News

October 17, 2020 at 11:50am

Marianne Wex (1937–2020)

Marianne Wex, whose short career as an artist yielded enduring contributions to women’s and gender studies as well as the field of conceptual photography, has died at age eighty-three in her native Germany.
Born in Hamburg in 1937, Wex studied at the Academies of Art Hamburg and Mexico City, originally focusing on painting. She became most known for her installation and book Let’s Take Back Our Space, a vast but rigorously organized taxonomy that collated hundreds of rephotographed images from mass media alongside thousands of her own street photographs—all shot with a Mamiya camera and intended

Read more
October 16, 2020 at 5:17pm

Brooklyn Museum Continues Deaccessioning Spree

No doubt spurred on by the tremendous success of its first deaccession sale, which saw the institution reap $5.4 million ($6.6 million with fees), an amount considerably beyond its expectations, the Brooklyn Museum is planning another deaccessioning round. On the block this time will be works by Degas, Dubuffet, Matisse, Miró, and Monet.
The initial auction, overseen by Christie’s, took place on October 15, with hot sales including a sixteenth-century painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder that fetched a whopping $4.2 million, twice what the museum had counted on getting for the work. The second

Read more
October 16, 2020 at 1:06pm

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Names Successor of Ousted Director Nathalie Bondil

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) today announced Stéphane Aquin as its new director, Artnews reports. Aquin, who is currently chief curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, replaces Nathalie Bondil, who was forced out last summer amid allegations that she had contributed to a “toxic” workplace culture.
Aquin, a Montreal native, spent nearly twenty years at MMFA, first from 1990 to 1992, and later from 1998 to 2015, before departing to helm the Hirshhorn, where he oversaw exhibitions including solo shows of Mark Bradford, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, and Rafael

Read more
October 15, 2020 at 5:42pm

San Francisco Institutes Universal Basic Income Pilot Program for Artists

The San Francisco mayor London Breed last week announced the implementation of a pilot universal basic income program for artists, with $6 million earmarked for $1,000 monthly stipends for up to 130 artists and cultural workers, including teachers. Recipients can expect their first payment in early 2021, with disbursements to continue for at least six months.
The program was one of forty-one proposals delivered by the city’s Economic Recovery Task Force, which was created in April. Convened by Breed and board of supervisors president Norman Yee, the committee is composed of leaders from San

Read more
October 15, 2020 at 1:43pm

Art in General, Long a New York Stalwart, to Close after Forty Years

The long-running nonprofit exhibition space Art in General will permanently shut down operations as of October 31 owing to the continuing Covid-19 pandemic. Founded in 1981 by artists Martin Weinstein and Teresa Liszka, the widely respected organization was devoted to exhibiting and supporting unconventional contemporary art by a diverse range of emerging and midcareer artists, and altogether put on more than 2,000 shows. The space was for decades a fixture of New York’s downtown scene at its location at the city’s General Hardware Building. In 2015, the facility decamped to Brooklyn’s Dumbo

Read more
October 14, 2020 at 10:30am

Ford, Mellon Foundations Initiate Disability Futures Fellows, Awarding $50,000 to 20 Artists

The Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation this morning announced the twenty inaugural Disability Futures Fellows, each of whom will receive a $50,000 grant toward their work. The fellowship, the first of its kind, is an 18-month, discipline-spanning initiative meant to increase the visibility and amplify the voices of disabled creative practitioners, artists, educators, and activists in the US.
The fellows, nominated and chosen by disabled practitioners and scattered across the country, are multimedia artist Navild (niv) Acosta, poet and essayist Eli Clare, writer and filmmaker

Read more
October 14, 2020 at 10:09am

Simone Leigh to Represent United States at 2022 Venice Biennale

Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art today announced in conjunction with the US State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs that sculptor Simone Leigh will represent the US at the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale, which is to take place April 23–November 27, 2022. Leigh is the first African American woman to receive the honor in the biennale’s 125-year history. The Brooklyn-based artist, known for her work examining history, race, gender, and labor, will create a new series of sculptures for the US pavilion, which is co-commissioned by Boston ICA director Jill Medvedow and chief

Read more
October 13, 2020 at 12:38pm

150 Artists, Arts Workers Sign Open Letter Calling to #DismantleNOMA

More than 150 artists and art workers signed an open letter demanding the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) dismiss its leaders and address and reform its institutional culture, Hyperallergic reports. The letter was released yesterday in honor of Indigenous Peoples Day, which the missive’s authors described as important “only so far as its meaning encourages colonial institutions like NOMA to reflect on the persistent and ongoing nature of their settler violence.”
The #DismantleNOMA intiative took root this past June, when a group of former NOMA staff members alleged abuses at the museum including

Read more
October 12, 2020 at 5:12pm

Julie Tolentino Wins 2020 Queer|Art|Prize for Sustained Achievement

Performance artist, dancer, activist, and radical caregiver Julie Tolentino—founder of the storied Clit Club, a queer, pro-sex nightclub that floated throughout various Manhattan locations from 1990 to 2002—has won Queer|Art’s annual $10,000 award for Sustained Achievement.
“As we consider the present and future of performance during Covid, Julie Tolentino’s work signals hope and possibility for a future of live art anchored in care, community, resilience, and bold visionary thinking that inspires us to imagine new ways of being present in the world together,” read a statement by Queer|Art, the

Read more
October 12, 2020 at 3:17pm

Tom Gores Departs LACMA Board Over Prison Telecom Connection

Billionaire private equity mogul and Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores has resigned from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s board of directors after the activist groups Color of Change and Worth Rises lobbied for his removal over his ties to a company that charges “egregious” rates for phone calls from prisons and immigrant detention centers.
Gores’s Platinum Equity, of which he is chairman and CEO, in 2017 bought Securus Technologies, a company that the activist groups allege “makes over $700 million annually” by charging families that are “disproportionately Black and low-income,” up to $25

Read more
October 11, 2020 at 11:53am

Avni Sethi Wins Vera List Center’s Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at New York’s New School has named Avni Sethi as the recipient of the 2020–2022 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice. Sethi was awarded the $25,000 prize for Conflictorium, a participatory museum of conflict she founded in 2013 in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India. The decision was reached unanimously by a jury chaired by Candice Hopkins and comprising Ivet Curlin, Natasha Ginwala, Carin Kuoni, Tamara Oyola-Santiago, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta.
The Jane Lombard 2020–2022 fellows, all finalists for the prize, include Jorge González for

Read more
October 09, 2020 at 2:34pm

UK Government Awards Heritage Organizations $113 Million While Recipient National Trust Cuts 1,300 Jobs

Though word is still awaited as to when arts organizations including museums, galleries, theaters, and music venues will receive aid from the UK’s $1.73 billion bailout package revealed in July, the government has announced its first major disbursement of cash from the fund, with 445 heritage organizations sharing $113 million in Covid-19 rescue grants. Awards of between $11,000 and $1.1 million issuing from a $73.6 million fund earmarked for “costs for operating, reopening and recovery” will be made to 443 recipients, while an additional 12 nationally important organizations will split $37.4

Read more

1 2 3 4 5 > >>