News

  • The Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts.
    July 22, 2019 at 9:44am

    Worcester Art Museum Gifted $10 Million

    The Worcester Art Museum (WAM) in Massachusetts announced today that it has received a $10 million donation from the C. Jean and Myles McDonough Charitable Foundation—the largest gift in its 123-year history. The foundation also gave the institution a $4 million endowment gift in 2015. Museum director Matthias Waschek told the Boston Globe that Jean and Myles have generously supported the institution as well as other cultural organizations in the city since they moved to Worcester in 1960.

    “On behalf of the Worcester Art Museum, I would like to thank the McDonough family—and Jean in

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  • Emma Lavigne. Photo Manuel Braun.
    July 22, 2019 at 9:22am

    Emma Lavigne to Lead Palais de Tokyo in Paris

    Emma Lavigne has been named the next president of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. She will become the first woman to take the helm of the institution in its seventeen-year history. She comes to the arts center from the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where she has served as director since 2014. Lavigne succeeds Jean de Loisy who departed in December to head the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris’s academy of fine arts.

    Prior to joining Centre Pompidou’s satellite in Metz, Lavigne held positions at the International Council of Museums and the Paris Cité de la Musique. In 2008, she was appointed

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  • Sotheby’s, London.
    July 22, 2019 at 8:33am

    Sotheby’s Shareholders File Lawsuits to Halt Sale of Auction House

    Two Sotheby’s investors, Eli Goffman and Shiva Stein, have filed a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan in an attempt to block the $3.7 billion sale of the auction house to BidFair USA, which is owned by the media mogul and collector Patrick Drahi, Bloomberg reports. The complaints cite “incomplete and misleading disclosures” as the reason behind the legal action and are seeking unspecified damages.

    Sotheby’s was not fazed by the suits. In a statement, the auction house said: “As the vast majority of all public company mergers over $100 million are the subject of shareholder litigation, the

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  • Marisa Merz, untitled, undated, unfired clay, paraffin, copper.
    July 21, 2019 at 4:38pm

    Marisa Merz (1926–2019)

    Marisa Merz, whose intimate art defies category but consistently challenges ideas of femininity in its fragile evocations of the body, has died at age ninety-three. The sculptor was the only woman artist associated with what critic-curator Germano Celant dubbed Arte Povera, or “poor art”—a radical association of avant-gardists in postwar Italy who made meaning from mundane materials and questioned the role of art itself. “Merz condenses forms and meanings and at the same time makes them seem to float free and evaporate,” wrote Ida Panicelli in a review for Artforum’s summer 2007 issue.

    Born

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  • Forensic Architecture, Triple-Chaser (still), 2019.
    July 20, 2019 at 4:30pm

    Forensic Architecture Becomes Eighth Exhibitor to Withdraw from Whitney Biennial

    Forensic Architecture is the latest participant to pull their work from the Whitney Biennial over Warren B. Kanders, the vice chair of the Whitney Museum’s board who is the CEO of Safariland—a global weapons manufacturer whose munitions have been used to suppress protest in at least thirteen countries. Forensic Architecture’s move follows the decision by four artists—Korakrit Arunanondchai, Meriem Bennani, Nicole Eisenman, and Nicholas Galanin—to withdraw on Friday morning and three artist’s decision to withdraw since then: Eddie Arroyo, Christine Sun Kim, and Agustina Woodgate.

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  • The British Museum in London.
    July 19, 2019 at 4:30pm

    British Museum Staffers Express Solidarity with Trustee Who Resigned over BP Sponsorship

    Following novelist Ahdaf Soueif‘s decision to step down from the board of the British Museum in London over its controversial sponsorship agreement with British Petroleum and its silence on issues such as repatriation, museum workers have issued a public statement of support praising the author for speaking out. Soueif announced her exit days after the institution’s director, Hartwig Fischer, revealed that the museum will continue to partner with BP until 2023.

    “Ahdaf’s actions highlight, once again, the troubling nature of the relationship between BP and the arts,” the statement reads. “Through

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  • The Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Karin Jobst.
    July 19, 2019 at 11:55am

    Artists Withdraw from Whitney Biennial as Backlash Builds Against Warren Kanders [UPDATED]

    Four artists—Korakrit Arunanondchai, Meriem Bennani, Nicole Eisenman, and Nicholas Galanin—have withdrawn from the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The reason given is the museum’s failure to address the concerns of staff, artists, and activists over the role of the Whitney’s vice chair, Warren Kanders, as CEO of Safariland, a global defense manufacturer that sells tear gas. The participants in the exhibition, which runs until September 22, signed a letter addressed to the biennial’s curators, Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta, and shared for public release with Artforum, asking for their works

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  • Katharine Mulherin. Photo: Yuula Benivolski.
    July 18, 2019 at 6:20pm

    Katharine Mulherin (1964–2019)

    Gallerist Katharine Mulherin, a champion of Canadian artists for more than two decades, has died. The fifty-four-year-old took her own life on Sunday, July 14. As one of the first to launch an arts space on Queen Street, a major thoroughfare in Toronto, Mulherin is credited with helping to define the city’s arts scene.

    For eighteen years, Mulherin ran her eponymous gallery out of multiple storefronts in Toronto, showcasing emerging Canadian artists including Dean Baldwin, Sojourner Truth Parsons, and Kris Knight alongside international artists. Mulherin was also the proprietor of the now-defunct

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  • Activists protesting the building of the Ilisu Dam in Turkey at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin on Saturday, July 13. Photo: the Initiative to Keep Hasankeyf Alive.
    July 18, 2019 at 3:45pm

    Turkish Artist Zehra Doğan Detained in Berlin

    Artist and activist Zehra Doğan, who was recently incarcerated in Turkey for painting the destruction of a Kurdish city by the military, was detained in Berlin along with several collaborators on Saturday, July 13 for participating in an unauthorized public performance-art piece at the city’s Pergamon Museum.

    Doğan, and the artists Juan Golan Eliberg, Aurélie Gerardin, and Thomas Lamouroux, staged the performance in protest of the imminent flooding and loss of Hasankeyf, an ancient Mesopotamian citadel and settlement in southeastern Turkey, due to the construction of the controversial Ilisu Dam.

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  • Art + Museum Transparency End Unpaid Internships Spreadsheet.
    July 18, 2019 at 2:00pm

    Art-World Salary Spreadsheet Creators Launch Internship Survey

    Michelle Millar Fisher, the Philadelphia Museum of art curator who made a crowdsourced spreadsheet of museum workers’ salaries in order to promote pay transparency in the cultural sector, has created a survey that aims to gather more data on internships in the field.

    In an essay published by Artnews, Fisher and the group Art + Museum Transparency said that shifting their focus to internships was a natural next step, especially since summer is high season for interns. After reviewing the information entered on the Arts + All Museums Salary Transparency spreadsheet, which has almost three thousand

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  • Tobias Ostrander.
    July 18, 2019 at 11:45am

    Pérez Art Museum Miami’s Chief Curator Steps Down

    Tobias Ostrander, who has been chief curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) since 2011, has resigned. Over the years, Ostrander curated numerous exhibitions, including “Beatriz González: A Retrospective” (2019), with Mari Carmen Ramírez; “Ebony G. Patterson: . . . while the dew is still on the roses . . .” (2018–19); and “Meiro Koizumi: Battlelands” (2018); and oversaw the museum’s public programming and other initiatives. “I’m proud of all I did at PAMM,” Ostrander told the Miami Herald. “I’m leaving with a great sense of accomplishment.”

    Prior to joining the museum, Ostrander served as

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  • Mid-America Arts Alliance’s headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri. Photo: Sabatini Architects.
    July 18, 2019 at 11:18am

    Recipients of $20,000 Grants from Mid-America Arts Alliance Announced

    The Mid-America Arts Alliance in Kansas City, Missouri, has named the inaugural artists recognized by its new Interchange program, which supports artist-led projects designed to have a social impact. Hailing from Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, the grantees will each receive $20,000.

    A pilot program funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Interchange was created to help regional artists realize projects that address issues reaching rural and urban communities. The recipients will also have access to the alliance’s network of creative professionals, who may mentor or

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