PORT has a large backlog of interviews and other articles for you real soon (starting this afternoon) but till then here is a glance to the South.

It looks like A New Sculptualism, a show about recent California Architecture at MOCA is on the verge of cancellation. (check out Thom Mayne's courthouse in Euguene for an example) It also puts Deitch back under the microscope, one which has pretty much paralyzed the past 12 months of his directorship. Sure it looks like MOCA is getting out from under the funding quagmire it has faced for over a decade but it also highlights how reliance on outside curators due to a depleted staff has truly gutted the West Coast's most important contemporary art institution. Put it this way, if a curator isn't tied to the minute internal plumbing of an institution, weird things like this happen... especially if the director has been heavy handed. Though I admire him as a gadfly gallerist, I still expect Deitch to leave MOCA around June 30th. Also, because we are all sick of this I'm calling it Deitchwatch and it is a lot like watching Hasselhof run in slow motion in the sand, only the Hof puts on a better show.


(c) SO-IL, UC Davis Art Museum design

In more upbeat news UC Davis has unveiled a truly exciting new art museum design by SO-IL. Where else but the stomping grounds of the light and space movement should there be an art museum that looks more like a garden than a concrete, metal and marble bunker? They have been doing a lot of similar things down in South America but this is the first art museum I've seen with this kind of scheme. I think everyone is pretty sick of the traditional white box that shuts out the world.