News

March 05, 2021 at 4:35pm

Longtime Director of Museum of Contemporary Art Australia to Depart

Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, who served as director of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, has resigned following twenty-two years on the job. She has said she will depart the institution in October, two months ahead of the expiration of her most-recent five-year contract, in December, in order to facilitate a smooth transition for her replacement as the museum celebrates its thirtieth anniversary.
A tireless advocate for Australian art, Macgregor is famously credited with leading the institution from near bankruptcy to becoming the world’s most visited contemporary art museum. Welcoming

Read more
March 05, 2021 at 4:04pm

Majority of German Museums to Reopen March 8

The German government on March 3 surprised museums with the news that most will be allowed to open Monday, March 8, The Art Newspaper reports, putting them ahead of restaurants, theaters, and sports facilities, which are to remain shuttered until March 22. The institutions, which have been closed for four months owing to the continuing Covid-19 crisis, may open if their area has averaged fewer than a hundred cases per hundred thousand residents in the past seven days. Of those, museums in areas where the infection rate is between fifty and one hundred per hundred thousand must require visitors

Read more
March 04, 2021 at 6:07pm

Barbara Ess (1948–2021)

Barbara Ess, a boundary-pushing photographer, musician, and writer, and the creator of the No Wave experimental media zine Just Another Asshole, died today at the age of seventy-three. Ess was most widely known for her large-scale photographs made using a pinhole camera, a rarity in the art world but a device she used to great effect, producing blurred, haunting images that evoked variously dreamy anxiety, shattered romanticism, and the stuttering disquiet of the late twentieth century.
Born in Brooklyn, Ess earned her BA at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1969 before going on to attend

Read more
March 04, 2021 at 1:44pm

Resolution Reached to Save Elyn Zimmerman Sculpture Amid National Geographic Renovations

The National Geographic Society has agreed to relocate a massive, site-specific sculpture by Elyn Zimmerman which was threatened by the organization’s renovation plans, at its own expense. The resolution was announced by the Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), which brokered the deal between the two parties.
Plans to revamp the Washington, DC–based National Geographic Society’s campus were put on hold this past spring after the news that the 1984 sculpture would be displaced in the process sparked outrage. The Historic Preservation Review Board (HPRB) of the District of Columbia had in 2019

Read more
March 04, 2021 at 12:13pm

Kader Attia Named Curator of 2022 Berlin Biennale

Interdisciplinary French-Algerian artist Kader Attia has been chosen to curate the Twelfth Berlin Biennale, scheduled to take place in 2022. The appointment was revealed on social media; no venues have yet been announced for the event, nor has Attia issued an official statement. He is the first solo artist to helm the biennial since the 2012 edition, which was curated by Polish artist Artur Żmijewski; last year’s edition, one of the few such events to take place in 2020, was curated by an intergenerational group of female-identifying South American curators: María Berríos, Renata Cervetto,

Read more
March 04, 2021 at 10:16am

Oregon’s High Desert Museum Receives $6 Million Grant to Show Rarely Seen Art Collection

The High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon, received a $6 million grant that will enable its large collection of artworks, a large number of which are typically held in storage and have rarely been seen by the public, to go on permanent display in a newly constructed facility on the museum’s 135-acre campus. The grant comes from the Oregon-based Roundhouse Foundation and represents the largest donation of the museum’s forty-year history. The money will additionally fund an immersive tree canopy experience for visitors to the Smithsonian-affiliated institution, and a reconditioning of its exhibit on

Read more
March 04, 2021 at 10:10am

Reports Paint Grim Picture of California’s Arts Economy and Suggest Ways Out

The 2020 Otis Report on the Creative Economy—this year’s iteration of the report released annually by the Los Angeles–based Otis College of Art and Design and measuring the health of the California economy across five creative fields—showed significant arts-related job losses across the state but offered achievable recommendations for rebuilding the sector. The fields under consideration include fine arts and performing arts, architecture, entertainment, and digital media, creative products, and fashion.
According to the report, 175,000 arts-related jobs—nearly sixteen thousand of them in the

Read more
March 03, 2021 at 5:32pm

Mihnea Mircan and Kasia Redzisz to Cocurate Art Encounters Biennial

The Art Encounters Biennial, which casts itself as a cross between an experimental art festival and a contemporary art biennial, has announced that Mihnea Mircan and Kasia Redzisz will cocurate its fourth edition, to be held October 1–November 14 in Timisoara, Romania. Mircan, a curator, writer, and PhD candidate at Melbourne’s Monash University, was previously artistic director of Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp, Belgium; Redzisz, formerly of Tate Modern, London, is senior curator at Tate Liverpool.
Titled “Our Other Us,” this year’s biennial will present two curatorial projects exploring empathy

Read more
March 02, 2021 at 4:40pm

Judy Chicago Artwork Planned for Desert X Canceled Over Environmental Concerns

An ephemeral Judy Chicago artwork that promised visitors to this year’s iteration of open-air biennial Desert X, in Palm Springs, California, colorful plumes of nontoxic smoke, has been canceled after a local writer raised environmental concerns. The work by the pioneering feminist artist was to take place April 9 at the 1,200-acre Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Palm Desert, which told biennial organizers that it was pulling the plug on it for fear of becoming embroiled in controversy, according to the New York Times.
Ann Japenga, a Palm Springs–based arts and environmental writer, began a

Read more
March 02, 2021 at 2:10pm

Singapore’s Substation Announces Permanent Closure

Singapore’s Substation, the city-state’s first independent multidisciplinary venue, announced today that it will close for good after vacating its Armenian Street space, a repurposed power substation for which it was named, at the end of July. The city-state’s National Arts Council (NAC) in 2017 determined that the 1925 building was in need of renovation, and plans were afoot for the organization to depart the premises for the two-year span necessary for the repairs to take place.
The Substation opened under NAC’s rental subsidizing Art Housing Scheme, which in 2011 was changed to the Framework

Read more
March 01, 2021 at 8:00pm

MoMA to Temporarily Obscure Philip Johnson’s Name

After a group of well-known artists, architects, and academics in January penned a letter to New York’s Museum of Modern Art asking it to remove the name of architect Philip Johnson from its galleries owing to his racist and white supremacist views, the institution has announced that it will cover his name while the show “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness” is up, Hyperallergic reports.
The renowned architect, who worked at and with the museum in some capacity for six decades, “not only acquiesced in but added to the persistent practice of racism in the field of architecture,” the letter

Read more
March 01, 2021 at 6:22pm

Second Long-Lost Jacob Lawrence Painting Located in NYC Home

Just two weeks after a visitor to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art discovered a painting from Jacob Lawrence’s thirty-panel 1954–56 series “Struggle: From the History of the American People” in a neighbor’s Upper West Side living room this past October, a woman living in the same neighborhood alerted officials at the institution that she, too, was in possession of a painting from the series. As reported this morning in the New York Times, in an article appropriately headlined “Lightning Strikes Twice,” the woman, a nurse, read about the first painting’s discovery on a neighborhood-bulletin

Read more

1 2 3 4 5 > >>