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May 18, 2022 at 6:33pm

Sandra Benites, MASP’s First Indigenous Curator, Quits amid Censorship Kerfuffle

Sandra Benites, a member of the Guaraní Ñandeva people who in 2019 became the first Indigenous curator hired by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), has resigned from the institution after officials there declined to show a half dozen works depicting the left-leaning Landless Workers Movement (MST) in an exhibition she was co-organizing. The six photos showed members of the Marxist-influenced group, which for more than thirty years has supported the redistribution of land as a way of rectifying wealth disparity, and were to have appeared in “Retomadas” (Resumptions), a

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May 18, 2022 at 4:11pm

Warhol Foundation Commits $350,000 to Ukrainian Emergency Relief

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts today announced that it is committing $350,000 to four agencies supplying emergency relief to the visual arts community in Ukraine. The funding comes as Russia continues its unprovoked attack on Ukraine, launched in February and resulting in tremendous devastation across the country, with some twelve million citizens displaced. Among the efforts the money will sustain are those intended to bring artists to safety, protect artworks and institutions, and provide arts and culture workers with food, shelter, and medical care.
“As artists and cultural

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May 17, 2022 at 1:05pm

Independent to Launch Fair Devoted to Diversifying the Canon of Twentieth-Century Art

Elizabeth Dee and Matthew Higgs, respectively the founder and the founding curatorial advisor of the New York–based Independent art fair, have announced the launch of a new fair dedicated to twentieth-century art. Slated to run concurrent with the Armory Show, the inaugural edition of Independent 20th Century will take place September 8–11 at the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan. Participation is by invitation only: Some thirty galleries have been asked to display work this year, with a focus on underrepresented artists of the past century.
Dee, who initiated the original Independent

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May 16, 2022 at 4:24pm

Albers Foundation to Establish New Museum in Senegal

The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in conjunction with its own grant-issuing, Senegal-focused nonprofit Le Korsa has announced plans for a new museum in Senegal that will serve as both a community center and an exhibition space for art. Bët-bi, as the institution will be known (the name means “the eye” in the local Wolof language), will also function as a waystation for repatriated objects from museums around the world as they make their way back to their rightful homes. The museum will occupy 10,700 square feet and is being designed by Atelier Masōmī, the architecture firm founded by Mariam

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May 16, 2022 at 2:40pm

Gilane Tawadros to Lead London’s Whitechapel Gallery

Gilane Tawadros has been appointed director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London, where she will take up her new post this October. Tawadros has since 2009 served as chief executive of the London-based Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS), a nonprofit specializing in artists rights management. She succeeds lwona Blazwick, who helmed the Whitechapel for two decades. Blazwick in January announced that she would be stepping down this spring, noting, “As the gallery emerges from the pandemic in a strong financial position and with programs admired and respected around the world, now seems a

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May 13, 2022 at 4:30pm

Stephanie Rosenthal Named Project Director of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

Stephanie Rosenthal has been announced as the new project director of the long-awaited Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a collaboration between Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation that has been in the works for nearly twenty years. Rosenthal will depart Berlin’s Gropius Bau, where she has served since arriving in 2018 as the gallery’s first female director. In her new role with the Guggenheim, she will take charge of the institution’s forecast 2025 opening, working in tandem with Maisa Al Qassimi, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s acting project director for the

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May 12, 2022 at 6:00pm

Suzi Gablik (1934–2022)

Suzi Gablik, an artist, author, and critic who penned the first English-language biography of René Magritte, died May 7 at the age of eighty-seven. In volumes that are still germane today, Gablik took on a diverse range of topics, including the commercialization of art, the relationship between art and the ecological and sociological spheres, and that between art and morality. Gablik firmly believed that artists could be agents of social change, and likewise believed that the term artist itself merited a broad definition. “I’ve always been trying to deconstruct the cultural narrative which pins

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May 12, 2022 at 10:19am

Joan Mitchell Foundation Announces 2022 Artists-in-Residence

The Joan Mitchell Foundation has named twenty-three artists who will be participating in the organization’s artist-in-residence program at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. Five New Orleans–based artists—Jose Cotto, Josiah Gagosian, Gabrielle Garcia Steib, Karla Rosas, and Summer White—were selected for this year’s residencies: They will join eighteen artists from across the nation who were chosen for the program over the past two years. These artists’ participation was necessarily deferred owing to the Covid-19 crisis, which in spring of 2020 temporarily halted in-person residencies at

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May 11, 2022 at 1:07pm

Allison Glenn Named Senior Curator at Public Art Fund

New York’s Public Art Fund today announced that it has hired Allison Glenn to serve as senior curator. Glenn, a curator and writer with extensive experience in the public-art sector, gained broad acclaim for organizing the pathbreaking 2021 exhibition “Promise, Witness, Remembrance” at Louisville, Kentucky’s Speed Art Museum in honor of Breonna Taylor, who was killed by Louisville police in her own apartment during a bungled raid. In her new role, which she will adopt on May 16, Glenn will be responsible for shaping Public Art Fund’s artistic program and for mounting exhibitions in public spaces

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May 11, 2022 at 12:09pm

Pompidou Halts $619,000 Donation from Russian Oligarch Vladimir Potanin

The Centre Pompidou in Paris announced that it was suspending a forthcoming donation of about $619,000 from the foundation of Vladimir Potanin, president of Russia’s Norilsk Nickel and owner of Russian multi-sector conglomerate Interros. The decision to halt transfer of the funds comes as Russia continues its sustained attack on Ukraine. It also follows on the heels of Potanin’s resignation from the board of New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which he tendered just hours after US president Joe Biden publicly announced that the nation’s Justice Department would begin investigating Russian

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May 10, 2022 at 1:38pm

Ruangrupa Addresses Allegations of Anti-Semitism Surrounding Documenta 15

The Indonesian curatorial collective ruangrupa, which is organizing the fifteenth iteration of the Documenta, has published an open letter responding to accusations of anti-Semitism attending the quinquennial. The missive comes on the heels of the curators’ last-minute decision to cancel a series of planned talks meant to address the allegations ahead of the event’s June 18 opening. Titled “We need to talk! Art — Freedom — Solidarity,” the conversations were scheduled to take place May 8, 15, and 22 and were to have featured speakers including Berlin-based Islam scholar Schirin Amir-Moazami;

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May 10, 2022 at 12:19pm

Warhol’s Marilyn Shatters Auction Record for American Artist at $195 Million

Andy Warhol’s 1964 Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, a forty-by-forty-inch silkscreen portrait of Marilyn Monroe, sold for roughly $195 million at an auction held by Christie’s in New York City last night. The amount is the highest ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist, eclipsing the $110.5 million fetched by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 Untitled in 2017. Prior to the sale of the Basquiat painting—whose price remains the highest ever fetched for a work by a Black artist—the record-high figure belonged to another Warhol work, Double Disaster, 1963, which brought $104.5 million in 2013. The

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