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December 02, 2021 at 5:00pm

Belfast’s Activist Array Collective Wins Britain’s Turner Prize

Belfast’s eleven-member Array Collective, whose work centers around issues such as abortion rights, queer liberation, and social welfare, was named the winner of Britain’s Turner Prize at a December 1 ceremony taking place at London’s Coventry Cathedral and administered by Tate museums. The prize, awarded annually to a UK visual and considered one of the world’s most prestigious, includes a $33,000 stipend.
This year marked the first time since the prize’s 1984 founding that all shortlisted nominees were collectives. The other four groups elected—all with a social-activist bent—were London’s

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December 02, 2021 at 3:45pm

Lawrence Weiner (1942–2021)

Lawrence Weiner, a towering figure in the Conceptual art movement arising in the 1960s and who profoundly altered the landscape of American art, died December 2 at the age of seventy-nine. Known for his text-based installations incorporating evocative or descriptive phrases and sentence fragments, typically presented in bold capital letters accompanied by graphic accents and occupying unusual sites and surfaces, Weiner rose to prominence among a cohort that included Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, and Sol LeWitt. A firm believer that an idea alone could constitute an artwork, he

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December 02, 2021 at 1:03pm

Oman National Pavilion to Debut at Venice Biennale

Oman will present its first-ever Venice Biennale national pavilion this spring at the event’s fifty-ninth iteration, taking place April 23–November 27, 2022. Curated by art historian Aisha Stoby, whose area of expertise is the modern art of Oman and the Middle East, the multimedia exhibition will feature the work of five artists spanning three generations: painter Anwar Sonya, known as the godfather of Oman’s contemporary art scene; photographer and abstract artist Hassan Meer, founder of experimental collective the Circle; photographer and videographer Budoor Al Riyami; sculptor and textile

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December 01, 2021 at 12:09pm

Metropolitan Museum of Art to Renovate Modern Wing with $125 Million Gift

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announced yesterday that it had received a pledge of $125 million from activist collectors Oscar Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang. The promised gift is the largest monetary donation in the history of the institution, and is earmarked for the renovation of the museum’s Modern Wing, which will expand to include 80,000 square feet of exhibition and public space and will be rechristened the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing.
The Met has sought for more than a decade to renovate its Modern Wing. “The reimagining of these galleries will allow the Museum to approach

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December 01, 2021 at 11:14am

Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Announces 2021 Grantees

The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant has named the twenty writers who are the recipients of its 2021 grants, which total $695,000. The grantees work across three categories—articles, books, and short-form writing—and each will receive an award of between $15,000 and $50,000. The grants, administered by Creative Capital, are issued in support of contemporary-art writing and are meant to foster critical writing in relation to the visual arts. Work considered ranges from brief reviews in magazines or newspapers to in-depth book-length studies, on topics aimed at both general and special-interest

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November 30, 2021 at 11:50am

David Zwirner Taps Lihua Tung to Lead Hong Kong Outpost

New York–based gallery David Zwirner has announced Lihua Tung as the new director of its Hong Kong location. Since February 2020 a senior director and senior specialist of twentieth-century and contemporary art at Phillips auction house in Hong Kong, Tung will work in tandem with the outpost’s senior director, Leo Xu. The pair are charged with expanding the gallery’s presence in exhibitions and fairs across Asia. Tung, who prior to her arrival at Phillips spent nearly a dozen years specializing in contemporary art at the Hong Kong and Taiwan outposts of storied auction house Christie’s, will

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November 30, 2021 at 11:10am

Robert Farris Thompson (1932–2021)

Art historian Robert Farris Thompson, renowned for his extensive and luminous writing on the art of Africa and the Afro-Atlantic and for his lively lecturing on the topic, died November 28 at the age of eighty-eight. The news was confirmed by his daughter, Alicia Thompson Churchill. Thompson, who minted the term “Black Atlantic,” devoted his life to the study of African art history, of which he was one of the world’s foremost scholars. His pathbreaking book Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, an investigation of the trajectory of the visual arts and philosophies

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November 30, 2021 at 9:08am

Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco Announces Key Hires, Inaugural Programs

The Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco (ICA SF), a new noncollecting art museum slated to open in summer 2022, has announced four hires to crucial positions and has revealed plans for its inaugural exhibition. Situated in the city’s trendy Dogpatch neighborhood and occupying a refurbished 11,000-square-foot 1940 brick building that was once home to a paint company, the museum will begin welcoming the public in January with a three-month series of pop-up exhibitions by Bay Artists before officially opening in September with a major exhibition of work by Choctaw-Cherokee artist Jeffrey

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November 29, 2021 at 4:11pm

Virgil Abloh (1980–2021)

Visionary designer and artist Virgil Abloh, who built a clothing empire based on the Duchampian notion that an original design need be altered only 3 percent in order to stand as new, died in Chicago on November 28 of cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare form of cancer. He was forty-one years old. Trained as an architect, Abloh turned his attention to clothing after a Rem Koolhaas–designed building he spied being constructed on a college campus inspired him to apply the strictures of architecture to the structure of garments. The founder of unicorn fashion house Off-White, renowned for consistently

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November 24, 2021 at 5:35pm

The Met Repatriates Looted Benin and Ife Works

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has officially restituted three objects in its collection to Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM). The Met had promised to return the objects this past June, and did so in a ceremony in New York on Monday, where the museum also signed an agreement promising to collaborate with the Nigerian government on future scholarship and loans of other artwork. Under this arrangement, the Met will lend some of its holdings to several Nigerian museums, including the planned Edo Museum of West African Art in Benin City. In exchange, the NCMM will

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November 23, 2021 at 5:18pm

Brooklyn Museum Receives Historic $50 Million Gift from New York City

A $50 million gift to the Brooklyn Museum announced yesterday by outgoing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio marks the largest donation in the museum’s history. The windfall from the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs is the upshot of the shrewd politicking from Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak, who came to de Blasio in June 2020 with the request, The New York Times reports.
“Our exhibitions and public programs have been embracing ideas for twenty-first century museums, but our building is absolutely mired in the 19th century. So it’s time to catch up,” she told the Times. The museum’s

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November 23, 2021 at 12:09pm

Frieze Appoints Christine Messineo Director of US Fairs

Frieze organizers have hired art dealer Christine Messineo to direct its two annual US events, Frieze Los Angeles and Frieze New York. Messineo will take up her position on November 29, two months before Frieze LA opens its third edition next February in a new Beverly Hills venue.
While her first job at an art fair, Messineo is no stranger to their booths. Previously a partner at New York’s Bortolami gallery from 2009 to 2015, Messineo moved to LA in to become a director at Hannah Hoffman Gallery. In 2020, she was named executive director of the Plan Your Vote initiative, whose campaigns used

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