News

February 20, 2019 at 2:05pm

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019)

Legendary German designer Karl Lagerfeld, the longtime creative director of Chanel and Fendi who helped shape today’s luxury fashion industry, has died. Chanel announced his passing on Tuesday, February 19. He was eighty-five years old.
During his thirty-six-years at the helm of the French couture house, Lagerfeld breathed new vitality into its iconic collection and helped grow its fortune—when he joined Chanel in 1983 its revenue mostly came from sales of accessories and makeup; today it brings in around $4 billion in profits each year. He also helped turn Fendi, the Italian brand which

Read more
February 19, 2019 at 5:30pm

Cuban Artists Urge Havana Biennial Participants to Stand Against Decree 349

As the opening of the Thirteenth Havana Biennial approaches, a number of Cuban artists and activists have banded together to ask the participants in the exhibition to support the movement against the country’s infamous Decree 349, which criminalizes independent cultural activity.
First passed by President Miguel Díaz-Canel in April 2018, the censorship law was expected to go into effect in December, but after major pushback from the local arts community, it has yet to be enforced. The Cuban government has since told the media that it won’t go into effect until more detailed regulations are

Read more
February 19, 2019 at 2:53pm

Philip Himberg Named Executive Director of MacDowell Colony

Philip Himberg, who has served as artistic director of the Sundance Institute’s theater program since 1996, will join the MacDowell Colony as its new executive director. He succeeds Cheryl A. Young, who will retire in June after twenty-three years at the helm of the 112-year-old arts organization.
Himberg will be based in MacDowell’s New York office and will work closely with David Macy, the director of the organization’s flagship residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire. “It’s really important for me to understand the animating impulse for the colony, looking back to the initial vision,” he said

Read more
February 19, 2019 at 1:10pm

Marianne Boesky Gallery Appoints Stephanie Gabriel Director

Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York announced today that it has named Stephanie Gabriel director. Gabriel comes to the gallery from Lehmann Maupin, where she held various positions over the past fifteen years. Most recently, she served as a partner from 2010 to 2017. Gabriel will take up the post on February 26. The gallery also welcomed a new marketing and communications coordinator. Sara Putterman, the digital marketing manager at Sotheby’s New York, will join the gallery on February 21.
“Stephanie brings with her an incredible record of gallery leadership and wide range of long-standing

Read more
February 19, 2019 at 12:49pm

Carla Pellegrini (1931–2019)

Carla Pellegrini, the director of Italy’s Galleria Milano since 1965, died on Sunday at the age of eighty-seven. Throughout her extensive career, Pellegrini staged some three hundred exhibitions at the gallery, which was established in 1928, closed during World War II, and reopened in 1964. Her exhibitions reflected a clear political commitment in the range of media, styles, and groups she championed, from avant-garde photography to popular culture and from anthropological research to experimental cinema.
The early shows she put on included the 1966 group exhibition “London Under Forty,” Italy’s

Read more
February 19, 2019 at 11:54am

Naiza Khan to Represent Pakistan at 2019 Venice Biennale

For the country’s debut at the Venice Biennale, Pakistan will present work by the multidisciplinary artist Naiza Khan. Khan’s practice, which encompasses drawing, prints, installation, and text, investigates the legacies of colonialism, labor-force migrations, and urban development within the ecology of local environments.
“[My work] is also very much about a subjective experience of me as a female body traversing a space, which is a very public, very gendered space,” the artist said in an interview with Art Now Pakistan.
Curated by Zahra Khan, the pavilion will feature Khan’s project Manora Field

Read more
February 19, 2019 at 11:46am

Dallas Museum of Art Names Nicole R. Myers Senior Curator of European Art

The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) announced today that Nicole R. Myers has been appointed senior curator of European art. Myers previously served as the institution’s curator of European painting and sculpture for the past three years. During her tenure, she has curated various exhibitions, including the forthcoming “Berthe Morisot, Woman Impressionist,” which opens on February 24.
“In her time at the DMA, Nicole has already demonstrated incredible leadership through her significant contributions to scholarship, visionary acquisitions, and compelling exhibitions that highlight the strength and

Read more
February 19, 2019 at 10:52am

Morgan Library & Museum Faces Backlash over 2019 Exhibition Program

The Morgan Library & Museum in New York has come under fire for announcing a 2019 exhibition program that features solo shows of work by only white male artists, including William Hogarth, Maurice Sendak, John Singer Sargent, Giuseppe Verdi, and Walt Whitman. An online petition launched earlier this week is calling for the museum “to rectify their institutionally gender-biased programming” by exhibiting solo shows of work by only women artists in 2020.
Created by the Brooklyn-based artist Elizabeth Meggs, the change.org petition, which was signed by more than one hundred people by Tuesday morning,

Read more
February 18, 2019 at 3:54pm

Nan Goldin Threatens to Boycott London’s National Portrait Gallery over Gift from Sackler Trust

Photographer and activist Nan Goldin has declared that she will boycott London’s National Portrait Gallery if it accepts a gift of more than $1 million from the branch of the Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of the powerful painkiller OxyContin, The Observer reports.
According to the British newspaper, the artist—who made headlines recently for her protests at cultural institutions that have accepted donations from members of the Sackler family, which has made billions off of the sale of the drug—is planning to turn down the institution’s major retrospective

Read more
February 18, 2019 at 10:22am

LACMA Gifted Kerry James Marshall’s Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self

The Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art (LACMA) has been gifted the small yet powerful Kerry James Marshall work A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980. The piece, which was made with egg tempera on paper, depicts the bust of a black male rendered almost completely in shades of black. The figure’s features are hard to discern, save for the whites of his eyes, his gap-toothed smile, and his undershirt.
Collector Steven Lebowitz, bought the painting for $850 from the Koplin Gallery in Culver City, California, in 1984. According to the Los Angeles Times, Lebowitz first

Read more
February 18, 2019 at 8:33am

Metropolitan Museum of Art Returns Looted Artifact to Egypt

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has successfully restituted a gilded coffin inscribed with the name Nedjemankh, a priest of the Egyptian ram-god Heryshef, to Egypt after it learned that the piece was stolen sometime in 2011. The work, which dates to the first century BCE, was the central focus of the exhibition “Nedjemankh and His Gilded Coffin,” until the museum closed the show early on February 12 in order to return the prized object.
According to the Met, all of its acquisitions of ancient art undergo a rigorous vetting process “in recognition of the 1970 UNESCO treaty, in adherence to the

Read more
February 18, 2019 at 7:56am

Hundreds Protest BP Sponsorship of British Museum

More than three hundred activists converged on the British Museum in London on Saturday, February 16 to stage one of the largest protests yet against oil sponsorship. Demonstrators formed one large circle in the museum’s Great Court and wielded banners that underscored the UK’s role in helping BP, one of the institution’s longtime sponsors, access Iraqi oil prior to the war in Iraq. They also called out BP’s contribution to climate change.
Led by the activist group BP or not BP?, the action was organized as a rally against the oil giant’s support of the temporary exhibition “I Am Ashurbanipal:

Read more

1 2 3 4 5 > >>