News

  • Lynda Resnick, Caltech president Thomas F. Rosenbaum, and Stewart Resnick in the surface science lab at Caltech's Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis. Photo: The Wonderful Company. Courtesy of Caltech.
    September 26, 2019 at 2:59pm

    Arts Patrons Lynda and Stewart Resnick Donate $750 Million for Climate Change Research

    Lynda and Stewart Resnick, the billionaire owners of various agricultural companies and major supporters of the arts, have pledged $750 million to the California Institute of Technology in support of environmental sustainability research. The mega-donation comes on the heels of the global climate strike and the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit and is one of the biggest commitments ever made to combating climate change. The gift is also the largest ever received by Caltech and is the second-largest gift made to a US academic institution.

    “The risks we face due to climate change present

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  • Bangkok Art and Culture Center. Photo: Supanut Arunoprayote/Wikipedia.
    September 26, 2019 at 1:58pm

    After Funding Dispute, Bangkok Art Director Fired

    Pawit Mahasarinand, director of the Bangkok Art and Culture Center (BACC), claims that the center’s board of directors wrongfully terminated his contact last month over remarks he made to the media about how the local municipality’s decision to not continue funding the public arts institution was jeopardizing its future. Pawit was supposed to lead the BACC until 2022. His last day at the center will be September 30.

    According to Khaosod English, an internal memo sent to Pawit on August 31 stated that the dismissal was over his unsatisfactory work performance at BACC. However, the embattled arts

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  • Jorge M. Pérez. Photo: Nick Garcia Photography.
    September 25, 2019 at 4:26pm

    Jorge M. Pérez to Open Experimental Miami Arts Space in December

    Jorge M. Pérez—the Miami-based real estate developer, collector, and philanthropist who is best known in the art world for his major contributions to the Miami Art Museum, which was renamed in his honor—is planning to open a new experimental arts space in December. The launch of the venue is Pérez’s latest effort to support South Florida’s cultural sector. Earlier this year, he established the $50,000 Pérez Prize as well as a new grant program that will award $1 million to Miami arts organizations annually.

    El Espacio 23 will house Pérez’s extensive private holdings of contemporary art, which

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  • Amelia Manderscheid. Photo: Bonhams.
    September 25, 2019 at 3:09pm

    Bonhams Appoints Amelia Manderscheid Senior Director of Postwar and Contemporary Art

    Bonhams auction house has named Amelia Manderscheid the new senior director of its postwar and contemporary art department for the Americas. Manderscheid will be based in San Francisco and will report to the head of the department, Muys Snijders. She will be responsible for expanding the auction house’s activities on the west coast.

    Manderscheid was most recently a general partner at Exponential Creativity Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in startups that utilize technology to maximize humanity’s creative potential. Previously she worked at David Zwirner Gallery, where she helped develop

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  • Composite of artworks by the 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation grantees. Courtesy of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
    September 25, 2019 at 12:30pm

    Joan Mitchell Foundation Announces 2019 Grant Recipients

    The Joan Mitchell Foundation announced today the twenty-five recipients of this year’s Painters and Sculptors Grants, which provide $625,000 in unrestricted funds to artists annually. In addition to receiving $25,000 in financial support, each grant recipient is eligible to apply for residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. Among the 2019 grantees are Lauren Halsey, Baseera Khan, Daniel Lind-Ramos, Kate Newby, and Young Min Moon.

    “The Painters & Sculptors Grants are a cornerstone of our work at the foundation,” said Christa Blatchford, the foundation’s CEO. “The program fills what

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  • Christopher Ketcham and Selby Nimrod. Courtesy of MIT List Visual Arts Center.
    September 25, 2019 at 10:59am

    MIT List Visual Arts Center Names New Public Art Curator and Assistant Curator

    The MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has appointed Christopher Ketcham, who earned his Ph.D. in history, theory, and criticism of art from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018, as associate curator of the center’s public art and permanent collection. Ketcham recently served as assistant registrar for collections and exhibitions at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.

    The contemporary art museum has also promoted Selby Nimrod from curatorial assistant to assistant curator for exhibitions. Since joining the center in 2018, Nimrod has contributed scholarly

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  • Jeffrey Gibson. Photo: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
    September 25, 2019 at 7:47am

    Mel Chin, Jeffrey Gibson, and Cameron Rowland Win MacArthur “Genius” Grants

    Twenty-six individuals—including artists, writers, philosophers, educators, scientists, urban designers, and criminal justice reformers—have been awarded MacArthur Fellowships, also known as the “genius grants,” for their “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits.” Administered by the MacArthur Foundation, the fellowships come with an unrestricted award of $625,000.

    Among the cultural producers included in this year’s cohort are visual artists Mel Chin, who uses his practice to raise awareness of social and environmental concerns; Jeffrey Gibson, who draws from indigenous

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  • Huguette Caland, Sunrise, 1973, oil on linen39 1/2 x 39 1/2".
    September 25, 2019 at 7:30am

    Huguette Caland (1933–2019)

    Lebanese-born, California-based artist Huguette Caland, whose five-decade career reflected an imaginative conception of form and color through whimsically sensual figurative and abstractly surreal painting, textile, drawing, and mixed media works, has died at eighty-eight years old. On the occasion of an exhibition at New York’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Art in 2018, Artforum contributor Kaelen Wilson-Goldie wrote of the “formal clarity of Caland’s erotic line—her ability to be sexually suggestive, almost comically naughty, while at the same time penning a feminist political critique of

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  • Photo: Excavating AI.
    September 24, 2019 at 2:10pm

    Image Database Purges 600K Photos After Trevor Paglen Project Reveals Biases

    ImageNet—a database of more than fourteen million images and one of the most widely used sources for training AI machine learning technologies to facially recognize people and objects—has announced it will remove more than 600,000 photos of people from its system. The news comes five days after artist Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford, distinguished professor of New York University and cofounder of the AI Now Institute, unveiled ImageNet Roulette, a viral project illustrating the biases and fallibility in how the program identifies people. 

    Currently on view in Paglen and Crawford’s “

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  • Vivian Li. Photo: Steve Briggs. Courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art.
    September 24, 2019 at 1:11pm

    Vivian Li Joins Dallas Museum of Art as Contemporary Art Curator

    Vivian Li has been appointed the curator of contemporary art at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). Li most recently served as associate curator of Asian art and global contemporary art at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. In her new role, she will work closely with senior curator of contemporary art Anna Katherine Brodbeck. Li will assume her responsibilities on October 7.

    “Just as we recently created new curatorial roles in Islamic and Latin American art to support and further strengthen these areas of our collection, we are pleased to strengthen our curatorial expertise in contemporary

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  • September 24, 2019 at 11:14am

    Lawrence Rinder to Step Down as Berkeley Art Museum Director and Chief Curator

    Lawrence Rinder, the director and chief curator of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), announced today that he plans to resign in March 2020 but will continue to work with BAMPFA on a consulting basis. Chief administrative officer Richard Tellinghuisen and senior film curator Susan Oxtoby will serve as co–interim directors until a successor is appointed.

    “For more than a decade, Lawrence Rinder has been an outstanding leader of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, amplifying the museum’s international reputation and deepening its public

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  • Charles Lim, Seastate Six, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Asian Art Biennial.
    September 24, 2019 at 10:55am

    Asian Art Biennial Releases Artist List for Seventh Edition

    The seventh edition of the Asian Art Biennial, organized and hosted by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung and curated by multimedia artists Hsu Chia-Wei and Ho Tzu Nyen, has announced its full list of participating artists. Titled “The Strangers from Beyond the Mountain and the Sea,” the biennial will open on October 5 and take up themes of the international migration crisis, decolonization, Eastern philosophies, technology, and climate change.

    For the curators, the title refers to not only “travellers from distant lands, but also spirits, gods, shamans, foreign merchants,

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