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Curator leaves Long Island City for LA

Queens Chronicle
April 29, 2010

By Nicole Levy

Deitch Studios in Long Island City will close after May 2 following curator Jeffrey Deitch’s controversial appointment as director of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art in January.

Deitch is well known in the New York art scene for his interest in contemporary art and his 30-year career curating innovative exhibitions at venues around the world. As an advisor to leading institutional and private collectors, he has supervised the acquisition of major international and modern art collections. As an art critic and author of catalogue texts, he pioneered the now popular “visual essay,” an integration of text and images.

It was over a decade ago, in 1996, that Deitch founded his eponymous public gallery with three New York locations, including the LIC studios located at 4-40 44th Drive. Deitch Projects has since housed over 250 exhibitions, performances, and installations by contemporary artists including Yoko Ono, Keith Haring, Barry McGee, Todd James and Stephen Powers.

Though he has a reputation for shrewd business dealings in the commerical art world, it would seem that at Deitch Projects, the Harvard Business School graduate and former Citibank employee has prioritized the artists’ work over its value.

MoMA director Glenn Lowry praised Deitch for having “one of the most exciting and adventuresome galleries in New York.” Lowry is confident Deitch “will undoubtedly bring the same energy and excitement to his work at MOCA.”

Deitch has pledged “to position MOCA as the most innovative and influential contemporary art museum in the world.

“I am excited by the opportunity to play a role in making MOCA and Los Angeles the leading contemporary art destination,” he said. It has been suggested that, in succeeding Charles Young, Deitch will secure the museum the international trustees it currently lacks.

However, some in the art world fear that, with his background in corporate art advisory, he will obsess over bottom lines rather than curating a cultural legacy in his capacity as MOCA’s new director.

Maddy Rosenberg, artist and director of Central Booking gallery in Dumbo, Brooklyn, believes Deitch will lead MOCA in the wrong direction. “When you’re drawing on someone who is more interested in the commercial value [of art], that’s not good for culture. You want to have lasting artwork, things for future generations to look at,” Rosenberg said.

Whatever his agenda may be, in closing his commercial galleries, Deitch will likely avoid any financial conflict of interest. At any rate, Rosenberg is unconcerned about Long Island City’s cultural future: “There was an art world there before he came to Long Island City, and it will continue,” she said, once he’s gone.

On May 2nd, Deitch Studios will close. Until then, Josh Smith’s fresco installation “On the Water,” painted in the course of three and half days directly on the wall and therefore unsaleable, will be on view.

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Art and Astronomy Come Together at DUMBO Gallery

Brooklyn Daily Eagle
April 12, 2010

By Harold Egeln

Central Booking’s `Celestial Art’ Frames Discussion

DUMBO – “How do you bring astronomy and art together?” asked Dr. Greg Matloff, an astronomy and physics professor at New York College of Technology in Downtown Brooklyn. As he asked that question, a mini-cosmos of space art surrounded him.

These were paintings combining stunning space photographs intermingled with wondrous images of the Earth, sailing ships, holograms and equations painted by artist C. Bangs, his wife and book collaborator, along with those by 14 other artists, who were answering his question.

The artwork is in the current “Astronomy: The Celestial” exhibit at the Central Booking gallery in DUMBO through May 2. “Artists explore the universe from a very earthly base as well as a more cosmic one,” said Maddy Rosenberg, exhibit curator and executive director of the gallery at 111 Front St. www.centralbookingnyc.com.

Matloff, author of several books, and Bangs were among those discussing connections between art and astronomy at an illustrated panel discussion Thursday evening on “Reconstructing the Cosmos.”

Joining them were City Tech cosmology instructor Dr. Ari Maller and geologist Dr. Denton Ebel, a meteorite and planetary formation specialist at the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of Earth and Planetary Science and colleague of Hayden Planetarium Director Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The Bangs-Matloff collaboration, dating back over 20 years, was evident in their latest book collaboration, co-authored with NASA scientist Les Johnson, deputy director for the Advanced Concepts Office in Alabama.

“Paradise Regained: The Regreening of Earth” (Springer Books) is about another connection: urging space advocates and environmentalists to work together in seeking space resources for new energy solutions, such as solar power satellites and mining asteroids and the Moon.

Space art was pioneered in the 1940s and 1950s by famed artist Chesley Bonestell, whose artwork fascinated readers of magazines such as Colliers, which featured artists in the coming age of space exploration and travel. Fanciful art appeared on science fiction magazine and book covers.

“I was influenced by science at a young age by my father, an engineer and scientist, and [also by] the use of art for science and the philosophy of art,” said Bangs, who met Matloff in the 1980s, which did their first collaboration.

“In the realm of images, it began to look like art,” said Ebel of the spectacular images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, in orbit for 20 years now, as he showed pictures of beautiful nebula and stellar nurseries several trillions of miles long.

He then showed slides of the surface and inner structure of meteorites and asteroid particles, revealing colorful patterns and intricate shadings. “Visually its about science meeting artists visualizations as also seen in planetary formation discs around new stars,” Ebel said.

“I call it the art of the cosmos,” said Muller, a colleague of Matloff at City Tech. That cosmic art, added Matloff, was seen with the astounding 3-D effects of the mega-hit Avatar movie that dazzled the public worldwide with its imagined depiction of the alien world Pandora, making many yearn for such a planet.

`The Hunt for Pandora’

With a longtime interest in as-yet-to-be undiscovered extraterrestrial civilizations, their survival and growth over the aeons, and a human destiny in space travel, Matloff mentioned a scientist in Illinois who has launched “the Hunt for Pandora.”

That involves the search for Earth-like rocky planets around the double star system of Alpha Centauri A and B, the closest solar system to ours at a distance of four-and-one-third lights years which could only support rocky Earth-sized worlds. The Kepler and Darwin space telescope missions are among the searchers to be eventually joined by the Terrestrial Planet Finder.

“A visionary view of the cosmos was depicted by novelist Olaf Stapledon in his famous science fiction book Star Maker in 1937, taking the main character on journey through alien planets and multiple universes, learning that the cosmos is an artistic creation,” Matloof said.

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Feature: Goodbye, Mr. Deitch

Artillery
vol 4 issue 4  (Mar/Apr 2010)

By John Haber

IS a commercial dealer the right choice for a museum, I asked dealers from around the city. And how will Jeffrey Deitch’s departure for LA MOCA affect New York?……

MADDY ROSENBERG IS A DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL BOOKING IN DUMBO, FEATURING ARTIST BOOKS ALONGSIDE OTHER MEDIA:

“Can we just go back to PhDs rather than MBAs as museum directors? Not that one needs academic credentials, but someone who has actually spent a life in the scholarly pursuit of art might have a legacy to leave. Museums have to be interested in art that doesn’t count on the bottom line. They are investing in the cultural future, not building up artists for investment killings. People are hungry for it. They are seeking freshness, rather than institutionalized, empty art. Artists are still making art. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we focused on their vision? I do think the New York art world will survive without him. There are those who make their mark, but dealers come and go, and no one’s indispensable. The art world is just too large these days.”Janet Goldner’s “WhY (Ntlomaw)” sculpture, on display at Central Booking (Brooklyn) ……

For the whole article please visit Artillery

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Art’s Evil Empire- Jeffrey Deitch and LA MOCA

New.York.Art.Crit.
January 10, 2010

By John Haber

Bringing Jeffrey Deitch to LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art is like asking Bill Gates to run Google. With street-level cameras and Google books, the company that made a fortune off the promise to do no evil is scaring people. So why not turn it over to the evil empire? As for MOCA, the museum that almost bankrupted itself is finding its way—at the cost of funding and oversight from a wealthy patron and collector, Eli Broad. So why not hire New York’s flashiest dealer, rather than a curator or academic?

And that is just what the museum has done, and it has polarized people. In fact, it polarized me, and I found myself on both sides. As it happened, the very week that I weighed in, a magazine asked me what some of New York’s other dealers think of the idea. This article interviews nine from around the city……

Beyond the Brooklyn Bridge

Maddy Rosenberg is an artist and director of Central Booking in Dumbo, featuring artist books alongside other media.

Can we just go back to PhDs rather than MBAs as museum directors? Not that one needs academic credentials, but someone who has actually spent a life in the scholarly pursuit of art might have a legacy to leave. I know it may be quaint to think a work of art might have some value besides how much it can garner in the commercial market, but museums have to be interested in art that doesn’t count on the bottom line. They are investing in the cultural future, not building up artists for investment killings.

The Alfred Barrs seem to be long gone, and directors these days are just about fund-raising anyway. The best a director can do is to be prescient enough to be surrounded by curators with a depth of knowledge and unique perspectives. I come by my own gallery as an organic growth from my years as an independent curator, not as a collector. I work with artists because of my belief in the quality of their work, desiring a widening of their audience, and not because I deem them economically viable.

If I had his chance, I would do what I do in my own curatorial program—show substantive work from artists who, for the most part, have careers but have not been given their due and young artists who are truly pushing the edge.

People are hungry for it. I see it over and over again in the eyes of even the most jaded New Yorker who walks into my gallery. They are desperate for challenging art that is also visually stimulating, work with concept and thorough follow through—and in quantity, rather than merely a rare find. They are seeking freshness, rather than institutionalized, empty art. Artists are still making art. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we focused on their vision?

I do think the New York art world will survive without him. There are those who make their mark, but dealers come and go, and no one’s indispensable. The art world is just too large these days. Besides, it is a rare contemporary dealer who goes for lasting quality rather than the latest trend. Few are confident enough to set trends rather than follow them, supporting artists who pursue their passion with an intensity and obsession…….

For the whole article please visit New.York.Art.Crit.

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For Singer Collins, ‘Over The Rainbow’ Is Brooklyn

Brooklyn Daily Eagle
March 8, 2010

By Harold Egeln

Signs Books at DUMBO Store

DUMBO – Over the Rainbow and down under the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges was where famed singer Judy Collins signed her new illustrated children’s book and CD at a party last week.

“Judy sang at one of my seaside park concerts on August 5, 1993,” recalled Borough President Marty Markowitz upon greeting Collins at the Central Booking art gallery and shop in DUMBO on Thursday evening. Brooklyn’s leader has held those concerts dear since he was a state senator.

As Markowitz pinned a Brooklyn pin on Collins’ jacket, the singer and city resident told people that she was thrilled to be in Brooklyn. In May 2009 Pratt Institute honored Collins with an honorary doctor’s degree in fine arts.

The evening’s excitement was centered on Collins and the beautiful Over the Rainbow book she collaborated on, stunningly illustrated by French-born painter Eric Puybaret with his graceful illustrations, filled with touching wit and joyful whimsy.

The hardcover book holds, on its inside back cover, Collins’ wondrous CD of The Wizard of Oz’ most famous song “Over the Rainbow” by famed composer Harold Arlen and lyricist E. Yip Harberg – a song that has enchanted generations.

Collins includes the original and rarely heard opening lyrics of the famed song, and she sang it after being introduced by Central Booking Executive Director Maddy Rosenberg, who is also the current art exhibit curator.

The CD also includes two wonderful songs by Collins from 1992, “I See the Moon” and “White Coral Bells,” both accompanied by a children’s chorus, that are distinctive pleasures to enjoy over and over again.

Children anywhere, in families and groups, can sing along to these pleasant enchanted tunes.

It was “send in the crowds” at the second-floor gallery and art book specialty shop at 111 Front St., which it shares with several other excellent art galleries in an attractive space. Many people who were friends and fans alike formed a line at a table as Collins signed the books, chatted about their favorite songs and concert moments, or shared memories recent or long ago.

Collins, who was a child piano prodigy in Seattle, has been performing for more than 50 years. She released her first album in 1961, inspired by the folk song revival sweeping the country. Expanding her repertoire, she blossomed into fame with her Wildflowers album in 1967.

Her version of “Both Sides Now” is in the Grammy Hall of Fame; and her memorable rendition of “Send in the Clowns’ from Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, now enjoying a Broadway revival, won her a Grammy Award in 1975.

She has written six previous books since 1987 and has released several albums over the last five decades, now adding the joyful and hopeful Over the Rainbowpublished by the Imagine! – A Peter Yarrow Book-New York company (www.imaginebks.com).

The book launch party and reception inaugurated the new exhibit at Central Booking, “Astronomy: The Celestial,” showcasing 15 artists including book illustrator Puybaret, on exhibit through May 2.

There will be an artists’ reception on Thursday, March 25 from 6 to 8 p.m., featuring a panel discussion on “Deconstructing the Cosmos” with C. Bangs, Denton Ebel, Ari Maller and Greg Matloff.

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What Were Books, Daddy? Two Trees Exhibit Space Pays Homage

The Commercial Observer
March 9, 2010

By Emily Geminder

Before they were flashes of pixels jettisoning across screens, books meant pages and crackling spines and penned notes in the margins. Although bookstores may be closing, Dumbo’s recently opened art gallery Central Booking is devoted to those strange relics of pre-Kindle civilization.

It’s perhaps fitting that physical books are finding homes in spaces typically reserved for aesthetic appraisal, or maybe an onslaught of digital reading has sparked interest in books as physical things. Whatever the reason, Central Booking is like an acid-fueled bookstore turned inside out. Its rotating book art exhibitions range from re-envisioned Natural History texts to large book sculptures. Books hang from the ceilings and racks of zines line the walls.

Originally a pop-up gallery, Central Booking signed a two-year lease at Two Trees Management‘s 111 Front Street. The 1,250-square-foot gallery opened last week as part of Dumbo’s First Thursday celebration.

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Central Booking: “ASTRONOMY: THE CELESTIAL”

Brooklyn The Borough
March 2, 2010

By Kat Irannejad

Central Booking opens with the Big Bang in its new space as Astronomy: The Celestial inaugurates Gallery II. In this exhibition, artists explore the universe from a very earthly base as well as a more cosmic one. Curated by Maddy Rosenberg, participating artists include: C Bangs, Doug Beube, Mary Hambleton, Karen Hanmer, Barbara Houghton, Eva Lee, Donna Levinstone, Despo Magoni, Pamela Moore, John Noestheden, Carol Prusa, Eric Puybaret, Ilse Schreiber-Noll, Susan Schwalb, and Ted Victoria.

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Sherri Rosen Publicity

Feb 25th, 2010

Artists C Bangs, Judy Collins

Astronomy: The Celestial

Central Booking Art Space

Exhibition Date: March 4 – May 2, 2010

Artist’s reception: March 25, 6-8pm

DUMBO First Thursday: March 4, 5:30 – 7:30pm

Special Appearance & Book Signing by
Legendary Singer/Songwriter Judy Collins Celebrating Book Launch of
Over the Rainbow a Collaboration with Painter Eric Puybaret

Brooklyn, (DUMBO), NY, – Central Booking opens its latest exhibition with the Big Bang in Astronomy: The Celestial, a group show featuring artists whose work explore the universe from a very earthly base as well as a more cosmic one. The exhibition premieres with a special appearance by folk icon Judy Collins who will be signing copies of her new book project, Over the Rainbow, a creative collaboration with renowned painter Eric Puybaret. Judy Collins will be at the gallery Thursday, March 4 from 5:30 – 7:30pm. She might even sing…

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The Villager

November 18 – 24, 2009

Goldner’s ideas conceived in Mali, born on Warren Street

Tribeca artist’s massive steel sculptures resonate through two worlds

Janet Goldner’s “WhY (Ntlomaw)” sculpture, on display at Central Booking (Brooklyn)

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Book ‘Em

cityArts
October 7, 2009

By Matt Connolly

When Maddy Rosenberg tells people she is, among other things, a book artist, she’ll often get such quizzical responses such as, “So…you’re an illustrator?” Rosenberg hopes to dispel this confusion with Central Booking, a Dumbo-based gallery focusing upon the multi-faceted art form.

A curator and artist who works across mediums, Rosenberg finds herself drawn to the differing ways that book art—which ranges from sculpture to printmaking to pamphlets made on a copy machine—manifests itself. “[Book art] is made by artists who approach some aspect of what a book is,” Rosenberg explained. “It may be text or structure or sequencing. It may be any one of those viewpoints that make it a piece of book art.”

As the gallery’s executive director and curator, Rosenberg works to filter the art form’s playful, multidisciplinary spirit into how she runs Central Booking. Two galleries make up the space, with the first devoted to all forms of book art and prints. Many of the pieces can be handled by visitors, and the price of individual works ranges from $2 to $100,000.

The second gallery houses various exhibitions. Keeping with Central Booking’s theme of disciplinary cross-pollination, the inaugural show, entitled “Natural Histories,”  focuses on the overlap between art and science. A future exhibition will examine the relationship between art and social anthropology.

Rosenberg also hopes to shake up established conventions of how to lay out a gallery space, paying tribute to the work of individual artists while ultimately seeking to cultivate a larger atmosphere beyond any one piece. “It’s not a traditional installation where there’s one work or sculpture in the center,” she said of Natural Histories. “With this, I could create a whole natural environment: work hanging from the ceiling, work coming out of the walls and into the space.”

It took roughly two years to see Central Booking come to fruition, and Rosenberg does not regret the decision to forge ahead with the gallery’s opening despite the dicey economic climate. With plans to curate special web-based projects and to publish a book-art ‘zine by year’s end, she sees the medium’s future as full of possibilities. “From ‘zines to sculptural pieces to video art: It’s a very open arena,” Rosenberg said.

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THE ART NEWSPAPER

Gallery dedicated to book art opens in Brooklyn
Commercial venture shows growing popularity of the medium

By Andrew Goldstein | Web only
Published online 5 Oct 09
The Art Newspaper

Central Booking’s opening party

NEW YORK. In tune with a growing interest in print and book art, a new pop-up gallery has opened in Brooklyn’s DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) neighbourhood dedicated to the art form. Called Central Booking, the space is the brainchild of Maddy Rosenberg, a book artist and independent curator who has worked in the field for more than two decades, and hopes to further expose the versatility of the medium to the art world at large.

“My definition of the book is very expansive and inclusive,” says Rosenberg. “When an artist says they’re making a book, that’s my parameter.” As a result, Central Booking bears little resemblance to a traditional book store. The first of the gallery’s two rooms is reserved for curated shows of work by artists who make prints but also explore other mediums; the current show, “Natural Histories”, contains pieces ranging from a sawbox by Steven Daiber that is filled with pine cones wrapped in wood prints of a natural history text ($5,000), a non-print-related installation of scavenged metal and natural debris by Judy Hoffman ($25,000), and a limited-edition copy of “A Book of Works”, an unfinished 1993 book of poems and photographs by Ana Mendieta (loaned by the artist’s foundation, it is the only piece in the gallery not for sale).

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in New York City

10.4.09 —

A NATURAL HISTORY OF BROOKLYN

by Haberarts haberarts.com

Topics: artist books, Central Booking, Dumbo galleries, Joseph Stashkevetch, Mary Frank, Natural Histories, science and art, Von Lintel

At least since Leonardo began his notebooks, artists have claimed fidelity to an impersonal nature. And at least since William Blake, artists have claimed to free humanity from the suffocating logic of science. “Art,” he wrote, “is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.”

And all the while, artist materials developed as in a laboratory.
Romantics even combined the roles—of ever-patient explorers and the creative imagination. Think of J. M. W. Turner, strapped to a mast to observe a storm. As it happens, scientists were doing much the same thing, give or take the melodrama. People still prize sketches by biologists and astronomers then, for both their beauty and their place in newly emerging theories. Science itself was emerging as a discipline, against a background of eighteenth-century natural history. (I tried to pin down parallels and differences between art and science after taking in Jacob van Ruisdael landscapes.)

For its opening show, through November 8, Central Booking looks back to that time and to the present. “Natural Histories” includes delicate drawings and print. It includes Mary Frank’s monkey, in deep blue against a deep red monoprint, bent like the fossil in mystic contemplation. It includes a closed book by Ana Mendieta, who had quite a habit of identifying herself with nature. Mostly, though, it has an eye to less-familiar artists and to Brooklyn’s own natural histories. It even has Long Island City weather reports, from SP Weather Station.

Both realism and truth took a beating in the last century or so. Science showed up again mostly as technology became new media. For the Dumbo gallery, an older model of science comes naturally. The gallery will specialize in, and a second room has dozens. Just when science textbooks are adding more and more fine illustrations, these artists can still cherish books as something to hold in one’s hand. No wonder they want to reclaim art and science for natural history.

Many works aspire to the scale and intimacy of a book, like insects by Helga Eilts and Jule Rump or Humanist Prayer Flags by Donna Maria de Creeft. Others aspire to its uniqueness, like monoprints of single species by Robin Holder, or fragility, like painting on chiffon by Desirée Alvarez. Some directly evoke dated modes of observation—like Case Studies in Taxidermy Restoration by Heidi Nelson, hand-painted stereographs by Julie A. McConnell, photographs on glass by Amina Bech, the composting of an Earth Volume by Michelle Wilson, and a textbook of engravings wrapped around pine cones by Steven Daiber. Some span a corner wall or migrate overhead, like butterflies by Sabra Booth and night creatures on shaped plywood by April Vollmer. When paintings appear in full color, by Holly Sears and Gerhard Mantz, they actually look the most like science fiction rather than science, with sharp reds out of late Romanticism. Think of Thomas Moran rather than Thomas Cole.

Sometimes, though, the work does spill into the present, like those creatures overhead. And then things get messy, like the pile of Gowanatopia on the floor by Judy Hoffman. Apparent shards or growths in a petri dish, from Travis Childers, turn out to be Silly Putty—with faces peeled from the papers, of course. On video, Chris Jordan compresses six days of the Chinatown skyline into minutes, and how time flies. For Sara Garden Armstrong, the changes in nature remain slow and elusive. Her fluid grays represent the water’s depth, and wash over into abstraction.

Central Booking surely fills a need, when the Center for Book Arts must focus on its active workshop and galleries like Bravin Lee must mix books with other media. It may even have to pare back its enthusiasm, after an opening with one hundred and twenty contributors. It also gets to share with others a reminder of natural histories.