News

September 22, 2018 at 2:21pm

Serralves Director Resigns Over Museum's Removal of Mapplethorpe Photographs

João Ribas has resigned from his position as artistic director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, a post he held for just eight months. His Friday announcement to the Portuguese newspaper Público follows the museum’s removal of twenty works from its recent “Robert Mapplethorpe: Pictures” exhibition, which Ribas commissioned and curated; an open letter condemning the museum’s decision is now circulating online, addressing the Serralves Foundation’s chair Ana Pinho. The museum also restricted select rooms of the exhibition to eighteen and over, against the wishes of

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September 22, 2018 at 1:08pm

Stedelijk's Chief Curator Bart van der Heide to Leave in November

Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum announced today that Bart van der Heide will leave his position as the museum’s chief curator and head of research on November 1. “Van der Heide has decided to orient himself towards the next step in his career,” interim director Jan Willem Sieburgh wrote in a statement from the museum. “We will greatly miss his substantive contribution and content knowledge . . . and wish him every success with his next step.”
The museum did not immediately respond to comment for further details on the terms of van der Heide’s departure. Van der Heide joined the Stedelijk in his

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September 21, 2018 at 5:50pm

Robert Venturi (1925–2018)

Robert Venturi, the influential American architect and author of landmark texts including Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972), died on Tuesday from Alzheimer’s-related complications at his home in Philadelphia. He was ninety-three. In contrast to the austere, unadorned designs of some twentieth century Modernists and Minimalists such as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Venturi’s designs incorporated and alluded to late-Renaissance decorative elements, and what some called “a perverse assortment of details that set other architects’

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September 21, 2018 at 3:45pm

Courtenay Finn Appointed Chief Curator at Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland

The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (MOCA) has appointed Courtenay Finn as chief curator. Finn arrives at the position from Colorado’s Aspen Art Museum, where she has served as senior curator since 2014. Finn, who succeeds Andria Hickey in the role, will develop the museum’s newly established Gund Foundation Curatorial Fellowship, which will offer a two-year opportunity for emerging curators from less represented communities in contemporary art.
“Courtenay joins MOCA at an auspicious moment, as the Museum approaches its 50th Anniversary,” said Jill Snyder, the museum’s executive director,

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September 21, 2018 at 2:25pm

CSU Long Beach Museum Director Kimberli Meyer To Appeal Her Dismissal

Kimberli Meyer, the former executive director of California State University, Long Beach’s University Art Museum, plans to appeal her September 11 dismissal, reports ARTnews. The firing came six days before the opening of lauren woods’s “American MONUMENT,” a project that Meyer initiated with woods and collaborators to address white supremacy, police violence, and anti-blackness. “When I asked them why they said, ‘Well you’re an at-will employee so we don’t have to tell you why,’” Meyer said of her dismissal. “So it’s a big question mark to me. [Departmental leadership] came in and I had to

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September 21, 2018 at 1:01pm

The Frick Collection May Move to the Met Breuer

Robin Pogrebin of the New York Times writes that New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is in discussions to turn over the Met Breuer to the Frick Collection. The venture would begin in 2020. For the Met, the transition marks a change from using the Met Breuer as a temporary exhibition space for modern and contemporary art to expanding that kind of programming in its Fifth Avenue location. “Our future is in the main building,” Daniel Weiss, the Met’s president and chief executive, said.
Ian Wardropper, the Frick’s director, said of the change that “It gives us a chance to think ahead when it comes

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September 21, 2018 at 12:39pm

Berlin Officials Squash Artists’ Plans to Recreate Berlin Wall

An art project and “social experiment” by filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky and the cultural programming organization Berliner Festspiele that intended to reconstruct the Berlin Wall twenty-nine years after its fall has been cancelled by officials two weeks before the installation’s premiere in the German capital. The organizers had planned to install the barrier in the city’s central Mitte neighborhood with the aim of creating a totalitarian experience for visitors. As the first of three iterations of the project, the Berlin tour had been slated to open for four weeks on October 12 under the title

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September 20, 2018 at 5:58pm

Walker Art Center Appoints John Christakos President of the Board of Trustees

Designer John Christakos has been named Walker Art Center’s board of trustees president. Christakos was previously vice president of the board. Other board appointments include Patrick Peyton, of investment consulting firm Peyton Group, as vice president; John P. Whaley, formerly of private equity firm Northwest Equity Partners, as treasurer; and Teresa Rasmussen, of Thrivent Financial, as secretary.
Christakos cofounded the Minneapolis–based modern design studio and furniture manufacturer Blu Dot in 1996 and has served as its CEO since its founding. Blu Dot’s designs have been shown at the Museum

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September 20, 2018 at 5:07pm

Larissa Sansour to Represent Denmark in 2019 Venice Biennale

Danish-Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour, whose practice comprises film, photography, installation, and sculpture, has chosen to represent Denmark at the 2019 Venice Biennale, reports Dutch magazine Metropolis M. The Danish Pavilion will be curated by Nat Muller. Sansour, who was born in 1973 in East Jerusalem, often addresses conflicts in and around Palestine in works set in a science-fiction universe. Her most recent exhibition was at Beirut’s Dar El-Nimer gallery, and she has also shown in Liverpool, Rome, Dubai, London, and Madrid, among other cities.
“It is a huge honor for me to represent

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September 20, 2018 at 12:00pm

Dealer Jane Lombard Donates $5 Million to Vera List Center for Art and Politics

Dealer Jane Lombard has bestowed the Vera List Center for Art and Politics with $5 million, a gift which will in part fund the center’s biennial $25,000 prize awarded to a social justice–oriented artist or group. The prize, which was established during the center’s twentieth anniversary in the 2012–2013 school year, intends to augment the impact of the recipient’s practice, and is complemented by a publication, conference, exhibition, and additional programming. Maria Thereza Alves was the 2016–2018 recipient of the award, which will be renamed the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice.

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September 20, 2018 at 11:45am

Russian Officials Shut Down Gulag Museum

Russian authorities have reportedly shut down the regional Memorial National Museum of Gulag History in the western city of Yoshkar-Ola in what its founder claims is the country’s latest effort to expunge the horrors of Soviet imprisonment. Pressured to vacate, museum founder Nikolay Arakcheev packed up the volunteer-run institution’s collection in mid-August, reports Sophia Kishkovsky of The Art Newspaper. The 5,000 objects had been housed in a former headquarters and torture chamber of the Ogpu, a secret police that preceded the KGB—it was until recently the only Gulag museum out of

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September 20, 2018 at 8:45am

Arthur Mitchell (1934–2018)

Arthur Mitchell, charismatic trailblazer of modern dance and founder of the Dance Theater of Harlem, died yesterday from complications related to heart failure in New York City, where he lived. He was eighty four.
Mitchell was born in Harlem in 1934 and studied jazz, tap, and modern dance at the High School of the Performing Arts. When Lincoln Kirstein, a cofounder of City Ballet, saw his graduation performance, he decided to fund his scholarship to the City Ballet–affiliate School of American Ballet, where he started learning ballet in 1952 at the late age of eighteen. Three years later, he

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