News

  • Stephanie Comilang. Photo: Leroy Schulz. Courtesy of the Sobey Art Award.
    November 18, 2019 at 6:00am

    Stephanie Comilang Wins 2019 Sobey Art Award

    Stephanie Comilang has been named the winner of this year’s Sobey Art Award. The prestigious $76,000 prize, which recognizes Canadian artists who are forty years or younger, is presented annually by the National Gallery of Canada and the Sobey Art Foundation. The thirty-nine-year-old Filipina-Canadian artist, who represents the Ontario region, was honored in a ceremony at the Art Gallery of Alberta on November 15. 

    “Representation is everything,” said Comilang. “Can we see ourselves in the wider world? Winning the Sobey Art Award and representing a demographic that looks like me hopefully lets

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  • Exhibition view, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” 2019, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
    November 15, 2019 at 4:27pm

    New Software Tracks Gender Gap in Museum Collections

    The Madrid-based visual arts advocacy nonprofit Mujeres en las Artes Visuales (MAV) will launch a tool next year that allows museums to parse the gender and racial breakdown of their holdings and acquisitions. The digital service, developed by art and gender equality expert Marian López Fernández-Cao and sociologist Alma Porta Lledó, will also offer information on the varying amounts of real estate works are accorded by demographics, as well as recommendations on how to promote greater gender equality.

    A recent report conducted by Artnet and the art advisory firm Art Agency Partners showed that

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  • Aimée Chan-Lindquist. Courtesy of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation.
    November 15, 2019 at 1:14pm

    Aimée Chan-Lindquist Appointed Executive Director of Rema Hort Mann Foundation

    The Rema Hort Mann Foundation announced today that Aimée Chan-Lindquist has been named the foundation’s next executive director. Chan-Lindquist comes to the foundation from the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York, where she served as director of advancement. Previously, she held senior positions at the Museum of Design Atlanta as well as at Art in General and Exit Art, which are both in New York, and was director of the Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica, California.

    Chan-Lindquist will oversee the foundation’s mission of honoring the legacy of Rema Hort Mann by directly

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  • A bronze head from the Kingdom of Benin, now Nigeria, from the collection of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg. Photo: MKG Hamburg.
    November 15, 2019 at 12:10pm

    Open Society Pledges $15 Million in Support of Restituting African Artifacts

    The Open Society Foundations, the grantmaking organization founded by financier-philanthropist George Soros, has pledged $15 million over four years toward grassroots, institutional, and governmental efforts to return looted cultural artifacts to African nations.

    “The legacy of colonial violence has deep implications for the ways that racism and imbalances of power are perpetuated today,” said Open Society president Patrick Gaspard. “This isn’t just about returning pieces of art, but about restoring the very essence of these cultures. We are proud to support this movement towards reconciling

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  • Rembrandt van Rijn, A Woman Bathing in a Stream, 1654.
    November 15, 2019 at 11:50am

    Police Thwart Theft of Two Rembrandts in London Exhibition

    An unidentified suspect targeted two Rembrandt paintings in an attempted theft at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery on Wednesday night, reports The Guardian.

    The police said the intruder forced their way into the “Rembrandt’s Light” exhibition galleries half an hour to midnight on November 13. A new state-of-the-art alarm system installed for the exhibition notified security, reports Artnet, and the authorities arrived quickly to the scene. The suspect sprayed a canister of an unknown substance into an officer’s face and was able to get away, though no one suffered serious injuries and both

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  • Michelle Müntefering at the 2019 Wikimedia Summit in Berlin. Photo: Jason Krüger/Wikipedia.
    November 15, 2019 at 11:50am

    German Politician Calls for Public Monument Honoring Migrant Workers

    To commemorate the migrant workers who came to Germany in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s as so-called Gastarbeiter (guest workers), the German minister of state for international cultural politics, Michelle Müntefering, has demanded that a monument be erected in their honor, reports Monopol. 

    In a speech given during the KulturInvest! Kongress, an annual European cultural forum that addresses topics ranging from cultural policy and management to tourism, in Essen on November 7, Müntefering emphasized the achievements of migrants and their contributions to Germany’s economic growth and prosperity.

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  • Donna De Salvo. Photo: Matthew Carasella Photography.
    November 15, 2019 at 10:40am

    Dia Art Foundation Names Donna De Salvo Senior Adjunct Curator

    Dia Art Foundation has appointed Donna De Salvo senior adjunct curator of special projects. De Salvo most recently served as deputy director of international initiatives and senior curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she worked for over fifteen years and helped the institution prepare for its move to its new home in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.

    Prior to joining the Whitney in 2004, De Salvo was senior curator at Tate Modern in London. She also served as curator at large at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus; curator at the Parrish Art Museum

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  • Nicole Eisenman, Going Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass, 2017. Photo: Nicole Eisenman. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, Vielmetter Los Angeles, and Anton Kern Gallery, New York.
    November 15, 2019 at 5:00am

    Frieze Los Angeles Announces 2020 Exhibitors, Nicole Eisenman Joins Hauser & Wirth, and More

    Frieze Los Angeles has revealed that more than seventy galleries will participate in its 2020 edition, which is taking place at Paramount Pictures Studios from February 14 to February 16. It is also introducing a new feature section devoted to emerging LA galleries, Focus LA, which will be curated by Rita Gonzalez, the curator and head of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Among the galleries joining the fair for the first time are David Lewis, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Gladstone Gallery, Goodman Gallery, House of Gaga, Skarstedt, and Xavier Hufkens.

    Frieze Projects, the

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  • Shoji Sadao.
    November 14, 2019 at 5:24pm

    Shoji Sadao (1926–2019)

    Architect Shoji Sadao, a longtime collaborator of polymaths Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi and the former director of the Noguchi Foundation from 1988 to 2003, died on November 3 in Tokyo. He was ninety-two years old.

    Sadao began his creative partnership with Fuller while at Cornell University’s school of architecture in the early 1950s, and for decades henceforth he brought Fuller’s ideas to practical fruition, including a twenty-story, 250-foot-diameter geodesic dome for the United States pavilion at Montreal’s 1967 International and Universal Exposition. In the November 2008 issue of 

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  • Ashley James. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
    November 14, 2019 at 4:36pm

    Guggenheim Museum Appoints Ashley James Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

    The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has named Ashley James as its new associate curator of contemporary art. James most recently served as assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she was the lead curator for “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” (2018–19) and organized “Eric N. Mack: Lemme Walk Across the Room” (2019). She is currently cocurating the forthcoming exhibition “John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance.”

    “Ashley is a curator who has demonstrated incisive and intersectional thinking about contemporary artistic practice,” Nancy Spector, artistic

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  • Joana Choumali, Ça va aller (it will be ok), 2019. Photo: Prix Pictet.
    November 14, 2019 at 2:27pm

    Joana Choumali Wins Eighth Prix Pictet

    The Ivorian photographer Joana Choumali has been named the eighth winner of the Prix Pictet, a global award for photography that was established by the Prix Pictet group in 2008 to draw attention to issues of sustainability. The theme of this year’s award was hope. Choumali, the first African artist to win the award, was presented with the prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on Wednesday night. The ceremony marked the opening of an exhibition of works by all twelve of the shortlisted artists.

    Choumali was selected for her series “Ça va aller (it will be ok),” which was taken three

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  • The 2019 Awards for Artists recipients. Photo: Emile Holba. Courtesy of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
    November 14, 2019 at 1:20pm

    Paul Hamlyn Foundation Names 2019 Recipients of Awards for Artists

    The Paul Hamlyn Foundation (PHF), one of the largest independent grantmakers in the UK, has announced this year’s recipients of its Awards for Artists, which provide financial assistance to visual artists and composers. Each awardee will be given a total of $77,000 over the course of three years.

    “A lot has changed since we set up Awards for Artists twenty-five years ago, but one thing hasn’t changed—the environment for artists is tough,” said Jane Hamlyn, chair of the foundation and chair of the visual arts judging panel. “The PHF awards give exceptional artists and composers an invaluable

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