News

October 27, 2020 at 6:37pm

NYU Professors Accuse Zoom of Censoring Political Speech

Video conferencing provider Zoom shut down a New York University webinar about censorship by tech platforms, including Zoom, that was being held via the service, according to a statement released late last week by the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
The October 23 online seminar, which was subsequently held privately and recorded, was specifically about Zoom’s censorship of a San Francisco State University Zoom event featuring Palestinian rights advocate Leila Khaled. NYU’s webinar was sponsored by the university’s Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic

Read more
October 27, 2020 at 3:15pm

Art X Lagos Postponed in Solidarity with Those Protesting Police Brutality in Nigeria

Leading West African art fair Art X Lagos, scheduled to run from November 5 through November 16, has been indefinitely postponed in solidarity with those fighting police brutality in Nigeria, Artnet News reports.
“We are vehemently against police brutality and fully support those who are against a system that denies essential civil liberties, freedom, and opportunity to its people,” said fair founder Tokini Peterside in a statement. Continuing peaceful protests, under the rubric #EndSARS, broke out against Nigeria’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad on October 8 in response to the unit’s abuse of power,

Read more
October 26, 2020 at 6:40pm

Frederick Weston (1946–2020)

Artist, fashion designer, and poet Frederick Weston, who explored the queer body, mass media, and accumulation in elaborately intimate collages and designs, has died of cancer at seventy-four years old. A longtime member of Visual AIDS and a self-professed attendee of “Clutters Anonymous,” Weston lived and worked in New York with an impressive collection of both paper and fabric ephemera for fifty years.
Born in Memphis in 1946, Weston, whose family moved north during the Great Migration, was raised in Detroit by his young mother, Freda, and his grandparents. He first learned how to sew by watching

Read more
October 26, 2020 at 1:23pm

Baltimore Museum of Art Loses $50 Million Planned Gift Over Deaccession

The furor over the Baltimore Museum of Art’s (BMA) deaccessioning of three major works—by Brice Marden, Clyfford Still, and Andy Warhol—continues, with two former board chairs announcing the withdrawal of planned gifts totaling $50 million, and two artists resigning from the institution’s board of trustees.
Stiles Colwill and Charles Newhall III said that they would cancel their pledged gifts, of $20 million and $30 million, respectively, in protest of the sales, with Newhall additionally resigning as honorary trustee. Colwill, whose planned gift comprised the entire value of his estate, told

Read more
October 26, 2020 at 11:43am

Kochi-Muziris Biennale Postponed to 2021

The fifth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which was to open December 12 of this year, has been pushed back to November 1, 2021, organizers announced Sunday. Preparations for the four-month-long event were halted during the spring as the Covid-19 pandemic raged in India and across the world, but as recently as August, the biennale advisory committee remained hopeful that with the proper protocols in place the exhibition could still happen. To that end, they continued through the summer and fall to promote exhibiting artists on Instagram and Facebook, and intensified their fundraising

Read more
October 23, 2020 at 4:03pm

Kunstmuseen Krefeld Sued by Heirs for Return of Mondrian Paintings

German institution Kunstmuseen Krefeld is facing a lawsuit filed in US District Court by the heirs of Piet Mondrian demanding restitution of four of the artist’s paintings loaned to the museum in 1929 as well as financial remuneration for four additional works that are alleged to have been sold sometime in the 1950s to pay for acquisitions of new works by Braque, Chagall, Matisse, and Picasso.
The suit was filed by trustees of the Elizabeth McManus Holtzman Irrevocable Trust on behalf of the children of Elizabeth McManus Holtzman and Harry Holtzman, an American abstract artist who brought Mondrian

Read more
October 23, 2020 at 1:24pm

Artist Collective Claims Responsibility for Stolen Beuys Sculpture

German artist collective Frankfurter Hauptschule has announced that its members are responsible for stealing a Joseph Beuys sculpture from an exhibition in Oberhausen, Germany, and delivering it to the Iringa Boma regional museum and cultural center in Tanzania as a “symbolic act of restitution to the former German colony,” Artnews reports.
The group has posted to YouTube a video titled “Bad Beuys Go Africa” that allegedly shows the heist taking place and the sculpture being delivered to the Tanzanian institution, a repurposed military hospital, all to the strains of a choral cover of Toto’s 1982

Read more
October 22, 2020 at 1:49pm

Marian Goodman Gallery to Shutter London Outpost, Launch New Programming Model

Marian Goodman Gallery will close its London venue by the end of the year and implement a different exhibition model in the city, the gallery announced today.
Named Marian Goodman Projects, the new initiative will stage events throughout London in settings intended to complement artists’ individual practices. The enterprise will be helmed by Philipp Kaiser, the gallery’s chief executive director of artists and programs, with its first project opening next autumn. After expanding from her flagship New York location to Paris in 1995, Goodman opened the London outpost—a David Adjaye–renovated

Read more
October 22, 2020 at 12:58pm

Sackler Family Members Settle Purdue Pharma Suit for $225 Million

The US Department of Justice yesterday announced that Sackler family members associated with Purdue Pharma will pay $225 million in civil penalties to settle a federal suit that saw the Stamford, Connecticut–based drug maker charged with aggressively marketing OxyContin and providing kickbacks to doctors who prescribed the powerful opioid, while downplaying the its addictive qualities, resulting in rampant overprescription and an accompanying surge of related addictions and deaths.
The money represents a fraction of the total $8.3 billion settlement, the largest ever involving a pharmaceutical

Read more
October 22, 2020 at 11:29am

Deana Lawson Wins 2020 Hugo Boss Prize

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Hugo Boss today announced Deana Lawson as the winner of the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize. Lawson is the first photographer to win the biennial prize since it was established in 1996 to recognize extraordinary achievements in the field of contemporary art. She will receive $100,000 and a solo show at the Guggenheim in spring 2021.
Known for her highly staged formalist photographs focusing on family, intimacy, sexuality, spirituality, and Black subjectivity, Lawson in college abandoned plans to earn a business degree in order to pursue photography. She has described

Read more
October 21, 2020 at 5:10pm

Three Berlin Museums Targeted in Vandalism Attack

Sixty-three artifacts were damaged in a vandalism spree taking place across three institutions on Berlin’s Museum Island earlier this month, as reported yesterday by German daily Die Zeit and broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. Berlin police have determined that an attacker, or attackers, sprayed an oily substance on objects at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Neues Museum, and Pergamon sometime during 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on October 3, while the institutions were open. Information on the attack was withheld from the public while officials contacted those who had purchased tickets to the three targeted museums

Read more
October 21, 2020 at 1:43pm

Jacob Lawrence Work Missing Since 1960 Discovered by Met Visitor

A painting from Jacob Lawrence’s thirty-panel 1954–56 series “Struggle: From the History of the American People” has been located by a visitor to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Times reported today. A woman attending the Met’s exhibition “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle” noted that five panels were missing from the series and realized that her elderly neighbors might well be the possessors of one of them.
The visitor was correct: The couple, who live on New York’s Upper West Side, within walking distance of the museum, purchased the missing painting, a 1956 work depicting

Read more

1 2 3 4 5 > >>