New York Artist Dorothy Podber Dies at 75

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PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University's Regina Gouger Miller Gallery has appointed  Astria Suparak as its new director. Suparak, who succeeds interim director Petra Fallaux, comes to Carnegie Mellon from Syracuse University's Warehouse Gallery, a public, non-profit art gallery. She has also curated exhibits independently in Montreal and New York. 

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Director Steven Spielberg announced on February 12 that he is resigning as an artistic adviser to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing following several unsuccessful attempts to convince the Chinese government to do more to help end Sudan's attacks in the Darfur region, the International Herald Tribune reports. In a statement sent to the Chinese ambassador and the Beijing Olympic committee, Spielberg wrote: "My conscience will not allow me to continue with business as usual." Sudan's government bears the bulk of the responsibility for these ongoing crimes, but the international community, and particularly China, should be doing more to end the continuing human suffering there," the statement said. In response, a spokesman at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., said, "As the Darfur issue is neither an internal issue of China nor is it caused by China, it is completely unreasonable, irresponsible, and unfair to link the two as one."

Farewells
NEW YORK—The artist and trickster Dorothy Podber died February 9 at the age of 75, the New York Times reports. Podber, who grew up in the Bronx, helped run the Nonagan Gallery in Manhattan during the late 1950s and 1960s. She also "became famous, or infamous, in the art world mostly as a muse and a co-conspirator of more prominent artists like Ray Johnson, with whom she staged impromptu happenings on Manhattan streets," according to the Times. Their shenanigans included persuading strangers to let them into their apartments, where they would play recordings of stuttering or re-enact the shower scene from Psycho. One of Podber's most notorious antics was shooting a hole in a stack of Andy Warhol's Marilyn silkscreen paintings—right in the middle of Marilyn Monroe's forehead— with Warhol's unwitting permission in 1964. Warhol thought that by asking to "shoot" his paintings, Podber meant she wanted to take photographs of them. 

SAUSALITO, Calif.—San Francisco architect and art collector C. David Robinson died February 2 at the age of 71, the Washington Post reports. Robinson, the chief architect of the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Calif., donated an important collection of 150 early photographs to the National Gallery of Art in 1995. He also had an extensive collection of 20th-century art and served on the boards of the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, and Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California at Berkeley.