Art Chicago

After more than two years of controversy and legal infighting, the board of the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago has decided to close the museum next year. The art collection assembled by the late Daniel Terra will remain in Chicago, but the museum itself will be closed in late October 2004, the board decided.

Madeleine Grynsztejn, senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has been appointed director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The seventh director and the first woman to lead the 40-year-old institution, Grynsztejn will assume her new position early next spring, succeeding Robert Fitzpatrick, who announced his resignation in March.

Art Cologne appointed Los Angeles gallery owner Daniel Hug to be its new director, part of a drive to boost attendance and win back top collectors and dealers. Hug succeeds Gerard Goodrow, who left in January under pressure from Cologne dealers concerned about the future of the 40-year-old German event. Art Cologne drew just 60,000 visitors last year, 10,000 fewer than in 2006. In February, the fair announced it was scrapping a sister event on the Spanish island of Majorca. Hug, 39, will take up his new position on May 1, after this year's event, which takes place April 16 to 20. He has dual Swiss and U.S. nationality and is the grandson of the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, once a professor at the Bauhaus school.

The UCLA Hammer Museum has a coup on its exhibition lineup for next fall. "Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective" -- co-organized with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, but scheduled to debut in Los Angeles (Oct. 7, 2003 to Jan. 12, 2004) -- is the first major exhibition in more than 30 years to survey this famously reclusive artist's work.

A bitter controversy has erupted behind the scenes of a much-anticipated retrospective of artist Lee Bontecou at the UCLA Hammer Museum, pitting the artist and her husband against a prominent New York art critic and curator who wrote one of the catalog's five essays -- a dispute over nothing less than the basic meaning and sources of the art that Bontecou has been making in rural seclusion for the last 30 years.

Three contemporary art museums -- the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York -- have formed a national consortium to commission and exhibit works by emerging artists. Dubbed the Three M Project and launched with financial support from the American Center and Peter Norton Family foundations, the consortium will pool the museums' resources in a effort to provide a larger audience for adventurous new art.

Kevin E. Consey, the director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach, has been named to head the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Consey, 38, who has headed the Newport Beach museum for six years, will assume his new post Nov. 15, according to Paul Olivier-Hoffman, chairman of the Chicago museum board. The Newport Harbor Art Museum is in the midst of a $50-million campaign to establish an endowment and to build a facility designed by architect Renzo Piano.

CHICAGO -- A window washer dressed as Spider-Man scales a building. A nanny clad as Catwoman attends to children. A pizza delivery man wearing Superman garb rides a bike with pies in the basket. The humorous photographs by Mexican artist Dulce Pinzon depict real immigrant workers in their everyday jobs. But the images also proclaim them as superheroes who work grueling hours to make a better life for their families.