News

  • The White House.
    March 18, 2019 at 3:48pm

    Trump Tries to Eliminate the NEA and NEH, Again

    On Monday, March 11, President Trump released a $4.75 trillion budget proposal for the 2020 fiscal year—the largest in federal history. Titled “A Promise for a Better America: Promises Kept. Taxpayers First.”, the budget includes a 5 percent increase in military funding and $8.6 billion for Trump’s US-Mexico border wall—about $3 billion more than the amount that led to the government shutdown. It also proposes drastic cuts to domestic programs—such as Medicare and Medicaid, education, and environmental protections—and once again targets the National Endowment for the Arts

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  • 2019 Art World Conference speakers.
    March 18, 2019 at 1:28pm

    Professional Development Conference for Artists to Take Place in April

    A new annual conference established to help artists and arts professionals develop business skills and learn about financial literacy will take place in New York this April. Called the Art World Conference, the event will address many of the opportunities and challenges faced by visual artists today.

    More than forty prominent art world figures will participate in a series of panels, workshops, and conversations that aim to provide artists and arts professionals with practical, actionable information that will help them build and sustain a career in the arts. Among the topics that will be discussed

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  • Rendering of BAM Strong, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s expansion and renovation project. Photo: Mitchell Giurgola Architects LLP.
    March 18, 2019 at 12:53pm

    Brooklyn Academy of Music to Open New Exhibition Space

    The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) has announced plans to open a new 1,100-square-foot gallery dedicated to visual art this fall. The exhibition space is part of an expansion project that will connect the organization’s three spaces on Fulton Street in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. Called BAM Strong, the initiative, which was made possible with a lead gift from BAM trustee Brigitte Vosse, will also fund building improvements that allow for greater accessibility.

    Designed by Mitchell Giurgola with construction by Hunter-Roberts Construction Group, the Rudin Family Gallery, which was

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  • Carmen Argote, Arragement of Contained Energies, 2018; Ron Athey performing Acephalous Monster at Performance Space New York, 2018; Diedrick Brackens, in the decadence of silence, 2018.
    March 18, 2019 at 12:04pm

    Artadia Names 2019 Los Angeles Award Winners

    Artadia has announced that three artists have won its 2019 Los Angeles awards: Carmen Argote, Ron Athey, and Diedrick Brackens. Each artist will receive $10,000 in unrestricted funds. Brackens, who was named the inaugural recipient of the Marciano Artadia Award, will be given an additional $15,000.

    For Artadia’s fifth year providing unrestricted awards to artists in the city, Pavel Pyś, curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; Erin Christovale, assistant curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; and the Brooklyn-based artist Zina Saro-Wiwa selected six finalists, which

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  • Barbara Hammer, On the Road, Big Sur, California, 1975, 2017, gelatin silver print, 8 x 12".
    March 17, 2019 at 3:00pm

    Barbara Hammer (1939–2019)

    Barbara Hammer, the treasured lesbian filmmaker and New York­–based artist, has passed away from ovarian cancer at seventy-nine. Hammer created more than eighty moving image works throughout her life, but near the end she began making work about her own death: Last October, she performed a lecture on living with advanced cancer titled The Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety) at the Whitney Museum in New York.

    Reporting on the event for Artforum.com, Corrine Fitzpatrick wrote that the performance “offers seven precepts—culled from fifty years of artistic practice—as

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  • A bronze head from the Kingdom of Benin, now Nigeria, from the collection of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg. Photo: MKG Hamburg.
    March 15, 2019 at 2:11pm

    German Culture Ministers Pledge to Return Looted Colonial-Era Artifacts

    German culture ministers from all sixteen states met on Wednesday, March 13, and agreed to establish protocols for repatriating colonial-era objects from public collections across the country that were acquired “in ways that are legally or morally unjustifiable today.”

    They released an eight-page document that declares their intention to address their colonial history and outlines the first steps they will take to do so. The states will work with museums and institutions to conduct research, digitize and publicize provenance information, and potentially establish a central information and help

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  • Crown Ether by Olalekan Jeyifous. Photo: Andrew Jorgenson.
    March 15, 2019 at 11:34am

    ArtPrize Announces Participating Artists for First Edition of Public Art Biennial

    The Michigan-based arts nonprofit ArtPrize has announced the artists participating in its inaugural public art biennial. Amanda Browder, Heather Hart, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Olalekan Jeyifous, and the duo Paul Amenta and Ted Lott will create large-scale public works for the first edition of the biennial, Project 1.

    Rick DeVos—son of current US secretary of education Betsy DeVos and grandson of the late billionaire businessman Richard DeVos—established ArtPrize in 2009 as an annual art competition. In 2018 the organization announced its plans to shift to a biennial schedule, with its

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  • Tone Hansen, director of the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, and Paulina Rider Wilhelmsen. Photo: Thomas Brun, NTB Production.
    March 15, 2019 at 10:44am

    Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Norway Announces $100,000 Artist Prize

    The Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Høvikodden, Norway, has established a biannual $100,000 artist prize. The winner of the inaugural Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award will be announced this fall and will have a corresponding exhibition at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in 2020. The prize also includes funds for a catalogue, public programming, and the possible acquisition of the work for the center’s permanent collection, and is intended for midcareer, international artists working in sculpture and painting, though the award “will remain rooted in Norway.”

    Michelle Kuo, curator of painting and sculpture at

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  • Okwui Enwezor.
    March 15, 2019 at 10:00am

    Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019)

    Okwui Enwezor, the Nigerian curator, poet, critic, and historian whose large-scale exhibitions led to a more global view of contemporary art, has died at the age of fifty-five years old from cancer. His tenure as artistic director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst, a role he began in 2011, as well as his landmark Documenta 11 in 2002, established Enwezor as one of the most influential exhibition organizers of the century so far. The news of his death comes nine months after his departure from Haus der Kunst and was first shared by Venice Biennale, whose 2015 edition Enwezor curated. 

    As the first

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  • Laura Allred Hurtado.
    March 15, 2019 at 7:03am

    Laura Allred Hurtado Appointed Executive Director of Utah Museum of Contemporary Art

    The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMoCA) announced that Laura Allred Hurtado has been named its new executive director. She comes to the institution from the Church History Museum, where she has served as the global acquisitions art curator. She will take up the post on April 1.

    “Laura has the combination of knowledge and enthusiasm which will assure that UMoCA continues as a unique, vibrant showcase for contemporary art in Utah,” museum board president Val Antczak said. “She has been an integral part of the Utah art community for years, while following the contemporary art scene across borders

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  • Lee Wen.
    March 14, 2019 at 4:40pm

    Lee Wen (1957–2019)

    Lee Wen, a Singaporean performance artist, writer, and organizer whose work traces themes of European colonialism and the modernization of his home country, died last Monday of a lung infection, reports the Straits Times. He was sixty-one years old. Lee was perhaps best known for his “Journey of a Yellow Man” series, 1992–2012. He worked as a computer operator and an officer in banking and logistics before quitting in 1987 to pursue his art career full time, which also included involvement in various artist groups such as the Artists Village and the Black Market International performance arts

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  • Kristy Edmunds. Photo: The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
    March 14, 2019 at 3:52pm

    Kristy Edmunds Receives United States Artists’ Inaugural Berresford Prize

    The Chicago-based nonprofit United States Artists (USA) has established a new $25,000 award that recognizes cultural practitioners who have contributed significantly to the advancement, well-being, and care of artists in society. The organization announced that the inaugural prize recipient is Kristy Edmunds, the executive and artistic director of the Center for the Art of Performance at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

    “At USA, we are thrilled to expand our awards program to include and honor those in the cultural vanguard who support artists every day,” said board chair Steven

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