News Register for our weekly news digest here.

December 01, 2022 at 4:00pm

MoMA Trustee Leon Black Accused of Rape

Leon Black, formerly board chair of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and currently a trustee, is being sued on charges that he raped a woman in the Manhattan townhouse of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, his onetime financial adviser. Cheri Pierson on November 28 filed a suit alleging that Black orally raped her in a “secluded area” of Epstein’s home in 2002, leaving her in “excruciating pain.” Pierson, who at the time of the alleged rape was a single mother of limited means, said she was invited to the townhouse by Epstein to give Black a massage, for which he paid her three

Read more
December 01, 2022 at 11:21am

Aline Kominsky-Crumb (1948–2022)

Pathbreaking underground comics artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb died of pancreatic cancer at her home in the Cévennes region of southern France, at the age of seventy four on November 29. Kominsky-Crumb in the 1970s emerged as a comedic and artistic force with comics that unsparingly, often crassly, depicted the complex emotional and physical lives of women. Frequently autobiographical, her comics touched on subjects ranging from masturbation to menopause, abortion to adoption, hairy armpits to receding hairlines, and broke ground for generations of women comedians, writers, and comics artists. “I

Read more
November 30, 2022 at 3:33pm

LA’s Hammer Museum Sets Opening Date for Expansion

After more than two decades, the newly expanded and renovated Hammer Museum is set to open March 26, 2023, according to the Los Angeles Times. Led by Michael Maltzan Architecture, the restoration includes a new, more visible entrance on the corner of Wilshire and Westwood boulevards, across from a yet-to-be-built Metro station, which itself is slated for completion in 2027. Down the block on Wilshire, where it meets Glendon Avenue, will be an outdoor sculpture terrace, while a neighboring building that was formerly home to City National Bank will host new gallery space.
The remodeled main Hammer

Read more
November 30, 2022 at 2:20pm

Ashley Bickerton (1959–2022)

Ashley Bickerton, known for his biting, wildly inventive parodies of consumerism and island fantasy, died November 30 at his home in Bali at the age of sixty-three. Bickerton had been diagnosed with the degenerative motor-neuron disease ALS in 2021. News of his death was confirmed by Gagosian, which began representing him earlier this year. Noted for his so-called self-portraits—canvases and crates emblazoned with multiple corporate logos—Bickerton in the 1980s rose to fame alongside fellow “neo-geo” artists Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, and Meyer Vaisman before departing the New York art scene in

Read more
November 30, 2022 at 11:13am

Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Announces 2022 Grantees

The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant has announced its 2022 grantees. The New York–based organization will distribute a total of $695,000 to twenty writers working across three categories—Articles, Books, and Short-Form Writing. Each will receive between $15,000 and $50,000. The grant program is meant to sustain critical writing about contemporary art and to ensure that such writing remains a valued way of engaging with the visual arts.
“The writers receiving Arts Writers Grants this year address an immensely rich terrain of subjects, ranging from representations of race and violence by

Read more
November 29, 2022 at 12:31pm

Artists Helping to Power Protests in China

Artists across China are among those participating in a nationwide uprising, sparked by Covid-19 measures, that is the largest China has seen since 1989 and the biggest one to date under president Xi Jinping, who has overseen a harsh crackdown on public dissent since his rise in 2012. The flash point of the revolt, which follows months of economic pain caused by China’s attempts to eradicate Covid by imposing severe restrictions, is a November 24 fire in an apartment block in Urumqui, Xinjiang. Ten people died in the blaze after Covid-control measures are said to have prevented their quick egress

Read more
November 28, 2022 at 1:24pm

Suhanya Raffel Appointed President of CIMAM

Suhanya Raffel, director of Hong Kong’s M+ contemporary art museum, has been announced as the next president of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM). The committee is made up of art museum professionals around the world; its stated goal is to “raise awareness and respond to the evolving needs of modern and contemporary museums, and to take a leadership role on issues of concern.” Raffel will lead the organization for two years beginning in 2023; she succeeds Mami Kataoka, director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, in the role.
Prior to arriving at M+ in 2019 as

Read more
November 28, 2022 at 1:21pm

Philadelphia Home of Henry Ossawa Tanner Imperiled

The North Philadelphia childhood home of painter Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), one of the first African American artists to gain international acclaim, is at risk of being destroyed. Tanner lived at the three-story brick rowhouse at 2908 West Diamond Street from 1872, when he was thirteen, to 1888, when he departed as a man of nearly thirty, eventually settling in Paris to escape America’s oppressive racism. The house passed out of the Tanner family’s hands sometime in the twentieth century and was much altered. Despite having been awarded National Landmark Status in 1976, the building has

Read more
November 23, 2022 at 4:08pm

Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022)

Poet, artist, publisher, and scholar Bernadette Mayer died November 22 at the age of seventy-seven at her home in East Nassau, New York. A giant of American poetry who blurred the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary in expansive streams of consciousness, she was most frequently associated with the New York School and with the Language poets. Mayer was widely recognized for her pathbreaking poetry featuring blunt and open musings on the experience of motherhood. She was a central figure of the community surrounding the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York in the 1970s,

Read more
November 23, 2022 at 2:01pm

Frieze Los Angeles Unveils Plans for 2023 Edition

The organizers of Frieze Los Angeles have revealed details of the art fair’s 2023 iteration, its largest to date. The event will take place at the Santa Monica Airport February 16–19 and will feature 124 participating galleries, a 24 percent increase over the previous year. Of note, the fair will feature more twentieth-century art than in years past, in which contemporary art took center stage. The Los Angeles gallery scene, which exploded over the past year, will be prominently represented amid a globe-spanning contingent featuring galleries from twenty-two countries, including South Korea,

Read more
November 23, 2022 at 12:54pm

König Galerie Sees Artist Roster Shrink

König Galerie, the Berlin- and Seoul-based gallery owned by Johann König, has seen a number of artists depart in recent months, as its owner grapples with sexual assault allegations, which he denies. According to both Artnet News and The Art Newspaper, Scandinavian artists Elmgreen & Dragset and German painters Katharina Grosse and Corinne Wasmuht have all severed ties with the gallery in recent weeks. Berlin-based artist Monica Bonvicini departed earlier this month. The feminist artist had “paused” her relationship with the gallery after the abovementioned allegations were made public. Bonvicini

Read more
November 22, 2022 at 5:44pm

Paris Gallerists Get Prison Time for Peddling Purloined Picassos

Husband-and-wife gallerists Anne and Herbert Pfeffer on November 18 were sentenced to two and one years in jail, respectively, for selling stolen Picassos through their gallery Belle and Belle. The court suspended the sentences but additionally dissolved the gallery and ordered the pair to pay roughly €400,000 ($412,000) in fines and indemnities. As well, the couple, who maintained their innocence throughout the October 5–7 trial, are barred from working as art dealers for the next five years.
The sentence brought to a conclusion a decade-long investigation into the theft by of handyman Freddy

Read more

1 2 3 4 5 > >>