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  January 25, 2023 at 6:04pm

  Kathy Halbreich to Step Down as Rauschenberg Foundation Director

  Kathy Halbreich announced today that she will depart in May as executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, which she has led since 2017. Halbreich arrived to the organization after nearly a decade as the associate director and Laurenz Foundation Curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “It’s a foundation focused on doing the best for artists,” she said at the time. “The more I learned, the more perfect the match felt as my next chapter.” Though she noted that the organization’s board will begin searching for a new candidate immediately, she did not cite a reason for her departure,

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  January 24, 2023 at 3:11pm

  Asma Naeem to Lead Baltimore Museum of Art

  The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has announced Asma Naeem as its next director, effective February 1. Naeem is the first person of color to lead the institution since its founding in 1914. She steps into the role from her previous position as BMA’s interim codirector, which she occupied alongside Christine Dietze since June 2022. Naeem succeeds the well-regarded Christopher Bedford, whose sometimes controversial tenure lasted from 2016 to 2022, when he departed to helm the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

  “The BMA is committed to bringing diversity and equity into every aspect of its work,

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  January 24, 2023 at 2:29pm

  Jewish Heirs Sue Guggenheim Over $200 Million Picasso

  Descendants of a Jewish family that fled Nazi Germany have launched a suit against New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, demanding the return of a $200 million Picasso painting. Heirs of Karl Adler and Rosi Jacobi, with the support of a group of Jewish nonprofits, on January 20 filed suit in Manhattan’s Supreme Court seeking the return of Picasso’s 1904 Woman Ironing. The painting, from Picasso’s Blue Period, has hung in the Guggenheim since 1978.

  Thomas Bennigson, Adler and Jacobi’s great-grandson, avers in the suit that Adler, who ran a profitable leather manufacturing business, purchased

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  January 24, 2023 at 12:29pm

  John Akomfrah to Represent Britain at 2024 Venice Biennale

  British Ghanaian filmmaker and artist John Akomfrah has been selected to represent Britain at the Sixtieth Venice Biennale, to take place April 20–November 24, 2024. Akomfrah, who was knighted this past New Year’s Eve in recognition of his contribution to the arts, is widely known for his incendiary multiscreen installations themed around imperialism, migration, slavery, racial injustice, and climate change. His work earlier appeared in the 2015 and 2019 iterations of the Biennale.

  “The quality and contextual depth of his artistry never fails to inspire deep reflection and awe,” said British

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  January 23, 2023 at 6:20pm

  Anthony Huberman Named Executive Director of John Giorno Foundation

  Anthony Huberman has been appointed executive director of the John Giorno Foundation, the New York–based organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of work by the eponymous American artist, poet, and activist; additionally, he will serve as artistic director of its venue, the Bunker. Huberman takes the reins from the foundation’s inaugural director, Elizabeth Dee, who has occupied the role since 2020. He arrives to the foundation from San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, where he has served as director and chief curator since 2013.

  In his new capacity, Huberman

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  January 23, 2023 at 2:37pm

  Michael Rakowitz Offers Work in Exchange for British Museum Repatriation of Assyrian Sculpture

  Iraqi American artist Michael Rakowitz has promised to donate a large-scale work to London’s Tate Modern if the British Museum returns an Assyrian artifact to Iraq. Rakowitz has tendered his 2018 sculpture The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, a massive winged bull—or lamassu—made of date-syrup cans, which he created for the prestigious Fourth Plinth commission in London’s Trafalgar Square, the competition itself the subject of recent debate. In exchange, he seeks the repatriation of one of two Assyrian gypsum statues depicting lamassus in the form of human-headed winged lions and dating to

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  January 19, 2023 at 5:40pm

  Rachel Whiteread Urges End to Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth Commission

  Turner Prize–winning sculptor Rachel Whiteread is calling for an end to London’s prestigious Fourth Plinth commission on the grounds that the works selected for it rarely find permanent homes when their day in the sun atop the empty Trafalgar Square plinth for which it is named is over. Whiteread, whose Monument, an upside-down translucent resin replica of the plinth, was selected for the honor in 2001, noted that she had not been able to place it since. The Guardian reports that roughly 75 percent of all past Fourth Plinth commissions are in storage, and that only one is on display in the UK.

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  January 19, 2023 at 11:19am

  Manuel Borja-Villel to Depart as Director of Reina Sofía

  Manuel Borja-Villel, who has led Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía for fifteen years, will not stand for re-election to the post this spring. According to Spanish daily El País, he will depart the role on January 20. Borja-Villel is eligible to reapply for the role of director through a public competition, which opens February 1, but told Spanish news outlet Efe that he had made the decision to leave “quite some time ago” after conferring with his staff and his family. He waited until the last possible moment to make the announcement, concerned that doing so earlier might

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  January 19, 2023 at 10:01am

  Gregg Bordowitz to Lead Whitney’s Independent Study Program

  New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art has announced artist, writer, activist, and educator Gregg Bordowitz as the new director of its renowned Independent Study Program (ISP), effective February 1. Bordowitz, a 1985–86 alumnus of the program and a visiting faculty member there for many years, succeeds founding ISP director Ron Clark, who is retiring after more than five decades in the role. Prior to accepting his post at the Whitney, Bordowitz, a longtime contributor to Artforum, taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He arrived there as a professor twenty-five years ago before

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  January 19, 2023 at 10:00am

  Gordon Parks Foundation Announces 2023 Fellowship Recipients

  The Gordon Parks Foundation has announced painters Jammie Holmes and José Parlá as the recipients of its 2023 fellowships and named art historian and scholar Melanee C. Harvey as the Genevieve Young Fellow in Writing. Each will receive an award of $25,000 in aid of new and ongoing projects centered around representation and social justice; Holmes and Parlá will exhibit their work in respective solo shows at the foundation’s Pleasantville, New York, gallery.

  “This year’s art fellows are both painters whose work moves Gordon Parks’s legacy forward in important ways, while Melanee’s writing fellowship

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  January 18, 2023 at 1:47pm

  New Monument to MLK and Coretta Scott King Polarizes Public Opinion

  A bronze sculpture memorializing married civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King was unveiled in Boston on January 14 to mixed reactions. The Embrace, by renowned sculptor Hank Willis Thomas, occupies Boston Common and realistically depicts at monumental scale the intertwined arms of the Kings, as portrayed in a 1964 photo taken shortly after MLK’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. A statement released by Embrace Boston, the nonprofit that comissioned the work, noted that the twenty-foot-tall public sculpture “differs from the singular, heroic form of many memorials

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  January 17, 2023 at 4:00pm

  Remains of More Than 110,000 Native Americans Reported Held by US Institutions

  Independent nonprofit news organization ProPublica on January 11 released a report showing that the remains of more than 110,00 Native Americans reside in the collections of more than six hundred institutions across the United States. Just ten institutions hold a total of more than half these remains. Topping the list is the University of California, Berkeley, with the remains of at least 9,075 Native Americans; the Illinois State Museum is second, with those of 7,590; and Harvard University’s Peabody Museum is fourth, with those of 6,165. Lower on the list is New York’s American Museum of

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