News

  • April 19, 2018 at 6:14pm

    Evgeny Gusyatinskiy to Curate Garage Museum’s Upcoming Outdoor Film Program

    The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow announced today that Russian film critic Evgeny Gusyatinskiy will curate its 2018 edition of Garage Screen, the museum’s popular outdoor summer film program known for screening works that otherwise moviegoers would not be able to see in Russia.

    Gusyatinskiy is the editor of Iskusstvo Kino (The Art of the Cinema), one of the oldest film magazines in Europe. Since 2011, he has also served as programmer of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which welcomed 329,000 attendees in 2018.

    “Moscow’s cinephile community is dedicated, but small because

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  • April 19, 2018 at 6:00pm

    Marcia Hafif (1929–2018)

    Marcia Hafif, whose meditative, abstract canvases often questioned the very practice of painting, has died at age eighty-nine. In addition to painting, the artist’s six-decade career encompassed drawing, photography, film, and sound installation. Since the early 1970s, Hafif’s experimental work has earned her a large audience in the United States and Europe, one that has only grown as Hafif continued examing color and the materiality of painting in her final years, when she began receiving increased institutional recognition for her art.

    Born Marcia Woods in Pomona, California, in 1929, she

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  • April 19, 2018 at 4:00pm

    Smithsonian Curator Lee Glazer to Lead Colby College’s Lunder Institute for American Art

    Colby College in Waterville, Maine, announced today that Lee Glazer has been hired as the founding director of its Lunder Institute for American Art. Glazer is a curator of American art for the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. As the institution’s inaugural director, she will be responsible for establishing its scholarly and creative direction.

     

    “The appointment of Lee Glazer as institute director puts us a giant step closer to building a truly distinctive and global research center for American art at the Colby College Museum of Art,” said Colby

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  • April 19, 2018 at 3:40pm

    Collector Sues Gagosian Gallery, Jeff Koons for Failing to Deliver Sculptures

    Steven Tananbaum, a prominent art collector and trustee of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is suing Gagosian Gallery, Inc. and Jeff Koons, LLC for allegedly failing to deliver three Koons sculptures after he’s paid more than $13 million for them, reports Artnews. A dramatic fifty-three-page complaint filed by New York litigator Aaron Richard Golub details Tananbaum’s payments for the unrealized sculptures, which include Balloon Venus Hohlen Fels (Magenta), 2013–15. The complaint accuses both powerhouse art entities of concocting a scheme to swindle collectors out of millions.

    An agreement dated

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  • April 19, 2018 at 2:09pm

    Chinese Artifacts Stolen from England Museum of East Asian Art

    Four masked thieves raided the Museum of East Asian Art (MEAA) in Bath, in southwest England, around 1:20 AM on Tuesday, April 17 and stole several Chinese artifacts. Witnesses saw the suspects break in by smashing a window on the first floor of the Georgian townhouse, which houses the institution, and alerted the authorities. Among the missing objects are jade mandarin ducks from the Qing dynasty, an inlaid wooden box from the Qing dynasty, and a Jizhou stoneware vase from the Song dynasty.

    “Due to the items stolen and the speed of the burglary, we suspect this to be a targeted attack with the

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  • April 19, 2018 at 1:43pm

    Aldo Scrofani Joins Harlem’s Apollo Theater as Chief Operating Officer

    The Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York, announced today that Aldo Scrofani, a veteran of the live entertainment industry, has been hired as its new chief operating officer. Throughout the course of his career, Scrofani has been involved with over one hundred theatrical productions and worked in executive positions at Columbia Artists and Jujamcyn Theaters. He is also the founder of Theater Management Associates, Inc.

    “Aldo is an incredibly dynamic, forward-thinking leader in the cultural field, and we are very excited to have him on board,” said Apollo Theater president and CEO Jonelle Procope.

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  • April 19, 2018 at 1:05pm

    Mary Miller Appointed Director of Getty Research Institute

    The J. Paul Getty Trust announced today that art historian Mary Miller has been named the new director of the Getty Research Institute. Miller will join the institute from Yale University where she serves as a professor of the history of art and senior director of Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage. In December 2008, Miller became the first female dean of Yale College, and she remained in the post for nearly eight years. 

    “As one of the world’s preeminent centers for cultural research, the Getty Research Institute must have a leader whose vision can encompass new practices

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  • April 19, 2018 at 12:45pm

    Hidden James Castle Drawings Discovered in Artist's Home

    A stash of previously unseen drawings by the celebrated outsider artist James Castle were exhumed by city officials in Boise, Idaho, reports the New York Times. The eleven sketches, made from soot and saliva, were found in the walls of the artist’s home, which is in the midst of being converted into a cultural center to honor Castle, who died in 1977 at age seventy-eight. The untaught artist, who was born deaf and never learned to communicate in a conventional way, often drew with soot from a wood stove and spit, often on found materials like cardboard from matches or paper from his parents’

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  • April 19, 2018 at 8:00am

    Collector Steven Cohen Gifts Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary to MoMA

    Hedge fund manager Steven Cohen is donating Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The painting, which features a black Madonna against a gold background replete with images of female genitals and pieces of elephant dung, sparked an uproar when it was exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum show “Sensation” in 1999. The critics of the piece were mainly Catholic, and they were aghast over the eight-foot-tall depiction of the religious figure.

    New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani also famously took offense to the controversial exhibition, calling it “sick stuff,” and even tried

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  • April 19, 2018 at 7:35am

    Istanbul’s SALT Beyoğlu Reopens

    SALT Beyoğlu in Istanbul reopened on April 17, more than two years after it shuttered because of  “technical reasons.” After the venue halted programming in 2015 and eventually closed its doors in January 2016, rumors circulated that the contemporary arts space was facing pressure from the government over its programming. However, former director Vasif Kortun denied that this was the reason for the closure. According to Süddeutsche Zeitung, the prime minister’s office allegedly received an anonymous complaint that raised questions over whether the arts center had attained the proper permits from

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  • April 18, 2018 at 3:28pm

    California College of the Arts Appoints New Deans of Fine Arts, Humanities and Sciences

    The California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco announced today that Allison Smith was named dean of fine arts and Tina Takemoto as dean of humanities and sciences. They will both assume their responsibilities on August 1, 2018. The college’s current dean of fine arts, curator and art historian James Voorhies, will now helm an expanded chairship of the school’s graduate program in curatorial practice. He has been the acting chair of the department since the passing of former chair Leigh Markopoulos in 2017.

    “We are thrilled to announce the appointments of Allison Smith and Tina

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  • April 18, 2018 at 10:05am

    Kenneth Frampton Receives Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale

    Kenneth Frampton, an English architect, writer, critic, and historian, has received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2018 Venice Architechture Biennale.

    Frampton studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, and has been a professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University in New York since 1972. His thinking has been deeply influential to many generations of architects. Among his most important texts are the 1983 essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” and

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