Lannan Foundation

2006
Pamphlet Architecture, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, New York
In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster Photographs by Chris Jordan, Essays by Bill McKibben and Susan Zakin Publication

Pamphlet Architecture, the non-profit publishing arm of Princeton University’s Architectural Press, received a grant in support of Chris Jordan’s book, In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss From An Unnatural Disaster.  Chris Jordan, an internationally acclaimed photographer, is primarily known for his work examining American consumerism and waste. In Katrina’s Wake, featuring photographs taken in New Orleans in late 2005, portrays the social and environmental costs of the hurricane on a personal scale and reflects the artist’s concerns about the deeper issues of the disaster, from global warming to economic, racial, and governmental causes.  In addition to the photographs, the book will feature an essay by Bill McKibben, author of ten books on environmental issues and Lannan Literary Award winner in 2000, about Katrina and global warming.  A second essay by Susan Zakin, former investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times, discusses the governmental, racial, social, and environmental factors that contributed to Katrina’s aftermath.

Photo: In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster published by Pamphlet Architecture.

2006
North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, North Dakota
The Disappeared Exhibition South American Tour

The North Dakota Museum of Art received support to tour the exhibition The Disappeared to five South American countries.  The exhibition brings together the work of twenty-five living artists from South America who, over the course of the last thirty years, have made art about Los Desaparecidos, or the disappeared. These artists have lived through the horrors of the military dictatorships that rocked their countries in the mid-decades of the twentieth century.  This grant will enable the exhibition to tour to Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, and Colombia.

Photo: Fernando Traverso, Intervention on the Streets of Rosario, 2001

2006
Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Warehouse Gallery Renovation Project, Challenge Grant

The Center for Contemporary Arts received a grant in support of the renovation of its Warehouse Gallery.  The remodeled gallery, a 5,800 sq.ft. space, will enable CCA to enhance programming through a significantly larger exhibition capacity.

Photo: Chopped, Chromed and Customed, the inaugural exhibition in CCA’s renovated Warehouse Gallery (now the Munoz-Waxman Gallery), fall 2007.

2006
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Focus: Mel Bochner Exhibition Catalogue

The Art Institute of Chicago received funding for the publication of a catalogue in conjunction with the exhibition Focus: Mel Bochner, on view October 5, 2006-January 7, 2007.  A leading practitioner of conceptual art, Mel Bochner was one of the first artists in the 1960s to introduce language into the visual field. Including works on paper, painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, the exhibition will bring together, for the first time, an overview of the artist’s language-based works created over four decades: 1966-2006.

Photo: Mel Bochner: Language 1966-2006 Monograph published by the Art Institute of Chicago, 2007.

2006
Cocoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective Exhibition

The Corcoran Gallery of Art was granted support for a retrospective exhibition of the work of San Francisco Bay area painter Robert Bechtle.  Bechtle’s work focuses on the subtle beauty of daily life, utilizing the photorealist style that was born in the 1960s. The exhibition featured 91 paintings and drawings from the 1960s to the present, including several of his best known works, many of which portray the residential neighborhoods of Northern California, replete with their signature stucco houses, repetitive rows of palm trees, and ubiquitous parked cars.  This exhibition marks the first major survey of the artist’s work since 1973.  The exhibition will be on view at the Corcoran from March 4 through June 4, 2006.

Photo: Robert Bechtle, Alameda Gran Torino, 1974, Oil on canvas, Collection SFMOMA.

2006
SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico
The Disappeared Exhibition

SITE Santa Fe received support for the presentation of the exhibition The Disappeared on loan from the North Dakota Museum of Art.  The Disappeared features 23 works by living artists from South America who, over the course of the last thirty years, have made art about Los Desaparecidos, or the disappeared. In conjunction with the exhibition, SITE has invited artists Luis Camnitzer (Uruguay) and Nicolás Guagnini (Argentina) to participate in community dialogues about their work and curator Mari-Carmen Ramirez to give a lecture on 20th century Latin American political art. This exhibition is the anchor of a citywide presentation on themes from The Disappeared and will be on view from October 11, 2007 to January 20, 2008.

Photo: Nicolás Guagnini, 30,000, 1998-2005, Vinyl decal on armature, 10 x 10 x 10 ft. Courtesy of the artist. Installation in front of SITE Santa Fe.

2006
Center for Contemporary Arts Cinematheque, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Restless Cinema: Latin American Film and Video After Los Desaparecidos

The Center for Contemporary Arts Cinematheque received funding in support of a film series concurrent with The Disappeared Collaborative Project.  Restless Cinema explored how Latin America’s recent history of political upheaval continues to resonate through the works of Latin American filmmakers. Featured films in the series include La Ciénega by Lucrecia Martel (Argentina); Salvadore Allende by Patricio Guzmán (Chile); The Kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt by Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes (US/Colombia); and El General by Natalia Almada (Mexico).

Photo: Film still from The Kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt directed by Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes, 2003.

2006
Institute of American Indian Arts Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Antonio Frasconi Exhibition for The Disappeared Collaborative Project

The Institute of American Indian Arts Museum received support for an exhibition of two suites of prints by artist Antonio Frasconi: Los Desaparecidos--The Disappeared, 1981 (suite of 18 prints) and In Memoriam, 1981-88 (suite of 56 prints.) Completed over the course of a decade, the extended series of woodblocks and monotypes push the viewer into recognizing a collective culpability, and into remembering. Frasconi’s art successfully portrays the horrors of torture, incarceration, and killing while preserving the memory of specific people. Frasconi’s work will be on view November 2007 through February 2008.

Photo: Antonio Frasconi, In Memoriam/En Memoria, 1981-1988, 56 monotypes.

2006
Santa Fe Art Institute , Santa Fe, New Mexico
Juan Manuel Echavarria: Mouths of Ash/Bocas de Ceniza Exhibition for The Disappeared Collaborative Project

Santa Fe Art Institute received support for the presentation of the exhibition Mouths of Ash/Bocas de Ceniza featuring the work of Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarria.  Since 1995, Echavarria’s work has been concerned with finding compelling and insightful ways to document his country’s grotesquely violent conditions.  His work employs metaphor and narrative to address the frightening ‘normality’ of violence in Colombia after fifty years of civil war. Mouths of Ash was curated by Laurel Reuter of the North Dakota Museum of Art and was featured in the Latin American Pavilion of the 2005 Venice Biennale. The exhibition is presented in Santa Fe as part of The Disappeared Collaborative Project and will be on view from December 1, 2007 through January 18, 2008.

Photo: Juan Manuel Echavarria, Bocas de Ceniza/Mouths of Ash, video, 15 mins, 2000.

2006
Blaffery Gallery, University of Houston, Houston, Texas
Jean-Luc Mylayne Monograph

The Blaffer Gallery received a grant in support of the creation of a monograph that will function as a free-standing compendium of Mylayne’s entire career focus, opening out from the current work to address the growth and development of his themes and concepts over a thirty year period. With 100 images and scholarly texts by curators Terrie Sultan and Lynne Cooke, this publication will make a significant contribution to contemporary discourse concerning the changing nature of photography in the 21st century. The monograph was published by Twin Palms Publishers of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Photo: Jean Luc Mylayne published by Twin Palms Publishers, 2007.

2005
The Art Institute of Chicago has recieved Lannan support for the exhibition “Focus: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle” which will be on view February 17-May 14, 2005.

Born in Madrid, Spain, in 1961, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle was raised in Bogotá, Colombia, and Chicago, where he currently lives, teaches, and maintains a studio.  Much of his early work was centered on community, concerned largely with issues of migration and immigration, ethnicity and place. Manglano-Ovalle is engaged in a process of understanding how certain extraordinary forces and systems—man-made and natural—are always and already in the process of remaking the world.  Over the course of the last decade, he has worked in a wide range of media—activist-inspired public art, sculpture, film, sound, and photography—all of which fuse the politics of contemporary urban culture with poetic meditations on aesthetics, history, and identity.

Today, the artist continues to embrace the interdisciplinary. Working in collaboration with geneticists, biotech researchers, legal consultants, medical ethicists, architects, composers, writers, historians, and others, Manglano-Ovalle forges a creative enterprise unrivaled among his peers in its scope and complexity.  Issues pertaining to personal and collective spaces, the negotiation of borders, and social injustice—which always have been central to his project—are still present.  Now, however, the artist treats these concerns in a more abstract fashion, against a larger, metaphorical landscape of passages— through time, space, atmosphere, and geography, with their attendant cultures of observation and documentation.  Most pointedly, weather and climate—super cell storm clouds, for example—have become, for the artist, new vehicles for examining patterns of mighty migrations that move where they will without respect for borders or boundaries.  “What I want to represent,” the artist declares, “is how the world represents itself to us.”

For the Art Institute of Chicago’s Focus exhibition, Manglano-Ovalle has constructed a monumentally scaled (two-stories high) model of an actual iceberg formation recorded this summer off the coast of Newfoundland and premiered a new digital video.

2005
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Dan Flavin: A Retrospective Exhibition

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago was granted support for the Chicago presentation of Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, the first comprehensive retrospective devoted to Flavin’s achievement as a major proponent of Minimalism.  The MCA has a long history of presenting the work of Flavin, beginning with the museum’s inauguration in 1967.

Photo: Dan Flavin, The Nominal Three (To William of Ockham), 1963. Cool white fluorescent light, 8 feet high, ed. 2/3, Collection Lannan Foundation, long-term loan to Dia Art Foundation, New York.

2005
Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Visual Arts Program and Development Staff

The Center for Contemporary Arts received a grant in support of the Visual Arts Program and Development Department.  The goal of CCA’s Visual Arts Program is to encourage artistic experimentation, critical discourse, and continued dialogue between artists and community through exhibitions, events and symposia.  Support was also provided to help establish a Development Department, a first in the organization’s 25-year history, which will aid the organization in obtaining long-term financial stability.

2005
Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland
I not I: Samuel Beckett, Philip Guston, Bruce Nauman Exhibition

A grant was awarded to the Royal Hibernian Academy, Gallagher Gallery, for the exhibition I not I, presented from March 24 to May 1, 2006, in conjunction with the celebration of the centenary of the birth of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989).  The exhibition combines two of America’s most outstanding artists of the twentieth century together with three recent films of Beckett’s shorter plays. The exhibition is curated by RHA Director, Patrick T. Murphy, who says of the project, “This exhibition celebrates the existential truths of human existence and the rigor that each of these artists brought to creating work that offers some companionship within the bleakness of that vision. Each is bound by the human condition’s ability for suffering, humor and an unremitting resolve ‘to go on’.”

Photo: Bruce Nauman, Clown Torture, 1987, 4 color video monitors, 4 speakers, 4 videotape players, 2 video projectors, 4 videotapes, dimensions variable. Collection The Art Institute of Chicago; gift of Lannan Foundation, 1997.

2005
North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, North Dakota
The Disappeared Exhibition and Catalog

A grant was approved to the North Dakota Museum of Art for the exhibition The Disappeared.  “To disappear” was newly defined during the twentieth century military dictatorships in Latin America. “Disappear” evolved into a transitive verb describing those considered threats to the State who were kidnapped, tortured, and killed by their own military, especially in the 1970s in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay.
The Disappeared brings together the work of twenty-seven living artists from South America who, over the course of the last thirty years, have made art about los desaparecidos or the disappeared. These artists have lived through the horrors of the military dictatorships that rocked their countries in the mid-decades of the twentieth century. Some worked in the resistance; some had parents or siblings who were disappeared; others were forced into exile. The youngest were born into the aftermath of those dictatorships. And still others live in countries maimed by endless civil war. Disappearance was inevitably linked to torture. Laurel Reuter, curator of the exhibition and director of the North Dakota Museum of Art, was struck by the timelessness and truthfulness of the art. For example, when Identidad, a collaborative installation made by thirteen Argentinean artists, opened in Buenos Aires, three people discovered their long-hidden identities. They had been taken at birth from those who opposed the government and adopted into military families. Through their art, these artists fight amnesia in their own countries as a stay against such atrocities happening again.

Photo: Identity/Identidad, collaboration by Carlos Alonso, Nora Astán, Mireya Baglietto, Remo Bianchedi, Diana Dowek, León Ferrari, Rosana Fuertes, Carlos Gorrarena, Adolfo Nigro, Luís Félipe Noé, Daniel Ontiveros, Juan Carlos Romero and Marcia Schwartz, 132 mirrors, 224 photographs, and 24 epigraphs, 12 x 12 “ each.

2005
Marion Center for Photographic Arts, College of Santa Fe, New Mexico
An-My Lê: Small Wars Exhibition

The Marion Center for Photographic Arts at the College of Santa Fe received a grant in support of hosting the An-My Lê exhibition created by the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College.  Programming around the exhibition included bringing the artist, An-My Lê, and the show’s curator, Karen Irvine, to the College for a gallery talk and lecture for photography students, invited students and faculty from neighboring institutions, and the public.

Photo: An-My Lê, Stability Operations (Iraqi Police), 2003-04, Collection Lannan Foundation.

2005
The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas
General Operating Support

Chinati Foundation received funds in support of general operations. Activities include art and education programs that establish close links to the local community and other cultural institutions and universities in the United States and abroad. Chinati’s Artists in Residence Program, started by Judd, provides artists from around the world an opportunity to develop and exhibit their work in a stimulating environment. Chinati’s Internship Program offers students from a variety of disciplines hands-on museum experience. Each summer the museum hosts art classes for local students. Chinati produces an annual newsletter in English and Spanish, and every October Chinati, in collaboration with Judd Foundation, hosts a weekend-long Open House, which features concerts, readings, and art exhibitions celebrating the museum’s rich history and vibrant present.

Photo: Art class students at Chinati Foundation.

2004
University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Agnes Martin: The Islands

A grant was made in support of the exhibition of Agnes Martin’s 12-part painting entitled, The Islands at the University of Michigan Museum of Art on view November 20, 2004—February 13, 2005. Each painting, though each slightly different, is seventy-two inches square with a composition of white and light blue paint with thin graphite lines. The series, owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, is rarely seen because of the space required to exhibit it in its entirety. The paintings will be hung in the museum’s apse space, which lends itself well to the contemplative nature of Martin’s work.

2004
Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Transmit+Transform

Lannan Foundation awarded a grant in support of Transmit+Transform, a season of rich and engaging interdisciplinary programs examining the ways in which contemporary artists working in a variety of media engage sound and light. In this series, internationally renowned visiting artists and writers join specialists in the humanities and science for a series of intensive studio workshops, lectures, exhibitions, performances, and special programs. Participating artists include Shirin Neshat, Christian Marclay, Jenny Holzer, and Richard Tuttle.

2003
The College of Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Sojourns: Photographs by Thomas Joshua Cooper

The College of Santa Fe received support for the exhibition Sojourns, presenting the work of photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper, on view at the Marion Center for Photographic Arts 9 October - 19 December, 2003.  The exhibition featured photographs spanning the entirety of Cooper’s 30-year career, with selections from several of the artist’s series including The End of the World, The Celtic World, the Rio Grande, and Quality of Dancing.

All photographs in the show were on loan from Lannan’s extensive collection of Cooper’s photographs.  In addition to the exhibition, the grant provided support for Cooper to present a public lecture, teach a master class for adults, and serve as visiting professor in the College’s Photography Department.

2003
Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Uncommon Ground: Manmade

Lannan Foundation supported the Santa Fe Art Institute in presenting Uncommon Ground: Manmade, an eight month-long art lecture series focused on the land, both in its natural state or manipulated, and the crucial role of the artist.

Some of the lecturers and topics in the series included Nancy Holt, Three Decades of Sculpture; Hamish Fulton, Walking the Land: Restarting Creativity; Estévan Rael-Gálvez, Narrative and Place; Matthew Coolidge, Interpreting Anthropogeomorphology: Projects of the Center for Land Use Interpretation; and John Beardsley, Regenerated Landscapes.

2002
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting

The Art Institute of Chicago received support for the exhibition Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting on view at the Art Institute 22 June - 15 September 2002.  The exhibition is the most comprehensive retrospective of this master’s work to be presented in North America since the Art Gallery of Toronto presented a mid-career traveling show in 1988.

In addition to the exhibition that was organized by the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute supplemented the checklist with works from its own impressive collection of Richter, many of which were a gift from the Lannan collection to the Art Institute in 1997.

2002
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois
Life Death Love Hate Pleasure Pain: Selected Works from the Museum Collection
Collection Catalogue

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago received support for a catalogue featuring selected works from their permanent collection.  Entitled, Life Death Love Hate Pleasure Pain: Selected Works from the Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the title is inspired by the title of a major work by artist Bruce Nauman in the MCA collection.

The catalogue featuresentries of approximately 14 acquisitions previously donated to the MCA by Lannan, including works by Jackie Ferrara, Cindy Sherman, Leon Golub, John Ahearn, Jackie Winsor, Sherrie Levine, Mike Kelley, and Chris Burden. The catalogue presents approximately 150 of the most significant works by 120 artists in the MCA collection, chronologically from 1945 to the present.

2002
The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Kara Walker: An Abbreviated Emancipation (from The Emancipation Approximation)
Commissioned Temporary Installation and Artist Monograph

The University of Michigan Museum of Art received support for a commissioned temporary installation by artist Kara Walker entitled An Abbreviated Emancipation (from The Emancipation Approximation), on view from March 9 - May 26, 2002, consisting of a panoramic frieze in her signature medium, cut-paper silhouettes on a life-size scale.

The recipient of a coveted MacArthur Foundation “genius” award in 1997, Walker is arguably the most controversial young African-American artist working today. Her provocative work is alternatively hailed and decried. Her strange and compelling images are pervaded by themes of social power, race, gender, sexuality, and violence. In her images taboos are transgressed, secrets are uncovered. Walker’s evocations of an antebellum world are rooted in stereotypes and comment on the system of slavery and its continuing legacy in the American consciousness.

The Museum is also creating, publishing, and arranging for the national distribution of the first book produced on Kara Walker. This publication is intended to be a companion volume for the site-specific work at the Museum, but will also provide a critical framework for investigating Walker’s work.

2001
Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Into the Light: James Turrell

Mattress Factory museum of contemporary art in Pittsburgh received funding in support of a major exhibition of new works by James Turrell, scheduled to open in May 2002. The exhibition will include five new works created by Turrell for the gallery spaces at the Mattress Factory and will be complemented by three of his works on view in the museum’s permanent collection, and Gasworks, 1991, a self-contained sphere.

An additional exhibition of models and two-dimensional plans of the Roden Crater project will also be on view. 

2000
Dia Center for the Arts, New York, New York
Support of National Collection of Site-Specific Artworks,
New Museum in Beacon, New York, and Ongoing Programs

Lannan Foundation has entered into a long-term collaborative partnership with Dia Center for the Arts to ensure the completion, presentation, and preservation of major contemporary artworks.

Over the past six years Lannan Foundation has provided significant support to a number of large-scale site-specific artworks in the Southwest. Support has included establishing an endowment for Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field; operating and capital grants for James Turrell’s Roden Crater; grants to the Chinati Foundation for operations and projects such as Dan Flavin’s The Marfa Project; and capital grants for ongoing construction of Michael Heizer’s City. Lannan now joins forces with Dia and other foundations to complete, maintain, and endow these projects as well as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.

In addition to its current site on West 22nd Street in Manhattan, Dia will open a 250,000 square foot museum in Beacon, New York for works from Dia’s and Lannan’s collections. Lannan Foundation’s support includes the acquisition of key artworks by Bernd & Hilla Becher, John Chamberlain, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Dan Flavin, Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, Donald Judd, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, and Robert Whitman as well as the long-term loan of works currently in Lannan Foundation’s collection including Donald Judd’s Untitled, 1968; Agnes Martin’s The Beach, 1964; and Bruce Nauman’s South America Circle, 1981 for installation at Dia’s new museum in Beacon. These pieces join Dia’s exceptional collection of works from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as well as a select number of other new acquisitions.

Here is more information on Roden Crater. 

1998
The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Culver City, California
Purchase of New Facility

A grant was awarded to The Center for Land Use Interpretation in November 1998 to assist CLUI in establishing a permanent facility in Culver City, CA. The new facility will provide exhibition and office space as well as a library and research room.

1996
Dia Center for the Arts, New York, New York
Walter de Maria: The Lightning Field

In November 1996 the foundation awarded a challenge grant to Dia Center for the Arts to establish an endowment for the maintenance and operation of Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field, 1977, located in the high desert of southwestern New Mexico.

Here is more information on The Lightning Field

1992
Foundation for Advanced Critical Studies, Los Angeles, California
Art Issues Magazine

In July 1992 a three-year contingency grant was awarded to assure the continued publication of Art Issues magazine. In March 1994 funding for the magazine was extended with a second three-year contingency grant. Separate funding was awarded in March 1994 for the publication of FACS’s second book, The World of Jeffrey Vallance: Collected Writings, 1985-94. A fourth grant was awarded in July 1994, for the publication by FACS of the book Last Chance for Eden: Collected Writings by Christopher Knight, 1979-1994. In October 1997, a third three-year contingency grant was awarded for the bi-monthly publication.