking and experimentation at all stages of the creative process. They function as a laboratory rather than a residency program. The public is invited to meet artists and observe them at work during the project and at culminating events and opening receptions.

The words "potentially harmful" on the cover of a book becomes an invitation to open the book, like a dare. The cover of this particular book attracted my attention. Thumbing through its pages, a photgraph of a woman wearing nothing but sunglasses and holding a large rubber dildo in front of her female genitalia caught me by surprise.

The controversial photograph is a self-portrait by Lynda Benglis that appeared in ArtForum magazine as an advertising in the November 1974 issue.

Born 1924, Asheville, North Carolina

Studied at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, 1946-48, and with Ossip Zadkins in Paris, 1948-49. Taught at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Washington, D.C., 1949-51, at the Catholic University, Washington, D.C., 1951-60, and at the Washington Workshop Center of the Arts, 1952-56. Served as Milton Avery Professor of the Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 1985.

This excerpt from the biography of Mr. Noland from his official website is a modest, if not a bare bones summation of Kenneth Noland's accomplishments as an artist, classified as belonging to the "Post-Abstract Expressionist" movement in the 1950s and 1960s by art historians.

Mr. Noland's style, and his predilection for concentric circles and bold colors, was influenced by the work of Helen Frankenthaler and championed by the critic Clement Greenberg.

Mr. Nolan and the somewhat older Morris Louis, a fellow teacher at Washington Workshop Center of the Arts, collaborated and experimented with color and texture to arrive at their definitive styles thus breaking with Abstract Expressionism.

The results of their collaborations and experiments, which included painting on "bed sheets" because "they were cheaper to buy" regrettably, were destroyed, "they were not meant to be kept" Mr. Noland declared in an interview with Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, in 1977, part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive in the Duke University Libraries.

Mr. Noland's obituary in the New York Times quotes art critic Karen Wilkins, the author of a monograph on Mr. Noland, “He was one of the great colorists of the 20th century.” Yet, his work and his name remain footnotes in the story of the New York art movements of the 1950s, eclipsed by the overwhelming strength of Abstract Expressionism and the Works of Jackson Pollock, and the Post-Abstract Expressionists Helen Frankenthaler (his main influence) and Morris Louis (his collaborator)

" The post-Abstract Expressionists,..by half of the 1950s, had firmly established that conventional subject-matter was back. Whereas Kenneth Noland's paintings of coloured concentric circles were read as just that, Jasper John's paintings of coloured concentric circles were read as targets, and perception of the work was constantly determined by that recognition" writes David Sylvester, in his book ABOUT MODERN ART, 1996... continue