News

  • Installation view of “Leonora Carrington: The Story of the Last Egg,” a Gallery Wendi Norris offsite exhibition at 926 Madison Avenue in New York, NY, until June 29. Photo: Dan Bradica.
    June 19, 2019 at 2:55pm

    Art Dealers Association of America Welcomes Eight New Member Galleries

    The Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) has annoucned that eight new galleries have joined the ranks of the nonprofit organization. Its new members are Avery Galleries (New York and Bryn Mawr), Kavi Gupta (Chicago), David Kordansky Gallery (Los Angeles), Monique Meloche Gallery (New York), Carolina Nitsch (New York), Gallery Wendi Norris (San Francisco), Ricco/Maresca Gallery (New York), and Leon Tovar Gallery (New York). 

    “The greatest strength of the association is the depth and breadth of our members’ collective expertise, relationships, and advancement of scholarship,” said ADAA president

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  • The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
    June 19, 2019 at 1:45pm

    MFA Boston Announces Curatorial Appointments

    The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) has named Christopher Atkins the inaugural director of its Center for Netherlandish Art. Established following a transformative gift from longtime MFA supporters Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo and Susan and Matthew Weatherbie in 2017, the new research center is dedicated to scholarship on Dutch and Flemish art of the early modern period and will launch in 2020. Atkins comes to the institution from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he serves as associate curator of European painting and sculpture before 1900 and manager of its curatorial digital program

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  • Dominik Lejman, Portrait of a Philosopher (Warren Niesluchowski), 2012–13, acrylic on canvas, video projection, 3'.
    June 19, 2019 at 11:55am

    Warren Niesluchowski (1946–2019)

    Warren Niesluchowski, a translator, writer, and nomad who made himself welcome around the globe, has died. He was seventy-two. Niesluchowski, who befriended, collaborated, and shared his erudition with countless artists, was known as an enduringly unfixed artworld fixture whose transient lifestyle—which often depended on serendipitous generosity—inspired philosophical questions for many about home, exile, and family, and led at least one critic to consider Niesluchowski’s entire existence a kind of artwork.

    Born in 1946 to a Polish couple in a displaced persons camp in Altenstadt,

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  • June 19, 2019 at 11:39am

    Whitney Museum Deputy Director Donna De Salvo to Step Down

    The Whitney Museum of American Art announced today that Donna De Salvo has resigned from her position of deputy director for international initiatives and senior curator. De Salvo most recently organized the blockbuster exhibition “Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again,” which premiered at the Whitney in November 2018 and is currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her last day at the institution will be July 1.

    “Donna De Salvo has played an indispensable role in helping to set the foundations for the Whitney as it now exists,” museum director Adam D. Weinberg said in

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  • Görgün Taner, the general director of the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts; Bige Örer, the International Istanbul Biennial director; and Nicolas Bourriaud, the curator of the 16th edition, at a press conference for the 2019 biennial. Photo: Ilgin Erarslan Yanmaz. Courtesy of the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts.
    June 19, 2019 at 9:30am

    Istanbul Biennial Releases Artist List for Sixteenth Edition

    The Istanbul Biennial has announced that fifty-seven artists and collectives from twenty-six countries, including Argentina, Iran, South Korea, and the United States, will participate in its sixteenth, which will open on September 14 and run through November 10. Curated by French scholar, curator, and critic, Nicolas Bourriaud, the current director of the Montpellier Contemporain, “The Seventh Continent” take place across three locations: the Istanbul Shipyards, the Pera Museum, and Büyükada Island.

    “The Seventh Continent is an anthropology of an off-centered world and an archaeology of our

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  • Interior of the Jewish Museum, Berlin.
    June 18, 2019 at 3:32pm

    Director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum Resigns Following Backlash over BDS-Related Tweet

    Peter Schäfer, the director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, resigned following backlash to a tweet posted on the official museum Twitter account that critiqued the German parliament’s recent designation of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel as anti-Semitic.

    Posted on June 6, the tweet links to a Tageszeitung article on an open letter urging parliament not to pass the motion. Signed by 240 Israeli and Jewish academics—many of whom specialize in Jewish history and studies—the letter reads, “The conflation of BDS with anti-Semitism does not advance the

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  • Kim Kanatani. Courtesy of Kim Kanatani.
    June 18, 2019 at 12:38pm

    Kim Kanatani Named Director of the UCI Institute and Museum for California Art

    Kim Kanatani has been appointed the inaugural director of the UCI Institute and Museum for California Art (UCI IMCA) at the University of California, Irvine. Kanatani comes to the UCI IMCA from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where she has served as deputy director and director of education. The university only established the museum—which serves as the home of collector Gerald Buck’s holdings of more than 3,200 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper—in 2017.

    “UCI has been a leader in the arts since the day our students and faculty first walked onto campus, and with

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  • Robert Therrien, Table and Four Chairs, 2012.
    June 18, 2019 at 12:15pm

    Robert Therrien (1947–2019)

    American artist Robert Therrien, whose exaggeratedly oversize sculptures of quotidian objects toyed with viewers’ sense of scale and time, has died. He was seventy-one years old.

    “Everyone, at some point in his or her childhood, sought refuge (for real or for fun) beneath the canopy of a table, and the disorienting mix of security and infantilization that this work produces makes for a surprisingly powerful bit of sculptural memory theater that inspires more than just simple admiration for Therrien’s extraordinary technical skill,” wrote Jeffrey Kastner in the September 2008 issue of Artforum.

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  • Serpentine Gallery. Photo: Alexander Baxevanis.
    June 18, 2019 at 11:29am

    Serpentine Galleries Chief Executive Officer Yana Peel Resigns Amid Controversy

    Yana Peel, the chief executive officer of the Serpentine Galleries in London, stepped down on Tuesday, days after The Guardian reported that her husband’s investment company, Novalpina Capital, purchased a controlling stake in an Israeli cybersecurity firm whose software has been used by governments to track dissidents.

    “In light of a concerted lobbying campaign against my husband’s recent investment, I have taken the decision to step down as CEO of the Serpentine Galleries,” Peel said in a statement. “I am saddened to find myself in this position. I have dedicated the majority of my professional

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  • Kevin Killian. Photo: Daniel Nicoletta.
    June 17, 2019 at 5:00pm

    Kevin Killian (1952–2019)

    Kevin Killian, a poet, novelist, playwright, art critic, scholar, prolific Amazon reviewer, and collaborator and friend to scores of artists, has died. Considered a pioneer of queer literature, Killian was a central figure of San Francisco’s New Narrative movement, which he once said was “not so much a style as a way of living in the world.” Killian wrote and edited poetry and short story collections—including I Cry Like a Baby (2001), Action Kylie (2008), and Tweaky Village (2014)—essays, three novels, a memoir, and more than fifty plays for the San Francisco Poets Theater on topics

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  • Patrick Drahi.
    June 17, 2019 at 10:29am

    Media Mogul Patrick Drahi Buys Sotheby’s Auction House for $3.7 Billion

    Sotheby’s, the only major publicly traded auction house, will be acquired by BidFair USA, owned by collector and telecommunications entrepreneur Patrick Drahi, in a deal worth $3.7 billion. Under the merger agreement, which was announced by Sotheby’s earlier today, stakeholders will receive $57 in cash per share of common stock. If approved, the transition will mark the 275-year-old auction house’s return to private ownership after thirty-one years on the New York Stock Exchange.

    “Patrick Drahi is one of the most well-regarded entrepreneurs in the world, and on behalf of everyone at Sotheby’s,

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  • Volksbühne Theater, Berlin.
    June 17, 2019 at 10:12am

    René Pollesch to Head Berlin’s Volksbühne Theater

    Berlin’s Culture Senator Klaus Lederer announced on Wednesday that René Pollesch has been appointed the next artistic director of the city’s Volksbühne Theater. He will take the helm of the institution in 2021. The fifty-six-year-old playwright and director was born in Friedberg, Germany, in the state of Hesse, in 1962. Over the course of his career, he has worked in a number of major theater houses in Stuttgart, Hamburg, Vienna, and Frankfurt, in addition to Berlin, where he recently staged Cry Baby and Black Maria at the Deutsches Theater.

    Pollesch had also collaborated with the former artistic

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