• Jerry Saltz writing about art auctions on artnet
• David Byrne's streaming radio

Eric Heist
installation view of Travel Agents

I was just reading the May issue of The Brooklyn Rail. There is a great essay by William Powhida on Eric Heist's show, titled Travel Agents, that was up at Schroeder Romero in April.

[photo from Schroedero Romero's web site]

This is a detail from one sculpture. It is almost completely made of paper. The gallery is open tomorrow, so you have one more chance to see the show.

Adia Millett
Pre-Fabricated Innocence: Reproduction (Globe with rabbits), 2004
11" × 14"
c-print

We saw this photograph Saturday at the new Mixed Greens space on 26th Street. It was the last day of the show, but you can see more on their web site.

I love the outside -- inside too, but I don't have a great image -- of the new space. It's a great way to announce the new location:

[photo at top from the Mixed Greens site]

Hello?, the video blog, has a short clip of a performance by DEVA -- the all-girl DEVO cover band.

K8 Hardy, plus others, at The Muster

We were out of town, but check out posts by Todd Gibson and Nicole Eisenman -- including photos.

[photo above is from Nicole's flickr album]

My favorite arts-related newsletter is the one from New York Foundation for the Arts. The latest one pointed me to a commissioned series of work by our friend Meredith Allen of people posing with her six month-old Shitzu/Jack Russell Terrier, Iggy. Click on the image to see the rest.

We're headed off to a New England vacation tomorrow morning, otherwise we would be at The Muster, and get a portrait done by Nicole Eisenman.

As members, we just received an invitation to a members-only viewing of a show at the Whitney. It's on a Saturday morning, 9-11AM. Not exactly encouraging an interesting downtown crowd to show up, are they?

This opens tonight, along with many other shows (see ArtCal), and looks well worth a visit, either tonight or this weekend, as it ends Sunday.

Parker's Box is delighted to announce its fifth annniversary, and in the true spirit of this celebration, we have invited a houseful of guests (artists, galleries, art publications, activists and nonprofits) to participate in a three day art "market" event that turns the tables on galleries representing artists, in order to have a number of artists "represent" their galleries through specific projects presented together under the same conditions and in similar spaces.

ArtCal has the full details.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a strike by the graduate students at Yale, who do much of the teaching. The Nation has a web article on what's happening at Columbia by Jennifer Washburn, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education.

Columbia is using tactics that would be illegal for any regular employer to use, but the private universities have seen to it that grad students aren't covered, and have hired union-busting law firms to advise them. The Nation has a pdf of a letter from liberal historian Alan Brinkley, currently Columbia's Provost, discussing retaliatory actions to be used against students trying to organize.

The memo, dated February 16, 2005, is signed by none other than Alan Brinkley, a well-known liberal historian who is now serving as Columbia's provost. Brinkley has gone out of his way to assure outside observers, including New York State Senator David Paterson, that "students are free to join or advocate a union, and even to strike, without retribution." Yet his February 16 memo, addressed to seventeen deans, professors and university leaders, lists retaliatory actions that might be taken against students "to discourage" them from striking. Several of these measures would likely rise to the level of illegality if graduate student employees were covered under the National Labor Relations Act.

Such measures include telling graduate student teachers and researchers who contemplate striking that they could "lose their eligibility for summer stipends" (i.e., future work opportunities) and also "lose their eligibility for special awards, such as the Whitings" (a prestigious scholarship and award program). Yet another proposal cited in the memo would require students who participated in the strike "to teach an extra semester or a year" as a condition for receiving their scholarly degree.

Not a very nice example for some of the wealthiest institutions in the country to be setting.

Untitled, 1988
Mark Morrisroe
three dyed x-rays, 17" × 14" each

His new art "career" continues to grow...

James is the curator for this month's Visual AIDS web gallery.

You'll want to read his statement while looking at the images, as he wrote about each artist's work.

[image from Visual AIDS]