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  • Guadalupe Maravilla. Photo: Steve Benisty/P.P.O.W. Gallery.
    October 06, 2021 at 2:02pm

    Guadalupe Maravilla Wins $100K Lise Wilhelmsen Award

    Multidisciplinary artist Guadalupe Maravilla, who once floated across the Rio Grande aboard his own artwork and organized an all-Latina motorcycle gang chorus, has been named the winner of the $100,000 Lise Wilhelmsen Award, one of the largest art prizes in the world. The award is administered by the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Sandvika, Norway. The institution will acquire the El Salvador–born artist’s pieces for its collection and will host an exhibition of his work beginning on January 14, 2022, and running through April 30.

    Maravilla, who lives and works in Brooklyn, came to the United States

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  • Chen Danqing’s Shepherds, 1980, sold for $25.2 million in Beijing this June.
    October 05, 2021 at 4:09pm

    Contemporary Art Market Stages Rebound with Record-Breaking Sales

    Following spring 2020’s sustained drubbing at the hands of the Covid-19 crisis, the contemporary art market has surged, with $2.7 billion in auction sales recorded between June 2020 and June 2021, according to Artprice, which released its annual report on Monday. The record-breaking figure follows on from the 36 percent dip in the market in the first half of 2020 and was thanks largely to a shift to online sales and to the rapid rise in popularity of NFTs, the former a response to global pandemic lockdowns, and the latter owing in part to the swift ascendancy of Ethereum and the resulting swell

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  • New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Photo: Jean-Christophe Benoist/Flickr.
    October 05, 2021 at 1:02pm

    J. Tomilson Hill to Chair Guggenheim Board; Claudia Rankine Joins as Trustee

    Billionaire hedge fund manager J. Tomilson Hill has been named chair of the Solomon R. Guggeneheim Museum’s board of trustees, and poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine has been elected to join the board as a trustee, the New York Times reports. Rankine is the second Black woman to serve on the board in the New York institution’s eighty-two-year history, after photographer Jane Moutoussamy-Ashe, the widow of tennis great Arthur Ashe, who was a trustee from 1993 to 1994.

    Hill, described by Dealbreaker as “the Ryan Seacrest of the quant scene,” chairs the private investment business at $

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  • Documenta 15 curators and ruangrupa members Reza Afisina, Indra Ameng, Farid Rakun, Daniella Fitria Praptono, Iswanto Hartono, Ajeng Nurul Aini, Ade Darmawan, Julia Sarisetiati, and Mirwan Andan. Photo: Gudskul/Jin Panji.
    October 04, 2021 at 2:00pm

    Documenta 15 Announces Participating Artists

    Indonesian art collective ruangrupa, curators of Documenta 15, have released a list of artists who will be participating in the 2022 iteration of the quinquennial event. Ruangrupa chose to make the announcement in the pages of Asphalt, a German newspaper whose proceeds go to aid the impecunious and the houseless, running a list in the publication’s October 1 edition. Of interest, the collective chose to name the time zones, rather than the countries, in which the participants typically operate. Additionally, the organizers grouped the artist according to “majeli,” or cosmologies.

    When creating

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  • A detail from San Francisco’s Coit Tower frescoes, part of the 1933–34 Public Works of Art Project. Photo: Gary Stevens/Flickr.
    October 04, 2021 at 12:46pm

    Bipartisan Bill Looks to Give Arts Workers $300 Million Boost

    A new bill supported by American Republicans and Democrats alike and seeking to provide $300 million to workers in the pandemic-struck arts sector last week came one step closer to being signed into law. The Creative Economy Revitalization Act (CERA) was introduced in the House of Representatives on August 13 by representatives Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-NM) and Jay Obernolte (R-CA); on September 29, Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) brought the bill before the Senate.

    CERA, which was inspired by the Works Projects Administration established by the government of Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to

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  • View of Liverpool’s waterfront. Photo: Terry Kearney/Flickr.
    October 01, 2021 at 5:32pm

    David Adjaye, Theaster Gates, Mariam Kamara, and Asif Khan Chosen to Design Liverpool Waterfront

    Architects David Adjaye, Mariam Kamara, and Asif Khan and artist Theaster Gates have been selected to redesign Liverpoool’s historic waterfront canning dock, winning a competition to transform the area hosted by National Museums Liverpool. The four were unanimously nominated by a jury composed of local officials and industry experts to perform the task, the purpose of which is to illuminate the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Liverpool in the eighteenth century was a slave-trade hub, its economy benefiting mightily from work performed on the canning docks, where slave ships frequently

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  • David Kordansky Gallery’s new Chelsea venue.
    September 30, 2021 at 1:50pm

    LA’s David Kordansky Gallery to Open New York Outpost

    David Kordansky Gallery, for nearly two decades a force in the Los Angeles art world, is opening a new outpost in New York in the spring of 2022. The gallery will occupy space on West Twentieth Street in the city’s Chelsea district, and is being designed by Kulapat Yantrasast, founder of Los Angeles–based architecture firm WHY, which designed Kordansky’s space in LA’s Mid-City neighborhood. Anna Fisher, formerly director of sales at New York’s Victoria Miro, just a few blocks north, will helm the new location.

    “Opening our own space in New York is the beginning of an incredible new chapter in

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  • Jens Haaning, Take the Money And Run, 2021. Photo: Kunsten Museum of Modern Art.
    September 29, 2021 at 6:02pm

    Danish Artist, Protesting “Miserable Working Conditions,” Hands In Blank Canvases for $84K

    A Danish artist given $84,000 by a museum to produce two works has kept the money in protest of the low fees offered him by the commissioning institution, and has in exchange provided it with two blank canvases. The Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark, loaned Jens Haaning the abovementioned sum to re-create two of his earlier works for an exhibition titled “Work It Out,” themed around people’s relationship to labor. Dating to 2007 and 2010, respectively, the works illustrated via sheaves of Danish currency contained within a larger frame and Austrian currency occupying a smaller

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  • The Museo del Prado in Madrid. Photo: Brian Snelson/Flickr.
    September 29, 2021 at 3:03pm

    Spain Approves $42 Million for Prado Expansion

    Following a six-year delay fueled by the Covid-19 crisis and by political and financial tensions reverberating throughout the country, Spain’s council of ministers has awarded Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado $42 million to complete a long-anticipated expansion. The country will dole out the funds over a three-year span, allowing the institution to renovate the neighboring Hall of Realms, which it purchased in 2012. El Pais, which broke the news, cited 2024 as the projected date for the expansion’s completion.

    The renovation is being jointly handled by British architects Foster and Partners and

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  • Rendering of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Image: TDIC and Gehry Partners, LLP.
    September 29, 2021 at 1:04pm

    New Opening Date Set for Guggenheim Abu Dhabi [Updated]

    Tourism officials in Abu Dhabi clarified on September 29 that the hotly anticipated Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is projected to open sometime in 2025, not fall 2026 as forecast last week. The preponement is a first for the museum, whose path to completion has since its 2006 announcement been beset by delays due to various factors including economic recession, the Arab Spring, leadership changes in the Emirati tourism department, and conflicts with the Labor Coalition over the working conditions of the migrant laborers hired to build the museum.

    Speaking September 21 at a press conference in Basel,

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  • A selection of the MacArthur winners. Photo: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
    September 29, 2021 at 12:53pm

    Jordan Casteel, Nicole Fleetwood, and Daniel Lind Ramos Win MacArthur Fellowships

    Painter Jordan Casteel, art historian and curator Nicole Fleetwood, and sculptor and painter Daniel Lind-Ramos are among the twenty-five recipients of the 2021 MacArthur Fellowships. Known colloquially as the MacArthur “genius” grants, the fellowships provide beneficiaries with $625,000 each. The money is disbursed over a five-year span and is to be used as the recipient sees fit.

    Casteel, who lives and works in New York, is known for her deeply empathetic and engaging portraits of people of color, whom she depicts in everyday surroundings, her subjects and their settings frequently made strange

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  • The New Museum in New York.
    September 28, 2021 at 5:52pm

    New Museum Announces Biennial Award for Sculpture by Women Artists

    New York’s New Museum today revealed that it is inaugurating a new biennial award for sculpture, specifically for women artists. The prize is funded by a $2 million grant from the Hostetler Wrigley foundation and will allow for the creation of new works by five recipients in a ten-year period; these will be exhibited in the New Museum’s public plaza, which is being constructed on the Bowery.

    “This award both acknowledges and builds on the New Museum’s legacy of championing women artists,” said New Museum dirctor Lisa Phillips. “We are deeply grateful to Trustee Sue Hostetler Wrigley and Beau

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