| The Pritzker Architecture Prize Adds Three New Jurors
Three new jurors, one from Italy, one from Japan and one from the U.S. have been added to the jury that selects the Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate for 2007. Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) September 11, 2006 — "Three architects from different countries and divergent backgrounds have been named as Pritzker Architecture Prize jurors," it was announced today by Thomas J. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation which established the prize in 1979. "The three are Shigeru Ban of Tokyo and Paris, Toshiko Mori of New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Renzo Piano of Genoa, Italy and Paris." They join jury chairman, Lord Palumbo, chairman of the Serpentine Gallery Trustees, former chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain and well known as an art and architectural patron; and (alphabetically): Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi, architect, planner and professor of architecture of Ahmedabad, India; Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman of the board of Vitra in Birsfelden, Switzerland; Carlos Jimenez, professor at Rice University School of Architecture, and principal, Carlos Jimenez Studio in Houston, Texas; Victoria Newhouse, architectural historian and author who founded and is the director of the Architectural History Foundation in New York; and Karen Stein, editorial director of Phaidon Press in New York.
Kara Walker pushes boundaries
New York — It's the day before Kara Walker's solo show opens at her gallery in the heart of Chelsea's art district. Passers-by hoping for a sneak peek stoop to peer beneath the half-lowered shades. Callers inquire whether she will be present at the reception — people who want to meet her, or even, the gallery owner suggests, touch her, as groupies would a rock star. The 37-year-old Walker is not just a star. In today's art world, she is a supernova. And this is the former Atlantan's moment: A triumphant retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, one of three exhibits in New York alone. She's on magazine covers, in bookstores. Critics suggest comparisons to Goya, the venerated Spanish Old Master. .
Kerry Hart: The danger of interdisciplinary arts education
Wouldn't it be great if we could read a couple of books on brain surgery and be ready to perform an operation? In arts education, that is the type of miraculous feat we often expect from our teachers. Every academic discipline requires a unique intellectual function — from quantitative reasoning to philosophical inquiry. The arts are no different. Dance requires a physical-kinesthetic brain function; music requires an auditory function; visual art requires a visual-spacial brain function; and drama incorporates a combination of several, including the verbal-linguistic function that is important to the literary arts. The college and university curriculum in each arts discipline is rigorous and, indeed, it takes a lifetime to acquire mastery in one subject area. Yet when it comes to teaching students who do not have a background in any of the arts, we create interdisciplinary arts courses that provide a superficial overview — usually from a historical perspective.
56-year Disney Legend helped create `Small World'
In need of a job in 1944, Santa Monica High School graduate Joyce Carlson followed a friend to Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, Calif., where she landed work in the traffic department delivering mail and office and art supplies. But what started as just a job turned into a career for Carlson, who spent the next 56 years involved first with Disney animated movies and then theme park attractions worldwide. Carlson, who helped ink animated films such as Cinderella, Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty before helping create the original model for the ''It's a Small World'' attraction for the 1964 New York World's Fair, died of cancer Wednesday at her home in Orlando, Fla. She was 84. As part of Walt Disney Imagineering, the company's theme park attraction design division, Carlson worked on many attractions but is most closely identified with ``It's a Small World.'' In addition to working on the model for the ride, she was known as the artist behind many of its singing dolls.
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