• Crate Update: Whenever a Walker-organized show goes on tour, Program Services staff design custom stencils for the shipping crates. Four new ones to add to our ongoing list (top to bottom): Some Assembly Required: Contemporary Prefabricated Houses (now on view at Yale); Chuck Close, Self-Portraits, 1967-2005 (no longer touring); ANDY WARHOL/SUPERNOVA: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962-1964 (no longer touring); and Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005 (on view at the Whitney).
• Artist news: Tacita Dean won the 2006 Hugo Boss Prize, while Damien Hirst, putting his net worth at “more like £100m,” curates from his own collection.
• Baldessari and bowler hats: Puffy blue clouds painted on the floors, museum guards wearing bowler hats, a Vija Celmins comb sculpture paired with Rene Magritte’s painting of a giant comb: that’s what LACMA got when they asked John Baldessari to design the exhibition Magritte and Contemporary Art.
• Inflatable studio: Rocketboom interviews Huong Ngo in her pop-up art studio atop an NYC rooftop.
• Civic Studio: The “civic studio” project takes Ngo’s notion an additional step, offering groups of 8 to 12 artists temporary space in public to facilitate lectures, artmaking, and demonstrations, with the aim of engaging “in the study and cration of civic forms through visual means.” (Via Free Soil.)