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March 23, 2023 at 5:43pm

Unionized Staff at New York’s Hispanic Society Museum Vote to Strike

Unionized workers at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, have authorized a strike to begin March 27, lasting indefinitely. The action, which was approved by 78 percent of members, comes as the institution prepares to reopen April 6 following a six-year closure for renovations. Staff at the museum unionized in 2021, concurrent with workers at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. While the staff at both institutions organized under the auspices of the Local 2110 branch of the United Auto Workers union, ratification of contracts has been slow. The Whitney union finally reached

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March 23, 2023 at 4:38pm

Report Shows Met Holds 1,000+ Antiquities Connected to Trafficking

A new investigation conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in collaboration with the UK-based nonprofit Finance Uncovered has revealed that New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art possesses more than one thousand objects linked to individuals “either indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes.” The organization’s report, published March 20, focused on the provenance of the Met’s antiquities collection, and on its continuing to acquire historic cultural artifacts despite the introduction in numerous countries of laws banning their export. “In the antiquities

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March 22, 2023 at 5:20pm

Director Marina Loshak Exits Pushkin Museum

Director Marina Loshak is leaving Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, which she has led for a decade. Born in Ukraine, Odesa, Loshak arrived in Moscow in 1986. She was appointed director of the Pushkin—home to the city’s largest collection of Western art—in 2013, and since then has organized a number of major exhibitions, frequently collaborating with international institutions. Elizaveta Likhacheva, currently the director of Moscow’s Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, will fill her role.
Losahak’s departure is thought to be a result of political pressure, which has been intensifying

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March 22, 2023 at 3:08pm

$54 Million Jackson Pollock Painting Uncovered in Raid

Authorities in Bulgaria discovered a hitherto-unknown painting by Jackson Pollock in the course of investigating an international art-trafficking ring. According to Bulgarian National Radio, which broke the story, Bulgarian Main Directorate officials were working with a Greek anti-crime unit organized under the Europol umbrella to break up the illegal business, which spanned from the Sofia region of Bulgaria to Athens and the island of Crete.
While in the process of arresting three Greek citizens and a Bulgarian national in connection with the operation, Greek officials discovered five works by

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March 21, 2023 at 1:36pm

Vivian Crockett and Isabella Rjeille to Curate 2026 New Museum Triennial

New York’s New Museum has named Vivian Crockett and Isabella Rjeille as the cocurators of its sixth New Museum Triennial, to take place in 2026. Crockett is a curator at the New Museum, to which she arrived in 2022 after serving as assistant curator of contemporary art at the Dallas Museum of Art. Rjeille is a curator at São Paulo’s Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), which she joined in 2016 as a curatorial assistant. She previously worked at the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo and was a curatorial assistant for the Thirty-Second Bienal de São Paulo.
“These two accomplished

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March 21, 2023 at 1:16pm

Centre Pompidou Expands into Seoul

The Centre Pompidou, Paris, announced today that it is opening a branch in Seoul. The French contemporary art institution will partner with South Korean finance and retail conglomerate Hanwha on the museum, which will occupy Tower 63, the reflective glass skyscraper housing Hanwha’s headquarters. Pompidou Center Hanwha Seoul, as the institution is tentatively named, will be designed by French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte and is scheduled to open in early 2025. According to an agreement signed March 19 by Pompidou president Laurent Le Bon and Hanwha Culture Foundation chair Shin Hyunwoo, the

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March 21, 2023 at 10:22am

Arts Contributed $1 Trillion to US Economy in 2021

The arts and cultural industry, which made up 4.4 percent of the US economy in 2021, accounted for a record $1 trillion of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) that year. According to a study conducted jointly by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the field rebounded from the global Covid-19 crisis comparatively quickly, expanding by 13.7 percent between 2020 and 2021, while the broader economy gained just 5.9 percent during the same period. Of note, the arts and entertainment sector was among those hardest hit by the pandemic.
Of the

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March 16, 2023 at 3:22pm

Whitechapel Slashes Jobs, Eliminates Curatorial Posts

London’s Whitechapel Gallery has laid off six staffers, half of whom are high-level curators, The Art Newspaper reports. Among those who are being made redundant are Lydia Yee, who served as the gallery’s chief curator, and Candy Stobbs, an associate curator there for more than two decades. The curatorial team will be led by Gilane Tawadros, who assumed the role of director of the Whitechapel last spring. Tawadros will be assisted by the two remaining curators, a special projects curator, and a head of exhibitions, who has not yet been named, as the position was just created.
The move comes as

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March 16, 2023 at 1:20pm

Frieze New York Announces Exhibitors for 2023 Edition

The organizers of Frieze have revealed the sixty-nine galleries that will be participating in the 2023 iteration of its New York fair. The event is set to take place May 18–21, with a preview on May 17, at the Shed, in the city’s Hudson Yards.
The lineup, which spans twenty-seven countries, includes global megagalleries Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace Gallery, Perrotin, David Zwirner, Thaddeus Ropac, and White Cube, as well as first-timers Arcadia Missa, Emalin, Silverlens. Among the New York–based galleries exhibiting are Canada, James Cohan, Alexander Gray Associates, Casey Kaplan, and Ortuzar

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March 15, 2023 at 6:11pm

Pompidou Will Open New Museum in Saudi Arabia

Laurent Le Bon, president of Paris’s Centre Pompidou, on March 14 signed an agreement with the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) to establish a massive branch of the contemporary art museum in the fast-growing AlUla region of Saudi Arabia. The outpost will be the fourth for the Pompidou, whose tendrils already reach Metz, France; Malaga, Spain; and Shanghai. The new institution will focus on art from Southwest Asia, North Africa, and South Asia, with an emphasis on twenty-first-century Land art and digital art. As well, the RCU will commission immersive installations and public artworks from Arab

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March 15, 2023 at 5:29pm

Inaugural Benin Pavilion to Debut at 2024 Venice Biennale

The Republic of Benin will stage a national pavilion for the first time at the Sixtieth Venice Biennale, to take place April 20–November 24, 2024. The West African country’s government revealed that the pavilion will be curated by Azu Nwagbogu, founder and director of the Lagos-based nonprofit African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), with the assistance of Yassine Lassissi, artistic director of Lagos’s La Galerie Nationale du Bénin, and architect Franck Houndégla. Playwright José Pliya, the general director of La Galerie Nationale, will commission the pavilion.
“We are delighted to have Azu Nwagbogu

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March 14, 2023 at 4:00pm

Phyllida Barlow (1944–2023)

British artist Phyllida Barlow, who placed humble materials in the service of massive works that she described as “nonmonumental,” owing to their rejection of sleek, masculinized form, died March 13 in London at the age of seventy-eight. Her death was confirmed by the gallery Hauser & Wirth, which has represented the artist for over a decade. Barlow served as a mentor to artists including Tacita Dean, Sarah Lucas, and Rachel Whiteread before gaining wide recognition herself in the late aughts. “Image and the pictorial are my enemies. They are what I always want to escape,” she told Artforum’s

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