News Register for our weekly news digest here.

May 27, 2022 at 12:52pm

Amber Esseiva Named Inaugural Curator-at Large at Harlem’s Studio Museum

The Studio Museum in Harlem has hired Amber Esseiva to serve as its first-ever curator-at-large. Esseiva arrives to the newly created role at the New York institution from the Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where she is currently a curator. Known for an eye for rising talent, Esseiva gave artists including South African multimedia artist Dineo Seshee Bopape; New York–based artist, composer, and performer Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste; and Berlin- and London-based artist and writer Kandis Williams, who focuses on collage, assemblage, and performance

Read more
May 27, 2022 at 12:26pm

Wallace Foundation Issues Grants to 18 Arts Organizations of Color

The Wallace Foundation has announced that it has selected eighteen arts organizations of color to participate in the inaugural phase of a five-year $100 million arts initiative. As part of the effort by the foundation to spur equitable improvements in the arts, each organization will receive between $900,000 and $3.75 million to develop a project engaging with the surrounding community and addressing a “challenge they are facing.” The money will be distributed across five years.
“Historically, arts organizations created by and for communities of color have been overlooked and underfunded,” said

Read more
May 26, 2022 at 12:52pm

Former Louvre Director Jean-Luc Martinez Indicted on Antiquities-Trafficking Charges

Jean-Luc Martinez, who served as director of the Louvre in Paris from 2013 through 2021, has been charged with trafficking antiquities, according to multiple reports. His indictment late Wednesday evening on charges of “complicity in fraud in an organized gang and laundering by false facilitation of the origin of property” comes after three days of questioning by the French Central Office for Combating Trafficking in Cultural Property (OCBC). Vincent Rondot, who heads the Louvre’s Egyptian department, and Olivier Perdu, a respected Egyptologist, were also detained and questioned but were released

Read more
May 26, 2022 at 12:27pm

Tate Modern’s Clara Kim Heads to LA MoCA as Chief Curator

Clara Kim is leaving London’s Tate Modern, where she has served as senior curator of international art since 2016, to become chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (LA MoCA). Kim, who will assume her new role September 1, was instrumental in broadening Tate’s permanent collection to include works addressing postcolonial and transnational art histories. Among the exhibitions she organized at the British institution are a widely praised 2020 exhibition of the work of Steve McQueen, and Kara Walker’s acclaimed 2019 Turbine Hall commission, Fons Americanus, a forty-three-foot

Read more
May 25, 2022 at 3:30pm

Randall Griffey Named Head Curator at Smithsonian

Randall Griffey, since 2013 a curator in the contemporary and modern art department of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is departing the institution to serve as head curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Griffey recently cocurated, with Kelly Baum, the widely lauded Alice Neel exhibition “People Come First” at the Met. During his tenure there, he greatly increased the presence of works by women and people of color in the museum’s collection and in its presentations. In his new capacity at the Smithsonian, he will lead the museum’s curatorial program and will

Read more
May 25, 2022 at 12:41pm

Michael J. Bramwell Appointed Boston MFA’s First Folk Art Curator

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has named Michael J. Bramwell its inaugural Joyce Linde Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art, the Boston Globe reports. The newly created position, under the aegis of the institution’s Art of the Americas department, and the recent establishment of the museum’s Folk Art Initiative represent an attempt on the part of the Boston MFA to elevate the genre. Folk art, a loose term applied to a wide range of artistic forms and expressions, and which is often attributed to anonymous or enslaved people, typically takes a back seat to works by European and American artists,

Read more
May 24, 2022 at 3:23pm

Dealer Inigo Philbrick Sentenced to Seven Years Over $86 Million Fraud

Once considered a rising young star in the gallery world, dealer Inigo Philbrick on Monday was sentenced to seven years in jail after pleading guilty to charges of wire fraud totaling $86 million. The sentence is less than the recommended minimum of just over ten years. Philbrick
has been imprisoned since November 2020, when US authorities picked him up on the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, whence he had fled. Judge Sidney H. Stein of the Federal District Court in Manhattan ruled that the two years the dealer has already spent in jail will count as time served toward his sentence. Among the

Read more
May 23, 2022 at 7:41pm

Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation to Return 23 Artifacts to Namibia

Berlin’s Ethnological Museum of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation is sending twenty-three ancient objects to Namibia as a joint research project between that institution and the Museums Association of Namibia, reports Monopol. The purpose of the project, undertaken in spring 2019, had been to assess the cultural value of about fourteen hundred artifacts and to uncover their history; some of the objects are believed to have been taken during the genocide committed by German military forces against the Herero and Nama people between 1904 and 1908. The items that will travel to Namibia are

Read more
May 23, 2022 at 1:19pm

Nan Goldin Awarded 2022 Käthe Kollwitz Prize

Nan Goldin has been named the recipient of the 2022 Käthe Kollwitz Prize. The prestigious award, presented by the Berlin Academy of Arts, recognizes contemporary photographers who have made important contributions in their field. The photographer, filmmaker, and activist is being lauded for her intimate, pathbreaking work focused on the LQBTQ+ community. She will receive the prize, which is accompanied by an E12,000 ($12,800) award, in early 2023; an attendant exhibition of her work will run from January to March of that year.
In an oeuvre spanning more than four decades, Goldin has examined

Read more
May 23, 2022 at 12:34pm

Artists Lose Suit to Protect Work in Manhattan Jail Demolition

Two artists on May 18 lost a suit to protect their work from being destroyed along with a jail in New York City’s Chinatown neighborhood. Citing the federal Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, Kit-Yin Snyder and Richard Haas had filed a suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York asking that demolition of the Manhattan Detention Complex, which houses works commissioned by the artists through the city’s Percent for Art program, be halted. The pair were were supported in their effort by local activists Neighbors United Below Canal. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, however, ruled

Read more
May 19, 2022 at 1:51pm

Colette Pierce Burnette Chosen to Lead Indianapolis Museum of Art

Colette Pierce Burnette has been named as the next president and chief executive officer of Newfields, the campus housing the Indianapolis Museum of Art. She will be the first Black woman to helm the museum since its founding in 1883.Burnette replaces Charles Venable, who stepped down in February 2021 after nine years with the institution. His departure followed a job posting by the museum seeking a director capable of helping the institution diversify while maintaining its “traditional, core, white art audience.”
The public outcry sparked by the advertisement led to an open letter by staff

Read more
May 19, 2022 at 9:43am

Greece and UK Agree to Discuss Repatriation of Parthenon Marbles

In a landmark agreement, the UK will hold formal talks with Greece in regard to the repatriation of the Parthenon marbles, which Greece has actively sought since 1983. Also known as the Elgin marbles, the ancient sculptures were stolen from the Acropolis in 1801 by Lord Elgin and have been held in the collection of London’s British Museum for more than two hundred years. No date has yet been set for an initial meeting, which was proposed by the UK on April 29 and accepted by Greece. Unesco announced the agreement on May 17.
Created between 447 BCE and 432 BCE, the contested objects comprise

Read more

1 2 3 4 5 > >>