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August 07, 2023 at 5:52pm

Fondation Beyeler Ticket Seller Gets Jail Time for Million-Dollar Embezzlement Scheme

A Fondation Beyeler cashier accused of embezzling nearly CHF1 million ($1.15 million) from the popular Basel arts institution has been sentenced by a city court to three years and seven months in prison. The fifty-four-year-old woman was found guilty of having diverted funds from museum ticket sales to her own pockets in a scam perpetrated over the course of more than a decade. She was additionally ordered to pay a fine of roughly $11,500 and to restore the filched francs to the foundation, along with the accrued interest.
The clerk, who was employed at the museum via an outside firm, ISS Facility

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August 03, 2023 at 4:15pm

New York’s JTT Gallery to Permanently Close

Trend-setting New York gallery JTT has announced that it will close its doors August 11, after more than a decade in operation. The group exhibition “Playscape,” currently on view, will be its last. Since its 2011 launch on the Lower East Side, the gallery had been instrumental in igniting or elevating the careers of artists including Anna Sophie-Berger, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Abigail DeVille, King Cobra (née Doreen Lynette Garner), Jamian Juliano-Villani, Sam McKinniss, Sable Elyse Smith, Borna Sammak, Diane Simpson, and Issy Wood. JTT last year moved to the newly hot art zone of TriBeCa, where

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August 03, 2023 at 1:51pm

Iwona Blazwick Named Curator of 18th Istanbul Biennial

Curator, writer, and art historian Iwona Blazwick, chair of the Royal Commission for AlUla’s Public Art Expert Panel in Saudi Arabia and the former longtime director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, will curate the Eighteenth Istanbul Biennial. Slated to take place September 14–November 17, 2024, the Biennial is sponsored by Turkish conglomerate Koç Holding and organized by the nonprofit Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), which additionally stages the city’s film, theater, and music festivals. The event’s theme and participating artists have yet to be announced.
Blazwick raised

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August 03, 2023 at 11:04am

Konrad Klapheck (1935–2023)

German painter Konrad Klapheck, who blended Surrealism and Pop to arrive at eroticized images of machines, died July 30 in Düsseldorf at the age of eighty-eight. He had managed Parkinson’s disease for several years. Klapheck gained acclaim for his depictions of such objects as industrial machinery, technical equipment, and office accoutrements. Rendered in tremendous detail at typically large scale and devoid of all but the simplest backgrounds, these otherwise unremarkable items appeared strangely sensual.
“What makes Klapheck’s pictures compelling is the way the objects he paints are

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August 02, 2023 at 5:28pm

Fifth Kyiv Biennial to Tour Europe

The Kyiv Visual Culture Research Center, organizer of the Fifth Kyiv Biennial, has announced that the event will take place across three Ukrainian cities and will examine themes of combat and displacement. Titled “Against the Logic of War,” the event will additionally travel to Vienna, Warsaw, and Berlin. Owing to its wide-ranging nature, the Biennial is being reframed as a “perennial” European event meant to point up international solidarity and to bring together Ukrainian artists from across the continent to which many of them arrived comparatively recently. The decision to expand the Biennial’s

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August 01, 2023 at 4:28pm

Guggenheim to Bump Admission Price to Among Highest in Nation

New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is set to raise the price of an adult ticket from $25 to $30. The move comes just weeks after the Whitney Museum of American Art announced an identical change in pricing structure and reflects the Guggenheim’s efforts to reckon with diminished attendance in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, and with the costs of a newly unionized staff, as well as with inflation. It also shows the institution to be betting on the loyalty of a smaller, core arts audience, rather than on expanding its reach to less affluent audiences with less focused interests.
“As we recover

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July 31, 2023 at 11:48am

Eva Respini to Lead Curatorial Programs at Vancouver Art Gallery

Closely watched curator Eva Respini has been named deputy director and director of curatorial programs at the Vancouver Art Gallery, effective August 1. Respini earlier this spring left her role as chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, after eight years at the institution. She will take over from interim chief curator Diana Freundl and, alongside CEO Anthony Kiendl, will shepherd the museum’s move to its new Herzog & de Meuron–designed home. The yet-to-be-constructed building is set to welcome its new tenant in 2028.
“The Vancouver Art

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July 28, 2023 at 6:12pm

British Museum Director Hartwig Fischer to Depart in 2024

Hartwig Fischer, the German art historian who since April 2016 has served as director of the British Museum, will depart the London institution in 2024. The museum will begin a search for his replacement this fall. At the time of Fischer’s arrival, the museum’s historic home was in dire need of renovation. Fischer worked for years to come up with an overarching plan for the restoration, the details of which are to be revealed this fall, followed by the launch of an international competition to determine which architect will perform the overhaul.
“In 2016, I was called to the British Museum to

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July 27, 2023 at 5:09pm

Zwirner Drops Piano in Chelsea

David Zwirner gallery is abandoning plans for a new $50 million Renzo Piano–designed headquarters on West Twenty-First Street in New York’s Chelsea district in favor of an Annabelle Selldorf–designed flagship on Nineteenth Street, the New York Times reports. Gallery owner David Zwirner pointed to a developer's “financial headwinds during Covid” as part of the reason for the switch. Of note, though the location, architect, and plan for the project changed, the price did not.
Zwirner back in 2018 revealed plans to build a five-story, 50,000-square-foot structure on a corner lot at 540 West Twenty-First

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July 27, 2023 at 3:21pm

MoMA Trustee Leon Black Accused of Raping Autistic Teen

Billionaire collector Leon Black, a former board chair of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and since 1997 a trustee of that institution, is being sued over allegations that he raped an autistic teenage girl at the Manhattan home of financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for Southern New York on July 25, the complainant, a woman in her thirties identified only as Jane Doe, offered horrific details of an encounter she says took place at Epstein’s East Seventy-First Street town house when she was sixteen.
According to the suit, the complainant,

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July 27, 2023 at 2:42pm

Jeffrey Gibson to Represent US at 2024 Venice Biennale

Multimedia artist Jeffrey Gibson, whose practice integrates Native American, queer, and American histories and perspectives alongside tropes of pop culture to explore issues of identity, will represent the United States at the Sixtieth Venice Biennale, to take place April 20–November 24, 2024. Gibson, who is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee heritage, is the first Indigenous artist to have a solo exhibition at the US Pavilion since the Biennale’s founding in 1895.
Curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby, curator of Native American Art at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon,

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July 26, 2023 at 5:01pm

Tsugumi Maki to Lead RISD Museum

The RISD Museum has announced Tsugumi Maki as its next director. Maki, who will assume her new post at the Providence, Rhode Island institution on October 10, is currently chief exhibitions and collections officer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She arrives to the job with twenty-five years of experience in the museum field.
“I am thrilled to welcome Tsugumi to RISD as our next museum director,” said Rhode Island School of Design president Crystal Williams in a statement. “During our search process, I was struck by her expertise, her inclusive and collaborative leadership style and

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