News

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  January 22, 2021 at 5:00pm

  Laura Domencic Named Executive Director of Erie Art Museum

  Arts consultant and curator Laura Domencic has been appointed executive director of the Erie Art Museum, Pennsylvania. The Pittsburgh native will assume her new role on February 8, replacing interim director Pam Masi, who had occupied the post since March, following the hasty January exit of executive director Joshua Helmer. Helmer had been with the institution for less than two years before allegations that he had behaved inappropriately toward female colleagues at the museum and at the Philadelphia Art Museum, where he had previously worked as an associate curator, caught up with him, forcing

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  January 22, 2021 at 4:16pm

  Hundreds of Moscow Artist Studios to Be Razed by Government

  The Moscow Union of Artists (MUA) has said that more than seven hundred Moscow-based artists are facing eviction and the destruction of their workspaces by the Russian government, according to a report in The Art Newspaper. Moscow owns about a thousand studios, most of which are located in “Khrushchyovka” residential buildings scattered throughout the capital; the spaces are leased at no cost by MUA as part of a now-defunct Soviet-era artist-training program. Of these, some five hundred are slated to be bulldozed, forcing the artists who occupy them—some of whom have held their leases for

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  January 21, 2021 at 1:58pm

  Gagosian Names Critic Antwaun Sargent Director, Curator

  Blue-chip megagallery Gagosian has announced critic Antwaun Sargent as its newest director, the New York Times reports. Sargent, who will be based in New York, joins some thirty directors across the gallery’s seventeen outposts, which additionally occupy space in Los Angeles, London, Paris, Geneva, Athens, Rome, and Hong Kong. His first show for Gagosian, to take place later this year, will to center on themes of what he has called “notions of Black space.”

  Sargent, 32, has spent the past decade writing for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Artnews, among other publications and platforms,

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  January 21, 2021 at 10:19am

  Art Basel Postponed from June to September

  Art Basel, the preeminent global contemporary art fair, has announced that it is pushing its 2021 flagship iteration from June 17–20 to September 23–26 owing to the continuing Covid-19 crisis. The decision echoes that taken in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, when the fair similarly postponed that year’s Swiss edition from June to September, ultimately canceling the event altogether and offering a digital experience instead.

  “The decision was made after extensive discussions and analysis in consultation with gallerists and collectors, as well as external experts, putting foremost the health

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  January 20, 2021 at 4:20pm

  Robert S. Duncanson Painting Presented to Biden Administration

  Following his inauguration this morning as the forty-sixth president of the United States, Joe Biden was presented by Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri with a painting by Robert S. Duncanson, a prominent Black painter of the Hudson River School. The presentation of the work, Landscape with Rainbow, 1859, which is on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, took place during a gift-giving ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. The event replaced the congressional luncheon that traditionally follows the inauguration ceremony but was forgone this year owing to the continuing

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  January 20, 2021 at 3:29pm

  MCA Chicago Chief Curator Michael Darling to Depart for Start-Up

  Michael Darling, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, is leaving the institution to serve as a cofounder and the chief growth officer of Museum Exchange, a for-profit platform launching today that will match art collectors with institutions seeking their donations, the Chicago Tribune reports. Darling, who has helmed MCA Chicago since 2010, during his tenure brought the institution some of its most popular shows, including solo exhibitions by Takashi Murakami and Virgil Abloh, which he curated, and the traveling exhibition “David Bowie Is,” whose presentation at the museum

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  January 19, 2021 at 3:26pm

  Museums Worldwide Begin to Reopen as Vaccination Centers

  A number of shuttered arts institutions around the world have found a second calling as Covid-19 vaccination centers, the Art Newspaper reports. Among them are London’s Science Museum and the Black Country Living Museum (BLCM) in Dudley, UK. The Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds, UK, perhaps unsurprisingly, beat both of them to the punch, offering its gallery space for vaccinations back in December; it should be noted that the Thackray is conveniently located next door to St. James’s Hospital. In Italy, Turin’s Castello di Rivoli will partner with city health officials to offer vaccinations

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  January 18, 2021 at 2:35pm

  UK Government Announces New Legislation Protecting Historic Monuments

  The UK government has announced new legislation meant to protect the country’s historic monuments. If the bill passes Parliament, anyone wishing to remove a historic statue would need to first obtain listed building consent or planning permission. Councils seeking to grant such permission would be required to notify the British communities secretary, who would render the final decision about the application in question.

  The proposed legislation comes just weeks after the country completed Brexit, and on the heels of a June 7, 2020, incident in which an eighteen-foot-high statue of seventeenth-century

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  January 18, 2021 at 11:44am

  Brooklyn Museum to Host Controversial Nick Cave Artwork

  Nick Cave’s Truth Be Told, 2020, a massive text work currently on display on the exterior of the School, an outpost of Jack Shainman Gallery, in Kinderhook, New York, will move to the plaza of the Brooklyn Museum this spring, the New York Times reports. The work, which comprises the three words of the title cut from black vinyl and spanning the 160-foot-wide face of the gallery, a repurposed high school, sparked outrage from the village government, which has claimed that it is a sign and thus violates city code.

  Cave, who created the work in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of

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  January 15, 2021 at 5:27pm

  Italy’s Castello di Rivoli Museum to Serve as Covid-19 Vaccination Center

  Castello di Rivoli, near Turin, will open its vast galleries as a Covid-19 vaccination center, becoming the first museum in Italy to do so. The institution is partnering with Rivoli city health authorities in support of Italy’s organized effort to vaccinate its citizens against the virus that to date has sickened 2.3 million and killed 80,000 in the country. 

  Officials at Castello di Rivoli, which occupies the Savoy royal palace, came up with the idea of offering up their third-floor gallery for the vaccination process after realizing that the 10,000-plus-square foot space was ideal for the

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  January 15, 2021 at 3:37pm

  Guggenheim Appoints Naomi Beckwith Deputy Director, Chief Curator

  New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has announced the appointment of Naomi Beckwith as deputy director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator. In the latter role, Beckwith, formerly senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, will replace Nancy Spector, who resigned in October. In her dual roles, which she will assume in June, Beckwith will oversee the museum’s collections, exhibitions, publications, and curatorial programs and archives, and will play “an instrumental role in shaping the museum’s vision.”

  “One cannot overstate the iconicity and consequence of the Guggenheim

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  January 14, 2021 at 12:51pm

  Warhol Foundation Announces Fall 2020 Grant Recipients

  The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has announced the fifty-one recipients of its fall 2020 grants, which total $3.9 million and are issued in support of visual arts programs, exhibitions, and curatorial research. Among the first-time grantees are several dedicated to creating opportunities for emerging and underrepresented artists and writers who identify as BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and who are living with disabilities. These include Philadelphia’s BlackStar, which prioritizes opportunities for filmmakers and critics, and Chicago’s Sixty Inches from Center and New York’s Wendy’s Subway, both

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