NOTES FROM THE FIELD.

On April 1, The Alternative Museum in New York City closed its exhibition space and will now only present exhibitions on the Internet. This new electronic gateway to world culture and contemporary art can be found at www.alternativemuseum.org. As the electronic museum expands, it will provide Web residencies, performance art through Quicktime video clips, world music concerts, exhibitions about design, poetry readings, electronic catalogs, tours and more.... The 12 recipients of the 1999/2000 Flintridge Foundation Awards for Visual Artists, which supports artists living in California, Oregon and Washington, have been announced. Each will receive an unrestricted grant of $25,000. The artists were selected on the basis of merit and achievements spanning at least 20 years. This year's recipients include Harry Gamboa Jr., Los Angeles (photography/performance); Douglas Hall, San Francisco (multi-media); Paul Kos, San Francisco (installation/performance); Suzanne Lacy, Oakland (installation/performance); Daniel Jos eph Martinez, Los Angeles (multi-media); and Larry Sultan, Greenbrae, CA (photography).... The 2000 CalArts/Alpert Awards, with a $50,000 prize, will be presented to Peggy Ahwesh for Film/video and to Shinn Neshat for Visual Arts. These annual awards, a joint program of the California Institute of the Arts and philanthropist Herb Alpert, are given to artists "at the brink of broader creative careers." Neshat is a photographer whose work deals with women in contemporary Islam. Her latest works have also integrated film and video installation. Ahwesh's filmic work mixes styles and processing techniques as she explores issues of the feminine.... The International Center of Photography's Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement in Photography has been awarded to Nathan Lyons, artist, curator, educator and founder of Visual Studies Workshop. According to ICP, Lyons "has exerted a profound influence on the field of photgraphy ... [and has produced] a major body of work that reveals his unique view of America and its social landscape." Lyons's exhibition "Riding First Class on the Titanic!" will be on view at ICP through June 18.... Jan Howard has been appointed Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Howard recently held the same position at the Baltimore Museum of Art where she had also served as both assistant curator and associate curator. She will be responsible for the development and care of the collection which consists of over 80,000 works of art from diverse periods, cultures and genres.... Robert Rauschenberg will receive the 8th Wexner Prize in a ceremony to be held at the Wexner Center in Columbus, OH on May 22. Rauschenberg's lifetime achievements will be honored with the $50,000 prize. Various public events are scheduled to celebrate his work during the tenth anniversary of the Wexner Center. For more information call [phone].... On April 11, Minnesota Center for Book Arts moved to its new location at Open Book, a c. 1900 brick and beam building at 1011 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis. The new state-of-the-art location will double the center's space, making it the largest center of its kind in the U.S. Classes are offered to curious learners, novices and master artists. For more information call [phone] or visit www.mnbookarts.org.... OP Fotogallery opened in Toronto in February with its first exhibition, "City Detour," which included works by Leung Chi-wo, Yao Jui-chung, Lee Ka-sing, Patrick Lee and Ringo Tang. The original OP Fotogallery is in Hong Kong. More information can be found at www.opfotogallery.com.... La Foto, a photography organization with a gallery, studio and custom lab services opened February 26 in Santa Monica, CA. La Foto aims to bring photography to people of Latin American heritage that are not otherwise exposed to the medium, as well as to provide a forum for photographers of other ethnic backgrounds to show their work. For more information call [phone].... The Digital Scriptorium and the Rare Book, Manuscript a nd Special Collections Library at Duke University has launched a Web site dedicated to the work of photographer William Gedney. Included in the site are nearly 5000 images as well as selections from handmade photographic books and transcripts from his notebooks. Gedney's diverse work ranges from coal miner families in eastern Kentucky, to Hindu worshipers in India, to counterculture youth in San Francisco during the '60s. The site may be accessed at scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/gedney/.... This year's recipients of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) 1999 Melva J. Dwyer Award are Cindie Campbell and Sylvie Roy. Campbell and Roy are responsible for the publication Artists in Canada: A Union List of Artists' Files/Artistes au Canada: Une liste collective des dossiers d'artistes, a comprehensive bilingual reference source on over 42,700 artists. The awards were announced at the ARLIS/NA conference in Pittsburgh. Also announced were the 21st Annual George Wittenborn Memorial Book Awards for exemplar y 1999 publications. One of the three awards was presented to Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000 by Robert Sobieszek.