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January 19, 2022 at 6:30pm

Nathalie Bondil Settles with Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Nathalie Bondil, the former director and chief curator of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) who sued that institution’s board of directors for wrongful termination and defamation following her controversial 2020 firing by board chair Michel de la Chennelière, has reached a settlement with the entity. The amount the board will pay Bondil has not been revealed; in her initial suit, filed this past September in Canada’s Superior Court, she sought a total of $1.5 million, claiming $750,000 for moral damages and $750,000 for punitive damages.
Bondil had worked at the MMFA for more than two

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January 19, 2022 at 5:19pm

Protesting Lockdown Measures, Dutch Museums Open as Gyms, Salons

A number of arts organizations across the Netherlands today opened their doors in entirely new and unexpected capacities today in order to protest what they see as unfair lockdown rules. Under Covid-19 restrictions imposed in December amid yet another virus surge, museums, theaters, concert halls, and cinemas must remain shuttered while nonessential commercial concerns such as gyms, barbershops, brothels, and nail salons were late last week given permission to conduct business within limits imposed by the government.
Among the participants in the protest, which organizers have cast as playful

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January 18, 2022 at 3:57pm

Zdenka Badovinac to Lead Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art

Curator and writer Zdenka Badovinac, who in December 2020 was forced by Slovenia’s new right-wing government from her post as director of Ljubljana’s Moderna Galerija, a position she had held since 1993, has been announced as the new director of the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art (MSU). The news was first reported by Croatian daily Jutarnji List, which noted that she bested all other contenders in an open call for applicants and subsequently won the approval of Zagreb mayor Tomislav Tomašević.
“I was very excited and honored when I received the news,” said Badovinac in a statement published

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January 18, 2022 at 3:17pm

Veteran Director Victoria Siddall Leaves Frieze

Victoria Siddall, board director at Frieze, will depart her role there in March after eighteen years with the organization. Siddall, who cast her decision to step down as a “difficult” one, is the latest high-level staffer to leave the company in the past several years. She follows in the footsteps of Rebecca Ann Siegel, who left as director of the Americas in August 2021; Loring Randolph, who resigned as director of Frieze New York and as artistic director of the Americas in 2020; and Bettina Korek, who departed as executive director of Frieze Los Angeles in 2019 in order to serve as CEO of

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January 17, 2022 at 12:56pm

Tate Liverpool Plans $34 Million Gallery Overhaul

Tate Liverpool has launched a search for an architect to oversee a £25 million ($34 million) restoration of its facilities. The museum occupies a landmark brick structure on the Royal Albert Dock dating to the mid-nineteenth century and designed by Jesse Hartley. The seven-story former warehouse was revamped in the late 1980s by architectural firm Stirling Wilford ahead of Tate Liverpool’s 1988 inauguration there, resulting in the five-story gallery present today. With this latest conversion, the institution hopes to match the “ambition of today’s most exciting artists” and to create an environment

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January 13, 2022 at 2:44pm

Dieter von Graffenried (1953–2021)

Dieter von Graffenried, publisher of the acclaimed international art journal Parkett, of which he was also a cofounder, died December 19 at the age of sixty-eight. According to the journal, he experienced a heart attack while cross-country skiing “on a glorious day in his beloved Upper Engadine.” Frequently characterized by those he knew as ebullient, outgoing, and tireless, Graffenried was instrumental not only in Parkett’s founding but in its sustained and expanded success. During his thirty-plus year tenure with the bilingual journal, it gained renown for its unique artist-oriented focus and

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January 13, 2022 at 11:45am

More US Museum Staffers Unionize as Pandemic Drags On; Institutions Increase Incentives

As the Covid-19 crisis looks set to enter its third year, US museum workers, many of whose jobs were precarious or attached to low wages even prior to the pandemic, continue to push for unionization in an effort to gain some measure of job security and ensure safe working conditions. Staff at the Art Institute of Chicago this week concluded a process begun last summer and voted overwhelmingly to unionize, with 144 in favor, twenty-two against, and twenty votes “not counted due to management challenges.” The employees will join the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees,

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January 12, 2022 at 10:25am

Warhol Foundation Announces Fall 2021 Grantees

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has revealed the forty-nine recipients of its fall 2021 grants, which total $4.1 million and are issued to museums and arts organizations in support of their visual arts programs, exhibitions, and curatorial research, with up to 50 percent of the funding available to cover administrative expenses. Among first-time grantees, of which there are twenty, are those whose innovative, collaborative, and flexible programs have supported artists and allowed their practices to flourish in an especially turbulent time. These include Portland, Maine’s Indigo

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January 11, 2022 at 3:46pm

Guillaume Désanges to Lead Palais de Tokyo

Independent curator and critic Guillaume Désanges has been named the next president of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Known for his innovative and atypical programming, Désanges replaces Emma Lavigne. Lavigne—who arrived to the storied noncollecting contemporary art museum in 2019 from the Centre Pompidou Metz, where she was director—helmed the Palais for just two years before departing to serve as chief executive of the Pinault Collection. The Paris-based organization oversees the art collection of French billionaire François Pinault.
Désanges arrives to the job with a varied pedigree, solid

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January 11, 2022 at 10:51am

Richard Klein Steps Down as Exhibitions Director at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Richard Klein, who has served as exhibitions director at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum for more than thirty years, is departing the Ridgefield, Connecticut, institution to pursue independent projects, and to focus on creating and exhibiting his own work. He will continue his duties in an administrative capacity through June 2022 and will mount his final exhibition at the museum in February 2023.
Klein has been a force at the institution since he began working there as registrar and preparator in 1990; he stepped up as acting director in 1994 (he would hold the position several more times

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January 10, 2022 at 6:00pm

Uruguay’s First Contemporary Art Museum Opens

Uruguay on January 8 inaugurated its first major contemporary art museum. The hotly anticipated Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Atchugarry (MACA), located in the coastal resort town of Punta del Este, opened its doors to an eager public with exhibitions of the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, much of it being seen in the country for the first time, and of Argentine painter Léon Ferrari. On January 9, the first edition of the ARCA Intl. Film Festival opened at the museum. Programmed by Sergio Fant, who has served on the selection committee of the Berlinale and has programmed numerous other

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January 10, 2022 at 4:22pm

Ireland to Launch Universal Basic Income Program for Artists

Catherine Martin, Ireland’s minister of tourism, culture, arts, Gaeltacht, sport and media, on January 6 initiated an online consultation aimed at soliciting opinions regarding the creation of a basic income plan for a number of the country’s artists. The scheme, which Martin described as a “once-in-a-generation policy intervention,” is meant to assist those working in the fields of arts, culture, audio-visual, and live performance and events who suffered economically as the global Covid-19 crisis surged in-country.
The program will cover two thousand arts and culture workers for a span of three

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