News

  • 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 MoAD, White has 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 the 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, a restaurant, and a courtyard, across a 100,000-square-foot campus.

    Less than a mile from the Rubell Family Collection’s original home 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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  • Jewyo Rhii. Photo: MMCA.
    December 03, 2019 at 1:35pm

    Jewyo Rhii Wins 2019 Korea Artist Prize

    The Korea Artist Prize, presented by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), and the SBS Culture Foundation, has named multimedia artist Jewyo Rhii as the winner of its 2019 award. The artist—whose practice spans installations, video, books, drawing, and performance—was recognized for her new installation Love Your Depot, a prototype for an art storage system and collaborative studio she proposed as “a way for sharing art and delaying the death of work by artists.”

    Born in 1971, Rhii earned her BFA from Ewha Women’s University, Seoul, and graduate degrees from

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  • Byron Kim, Synecdoche, 1991–.
    December 03, 2019 at 12:19pm

    Byron Kim Wins 2019 Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize

    The New York–based artist Byron Kim, who is known for his ongoing project Synecdoche (1991–), which consists of hundreds of abstract panel paintings of human skin tones and was exhibited in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, has been named the winner of the 2019 Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize for his outstanding achievements as a midcareer American painter. He will receive $25,000.

    This year’s jury comprised Carmen Hermo, associate curator of the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art; Norman Kleeblatt, the former chief curator of the Jewish Museum in New York; and William S. Smith,

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  • MoMA PS1. Courtesy of MoMA PS1.
    December 03, 2019 at 10:38am

    Michael Rakowitz Asks MoMA PS1 to Pause His Video Work in Protest of Board Members

    Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz has requested that MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York, pause his video work Return, which is currently on display in the museum’s exhibition “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011,” in protest of board member Larry Fink’s ties to private prisons and board chair Leon Black’s connections to arms. The move follows a series of actions targeting Fink—who is the chair and CEO of the investment firm Blackrock, one of the largest shareholders of prison companies Core Civic and GEO Group—that unfolded at the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art

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  • Tal R, Paris Chic, 2017. Courtesy of Victoria Miro.
    December 03, 2019 at 10:04am

    Danish Court Rules Against Designers who Planned to Shred Painting by Tal R

    A Danish court has issued an injunction against watchmakers Arne Leivsgard and Dann Thorleifsson to prevent them from cutting up the painting Paris Chic, 2017, by artist Tal R and including pieces of the canvas in the decorative faces of their newest line of designer wristwatches. According to The Guardian, the duo bought Tal R’s work, which is from the artist’s “Sexshops” series, for $91,000 from Victoria Miro Gallery in London in August.

    While Tal R, whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, sculpture, and installations, acknowledged that anyone who bought one of his works had the

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  • Stamatina Gregory. Courtesy of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.
    December 02, 2019 at 3:22pm

    Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Names Stamatina Gregory Director of Curatorial Programs

    Curator and art historian Stamatina Gregory will join the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York as the new director of curatorial programs on January 6, 2020. In this newly created position, Gregory will oversee the museum’s exhibitions and collection management, future programming, and external collaborations. “Stamatina brings a depth of experience along with a keen awareness of contemporary visual art movements that will engage and expand our audiences,” said Margaret Rose Vendryes, cochair of the museum’s board of trustees.

    Gregory’s curatorial work primarily focuses on the interrelationship

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  • Photography and fashion workshop at Edge Zones Art Center. Photo: Nathan Campos. Courtesy of the Knight Foundation.
    December 02, 2019 at 2:20pm

    Knight Foundation Announces Miami Arts Challenge Winners

    The Knight Foundation will award $1.8 million to forty-four artists and arts organizations who have been selected as winners of the Knight Arts Challenge, which was established to fund arts projects that would enrich the city of Miami and South Florida. The organization will also recognize twenty-one community leaders as champions of the arts during a celebration at the Pérez Art Museum Miami on Monday night and will provide them each with $10,000 to give to local cultural producers and institutions.

    “Arts and culture connect people to place and to each other,” said Alberto Ibargüen, Knight

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  • Installation view of “COSMO” (2015) by Andrés Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation at MoMA PS1. Photo: Miguel de Guzman. Courtesy of MoMA PS1.
    December 02, 2019 at 10:53am

    Andrés Jaque to Curate Thirteenth Shanghai Biennale

    Spanish curator, architect, and writer Andrés Jaque has been appointed the chief curator of the Shanghai Biennale’s thirteenth edition, which will be held at the Power Station of Art from November 13, 2020 to March 28, 2021. The Power Station of Art’s academic committee cited Jaque’s concept of spatial interventions and frequent interdisciplinary collaborations with artists, scientists, architects, historians, and ecologists as two of the reasons he was selected for the post.

    Commenting on his vision for the biennial, Jaque said: “It will be my priority that the city of Shanghai is not only a

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  • Mami Kataoka. Photo: Ito Akinori. Courtesy of CIMAM.
    December 02, 2019 at 9:49am

    CIMAM Appoints Mami Kataoka President, Elects New Board Members

    The International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM) has named Mami Kataoka, deputy director and chief curator of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, as its new president and Suzanne Cotter, director of the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg, as secretary-treasurer. The announcement was made during the organization’s annual conference, which was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney from November 15 to November 17. CIMAM also revealed the nomination of its new board.

    “I am thrilled to take this role of president of CIMAM as the first non-European

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