Bits: 12.02.10

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (One day this kid…) [click to enlarge]

• The Catholic League, an extreme-right group that frequently targets artists over the content of their work, has succeeded in getting the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery to remove a work by the late multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 from AIDS, for an 11-second clip depicting ants crawling on a crucifix on the ground. Calling the work "hate speech," the group claimed the piece was "designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians," despite the fact that the artist, as Blake Gopnik writes, hoped "the passage would speak to the suffering of his dead friend." He continues: "The irony is that Wojnarowicz's reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind."

• PPOW Gallery has made available Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (One day this kid…) to anyone who wants to print it and post it in protest of NPG's actions. The work is released to raise awareness of the TREVOR Project, which seeks to prevent more suicides by LGBT people. (Via Tyler Green.)

• Minnesota-born photographer Wing Young Huie brings works from his nine-month project on "the funny, touching, and sometimes strange intersection of Asian American and American cultures" -- including his shot of an Asian Elvis impersonator -- to Beijing on his first trip to China for an exhibition at SZ Gallery.

• Congratulations to Greg Allen of the always-excellent Greg.org for winning a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant! View all winners here.

• Cambodia's Tith Narith, whose work is now on view at Photo Phnom Penh, photographs discarded playing cards.

• North Minneapolis' indispensible Juxtaposition Arts has expansion plans.

• More congrats go to: Doryun Chong, MOMA Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture (and former Walker curator) for winning Independent Curators International's first-ever Gerrit Lansing Independent Vision Award for "his multiple, global understanding of artworks and their contexts, and the recent exhibitions he has curated and co-curated in a range of venues nationally and internationally." He'll be honored along with PERFORMA director RoseLee Goldberg, who won ICI's Agnes Gund Curatorial Award for outstanding achievements in the field, at the group's 35th anniversary event Dec. 9.

• For the most part, art only happens in New York or LA, according to Rob Pruitt and the Guggenheim.

• Check out the new issue of the Minneapolis-based art criticism online magazine Quodlibetica.