News

  • Exterior of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
    May 20, 2019 at 9:26am

    LA MoCA Board President Pledges $10 Million for Free Admission to the Museum

    The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’s board president Carolyn Clark Powers announced that she will gift $10 million to fund free general admission to the museum. The pledge was made during LA MoCA’s inaugural annual benefit which took place at Geffen Contemporary on Saturday, May 18, and was received by a standing ovation from the seven hundred guests who attended the event. 

    “Carolyn’s gift is an inspiration to us all,” said MoCA board of trustees chair Maria Seferian. “We have aspired to be able to provide free general admission for some time, and it is only with this incredible gift

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  • May 18, 2019 at 2:00am

    “You Can’t Hide”: Protesters March from Whitney to Warren B. Kanders’s Home During Biennial Opening

    On Friday, May 17, the official opening of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, more than 150 artists, activists, and collectives mobilized against Warren B. Kanders, the owner of the defense manufacturing company The Safariland Group and the vice chair of the Whitney Museum of American Art, taking part in the last of a series of actions intent on pressuring the institution to remove Kanders from its board. The demonstration traveled from the museum through the streets of downtown Manhattan to Kanders’s townhouse on West Twelfth Street in order to deliver the message that there is “no safe space for

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  • Jan Boelen. Photo: Veerle Frissen.
    May 17, 2019 at 1:05pm

    Jan Boelen Appointed Rector at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design

    Jan Boelen, the artistic director of the Z33 House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt, Belgium, will step down and head to Germany, where he will take up the post of rector at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design.

    Boelen first joined Z33 in 2001 and has since become a driving force behind building a new exhibition space for the contemporary art museum. He has also served as the head of the master department social design at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, since 2010 and is the artistic director of Atelier LUMA in Arles, France. In 2017, Boelen curated the Fourth Istanbul

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  • Nobuo Sekine with his sculpture Phase of Nothingness, 1969/70, at the Japanese Pavilion at the 35th Venice Biennale, 1970. Photo: Yoriko Kushigemachi.
    May 17, 2019 at 12:45pm

    Nobuo Sekine (1942–2019)

    Conceptual artist Nobuo Sekine—whose ephemeral, site-specific sculptural and installation works were associated with Mono-ha (the School of Things), the postwar Japanese art movement active in the late 1960s to the mid ’70s—died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was seventy-six years old.

    Sekine’s Phase—Mother Earth, comprising a seven-feet-wide, nine-feet-deep hole and an accompanying cylinder made of a mixture of earth and cement, was one of the most celebrated works of Mono-ha. Originally enacted in 1968 at the inaugural Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition at Kobe’s Suma Rikyū Park,

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  • Derek Fordjour’s Worst to Be First, 2019, and Cecilia Vicuña’s Quipu Gut, 2017. Photo: the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
    May 17, 2019 at 12:24pm

    Pérez Art Museum Miami Adds Works by Eleven Artists to Its Collection

    The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) has acquired works by eleven artists for the museum’s permanent collection: Maria Berrio, Carlos Estévez, Teresita Fernández, Derek Fordjour, Abbas Kiarostami, Hun Kyu Kim, Pierre Malphettes, Christina Pettersson, Anastasia Samoylova, Barthélémy Toguo, and Cecilia Vicuña.

    “Through the support of our donors and the collectors council, we are able to expand PAMM’s collection with the work of these exceptionally talented artists,” said PAMM director Franklin Sirmans. A museum announcement also noted that the acquisitions are an example of the institution’s

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  • NRW Forum, Düsseldorf. Photo: NRW Forum.
    May 17, 2019 at 11:40am

    Düsseldorf’s Kunstpalast and NRW Forum Will Merge

    The city of Düsseldorf has announced that the Kunstpalast (Art Palace) and the NRW Forum, the exhibition center dedicated to photography and popular and digital culture, will merge. The two neighboring institutions will maintain their individual brand identities but will both be helmed by the Kunstpalast’s current director, Felix Krämer.

    Merging the NRW Forum with the significantly larger, municipally supported Kunstpalast was originally suggested by NRW Forum artistic director Alain Bieber. In March, Bieber decided not to renew his contract with the institution, citing the lack of political

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  • Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction on Thursday, May 16. Courtesy: Sotheby’s.
    May 17, 2019 at 10:02am

    Sotheby’s and Phillips Contemporary Art Auctions Rake in $441.8 Million

    Led by works by Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko, the Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction on Thursday, May 16 netted $341.9 million. Phillips’s Evening Sale of Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Art, which was also held Thursday night, hauled in $99.9 million. The auctions concluded New York’s spring contemporary art evening auctions, during which a total of $981 million was spent on artists such as Jeff Koons—who smashed the auction record for a work by a living artist at Christie’s on Wednesday—Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Willem de Kooning.

    “Tonight we saw a resounding response to

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  • Kelly Kivland and Alexis Lowry. Photos: Gabriela Herman.
    May 17, 2019 at 10:00am

    Kelly Kivland and Alexis Lowry Named Curators at Dia Art Foundation

    The Dia Art Foundation has promoted associate curators Kelly Kivland and Alexis Lowry to the position of curator. During their tenures, they have spearheaded major contemporary commissions, curated exhibitions and performances, and overseen preservation work and other initiatives.

    Kivland has worked at the foundation since 2011 and was appointed associate curator in 2015. In this role, she has curated numerous exhibitions, including a 2018–19 presentation of Nancy Holt’s work at Dia:Chelsea in New York City, and a 2015–18 presentation of Robert Irwin’s work at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, New York. She

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  • I.M. Pei circa 1985.
    May 16, 2019 at 7:50pm

    I.M. Pei (1917–2019)

    Ieoh Ming Pei—the celebrated Chinese American architect, known as I.M. Pei, whose oeuvre includes more than fifty projects ranging from the iconic addition to the Louvre, a glass-and-steel pyramid designed for the historic building’s central courtyard, to the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, which incorporates the geometries and patterns that make up the “essence of Islamic architecture”—has died, the New York Times reports. He was one hundred and two years old.

    Born on April 26, 1917 in Guangzhou, the Canton province of China, Pei came to the United States to study architecture in 1935.

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  • Susan Meiselas, Muchachos await the counter attack by the National Guard, Matagalpa, Nicaragua, 1978–1979. Photo: Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos.
    May 16, 2019 at 3:19pm

    Susan Meiselas Awarded 2019 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize

    Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas has won this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, which honors a living photographer who has significantly contributed to the medium. Administered by the foundation and the Photographers’ Gallery in London, the annual $34,000 award was presented to Meiselas at a ceremony at the gallery on Thursday, May 16.

    With a career spanning four decades, Meiselas is best known for her work in conflict zones, particularly for her images of the Nicaraguan Revolution. The photographer prefers to be immersed in a community for long periods of time when working

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  • May 16, 2019 at 11:55am

    American Academy in Rome Establishes New Prize with $3 Million Gift

    The American Academy in Rome has received a $3 million gift from Musa and Thomas Mayer. The donation was made in honor of Musa’s father, artist Philip Guston, a former Rome Prize winner. With the funds, the academy will establish a new fellowship, the Philip Guston Rome Prize in Visual Arts.

    “When my father was awarded the Rome Prize in 1948, he was at a crucial juncture in his painting,” said Musa. “In 1970, an extended stay at the Academy offered the distance and perspective he needed, allowing him to continue painting unencumbered by the rejection of the New York art world. On each visit, he

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  • Santa Fe Art Institute.
    May 16, 2019 at 11:30am

    National Endowment for the Arts Awards $80.4 Million to Cultural Initiatives

    The National Endowment for the Arts has announced the recipients of its second round of grants for the 2019 fiscal year. The agency will award $80.4 million to arts organizations across all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and four other US jurisdictions. The funds will be distributed through four grant categories: Art Works II; Our Town; Research: Art Works; and State and Regional Partnerships.

    “Reflecting the diverse artistic richness of our nation, these Arts Endowment-funded projects are varied in their size, scope, and artistic discipline,” said the agency’s acting

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