While many of her works were not in the studio and had to be discussed while huddled over her laptop, it was clear that her command of the materials and consideration of the ideas she was grappling with was impressive.  As she put it, Daneille is "fascinated with how everyday materials can be manipulated" and considers artist Lee Bontecou as a key inspiration.   She often incorporates motors in order to activate her sculptures.  In many cases I thought her additions of those elements made her works that much more enticing.

She's in the midst of preparing for an exhibition at Cynthia Reeves Gallery.  I am excited to see what she will come up with next.  From the looks of the experiments I saw with sugar in her studio, her works will be palatable to anyone who comes through the space.

Lisa Dent
Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to visit the Art Institute of Chicago with Dominique H. Vasseur, our European curator, and had a wonderful time exploring their new spaces and learning more about some of the exciting changes they've implemented.

In May of this year, the Art Institute inaugurated its Modern Wing, a 264,00-square-foot Renzo Piano-designed addition. The Modern Wing, the largest expansion project in the museum's history, increased the museum's size to more than a million square feet, making it the second largest art museum in the United States. Click here to read more about the project.

The opening of the Modern Wing has provided them with the opportunity to reinstall the rest of the permanent collection in new and exciting ways. They've moved toward monographic hangs in which a number of works by the same artist are displayed together, which allow the visitor to gain a much deeper understanding of the artist and their work. For example, one wall was hung with several paintings from Monet's Haystack series. Below is a picture I took of Griffin Court, the central court of the Modern Wing.

We were able to meet with David Stark, Vice Director of Education, who gave us a tour of their wonderful new education spaces and classrooms. We also met with James Yood, a professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mr. Yood will be speaking here at CMA on Sunday, November 22 at 2:00 PM about Dale Chihuly's work in the context of other contemporary artists who sculpt glass and make use of light.

James was kind enough to take us up to the 12^th floor of the art school where we could look down and see the full scope of the campus. It was absolutely beautiful and a wonderful way to be able to appreciate what James talks about as this conversation between the Classicism of the museum and the sort of wildness of the Frank Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Pavilion located in Millennium Park.

There are so many wonderful and exciting things happening at the museum. Through January 31, 2010, they have an extraordinary painting by Caravaggio on display from The National Gallery in London. Titled The Supper at Emmaus, was created in 1601 for Ciriaco Mattei, a nobleman with one of the greatest collections of art in Rome. They've hung the painting in one of their permanent galleries and peppered some of the surrounding galleries with Caravaggio works from their own collection. It's almost like embarking on a pilgrimage (and one well worth the effort) to see this stunning piece.

Venturing out into Millennium Park, we were able to see A Conversation with Chicago: Contemporary Sculpture From China, which is up through October of next year and features several large-scale sculpture. Below are some pictures from that wonderful exhibition as well as some of Cloud Gate, British artist Anish Kappor's first public outdoor work installed in the United States, often referred to as "The Bean" because of it's unique shape.

The trip was energizing and helped to fuel my excitement about our own renovation and expansion project.

Art Speaks. Join the Conversation.

Nannette Maciejunes

CMA Executive Director

-Jeff Sims, Educator for Adult Programs/Multimedia Producer

These switches were over 8 years old but they were great. The four switches made up our 1GB fiber backbone. During the transition, we kept one of them online but two weeks ago we shut it down for good. The picture to the right is my Network Administrator pulling the fiber connection from the switch.

Now our backbone is 10GB and everything else is upgraded. We've also updated our Public Wifi to be more secure and are rolling out a new access point in Chihuly.

~Thomas Deliduka
Director of Information Technology

I tend to read a lot of novels, not the pulp variety but usually older works.  Maybe I am trying to fill in my literary education that went on hold for many years when I was watching too much TV.  Granted, I love biographies and books about art and artists, but recently I got a hold of a copy of René Gimpel’s Diary of an Art Dealer and I have been thoroughly engrossed in it for the past few weeks. 

Gimpel was one of the most important and successful art dealers in Paris in the first half of the 20^th century and perhaps not surprisingly, he knew nearly everyone who was rich, famous, or collected art. 

He recounts numerous visits to an aging Claude Monet at Giverny, to an equally frail Auguste Renoir in his home in Southern France, dinner parties where companions recounted stories of Degas’s rudeness, his meeting Marcel Proust on vacation on the seacoast of Normandy, his mistrust of the American expatriate art historian Bernard Berenson, and so-on.

But he doesn’t confine himself merely to art or the rich and famous; Gimpel was an astute and sensitive man who could capture the essence of his time with a few words: about World War I, “On a bench: five soldiers with seven wooden legs.” His journal entries about the “Great War” and its aftermath are sobering. 

Of significant interest to a curator in an American art museum are his frequent visits to America and his meetings with collectors like Henry Clay Frick (“America’s most hated man”), J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford (who he describes quite unflatteringly), as well as dinners and cocktail parties—(and this was during Prohibition)—with museum directors like W.R. Valentiner of Detroit and George and Nina Spalding Stevens of Toledo. 

He frequently notes prices for works of art that he has sold, works others (like the famed British art dealers, the Duveens, into whose family he married) have sold, works he knows to be fakes, and some famous art scandals of the time. If you love art, larger-than-life personalities, “culture gossip,” European and American history during the important years leading up to the outbreak of World War II, you certainly will enjoy this book. 

Gimpel’s entries tend to be brief and pithy so one can read as much or as little as one has time for.  Unfortunately, I believe this book, originally published in translation in 1967, was reprinted in 1992, but copies can be found on the Internet through various book dealers.  Good reading! 

Dominique H. Vasseur

Curator of European Art