News

April 24, 2019 at 5:45pm

Henry Wollman Bloch (1922–2019)

American businessman and philanthropist Henry Wollman Bloch, the founder of the largest tax-service provider in the United States, H&R Block, and a longtime supporter of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, died on Tuesday, April 23. The arts patron was ninety-six-years old.
Born on July 30, 1922, Bloch studied at the University of Kansas City (today’s University of Missouri at Kansas City) and at the University of Michigan, where he earned his degree in mathematics. After graduation, he served in the US Army Air Corps during World War II and flew more than thirty combat missions. In

Read more
April 24, 2019 at 3:42pm

Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels to Undergo Conservation Work

The Dia Art Foundation announced that it will lead the first major effort to conserve Nancy Holt’s iconic Sun Tunnels, 1973–76, in its forty-six-year history. Located on a remote forty-acre plot in Utah’s Great Basin Desert, the important work of land art was acquired by the foundation last year.
Consisting of four concrete cylinders that are eighteen feet in length and nine feet in diameter and arranged in an “x” pattern on the desert floor, the work merges Holt’s interest in perception and time. During the summer and winter solstices, the tunnels align with the angles of the rising and setting

Read more
April 24, 2019 at 12:38pm

Police Recover Stolen Paul Signac Painting in Ukraine

An oil painting stolen from the Museum of Fine Arts in Nancy, in the northeast of France, has been found in Ukraine, AFP reports. The Port of La Rochelle, 1915, by French Impressionist Paul Signac was cut from its frame during a heist last year. Valued at approximately $1.68 million, the canvas was found at the home of a man in Kiev and several suspects were arrested. The homeowner is also currently being investigated on suspicion of murder.
Police official Sergiy Tykhonov said that officers were tipped off about people looking for buyers for stolen works, which prompted them to carry out a series

Read more
April 24, 2019 at 9:30am

Klaus Biesenbach Revamps LA MoCA’s Annual Gala Following Controversy

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, has announced the return of its annual spring gala. Last year’s fundraising event was canceled after artist Mark Grotjahn refused to accept the institution’s gala award, citing the lack of diversity among previous honorees—the last three recipients of the accolade were all straight, white men: Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, and John Baldessari.
Taking place on May 18 at the Geffen Contemporary at MoCA in Little Tokyo, the event has been refashioned as a benefit. According to the museum, the institution’s director Klaus Biesenbach wanted to introduce a “

Read more
April 24, 2019 at 7:32am

New York Museums Must Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions or Face Fines

In an attempt to fight climate change, the New York City Council passed a landmark package of bills that will force thousands of large buildings across the five boroughs to drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions or face substantial fines. While hospitals, houses of worship, public housing, and rent-controlled residential buildings are exempt from the new law, museums are not.
Among the city’s cultural institutions that must comply are the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the New Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, which is currently undergoing an expansion

Read more
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

Read more
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

Read more
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

Read more
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

Read more
April 23, 2019 at 10:26am

New York Tenement Museum Staff 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,

Read more
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

Read more
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

Read more

1 2 3 4 5 > >>