Winners Announced--The Penny McCall Foundation has announced the winners of the inaugural Ordway Prize. The winner in the category of artist is Colombian artist Doris Salcedo; and the winner in the category of curator and/or arts writer is Ralph Rugoff. To be given biennially, the Ordway Prize--with awards this year totaling $230,000--recognizes individuals in mid-career who have made important contributions to the field of contemporary arts and letters. Each winner received an unrestricted monetary award of $100,000, while the four remaining finalists each received $7,500.

Historic Casts To Go on Block--On Feb. 28 Sotheby's (NY) will sell 177 lots of plaster casts consigned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art from a collection the Museum formed in the late 19th century to illustrate major monuments in the history of art. The majority reproduce important Gothic and Renaissance sculpture and architectural elements, but there are also many ancient Greek and Roman statues and reliefs. An exhibition will take place Feb. 22-24 and Feb. 27 at the storage facility in which the casts are currently located at the Met.

Milestone Reached--Edith Kiertzner Heath, one of America's pre-eminent ceramicists who led the mid-century California pottery movement with her award-winning "Heath Ceramics" tableware and architectural tiles, has died at her home in Tiburon, CA, at age 94. She is best known for her pioneering glazes and clay bodies made to her own formulations with a minimalist look, considered avant-garde at the time.

New Director Named--The Miami Art Museum, FL, has hired Terence Riley, a longtime chief curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, to become its new director. MAM recently passed a $100 million bond issue for the creation of a new facility at Museum Park.

Sculpture Unveiled--A new sculpture greets travelers at JFK Airport's International Arrivals Hall. "Light to the Sky" is a 16-foot bronze creation by Dimitar Lukanov that was cast in the lost wax technique.

NEA News--The FY 2007 Grants for Arts Projects guidelines are now available at www.arts.gov/grants/apply/. The Grants for Arts Projects--Access to Artistic Excellence, Challenge America and Learning in the Arts for Children and Youth--are the primary funding opportunities for organizations.

Love Blooms--Available for this Valentine's Day is the new "Love: True Blue" stamp from the Postal Service. The colorful first-class non-denominated stamp depicts two birds perched on a branch sharing a devoted gaze, with the space between them forming a heart. The denominated version will be issued in March. To create this original design, illustrator Craig Frazier arranged paper cutouts into a composition. He then created a digital file of the artwork and applied shades of blue to the birds, setting them against a yellow background.

Exhibitions:

Poughkeepsie, NY -- Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College -- Presses, Pop, and Pomade: American Prints Since the Sixties presents 36 works that examine the medium's continuing importance to new artistic movements, including realism in the '70s, expressionism in the '80s, and identity politics in the '90s and early 2000s. The works spotlight an array of printmaking processes and media, including screenprint, lithography, etching, aquatint, woodcut, monotype and the artist's book--and span the influential art presses and publishers of the past 40 years, as well. Through March 19.

Washington, D.C. -- National Gallery of Art -- Cezanne in Provence is the principal international exhibition marking 2006 as the centenary of the death of Paul Cezanne. Approximately 100 of Cezanne's greatest oil paintings and watercolors demonstrate his intense, emotional engagement with the countryside of his birthplace, where he painted some of his most compelling landscapes, penetrating portraits of family members and the monumental "Bathers" from the National Gallery, London. Through May 7. Take an online collection tour at www.nga.gov/collection/gallery.

Los Angeles, CA -- Los Angeles County Museum of Art -- LACMA at 40: Gifts in Honor of the Museum's Anniversary commemorates this milestone. A celebration of the art of giving, this exhibition showcases only a fraction of the many exceptional works of art given or promised to the museum in honor of its first four decades. Opens February 24 through April 16.

Brooklyn, NY -- Brooklyn Museum -- Michelangelo of the Menagerie: Bronze Works by Antoine-Louis Barye features approximately 70 works from the Museum's holdings of bronzes and watercolors by the French artist. Dubbed the "Michelangelo of the Menagerie" by the contemporaneous art critic Theophile Gautier, Barye devoted his career to animal subjects, from sweet groupings of woodland creatures to violent encounters between predator and prey to mortal combats between the fantastic monsters of ancient myths. Call 718-638-5000.

Copyright ARTtalk Vol. 16 No. 4 -- February 2006