News

April 23, 2019 at 4:01pm

Art Gallery of Nova Scotia to Build New $96 Million Home

The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS) in Halifax, the province’s capital, is planning to build a new 142,000-square-foot facility on the city’s waterfront. The museum will be twice the size of its current home on Hollis Street, where the institution has been located since 1988.
On Thursday, April 18, Nova Scotia’s premier, Stephen McNeil, and rural economic development minister, Bernadette Jordan, pledged at least $52 million to the project, which is estimated to cost $96 million or more. The federal government is expected to commit roughly $22 million to the museum, and the gallery plans to

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April 23, 2019 at 1:48pm

Kirsten Paisley Named Director of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

Kirsten Paisley will serve as the next director of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in New Zealand, beginning May 1. Gregory Burke, the former director and CEO of Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Canada, was originally tapped for the position, but he withdrew his application last month after an allegation of workplace harassment surfaced.
According to the New Zealand Herald, the accuser, an unidentified former female coworker, claims the harassment took place at Remai Modern in 2013, when it was still operating as the Mendel Art Gallery. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission is investigating the

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April 23, 2019 at 1:12pm

Museum Docent Gifts $8 Million to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia has revealed that the late Estelle Barenbaum Rubens, a longtime docent at the museum, donated nearly $8 million to the institution, making it one of the largest gifts ever given to the academy. “We knew the bequest was coming,” David R. Brigham, PAFA president and chief executive, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “But we had no idea of the magnitude. It far exceeded our expectations.”
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Rubens volunteered at PAFA for more than fifteen years. Her late husband, the attorney Raymond Rubens, was also an active

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April 23, 2019 at 11:08am

Jayne Wrightsman (1919–2019)

New York philanthropist and longtime Metropolitan Museum of Art trustee Jayne Wrightsman, who amassed an incredible collection of paintings by Eugène Delacroix, Johannes Vermeer, El Greco, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Peter Paul Rubens, and Jacques-Louis David, which she gifted to the Met over the years, died at her Manhattan home on Saturday at age ninety-nine, the New York Times reports.
She and her husband, the late oil tycoon Charles B. Wrightsman, also donated extensive collections of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century porcelain, furniture, chandeliers, clocks, and other pieces made

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April 23, 2019 at 10:26am

Staff of Tenement Museum in New York Votes to Unionize

Front-facing staff members of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which focuses on the history of urban migration, labor, and immigration, voted seventy-two to three in favor of unionizing and joining the UAW (United Auto Workers) Local 2110 last week. Employees of the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Historical Society, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the New Museum are also in the UAW.
The vote comes after over a decade of failed unionization attempts by staffers in the museum’s education, retail, and visitor services departments, who cite poor working conditions, including low wages,

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April 22, 2019 at 3:13pm

Gabriela Rangel Appointed Artistic Director of MALBA

The Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) has named Venezuelan curator Gabriela Rangel as its new artistic director. Rangel comes to the institution from New York, where she most recently served as director of visual arts and chief curator at the Americas Society. A specialist in Latin American Art, Rangel will be responsible for overseeing the institution’s exhibitions program, collection, publications, and educational initiatives, as well as for spearheading collaborations with other local and international institutions.
“After an exhaustive search over nearly a year, we have

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April 22, 2019 at 2:34pm

Josine Ianco-Starrels (1926–2019)

The Romanian-born curator Josine Ianco-Starrels, who became an influential figure in the Los Angeles art scene and a champion of underrepresented artists beginning in the 1960s, died at her home in Rogue River, Oregon, on April 8, the Los Angeles Times reports. Her daughter, Elissa Kline, said she passed away of natural causes.
“Ianco-Starrels is a progressive, energetic curator with an international perspective and a great depth of knowledge of contemporary California art,” Long Beach Museum of Art director Stephen Garrett said in 1986.
The daughter of the Israeli Romanian artist and architect

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April 22, 2019 at 1:04pm

Czech Culture Minister Dismisses Two Prominent Museum Directors, Sparking Protests

Last week, Czech culture minister Antonin Staněk dismissed Jiří Fajt, who had served as director of the National Gallery, Prague, for five years, and Michal Soukup, who had been head of the Olomouc Museum of Art, Monopol reports.
The culture minister said in a public statement that the dismissals were based on the results of “currently completed and ongoing public administration controls of both institutions.” He continued that he had lost faith in the directors’ abilities to lead the art institutions in a way that was “economically [responsible].”
Staněk is also filing a criminal complaint against

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April 22, 2019 at 11:14am

Barnes Foundation Names Valerie V. Gay Deputy Director for Audience Engagement, Chief Experience Officer

The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia has appointed Valerie V. Gay as its new deputy director for audience engagement and chief experience officer. Gay most recently served as executive director of Philadelphia’s Art Sanctuary and has nearly twenty years of experience in nonprofit administration. She will be responsible for expanding the organization’s diversity and inclusion initiatives and will take up the post in April.
“Art Sanctuary has been a community partner of the Barnes for six years, and over that time, I’ve admired its work in public, community, and family programs,” Gay said in a

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April 22, 2019 at 10:13am

Rick Kinsel Joins NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts’ Board of Trustees

The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in Manhattan announced today that it has welcomed Rick Kinsel to its board of trustees. Kinsel currently serves as the president of the Vilcek Foundation, an organization dedicated to raising awareness of immigrant contributions to the United States and to fostering appreciation of the arts and sciences. Kinsel has been with the foundation since its inception in 2000.
Prior to joining the foundation, Kinsel was director of cultural affairs for Coty Inc. in New York, where he supervised all arts and educational programs from 1997 to 2003. He also

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April 22, 2019 at 10:00am

Olu Oguibe’s Documenta Obelisk Returns to Kassel

After being dismantled in October amid rising pressure from far-right politicians, artist Olu Oguibe’s concrete obelisk returned to Kassel, Germany, on Thursday, Monopol reports. Monument to Strangers and Refugees, 2017, was originally installed in Kassel’s Königsplatz for Documenta 14 and was intended as a rebuke to xenophobia. The monument bears the inscription “I was a stranger and you took me in” (Matthew 25:35), in four different languages: Arabic, English, German, and Turkish.
The Nigerian-born, US-based artist was awarded the quinquennial’s Arnold Bode Prize by the city, which called the

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April 21, 2019 at 10:40am

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922–2019)

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, whose lucent works ally modernist abstraction with Islamic ornament, has died at age ninety-seven. Renowned internationally for her dazzling, painstaking mirrorwork, in later life Farmanfarmaian rose to prominence as one of Iran’s foremost contemporary artists and as one of its most prolific collectors. The first artist to make secular cut-glass mosaics, Farmanfarmaian, whose career spanned six decades, was also celebrated for her paintings, drawings, textile designs, and monotypes.
Born in 1922 to Ottoman aristocrats in Qazvin, Iran, and taking up art early on,

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