Daily art news

NEW YORK (AP).- For more than a century, tens of thousands worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, building some of the nation's most storied warships — sailing frigates, Civil War ironclads, gunboats, sloops and 20th-century warships and submarines. The yard's sprawling hospital treated soldiers from the 1860s through World War II. Now, more than four decades after the largest-scale shutdown of any military facility in U.S. history, the Navy Yard is coming to life again.
Today, the 300-acre facility hums as a vibrant industrial park with the Steiner Studios, the largest film and television complex outside Hollywood, and hundreds of other businesses. A $25.5 million museum and visitor's center under construction, the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at Building 92, will highlight the shipyard's 210-year history with blueprints, maps, photos and vintage tools. 

British photographer Mary McCartney, daughter of Linda Eastman McCartney and Paul McCartney during the opening of the exhibition 'From where I stood' in the gallery Contributed in Berlin, Germany.  Mary McCartney (b 1969) started her career as a photographer in 1995. Her work is reflection not only of Marys personal world, but of the unique relationships she establishes with the people she photographs, like Kate Moss, Helen Mirren, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tracey Emin, Stella McCartney or Paul McCartney. Her first book – From Where I Stand – combines those images with places and events as seen through Marys eyes: the intimacy of backstage preparations amoung the corps de ballet at the Royal Opera House, the raw energy of fashion shows and rock concerts, both on stage and off, the private spaces of home and family and the wittily observed vignettes of visual delight. CONTRIBUTED presents the first solo show of Mary McCartney in Germany. 

CHICAGO, IL.- In 1948, a nationwide survey pronounced John Marin (1870–1953) “America’s Number 1 artist.” Marin’s exuberant and improvisational paintings are recognized today as critical to the evolution of American modernism. Less well known, though, is the extent to which Marin pushed the limits of the watercolor medium, establishing for a new generation of artists its inherent suitability to avant-garde expression. The Art Institute of Chicago has organized a major exhibition that is the first to explore this idea through close technical analysis of the artist’s watercolor practice: John Marin's Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism, which is on view in the museum’s Jean and Steven Goldman Prints and Drawings Galleries in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Wing (Galleries 124–127) from January 23 through April 17, 2011. This groundbreaking exhibition presents 110 stunning watercolors, oils, drawings, and etchings by Marin, ranging from early images rooted in traditional practice to more experimental compositions. At the heart of this exhibition is a group of 40 watercolors that were donated to the Art Institute in 1949 and 1956 from the collection of Alfred Stieglitz by his wife, Georgia O'Keeffe