RUSSIAN ART SALE BREAKS $50 MILLION; DANSPACE PROJECT ANNOUNCES NEW DIRECTOR

Russian artworks sold for a record $51.4 million at Sotheby’s auction house in London on Monday night, reports RIA Novosti. The fifty-seven lots on sale were originally valued at around thirty-two million dollars and included works by Natalia Goncharova, Konstantin Makovsky, Nikolai Roerich, Ivan Aivazovsky, Lyubov Popova, and Vasily Polenov. Goncharova’s painting Bluebells, 1909, fetched six million dollars. London auction houses are expecting more records to fall on Wednesday when a recently discovered Fabergé egg, valued at twelve to eighteen million dollars, goes under the hammer. “It’s our biggest week, our most valuable week,” said Matthew Paton of Christie’s, estimating total sales could fetch up to seventy-six million dollars.

In other news, on Monday the Danspace Project board of directors announced the appointment of Judy Hussie-Taylor as the organization’s new executive director. Hussie-Taylor will officially assume her post on January 2. She has nearly twenty years of experience in arts administration and community relations. The former executive director of the nationally acclaimed Colorado Dance Festival, she has also served as artistic director for Theater Programs at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and deputy director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. She taught in the department of art and art history at the University of Colorado, Boulder.