Preview summer 2002

Katy Siegel

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY

Dave Muller

CENTER FOR CURATORIAL STUDIES, BARD COLLEGE

In addition to the convivial group shows ("Three Day Weekends") he organizes, gregarious Los Angeles-based artist Dave Muller makes smart, colorful drawings that recontextualize and often wryly reinterpret posters and announcements for other artists' exhibitions. This survey, organized by Bard CCS Museum director Amada Cruz (who, with CCAC Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art curator Matthew Higgs, contributes to the catalogue), focuses on the drawings, which means the exhibition should have a collegial feel. In addition, the artist will give visitors a taste of Muller-style sociability when he hosts a local Three Day Weekend comprising friends and colleagues from New York and LA as well as Bard grad students. June 23-Sept. 8.

Ralph Rugoff

NORTH ADAMS, MA

Uncommon Denominator: New Art from Vienna

MASSACHUSETTS MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

From the tortured gorgeousness of Klimt and Schiele to the gorgeous torture of the Actionists, Vienna is a city that seems to elicit intensity from its artists. All the same, the idea of exploring the identity of a locale via one grand exhibition can promote a certain anodyne blandness. Perhaps to offset this factor, "Uncommon Denominator" stresses its multimedia unclassifiability, delivering some seventy works by sixteen participants; painting, video, wall drawings, and more are promised, with most work dating from the last three years. The roster, selected by Mass MOCA's Laura Heon, boasts old hands like Franz West and Erwin Wurm as well as several newcomers whose work is little known in the States. May 25, 2002-Apr. 2003.

Frances Richard

WASHINGTON, DC

Alfred Stieglitz: Known and Unknown

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

For longtime National Gallery curator Sarah Greenough, this is the big one: a 100-print exhibition of Alfred Stieglitz's career, drawn from the museum's collection of more than 1,600--the so-called key set assembled by Georgia O'Keeffe and donated by her and the Stieglitz estate. Greenough's career has focused on the impressario of modernist photography, and in showing Stieglitz's iconic images alongside lesser-known pictures, this survey promises to be insightful. Best of all, the show is accompanied by a catalogue reproducing the entire collection, with scholarly entries for each image and--for the first time, according to Greenough--authoritative tides and dates. June 2-Sept. 2; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Oct. 6, 2002-Jan. 5, 2003.

AG

Larry Rivers

CORCORAN GALLERY OF ART

A quiz: (1) Who was originally considered (with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg) one of the big three breakaway-from-AbEx figures? (2) What American artist admitted to adolescent carnal knowledge of an overstuffed chair? (3) Who was the best artist ever at charcoal variations on stenciled lettering? (4) Which artist--among those whose last names begin with the letter R, please--is a better jazz musician than Woody Allen? The answers to these questions, not to mention a chance to review the artist's output from the past five decades, can be found in this sixty-work exhibition curated by the Corcoran's Jacquelyn Serwer. May 18-July 22; Musee National du Jeu de Paume, Paris, Oct. 7-Dec. 1.