News

  • John Christakos.
    September 20, 2018 at 5:58pm

    Walker Art Center Appoints John Christakos President of the Board of Trustees

    Designer John Christakos has been named Walker Art Center’s board of trustees president. Christakos was previously vice president of the board. Other board appointments include Patrick Peyton, of investment consulting firm Peyton Group, as vice president; John P. Whaley, formerly of private equity firm Northwest Equity Partners, as treasurer; and Teresa Rasmussen, of Thrivent Financial, as secretary.

    Christakos cofounded the Minneapolis–based modern design studio and furniture manufacturer Blu Dot in 1996 and has served as its CEO since its founding. Blu Dot’s designs have been shown at the Museum

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  • Still from Larissa Sansour’s In The Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, 2016.
    September 20, 2018 at 5:07pm

    Larissa Sansour to Represent Denmark in 2019 Venice Biennale

    Danish-Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour, whose practice comprises film, photography, installation, and sculpture, has chosen to represent Denmark at the 2019 Venice Biennale, reports Dutch magazine Metropolis M. The Danish Pavilion will be curated by Nat Muller. Sansour, who was born in 1973 in East Jerusalem, often addresses conflicts in and around Palestine in works set in a science-fiction universe. Her most recent exhibition was at Beirut’s Dar El-Nimer gallery, and she has also shown in Liverpool, Rome, Dubai, London, and Madrid, among other cities.

    “It is a huge honor for me to represent

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  • Maria Thereza Alvez's exhibition at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Photo: Philip Van Nostrand.
    September 20, 2018 at 12:00pm

    Dealer Jane Lombard Donates $5 Million to Vera List Center for Art and Politics

    Dealer Jane Lombard has bestowed the Vera List Center for Art and Politics with $5 million, a gift which will in part fund the center’s biennial $25,000 prize awarded to a social justice–oriented artist or group. The prize, which was established during the center’s twentieth anniversary in the 2012–2013 school year, intends to augment the impact of the recipient’s practice, and is complemented by a publication, conference, exhibition, and additional programming. Maria Thereza Alves was the 2016–2018 recipient of the award, which will be renamed the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice.

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  • The Memorial National Museum of Gulag History in Yoshkar-Ola.
    September 20, 2018 at 11:45am

    Russian Officials Shut Down Gulag Museum

    Russian authorities have reportedly shut down the regional Memorial National Museum of Gulag History in the western city of Yoshkar-Ola in what its founder claims is the country’s latest effort to expunge the horrors of Soviet imprisonment. Pressured to vacate, museum founder Nikolay Arakcheev packed up the volunteer-run institution’s collection in mid-August, reports Sophia Kishkovsky of The Art Newspaper. The 5,000 objects had been housed in a former headquarters and torture chamber of the Ogpu, a secret police that preceded the KGB—it was until recently the only Gulag museum out of

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  • Arthur Mitchell.
    September 20, 2018 at 8:45am

    Arthur Mitchell (1934–2018)

    Arthur Mitchell, charismatic trailblazer of modern dance and founder of the Dance Theater of Harlem, died yesterday from complications related to heart failure in New York City, where he lived. He was eighty four.

    Mitchell was born in Harlem in 1934 and studied jazz, tap, and modern dance at the High School of the Performing Arts. When Lincoln Kirstein, a cofounder of City Ballet, saw his graduation performance, he decided to fund his scholarship to the City Ballet–affiliate School of American Ballet, where he started learning ballet in 1952 at the late age of eighteen. Three years later, he

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  • Paul Virilio.
    September 19, 2018 at 4:50pm

    Paul Virilio (1932–2018)

    Paul Virilio, the influential French philosopher, urbanist, teacher, and writer on speed and acceleration, has died at the age of eighty-six. His family announced yesterday that he suffered from a cardiac arrest on September 10, according to LeMonde.fr. Virilio wrote influential books and essays on perception, cinema, media studies, and military and information technology, including War and Cinema (1989), Strategy of Deception (2000), Pure War (1983), and Speed and Politics (1986). “Since the beginning of the twentieth century . . . the screen . . . became the city square,” he wrote in The Lost

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  • Ian Buruma, former editor of the New York Review of Books.
    September 19, 2018 at 4:04pm

    Editor Ian Buruma Leaves New York Review of Books After Backlash Over Essay

    Amid furor over his decision to publish an accused sexual assaulter’s essay on the #MeToo movement, Ian Buruma has left his position as chief editor at the New York Review of Books (NYRB), a publicist from the magazine confirmed today to the New York Times. The exact conditions of his departure are as yet unknown, and the NYRB did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    His leaving follows a week of backlash against Buruma and the magazine’s publication of an essay by Jian Ghomeshi, the former radio show host who was accused by over twenty women of sexual harassment, assault, and battery,

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  • Geta Brătescu in 2015. Photo: Ștefan Sava/Hauser & Wirth.
    September 19, 2018 at 2:28pm

    Geta Brătescu (1926–2018)

    Geta Brătescu, a leading figure of Romanian Conceptual art who honed her legacy of pioneering abstraction in a Bucharest studio amid the repressive Ceauşescu regime, has died at age ninety-two. The death was confirmed by Hauser & Wirth, which has represented the artist since last year. Although Brătescu has long been a major inspiration for many contemporary Romanian artists, she worked in relative obscurity outside of that country until recent years, which saw a career survey at the Tate Liverpool as well as her 2017 participation in both Documenta 14 and the Venice Biennale, the latter as

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  • Piers 92 and 94, where next year’s Armory Show will take place.
    September 19, 2018 at 1:19pm

    Curators for 2019 Armory Show Announced

    The Armory Show announced today that Sally Tallant, director of the Liverpool Biennial; Lauren Haynes, curator of contemporary art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; and Dan Byers, director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, will curate portions of its 2019 iteration. That edition will mark the fair’s twenty-fifth anniversary since it started in 1994, and will run from March 7 to March 10 on New York’s Piers 92 and 94.

    Tallant will curate the “Platform” section, a section dedicated to large-scale installations and performances. According to a release,

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  • Chinese artist Zhang Daqian on view during Asian Art Week at Christie's, New York. Photo: Xinhua/Wang Ying.
    September 19, 2018 at 11:37am

    After Public Hearings, Trump Administration Revises Proposed Tariff on Chinese Art

    The Trump administration’s tariff on imported Chinese goods will no longer apply to art and antiques, according to an updated list released on Monday by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). The agency said that after engaging “in a thorough process to rigorously examine the comments and testimony” from the public hearings held last month in Washington, DC, to deliberate the tax, they had “determined to fully or partially remove 297 tariff lines from the original proposed list.”

    US lawyer Peter Tompa was one of the more than three hundred people who attended the hearings

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  • David Adjaye.
    September 18, 2018 at 1:11pm

    David Adjaye Tapped to Design New Princeton University Art Museum

    Princeton University announced today that London-based architect David Adjaye, of Adjaye Associates, will lead the design for the university’s art museum, which has a collection of over 100,000 works spanning from the age of antiquity to contemporary art. The current museum is projected to close in 2020 for about three years; the new museum will replace it with a “dramatically enlarged space for the exhibition and study of the museum’s encyclopedic collections, special exhibitions and art conservation, as well as object-study classrooms and office space for the hundred-person museum staff,”

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  • Rendering of Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz.
    September 18, 2018 at 4:02am

    Hauser & Wirth to Open Its Ninth Gallery in St. Moritz, Switzerland

    Hauser & Wirth has announced that it will open its third Swiss location and its ninth outpost internationally this December. The new 4,400-square-foot exhibition space, spanning three floors, will occupy the Palace Galerie, a building owned by Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in the center of St. Moritz.

    “Our new gallery in St. Moritz represents a return to my earliest steps into the art world and speaks to our DNA as a Swiss gallery,” Iwan Wirth, president and cofounder of Hauser & Wirth said in a statement. “I organized my first show in St. Moritz in 1987 at age seventeen, an exhibition that included

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