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February 03, 2023 at 6:41pm

Cooper Union Delays Show on Russian Art School, Raising Censorship Concerns

New York art school Cooper Union has postponed the exhibition “Vkhutemas: Laboratory of the Avant-Garde,” originally scheduled to open on January 25. The Moscow art and architecture school Vkhutemas, considered to be the Russian equivalent of the Bauhaus school, was operational between 1920 and 1930 before being shuttered by Joseph Stalin, who cast it as a breeding ground for “formalism.” Among those who taught there were Aleksandra Ekster, El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenkov, and Vladimir Tatlin.
Cooper Union cited Russia’s ongoing unprovoked attack on Ukraine as

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February 02, 2023 at 5:58pm

Anish Kapoor Bean Makes New York Scene

Anish Kapoor’s massive stainless-steel sculpture known colloquially as the bean was unveiled in New York City’s TriBeCa neighborhood on January 31. The shiny curved colossus, which closely resembles the British artist’s famous Chicago Cloud Gate, is his first for the Big Apple. Measuring nineteen feet high and forty-eight feet wide, and weighing forty tons, the pleasingly rounded form appears to be squeezing its way out from under the Herzog & de Meuron–designed “Jenga” tower at the corner of Church and Leonard Streets. The high-rise, so called for its jutting, stacked form, is home to Kapoor,

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February 01, 2023 at 6:33pm

Whitney Union Members Demonstrate Outside Museum Fundraiser

Unionized members of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art on January 31 staged a protest outside a fundraising event at the museum. Workers greeted passersby and attendees of the Art Party, a $500-per-ticket gala, with flyers notifying readers that “the Museum is still rejecting proposals for higher wages despite historic inflation and the very high rates that they are hiring managers at.” The flyers warned that the increased wage disparities would hold down unionized worker’s salaries “for years to come.”
Employees of the Whitney voted 96 to 1 to unionize under the Local 2110 branch of the

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February 01, 2023 at 12:25pm

Jenny Moore Named Inaugural Director of Montana’s Tinworks

Jenny Moore has been announced as the founding director of Tinworks Art in Bozeman, Montana. Moore arrives to the four-year-old arts organization from Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. She led that institution, founded by Donald Judd in the 1980s, from 2013 to 2022. At Tinworks—which occupies an array of historic and light industrial buildings and focuses on presenting work by diverse artists in unusual settings—Moore is charged with building the contemporary art program, commissioning site-specific works, developing the museum site, and expanding and formalizing operations. She will assume

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January 31, 2023 at 3:38pm

Ebony G. Patterson Wins 2023 David C. Driskell Prize

Atlanta’s High Museum of Art has announced multimedia artist Ebony G. Patterson as the winner of its 2023 David C. Driskell Prize for her contributions to the field of African American art. Patterson will receive a $50,000 cash award and will be honored at a gala event to take place April 28. The museum has awarded the prize annually since 2005 in an effort to elevate and promote the work of African American artists and scholars.
Patterson, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and splits her time between that city and Chicago, investigates issues surrounding identity, the body, and social and

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January 30, 2023 at 5:17pm

Alfred Leslie (1927–2023)

Alfred Leslie, whose monumental, planar grisaille portraits of the 1960s at once rejected abstraction and the romanticization of the figure, died January 27 in Brooklyn of complications related to Covid-19. He was ninety-five. A native of New York City, he was an early auteur in the world of underground film beginning in the 1940s, eventually collaborating with Robert Frank on the 1959 Beat classic Pull My Daisy. His figural canvases, begun in the early 1960s, were no less shocking to audiences than Abstract Expressionism had been a generation before, thanks to their direct and unyielding mien.

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January 30, 2023 at 3:33pm

Museum Staffs Across the UK Plan Strikes

Members of the PCS Culture Group, a branch of the UK’s Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), will strike in February to protest low wages after the government offered workers raises of just 2 percent, compared with the national inflation rate of 9.2 percent as of December 2022. PCS members voted on the action November 7, 2022, with 86.2 percent of balloters in favor.
Chief among the arts institutions whose workers are involved in the action are London’s British Museum, whose staff will stage a weeklong strike beginning February 13. That date marks a half-term school holiday, during which

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January 26, 2023 at 4:53pm

Facial Recognition Technology Suggests Raphael Painted the de Brécy Tondo

A group of researchers from the University of Nottingham and University of Bradford using facial recognition technology to inspect a canvas known as the de Brécy Tondo discovered that the faces in the painting are identical to those in a Raphael altarpiece. The team concluded that the tondo, whose author had previously been unknown, was likely painted by the Italian master.
The de Brécy Tondo was purchased at an English country-house sale in 1981 by Cheshire businessman George Lester Winward. Though some experts believed it to be a Victorian copy of a Raphael, Winward came to believe that it was

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January 26, 2023 at 1:18pm

Kapwani Kiwanga Will Represent Canada at 2024 Venice Biennale

Rising multidisciplinary artist Kapwani Kiwanga will represent Canada at the Sixtieth Venice Biennale, to take place April 20–November 24, 2024. Kiwanga is the first Black woman to receive a solo exhibition at the Canadian Pavilion and the second Black artist to so do, after Stan Douglas, who represented Canada at the Biennale in 2022. News of her selection was announced jointly by National Gallery of Canada, which commissions the pavilion commissioner, and the nonprofit National Gallery of Canada Foundation, which sponsors the effort.
The Canadian-born Paris-based Kiwanga works across media

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January 25, 2023 at 6:04pm

Kathy Halbreich to Step Down as Rauschenberg Foundation Director

Kathy Halbreich announced today that she will depart in May as executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, which she has led since 2017. Halbreich arrived to the organization after nearly a decade as the associate director and Laurenz Foundation Curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “It’s a foundation focused on doing the best for artists,” she said at the time. “The more I learned, the more perfect the match felt as my next chapter.” Though she noted that the organization’s board will begin searching for a new candidate immediately, she did not cite a reason for her departure,

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January 24, 2023 at 3:11pm

Asma Naeem to Lead Baltimore Museum of Art

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has announced Asma Naeem as its next director, effective February 1. Naeem is the first person of color to lead the institution since its founding in 1914. She steps into the role from her previous position as BMA’s interim codirector, which she occupied alongside Christine Dietze since June 2022. Naeem succeeds the well-regarded Christopher Bedford, whose sometimes controversial tenure lasted from 2016 to 2022, when he departed to helm the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
“The BMA is committed to bringing diversity and equity into every aspect of its work,

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January 24, 2023 at 2:29pm

Jewish Heirs Sue Guggenheim Over $200 Million Picasso

Descendants of a Jewish family that fled Nazi Germany have launched a suit against New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, demanding the return of a $200 million Picasso painting. Heirs of Karl Adler and Rosi Jacobi, with the support of a group of Jewish nonprofits, on January 20 filed suit in Manhattan’s Supreme Court seeking the return of Picasso’s 1904 Woman Ironing. The painting, from Picasso’s Blue Period, has hung in the Guggenheim since 1978.
Thomas Bennigson, Adler and Jacobi’s great-grandson, avers in the suit that Adler, who ran a profitable leather manufacturing business, purchased

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