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June 30, 2022 at 4:56pm

Berlin to Repatriate of Artifacts from Cameroon, Namibia, and Nigeria

The Prussian Heritage Foundation (SPK), the federal body responsible for overseeing Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, has announced that it has agreed to return objects to Cameroon, Namibia, and Nigeria. The revelation follows months of talks between German museum officials and those from the African nations who will receive the items, which were stolen during Germany’s colonial rule of the continent.
Among the objects being restored to their rightful national owners are twenty-three artefacts, including tools and jewelry, which had been held at the Berlin Ethnological Museum and last month were sent to

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June 30, 2022 at 3:00pm

Ruth Foundation for the Arts Launches $440 Million Philanthropic Effort

The Milwaukee-based Ruth Foundation of the Arts, established with a $440 million endowment from the late bathroom-fixture heiress Ruth DeYoung Kohler II, has announced its presence with an initial $1.25 million in unrestricted grants to seventy-eight unsuspecting US nonprofit arts organizations. The grantees, each of whom received $10,000, $20,000, or $50,000, were chosen by a diverse panel of nearly fifty artists from around the country representing a variety of practices and career stages. Because the grants are invitation-only, many recipients were shocked to learn they were receiving funding.

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June 29, 2022 at 4:40pm

Warhol Foundation Awards Grants Totaling $3.9 Million

The Warhol Foundation today revealed that it will award $3.9 million in grants to fifty US arts organizations scattered across eighteen states and the District of Columbia. Nineteen of those receiving funding are first-time recipients. In order to assure the long-term recovery and continued stability of the arts, which were hard hit by the Covid-19 crisis, the foundation announced that with this round of funding it would continue its practice, established during the pandemic, of allowing grantees to use up to 50 percent of the award money for administrative expenses.
Many of the grantees were

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June 29, 2022 at 11:58am

Met President and CEO Daniel Weiss to Step Down Next Year

Daniel Weiss, president New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art since 2015 and its CEO since 2017, will leave the institution in June 2023. Weiss, whose tenure encompassed the global Covid-19 crisis, the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the financial restructuring of the museum, was known for his levelheaded handling of fiscal and managerial matters. Under Weiss’s leadership, the museum managed to survive financially despite being forced by the pandemic to shutter and lay off staff; the institution additionally stepped up its commitment to staff diversity and committed increased

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June 29, 2022 at 10:56am

Orlando Museum of Art Fires Director Following FBI Raid

Aaron De Groft was dismissed from his post as director and CEO of the Orlando Museum of Art on June 28, just four days after the Federal Bureau of Investigations entered the institution and seized twenty-five works said to have been by Jean-Michel Basquiat over allegations that they are in fact forgeries. The paintings made up the entirety of the exhibition “Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat,” which was to travel to Italy following its slated June 30 closing. According to the New York Times, the firing stemmed from the revelation of a threatening missive from De Groft to an academic involved

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June 27, 2022 at 4:36pm

FBI Seizes Basquiat Works from Orlando Museum of Art

The Federal Bureau of Investigations on June 24 raided the Orlando Museum of Art and carted away twenty-five paintings alleged to have been made by Jean-Michel Basquiat after the works’ authenticity was questioned. The haul comprised the entirety of the works in the show “Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat,” which opened at the Florida museum in February and had been slated to run through June 30. The seizure took place while visitors were in the institution, with the museum closing its doors—and the exhibition—shortly thereafter.
According to multiple sources, officials were acting on

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June 27, 2022 at 4:00pm

Sam Gilliam (1933–2022)

Sam Gilliam, who profoundly reshaped the idea of painting by liberating the canvas from the frame and rendering it in three dimensions, died of kidney disease at his home in Washington, DC, June 25 at the age of eighty-eight. The news was confirmed jointly by Pace Gallery and David Kordansky Gallery, which represent the artist. During a career that spanned seven decades, Gilliam first gained broad recognition in the 1960s and early ’70s for his Beveled-edge paintings and his Drape works, the former featuring canvas that the artist painted with abstract designs before stretching it across a

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June 24, 2022 at 6:13pm

Documenta 15 Curators, Director, Apologize for Inclusion of Work Deemed Anti-Semitic

Indonesian curatorial collective ruangrupa, who organized the recently opened Documenta 15, and Sabine Schormann, the quinquennial’s director, separately issued statements apologizing for the inclusion at the exhibition of a work containing anti-Semitic imagery. People’s Justice, a mural by Indonesian collective Tarang Padi, created in 2002 in response to the violent military dictatorship of Suharto in their home country, was first covered over and then removed after it was discovered to feature two exaggerated and unkind depictions of Jews. One was a clearly labeled Mossad agent with the head

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June 24, 2022 at 4:53pm

Indigenous Tribes to Jointly Manage Bears Ears National Monument

Representatives from five Native American tribes and US government officials on June 22 signed a historic agreement placing Bears Ears National Monument in the joint care of the tribes and the federal government. The Utah park, encompassing roughly 1.8 million acres and comprising red rock canyons and active pasturelands and home to numerous petroglyphs and pictographs, will be comanaged by the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Zuni, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in conjunction with the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management

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June 23, 2022 at 5:15pm

$800,000 Awarded to Six Institutions by Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Foundations

Six cultural institutions have been named as the beneficiaries of an $800,000 grant initiative honoring artists Wolf Kahn (1927–2020) and Emily Mason (1932–2019), who were married for sixty-two years. The grant recipients are Hunter College (Advanced Curatorial Certificate Program), the New York Botanical Garden, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop), and the International Print Center, all in New York, and the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center and the Vermont Studio Center, both in Vermont. Each grantee will receive $100,000. The grants are made jointly by

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June 23, 2022 at 12:05pm

Pasadena ArtCenter College of Design Faculty Unionize, Joining AFT/CFT

The faculty of the Pasadena ArtCenter College of Design earlier this month voted to join AFT/CFT, the California branch of the American Federation of Teachers, which is affiliated with the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Organizations, the largest federation of unions in the United States. The college’s seven hundred full- and part-time faculty members cast their ballots via mail: These were counted on June 21, with sixty percent in favor of unionizing.
The unionization arrived after two years of sustained campaigning by faculty, which was met by the administration with

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June 22, 2022 at 5:28pm

Palais de Tokyo Founder to Lead Fledgling Mexican Culture Center

French critic and curator Jérôme Sans, who twenty years ago cofounded the Palais de Tokyo in Paris with Nicolas Bourriaud, will serve as the inaugural creative director of cultural center Lago/Algo, which opened in February in Mexico City, ArtReview reports. Lago/Algo, which occupies a restored 1964 lakefront pavilion in Chapultepec Park, is a dual-purpose cultural hub, with the Lago space housing a restaurant, and the Algo space serving as an arts venue under the auspices of Mexico City’s Galería OMR. The gallery in a press release referred to Algo as a “vibrant laboratory for new social and

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