News

  • Hannah Starkey, Pussy power, Women’s March, London 2017. Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London.
    December 05, 2019 at 2:02pm

    Hepworth Wakefield Wins $132,000 Freelands Award

    The Freelands Foundation has selected Hepworth Wakefield as the fourth recipient of its $132,000 Freelands Award, which will support the presentation of a major exhibition of Belfast-born photographer Hannah Starkey in 2020. The survey will be the artist’s first solo exhibition to take place at a major institution. It will include a new body of work that will be centered on shifting female identities within communities that were once strongly defined by coal mining and industrial manufacturing.

    “Starkey’s emotionally evocative body of work created over the last twenty years, subtly explores how

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  • Solveig Øvstebø. Courtesy of Astrup Fearnley Museet.
    December 05, 2019 at 12:02pm

    Solveig Øvstebø Named Executive Director of Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museet

    Solveig Øvstebø, the director and chief curator of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, will join the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo as its new executive director in May 2020. Øvstebø succeeds Gunnar B. Kvaran who has led the museum since 2001.

    Øvstebø announced in August that she planned to step down from the helm of the Renaissance Society after a seven-year tenure, during which time she bolstered the institution’s endowment, launched a new series of programming dedicated to performance, and oversaw the twenty solo exhibitions of artists such as Kevin Beasley, Alejandro Cesarco,

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  • Hans van Manen, Taco Dibbits, and Henk van Dijk with some of the donated Robert Mapplethorpe photographs. Photo: Jan-Kees Steenman/Rijksmuseum.
    December 05, 2019 at 11:34am

    Rijksmuseum Receives Donation of Early Mapplethorpe Works

    Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen and his husband, Henk van Dijk, have gifted the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam twenty-four works by the late American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989). Among the pieces included in the donation are twenty-one photographs and three porcelain plates featuring photographs of flowers. “I have been looking at them for forty years,” van Manen said. “Now other people will be able to enjoy them.”

    While the Rijksmuseum has approximately 150,000 photographs that were taken in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries in the Netherlands and abroad in its

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  • Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Alexander Franke/Wikipedia.
    December 05, 2019 at 11:02am

    Museums Close as Workers of Various Industries Strike Across France

    As nationwide protests sweep France, several cultural institutions have temporarily shuttered. Unions representing the transportation sector called for workers to stage a mass walkout today to protest president Emmanuel Macron’s changes to the state’s pension system. The strike, which began Wednesday, involves individuals from various fields, including teachers, hospital employees, and police officers. As a result, the country has largely come to a standstill.

    The Musée d’Orsay in Paris closed today and wrote on Twitter that it is “uncertain” if it will open Friday, and Musée Rodin will be dark

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  • Installation view of “Emily Jan: After the Hunt” (2017) at Hamilton Artists Inc. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada.
    December 05, 2019 at 10:04am

    Small Arts Organizations Recognized by Canada’s New $68,000 Lacey Prize

    The National Gallery of Canada has named Hamilton Artists Inc. in Ontario the first recipient of its new biennial Lacey Prize, which was launched by John Lacey in partnership with the gallery earlier this year. The award recognizes the critical role artist-run centers and small arts organizations play in supporting artists and fostering emerging practices in Canada.

    Hamilton Artists Inc., which celebrates its forty-fifth anniversary in 2020, will receive $38,000, and finalists Gallery Gachet in Vancouver and Calgary’s Untitled Art Society in Alberta will each be awarded $15,000. In addition, a

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  • Hesse McGraw. Photo: Mike Sinclair. Courtesy of Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
    December 05, 2019 at 9:36am

    Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Appoints Hesse McGraw Director

    The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) announced today that Hesse McGraw has been named the institution’s tenth director. McGraw will oversee all aspects of the noncollecting museum’s artistic and educational programs, fundraising efforts, and day-to-day operations. McGraw will assume his role at CAMH in January 2020.

    “I could not be more pleased that Hesse McGraw will be coming to Houston to serve as the new director of Contemporary Arts Museum Houston,” said Dillon Kyle, chair of the board of trustees. “Hesse brings a wonderful combination of a deep passion for the arts and practical

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  • Stephen Garrett. Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
    December 04, 2019 at 4:00pm

    Stephen Garrett (1922–2019)

    British architect and veteran museum director Stephen Garrett, who became the first to lead the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Getty Villa in Malibu after the death of founder J. Paul Getty in 1976, died on December 2, Artnews reports. He was ninety-six years old. He is survived by his longtime partner Phyllis Nugent and his four children, Carey Cowham, and Georgia, Rebecca, and Jason Garrett.

    Born in Ashtead, England in 1922 to parents Howard Garrett and Ida King-Harman, Garrett was a student of the Dragon School, Oxford, and Charterhouse School, Surrey, before he attended Cambridge

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  • Top row: Nora Alter, Leticia Alvarado, Hakim Bishara, Paul Brown, Sean Carney, and Nicole Caruth. Middle row: Jace Clayton, Aruna DSouza, Ala Gilbert, Ari Heinrich, Robb Hernandez, and Jean Ma. Bottom row: Prudence Peiffer, Paul Schmelzer, Jillian Steinhauer, Elvia Wilk, Mimi Wong, and Nicole Woods. Courtesy of Creative Capital.
    December 04, 2019 at 11:20am

    Arts Writers Ari Heinrich, Jillian Steinhauer Among Warhol Foundation Grantees

    The Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program announced today that it will award $680,000 to nineteen recipients of its 2019 grants including Leticia Alvarado, Aruna D’Souza, Patricia Failing, Ari Heinrich, Jillian Steinhauer, and Mimi Wong. Ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 in four categories—articles, blogs, books, and short-form writing—these awards support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences, from scholarly studies to critical reviews, and self-published blogs.

    “The Warhol Foundation aims to support the full range of artistic activity in

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  • Monetta White. Courtesy of Museum of the African Diaspora.
    December 04, 2019 at 10:26am

    Monetta White to Lead San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora

    The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco has named Monetta White as its next executive director. Previously a board member of the museum, White has served as interim director since August and has been involved with MoAD since its opening in the city’s Yerba Buena arts district in 2005. A well-known civic leader and restaurateur in the Bay Area, White has served as managing partner of 1300 on Fillmore, which she opened with her husband, chef David Lawrence, in 2007 to help revive the neighborhood she grew up in through food and music.

    According to the MoAD, White helped the museum

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  • December 04, 2019 at 8:30am

    Kyrgyzstan Museum Director Resigns Following Government Censorship

    An exhibition dedicated to women’s rights at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, has been censored by the government, Reuters reports. Among the artworks that have been labeled as too provocative by the state are a performance for which Danish artist Julie Savery disrobes and a punching bag that is shaped like a woman’s torso dressed in lingerie. After receiving death and rape threats from right-wing nationalists who saw the exhibition as an offense to traditional Kyrgyz values, museum director Mira Djangaracheva stepped down.

    A former deputy prime minister in the Muslim

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  • Don Rubell in front of works by Kehinde Wiley and Keith Haring at the Rubell Museum. Courtesy of the Rubell Museum.
    December 04, 2019 at 8:00am

    Rubell Museum Opens in Miami

    The Rubell Museum, which houses the 7,200-work collection of Don and Mera Rubell, opens today in its new Annabelle Selldorf–designed home in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood. Housed in six former industrial buildings that have been overhauled by Selldorf Architects, the museum unfolds on a single level, with forty galleries, flexible performance space, an art research library, a bookstore, restaurant, and courtyard, across a 100,000 square-foot campus.

    Less than a mile from the Rubell Family Collection’s original home in in a former Drug Enforcement Agency building in Wynwood, which opened in

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  • Oscar Murillo, Tai Shani, Helen Cammock, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Photo: Stuart C Wilson/Getty Images. Courtesy of Turner Contemporary.
    December 03, 2019 at 5:28pm

    2019 Turner Prize Goes to All Four Nominees

    In an unprecedented move, the jury of the Turner Prize, the prestigious annual award that recognizes contemporary artists born or based in Great Britain, has awarded this year’s honor to all four of the prize’s nominees: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, and Tai Shani. The accolade was presented by Edward Enninful, the editor in chief of British Vogue, at a ceremony that took place this evening at Dreamland in Margate.

    The four nominees had appealed to the jury to consider awarding the prize to them as a collective due to their shared commitment to urgent social and political

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