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January 12, 2022 at 10:25am

Warhol Foundation Announces Fall 2021 Grantees

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has revealed the forty-nine recipients of its fall 2021 grants, which total $4.1 million and are issued to museums and arts organizations in support of their visual arts programs, exhibitions, and curatorial research, with up to 50 percent of the funding available to cover administrative expenses. Among first-time grantees, of which there are twenty, are those whose innovative, collaborative, and flexible programs have supported artists and allowed their practices to flourish in an especially turbulent time. These include Portland, Maine’s Indigo

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January 11, 2022 at 3:46pm

Guillaume Désanges to Lead Palais de Tokyo

Independent curator and critic Guillaume Désanges has been named the next president of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Known for his innovative and atypical programming, Désanges replaces Emma Lavigne. Lavigne—who arrived to the storied noncollecting contemporary art museum in 2019 from the Centre Pompidou Metz, where she was director—helmed the Palais for just two years before departing to serve as chief executive of the Pinault Collection. The Paris-based organization oversees the art collection of French billionaire François Pinault.
Désanges arrives to the job with a varied pedigree, solid

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January 11, 2022 at 10:51am

Richard Klein Steps Down as Exhibitions Director at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Richard Klein, who has served as exhibitions director at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum for more than thirty years, is departing the Ridgefield, Connecticut, institution to pursue independent projects, and to focus on creating and exhibiting his own work. He will continue his duties in an administrative capacity through June 2022 and will mount his final exhibition at the museum in February 2023.
Klein has been a force at the institution since he began working there as registrar and preparator in 1990; he stepped up as acting director in 1994 (he would hold the position several more times

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January 10, 2022 at 6:00pm

Uruguay’s First Contemporary Art Museum Opens

Uruguay on January 8 inaugurated its first major contemporary art museum. The hotly anticipated Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Atchugarry (MACA), located in the coastal resort town of Punta del Este, opened its doors to an eager public with exhibitions of the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, much of it being seen in the country for the first time, and of Argentine painter Léon Ferrari. On January 9, the first edition of the ARCA Intl. Film Festival opened at the museum. Programmed by Sergio Fant, who has served on the selection committee of the Berlinale and has programmed numerous other

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January 10, 2022 at 4:22pm

Ireland to Launch Universal Basic Income Program for Artists

Catherine Martin, Ireland’s minister of tourism, culture, arts, Gaeltacht, sport and media, on January 6 initiated an online consultation aimed at soliciting opinions regarding the creation of a basic income plan for a number of the country’s artists. The scheme, which Martin described as a “once-in-a-generation policy intervention,” is meant to assist those working in the fields of arts, culture, audio-visual, and live performance and events who suffered economically as the global Covid-19 crisis surged in-country.
The program will cover two thousand arts and culture workers for a span of three

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January 07, 2022 at 5:49pm

Tracey Emin to Found Art School in Disused Mortuary

Turner Prize–winning artist Tracey Emin is establishing an art school and museum in the port town of Margate on England’s southeast coast, where she grew up. The school, to be christened TKE Studios (the name incorporates her own initials), will occupy a former bathhouse and mortuary, the Times of London reports. Both structures are situated nearby her studio, in a sprawling former printing house she purchased with a friend five years ago.
The school will incorporate thirty newly built studios, which students may rent for a comparatively nominal amount. Pupils will be expected to show their work

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January 07, 2022 at 3:50pm

Bengi Ünsal to Lead London ICA

Bengi Ünsal has been announced as the next director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), becoming the first woman to helm the museum in fifty-five years. She is the first director appointed since Wolfgang Tillmans assumed chairmanship of the institution’s board in 2019. At the ICA, which is approaching its seventy-fifth anniversary, she will expand the museum’s film and live-performance offerings as well as its nighttime programming and digital arts program, which grew exponentially as the Covid-19 pandemic surged.
“My colleagues and I are enormously excited that Bengi has agreed to

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January 06, 2022 at 3:07pm

Luciano Perna (1958–2021)

Conceptual artist Luciano Perna, known for his typically absurd Arte Povera–influenced found-object sculptures and his quietly evocative photographs, died December 28 in Los Angeles of a heart attack at the age of sixty-three. The news was confirmed to the Los Angeles Times by the artist’s wife, Darcy Huebler. His work across mediums including painting, photography, sculpture, and installation defied categorization, his oeuvre variously described as Constructivist, Duchampian, Futurist, and Surrealist. In works ranging from a self-portrait comprising an extreme close-up of a strand of spaghetti

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January 06, 2022 at 2:45pm

Delayed Kathmandu Triennale to Open in February

The fourth iteration of the Kathmandu Triennale, originally slated to open in December 2020 but postponed as Covid-19 swept the globe, will open February 11. Touted by its organizers, Nepal’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Civil Aviation and the Siddhartha Arts Foundation, as “the largest and most ambitious artistic project staged in the country to date,” the exhibition will run for a month and will include work by more than one hundred artists representing about forty countries.
The event was launched in 2009 as a biennial addressing climate change and feminism; in 2017 it was reformatted

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January 05, 2022 at 4:06pm

Sotheby’s Taps Jean Qian as China Director

Global auction house Sotheby’s has announced Jean Qian as its new director of operations in China. She will operate out of Shanghai, where she will work to elevate the auctioneer’s presence in the country. Qian previously served as vice president for the China Asia-Pacific market at fashion-industry e-commerce platform Farfetch; before that, she served as a management consultant for professional services providers Accenture and Ernst & Young.
Sotheby’s, like its competitors Christie’s and Phillips, enjoyed a strong year of sales in 2021, thanks to success of its expanded digital livestreaming

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January 05, 2022 at 2:35pm

Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick to Step Down

Iwona Blazwick, who has led London’s Whitechapel Gallery for two decades, will leave her post there in April. She will remain affiliated with the gallery into 2023 as an independent curator. Known for her commitment to cutting-edge art and for commissioning new works from highly touted artists, Blazwick was named to the Order of the British Empire in 2008 for her services to art. She doubled Whitechapel’s footprint the following year and over the next decade strengthened the gallery’s already distinguished programming with solo exhibitions of artists such as Isa Genzken, Hannah Höch, and Sarah

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January 05, 2022 at 12:34pm

Faith Ringgold Painting to Travel from Rikers Island to Brooklyn Museum

A Fatih Ringgold work dating to 1972 will move from the Rikers Island Correctional Institution for Women, where it has resided for five decades, to the Brooklyn Museum following a review by New York City’s Public Design Commission. The eight-foot-square oil-on-canvas For the Women’s House, depicts women engaged in various professions, including those of bus driver, construction worker, president, and basketball player. Ringgold made the painting after receiving a 1971 Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) grant for the creation of a public work and the following year chose the women’s facility

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