News

  • April 20, 2018 at 3:42pm

    MoMA Sues Lower East Side Café and Arts Space over Trademark Infringement

    The Museum of Modern Art in New York has filed a lawsuit against a newly-opened green tea café, which also serves as an exhibition space, that accuses the business of infringing on its trademark. MoMaCha opened on 314 Bowery earlier this month with a show by Dallas-based artist Dan Lam.

    According to the complaint, the “defendants’ willful intent here is clear as there is no possibility that they were not aware of MoMA or its famous MoMA mark. . .They are blatantly attempting to take advantage of the MoMA marks, which are unquestionably famous within the modern and contemporary art space, to

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  • April 20, 2018 at 3:33pm

    Rome’s Frutta Gallery Opens Second Outpost in Glasgow

    Scottish-born dealer James Gardner, who founded Frutta in Rome in 2012, has opened a second location in Glasgow, Andrew Russeth of Artnews reports. Located on 9 Duke Street, the gallery launched with an exhibition of works by Santo Tolone. Titled, The Distance Between the Fridge and My Belly, or Rather Between Your Eyes and This Title, the show will run until May 26.

    “Both Roma and Glasgow are somewhat on the geographical edge of Europe—that is, they parenthesize Central Europe and in that sense their independence makes [it] interesting,” Gardner said. “Yet they are linked via the openness

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  • April 20, 2018 at 3:04pm

    Fearless Girl Statue Moves to New York Stock Exchange

    New York’s Fearless Girl—the fifty-inch bronze girl who, arms akimbo, has stared down Arturo Di Modica’s Charging Bull sculpture for a little over a year—will soon be permanently relocated to stand outside the New York Stock Exchange, the original location for her bovine rival. Mayor Bill de Blasio and State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), the financial firm that installed the statue, had been in talks to find the sculptures new homes since February, though the bull is, as of now, to remain at the Bowling Green location in the financial district.

    Fearless Girl, designed by Kristen Visbal,

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  • April 20, 2018 at 1:12pm

    ICA London Launches Independent Film Council

    London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts has established an Independent Film Council, which will advise and advocate for cinema dedicated to independent film and artists’ moving image works.

    The council includes performer and filmmaker Tilda Swinton, producer Stanley Buchthal, academics Erika Balsom and Laura Mulvey, film editor Walter Murch, Sundance Institute’s Documentary Program director Tabitha Jackson, the National Film and Television School’s head of Screen Arts Sandra Hebron, and artists and filmmakers Gerald Fox, Laura Poitras, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Naeem Mohaiemen, James Richards,

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  • April 20, 2018 at 11:30am

    Copenhagen Contemporary Appoints Marie Nipper Director and Announces New Location

    The Danish arts center Copenhagen Contemporary has revealed that it will move to a new permanent home on Refshale Island in June. The approximately 75,000-square-foot-space was a former industrial welding hall. It also announced that Marie Nipper was named the institution’s new director.

    Nipper has worked as a curator at the ARoS Art Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, since April 2014. Previously, she was an interim artistic director at Tate Liverpool. Commenting on the institution’s new program, Kipper said that it will continue showing “big and technically demanding installation art” and presenting a

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  • April 20, 2018 at 11:15am

    Mophradat Names Artists for Inaugural Consortium Commission

    Mophradat, the Brussels-based contemporary arts organization that aims to create opportunities for artists from the Arab world, has revealed the artists who were selected for its inaugural Consortium Commissions—a new co-commissioning initiative for which cultural institutions from across the globe team up to support the production of new work. The program will award $22,000 to six artists and collectives.

    The artists chosen are Basma Alsharif, Shadi Habib Allah, Yazan Khalili, Maurice Louca, Jasmina Metwaly, and nasa4nasa, an artist duo made up of Egyptian choreographers and dancers Salma

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  • April 20, 2018 at 9:14am

    OMA-Designed Qatar National Library Officially Opens

    The Qatar National Library in Doha officially opened its doors to the public on April 16. Designed by Rem Koolhaas’s firm OMA, the angular concrete building with diamond-shaped facades is approximately 452,000 square feet. Located in Education City—a region on the outskirts of the capital that was designated for schools, universities, research facilities, and other educational initiatives—the structure is divided into three wings, each housing a different kind of library: the National Library, Public Library, and University Library. It also contains the Heritage Collection, comprising

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  • April 20, 2018 at 8:56am

    Phillips Collection Names Makeba Clay Its First Chief Diversity Officer

    The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, has hired Makeba Clay as its first chief diversity officer. She will be responsible for Phillips’s institutional inclusion strategy. Clay has helped higher education and cultural organizations work toward equity, diversity, and inclusion goals for the last twenty years. Currently the president and CEO of Innovative Global Solutions Consulting, LLC, Clay previously served as a diversity consultant for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and as associate vice president of institutional equity and diversity at the College of Southern Maryland.

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  • April 19, 2018 at 6:14pm

    Evgeny Gusyatinskiy to Curate Garage Museum’s Upcoming Outdoor Film Program

    The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow announced today that the Russian film critic Evgeny Gusyatinskiy will curate the 2018 edition of Garage Screen, the museum’s popular outdoor summer film program known for showing works that moviegoers would otherwise not be able to see in Russia.

    Gusyatinskiy is the editor of Iskusstvo Kino (The Art of the Cinema), one of the oldest film magazines in Europe. Since 2011, he has also served as the programmer of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which welcomed 329,000 attendees in 2018.

    “Moscow’s cinephile community is dedicated, but small

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  • April 19, 2018 at 6:00pm

    Marcia Hafif (1929–2018)

    Marcia Hafif, whose meditative, abstract canvases often questioned the very practice of painting, has died at age eighty-nine. In addition to painting, the artist’s six-decade career encompassed drawing, photography, film, and sound installation. Since the early 1970s, Hafif’s experimental work has earned her a large audience in the United States and Europe, which only grew as Hafif continued examing color and the materiality of painting in her final years, when she began receiving increased institutional recognition for her art.

    Born Marcia Woods in Pomona, California, in 1929, she studied at

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  • April 19, 2018 at 4:00pm

    Smithsonian Curator Lee Glazer to Lead Colby College’s Lunder Institute for American Art

    Colby College in Waterville, Maine, announced today that Lee Glazer has been hired as the founding director of its Lunder Institute for American Art. Glazer is a curator of American art for the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. As the institution’s inaugural director, she will be responsible for establishing its scholarly and creative direction.

     

    “The appointment of Lee Glazer as institute director puts us a giant step closer to building a truly distinctive and global research center for American art at the Colby College Museum of Art,” said Colby

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  • April 19, 2018 at 3:40pm

    Collector Sues Gagosian Gallery, Jeff Koons for Failing to Deliver Sculptures

    Steven Tananbaum, a prominent art collector and trustee of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is suing Gagosian Gallery, Inc. and Jeff Koons, LLC for allegedly failing to deliver three of Koons’s sculptures after he had paid more than $13 million for them, reports Artnews. A dramatic fifty-three-page complaint filed by New York litigator Aaron Richard Golub details Tananbaum’s payments for the unrealized sculptures, which include Balloon Venus Hohlen Fels (Magenta), 2013–15. The complaint accuses both powerhouse art entities of concocting a scheme to swindle collectors out of millions.

    An agreement

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