News

May 19, 2018 at 2:17pm

Laura Pye Named Director of National Museums Liverpool

The National Museums Liverpool announced that Laura Pye, the head of culture for Bristol City Council, was appointed director. She will be responsible for overseeing eight of the city’s museums and galleries, including the Walker Art Gallery, the Museum of Liverpool, and the Lady Lever Gallery, and will take up the post in August.
“I’m thrilled to be welcoming Laura to National Museums Liverpool,” said the organization’s chair, David Henshaw. “We’ve recently had our highest annual visitor figure ever, and with ground-breaking exhibitions including ‘China’s First Emperor’ and the ‘Terracotta

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May 19, 2018 at 10:32am

2018 Herb Alpert Award Winners Announced

The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts has been presented to five mid–career artists who were recognized for their contributions to the fields of music, film/video, theater, dance, and the visual arts. This year’s recipients of the $75,000 unrestricted prize are composer and pianist Courtney Bryan, artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa, playwright Robert O’Hara, choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili, and artist Michael Rakowitz.
“At this fraught moment it’s a powerful antidote to honor and support this year’s winners who are alert to the world, rigorous in their reach, and fiercely engaged with that which is

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May 19, 2018 at 10:00am

Marcus Civin Joins University of Nevada, Las Vegas as Department of Art Chair

The University of Nevada Las Vegas announced that interdisciplinary artist, critic, and educator Marcus Civin has been named chair of the department of art at the College of Fine Arts effective July 15. Civin joins the college following eight years with the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he served in a variety of leadership roles, including as associate dean for curriculum and assessment in graduate studies as well as interim director of curatorial practice. He is also the founder of New Urban Arts, a nonprofit community arts studio for high school students in Providence, Rhode Island.

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May 18, 2018 at 4:30pm

Israeli Minister Bans Art By Students Protesting Violence in Gaza

Israel’s science, technology, and space minister, Ofir Akunis, has banned artworks by students at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design from being shown at an international science conference taking place this month in Jerusalem after some students expressed solidarity with the Palestinians demonstrating at the Gaza border, according to Haaretz.
More than sixty protestors were slain by Israeli soldiers this week when tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered near the border. The students at the Jerusalem academy hung posters at their school on Wednesday listing the names of those killed,

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May 18, 2018 at 2:20pm

Germany Returns Cultural Artifacts to Indigenous People of Alaska

Germany has returned nine artifacts to indigenous communities in Alaska. The publicly funded Berlin State Museums, which are overseen by the Prussian Cultural Foundation, determined that several masks, a baby basket, and a wooden idol had been unlawfully taken from a burial site nearly four decades earlier.
The foundation’s president, Hermann Parzinger, said that because these icons were not gifted to the museum, they did not belong there. He presented part of a wooden mask to John F.C. Johnson, a representative of Alaska’s Chugach people, on Wednesday, May 16.
“Our people are traders, but they

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May 18, 2018 at 1:05pm

P. Diddy Revealed as Buyer of $21 Million Kerry James Marshall Painting

Sean Combs, the rapper and producer known as P. Diddy, has been revealed to be the acquirer of Past Times, 1997, the Kerry James Marshall painting that sold at auction on Wednesday for $21.1 million, a price that, at nearly double the original estimate from Sotheby’s, shattered both expectations and the record for a living African American artist.
Jack Shainman, Marshall’s New York dealer, verified to the New York Times that Combs was the work’s buyer. “I know that this work has found a home in a collection with purpose and an eye toward preserving legacy—that of Sean Combs, and that means

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May 18, 2018 at 12:17pm

Collector Grażyna Kulczyk to Open New Experimental Arts Space in the Swiss Alps

Grażyna Kulczyk, one of Poland’s most prominent collectors and arts patrons, is launching a new contemporary arts museum that will be dedicated to showcasing underrepresented artists. Housed on the site of a former twelfth-century monastery and nineteenth-century brewery in Susch, a remote town in the Swiss Alps, the institution is being described as a “laboratory” and experimental platform for artists.
Called Muzeum Susch, the complex will feature 16,000 square feet of gallery space, where the venue will present a series of permanent and site-specific installations, as well as a regular program

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May 18, 2018 at 7:38am

Zeitz Museum Director Resigns Following Inquiry Into His Professional Conduct

Mark Coetzee, the executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, stepped down from his position after the institution’s trustees launched an inquiry into his professional conduct. Azu Nwagbogu, the curator at large at the museum’s Roger Ballen Center for Photography, will assume his responsibilities.
According to Matthew Blackmen, the former editor of ArtThrob, Coetzee refused to respond to questions about the institutional practices at Zeitz MOCAA following concerns over alleged abuses of power.
In 2015, Blackmen wrote an open letter to Coetzee

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May 18, 2018 at 6:14am

Munch Museum in Oslo Creates Online Archive of Artist’s Drawings

More than 7,600 of Edvard Munch’s drawings are now accessible online. The Munch Museum in Oslo began digitizing the artist’s works on paper three years ago in order to make works with expired copyrights available to the public for free. The pieces range from studies for Munch’s famous painting The Scream, 1893, to his much lesser known compositions.
Philip Hook, the senior Impressionist and modern art specialist at Sotheby’s, where a pastel version of The Scream, produced in 1895, sold for $120 million, told the Art Newspaper that “Munch’s fame rests disproportionately on the global familiarity

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May 17, 2018 at 5:26pm

Luke Willis Thompson Wins 2018 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize

The New Zealand artist Luke Willis Thompson, a 2018 Turner Prize nominee, has been awarded this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, which celebrates photographers who make significant contributions to the field.
Thompson was recognized for his work autoportrait, a film installation and portrait of Diamond Reynolds, an American woman whose partner Philando Castile was fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop in Minnesota in 2016. Reynolds used Facebook Live to broadcast the moments after the shooting.
“His singular and uncompromising portrait, made in collaboration with its

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May 17, 2018 at 4:13pm

New York’s MoMA Acquires 324 Works on Paper from Merrill C. Berman Collection

The Museum of Modern Art announced today that it acquired 324 masterworks by ninety-seven artists from the holdings of Merrill C. Berman, a Rye, New York–based investor who amassed a collection of 20,000 early-twentieth-century works on paper. The selected works are from avant-garde movements of the era, including Dada, the Bauhaus, De Stijl, Futurism, and Russian Constructivism.
“By representing crucial figures—often women and artists from lesser-known geographies—missing or underrepresented in our collection, this extraordinary body of work is especially welcome as the museum continues

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May 17, 2018 at 2:25pm

Richard Gray (1928–2018)

Chicago art dealer and philanthropist Richard Gray, whose participation in the arts shaped the holdings of Chicago collectors and institutions but also influenced the international art world, died yesterday at age eighty-nine. In addition to his leading role at Richard Gray Gallery, he once served as president of both the Art Dealers Association of America and the Chicago Art Dealers Association. He was also a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, among numerous other organizations and institutions in the city.
Gray’s

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