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February 07, 2023 at 12:44pm

Massive Quakes in Turkey and Syria Damage Gaziantep Castle, Heritage Sites

A pair of earthquakes measuring 7.8 and 7.5, respectively, on the Richter scale killed more than 5,000 people in southeast Turkey and northern Syria on February 6 and caused significant damage not only to residential and commercial structures but to the countries’ heritage sites.
Chief among them is the Gaziantep Castle, which sits atop a hill in southeastern Turkey and is considered one of the country’s best-preserved citadels. Dating to the second millennium BCE, when the Hittite Empire was in power, the stone edifice was originally built as a watchtower. The structure was built out by the

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February 06, 2023 at 6:00pm

Cooper Union Delays Show on Russian Art School, Raising Censorship Concerns [Updated]

New York art school Cooper Union has postponed the exhibition “Vkhutemas: Laboratory of the Avant-Garde,” originally scheduled to open on January 25. The Moscow art and architecture school Vkhutemas, considered to be the Russian equivalent of the Bauhaus school, was operational between 1920 and 1930 before being shuttered by Joseph Stalin, who cast it as a breeding ground for “formalism.” Among those who taught there were Aleksandra Ekster, El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenkov, and Vladimir Tatlin.
Cooper Union cited Russia’s ongoing unprovoked attack on Ukraine as

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February 06, 2023 at 2:24pm

Kelly Taxter Named Deputy Director of Artists Space

Kelly Taxter, who from 2013 to 2021 served as the Barnett and Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art at the Jewish Museum in New York, has been announced as the new deputy director of the nonprofit Artists Space farther downtown. She replaces Miriam Katzeff, who occupied the role since 2019. Taxter assumes her new post today; her last exhibition for the Jewish Museum, “After the Wild: Contemporary Art from the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Collection,” opens at that institution in March.
“I could not be more excited to welcome Kelly Taxter to Artists Space,” said Artists Space executive

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February 06, 2023 at 11:35am

14th Gwangju Biennale Announces Full Artist List

Organizers of the Gwangju Biennale have revealed the seventy-nine artists who will be participating in the fourteenth iteration of the event. Titled “soft and weak like water,” the 2023 edition of the Biennale is curated by Sook-Kyung Lee and runs from April 7 through July 9. More than forty new works and projects have been commissioned for the event, some responding directly to the exhibition’s title, and others developed from ongoing research interests and projects in an attempt to shift focus away from relentless modes of production.
Those contributing new works that respond to the Biennale’s

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February 02, 2023 at 5:58pm

Anish Kapoor Bean Makes New York Scene

Anish Kapoor’s massive stainless-steel sculpture known colloquially as the bean was unveiled in New York City’s TriBeCa neighborhood on January 31. The shiny curved colossus, which closely resembles the British artist’s famous Chicago Cloud Gate, is his first for the Big Apple. Measuring nineteen feet high and forty-eight feet wide, and weighing forty tons, the pleasingly rounded form appears to be squeezing its way out from under the Herzog & de Meuron–designed “Jenga” tower at the corner of Church and Leonard Streets. The high-rise, so called for its jutting, stacked form, is home to Kapoor,

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February 01, 2023 at 6:33pm

Whitney Union Members Demonstrate Outside Museum Fundraiser

Unionized members of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art on January 31 staged a protest outside a fundraising event at the museum. Workers greeted passersby and attendees of the Art Party, a $500-per-ticket gala, with flyers notifying readers that “the Museum is still rejecting proposals for higher wages despite historic inflation and the very high rates that they are hiring managers at.” The flyers warned that the increased wage disparities would hold down unionized worker’s salaries “for years to come.”
Employees of the Whitney voted 96 to 1 to unionize under the Local 2110 branch of the

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February 01, 2023 at 12:25pm

Jenny Moore Named Inaugural Director of Montana’s Tinworks

Jenny Moore has been announced as the founding director of Tinworks Art in Bozeman, Montana. Moore arrives to the four-year-old arts organization from Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. She led that institution, founded by Donald Judd in the 1980s, from 2013 to 2022. At Tinworks—which occupies an array of historic and light industrial buildings and focuses on presenting work by diverse artists in unusual settings—Moore is charged with building the contemporary art program, commissioning site-specific works, developing the museum site, and expanding and formalizing operations. She will assume

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January 31, 2023 at 3:38pm

Ebony G. Patterson Wins 2023 David C. Driskell Prize

Atlanta’s High Museum of Art has announced multimedia artist Ebony G. Patterson as the winner of its 2023 David C. Driskell Prize for her contributions to the field of African American art. Patterson will receive a $50,000 cash award and will be honored at a gala event to take place April 28. The museum has awarded the prize annually since 2005 in an effort to elevate and promote the work of African American artists and scholars.
Patterson, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and splits her time between that city and Chicago, investigates issues surrounding identity, the body, and social and

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January 30, 2023 at 5:17pm

Alfred Leslie (1927–2023)

Alfred Leslie, whose monumental, planar grisaille portraits of the 1960s at once rejected abstraction and the romanticization of the figure, died January 27 in Brooklyn of complications related to Covid-19. He was ninety-five. A native of New York City, he was an early auteur in the world of underground film beginning in the 1940s, eventually collaborating with Robert Frank on the 1959 Beat classic Pull My Daisy. His figural canvases, begun in the early 1960s, were no less shocking to audiences than Abstract Expressionism had been a generation before, thanks to their direct and unyielding mien.

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January 30, 2023 at 3:33pm

Museum Staffs Across the UK Plan Strikes

Members of the PCS Culture Group, a branch of the UK’s Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), will strike in February to protest low wages after the government offered workers raises of just 2 percent, compared with the national inflation rate of 9.2 percent as of December 2022. PCS members voted on the action November 7, 2022, with 86.2 percent of balloters in favor.
Chief among the arts institutions whose workers are involved in the action are London’s British Museum, whose staff will stage a weeklong strike beginning February 13. That date marks a half-term school holiday, during which

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January 26, 2023 at 4:53pm

Facial Recognition Technology Suggests Raphael Painted the de Brécy Tondo

A group of researchers from the University of Nottingham and University of Bradford using facial recognition technology to inspect a canvas known as the de Brécy Tondo discovered that the faces in the painting are identical to those in a Raphael altarpiece. The team concluded that the tondo, whose author had previously been unknown, was likely painted by the Italian master.
The de Brécy Tondo was purchased at an English country-house sale in 1981 by Cheshire businessman George Lester Winward. Though some experts believed it to be a Victorian copy of a Raphael, Winward came to believe that it was

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January 26, 2023 at 1:18pm

Kapwani Kiwanga Will Represent Canada at 2024 Venice Biennale

Rising multidisciplinary artist Kapwani Kiwanga will represent Canada at the Sixtieth Venice Biennale, to take place April 20–November 24, 2024. Kiwanga is the first Black woman to receive a solo exhibition at the Canadian Pavilion and the second Black artist to so do, after Stan Douglas, who represented Canada at the Biennale in 2022. News of her selection was announced jointly by National Gallery of Canada, which commissions the pavilion commissioner, and the nonprofit National Gallery of Canada Foundation, which sponsors the effort.
The Canadian-born Paris-based Kiwanga works across media

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