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April 05, 2021 at 7:36pm

Shanghai Biennale Announces Theme, Artists for 2021 Edition

The Shanghai Biennale, whose thirteenth edition is scheduled to run from April 17 through July 25 at the Power Station of Art and various other locations throughout the titular city, has released a list of sixty-four participating artists, of which thirty-three will create new commissions. The theme for the Biennale will be “Bodies of Water” and the exhibition will focus especially on the relationship between humans and the earth’s climate, which is increasingly endangered. The theme is seen as particularly fitting given the Power Station’s former function as a coal-electrical plant which gave

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April 05, 2021 at 1:07pm

Oakland Museum of California Cutting Staff, Restructuring

The Oakland Museum of California is set to slash 15 percent of staff amid a major organizational restructuring, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The museum, which has been closed since March of last year, lost roughly $2.5 million in revenue owing to the continuing Covid-19 crisis. The restructuring will touch all departments and is in part being carried out with the intent of rendering the museum an “anti-racist and equitable multicultural institution,” according to a press release.
Employees were notified Friday that the East Bay museum will consolidate its 126 full-time positions to 106,

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April 02, 2021 at 4:07pm

New York’s Iconic Pyramid Club Closing

Renowned queer cabaret and nightclub the Pyramid Club, which opened in New York’s East Village in 1979, will not reopen following its closure in March 2020 as Covid-19 arrived in the city. The news was first reported in local blog the EV Grieve. Described by writer Tricia Romano as a “safe haven for freaks, geeks, weirdos, queers, and dreamers,” the club in the 1980s was uniquely inclusive across cultural lines, serving as an incubator for early drag artists, downtown performance artists, and young punk and hardcore bands of the era, while also hosting disco nights and art shows.
Originally a

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April 02, 2021 at 9:00am

New Museum Triennial Announces Artists for 2021 Edition

The New Museum in New York has announced the artists for its fifth triennial, titled “Soft Water Hard Stone” and running from October 27, 2021, to January 23, 2022. Cocurated by Margot Norton and Jamillah James of the New Museum and Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, respectively, the exhibition will devote four floors to showcasing new output by forty artists working across twenty-three countries.
“In this moment of profound change, where structures that were once thought to be stable are revealed to be precarious, broken, or on the verge of collapse, the 2021 Triennial recognizes

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April 01, 2021 at 12:16pm

Antonio Caro (1950–2021)

Antonio Caro, who was known as the father of Conceptualism in Colombia for his works placing iconic logos in the service of political and social commentary, died of heart failure in Bogotá on March 29 at the age of seventy-one. The news was announced by Bogotá’s Casas Riegner gallery, which represented him. Through a multivalent practice embracing painting, scultpture, xeroxing, public installations, lectures, posters, and materials, such as salt and achiote, relating to indigenous cultural practices, Caro critiqued commercialism in his home country, as well as political and corporate collusion.

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April 01, 2021 at 10:16am

Danielle A. Jackson Joins Artists Space as Curator

Artists Space, a long-running New York nonprofit gallery dedicated to elevating the work of emerging artists, has announced that Danielle A. Jackson will be joining the institution as curator, moving over from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she has been working as curatorial assistant in the Department of Media and Performance. She will assume her new role April 7.
“I could not be more excited for Danielle A. Jackson to be joining Artists Space,” said Jay Sanders, the gallery’s executive director and chief curator. “Her incisive and generous approach to artists and their work is

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March 31, 2021 at 5:17pm

M+ Bows to Government Censors, Will Not Show Ai Weiwei Work

Hong Kong’s brand-new M+ museum, slated to open this June, will not show in its inaugural exhibition a work by Ai Weiwei depicting the artist’s middle finger raised in front of Tiananmen Square. The decision comes just weeks after Hong Kong chief Carrie Lam promised to scrutinize art shown in public institutions out of concern that works might pose a threat to the government. Lam’s assertion is only one indicator of the Hong Kong government’s fast-increasing willingness to enforce the national security law criminalizing dissent that went into effect into the region last June; at that time, Lam

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March 31, 2021 at 3:29pm

Hauser & Wirth to Show Controversial Philip Guston Klan Paintings

New York gallery Hauser & Wirth will this fall exhibit a group of paintings by Philip Guston that led to the two-year postponement of the artist’s hotly anticipated four-institution retrospective, Artnet News reports. Concerns regarding presentation of the late works, which depict hooded Klansmen, arose last summer in the wake of the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd and the subsequent global rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Curators at the four hosting institutions—the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston;

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March 30, 2021 at 3:38pm

Detroit Institute of Arts Board Members Quit in Protest of Leadership

Six Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) elected board members—Anne Fredericks, Mary Ann Gorlin, Julie Rothstein, Suzanne Shank, Carol Walters, and Celeste Watkins-Hayes—have resigned after a board committee on Friday voted to monitor museum chief Salvator Salort-Pons rather than dismiss him for what staff have characterized as an aggressive, harassing, insular, and in some instances illegal management style. A seventh elected board member departed citing professional obligations rather than pointing to the retention of Salort-Pons.
Those resigning in protest were all dissenting members of a

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March 30, 2021 at 1:14pm

Suzanne Weaver to Leave San Antonio Museum of Art

The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) has announced that Suzanne Weaver is departing as interim chief curator and Brown Foundation Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Weaver, who came to the institution in 2016, is retiring after a career that has spanned three decades and during which she notably served as a curator at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, and at the Dallas Museum of Art.
Weaver’s tenure at SAMA was marked by her commitment to programming that engaged the community, and by an expansion of its collection, which under Weaver’s guidance grew to include more works by

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March 29, 2021 at 4:52pm

Tony Martin (1937–2021)

Tony Martin, a painter and new-media artist whose groundbreaking work with light was embraced by performers as disparate as Pauline Oliveros and the Grateful Dead, died in upstate New York on March 24 of congestive heart failure at the age of eighty-three. The news was confirmed by his wife, poet Margot Farrington. Martin, who got his start in the San Francisco underground scene of the early 1960s, is widely credited as one of the inventors of the light show and as an early proponent of interactive artworks.
Martin was born in 1937 in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of two artists employed by the

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March 29, 2021 at 11:44am

San Francisco to Provide Six Months’ Basic Income to Select Local Artists

The city of San Francisco in conjunction with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) has announced that it will award 130 local artists $1,000 per month for six months as the arts community there, like those around the world, continues to struggle amid the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. The funding, which comes from an $870,000 city grant approved late last year by the San Francisco Arts Commission, will be administered by the YBCA and is open to those in all fields of the arts, including fine arts, music, dance, creative writing, film, theater, and arts education. Applications are being accepted

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