News

December 10, 2018 at 4:58pm

Carol Rhodes (1959–2018)

The Glasgow-based artist Carol Rhodes, known for her imaginary aerial landscapes and unpeopled snapshots of industrial infrastructure, has died of motor neuron disease. She was fifty-nine years old. A student of the Glasgow School of Art, Rhodes created small-scale oil paintings on MDF that often contradicted the size of the geographical areas she depicted, which range from quarries and reservoirs to parking lots and airports.
Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Rhodes was raised in Bengal and returned to the United Kingdom at the age of fourteen. “My early experience of India, its colors, density of

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December 10, 2018 at 2:35pm

Sy Kattelson (1923–2018)

Photographer Sy Kattelson, who documented the lives of working-class New Yorkers, died on November 24 at the age of ninety-five. In 1947, he joined the left-leaning Photo League cooperative, where he studied with Sid Grossman and Paul Strand and taught photo-technique courses until the association was forced to disband in 1951, after landing on communist blacklists amid the Cold War and McCarthyism.
Born in 1923 in the Bronx, New York, Kattelson attended Stuyvesant High School before dropping out to work as a delivery boy for the Aremac Camera store to help support his family during the Great

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December 10, 2018 at 12:05pm

Democratic Republic of Congo Will Request Return of Cultural Objects from Belgium

The Democratic Republic of Congo announced that it is planning to make an official request for the repatriation of artworks from the Africa Museum in Belgium. In an interview with the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, President Joseph Kabila said that if the objects are returned, they will be displayed in a new national museum that is under construction in the capital of Kinshasa.
The news comes on the heels of the reopening of Belgium’s Africa Museum, which recently completed a five-year $73 million renovation and expansion project. The institution’s director general Guido Gryseels, told the New York

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December 10, 2018 at 10:50am

Activists Calling for Removal of Vice Chair Protest at the Whitney

Members of Decolonize This Place and other activists flooded the atrium of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York on Sunday to protest Warren B. Kanders, the vice chair of the institution’s board of directors and owner of Safariland, a company that manufactures tear gas canisters and other products that have been used against asylum-seekers at the US–Mexico border.
While the action was planned in solidarity with the ninety-five staffers who signed an open letter that called for the institution to answer for its ties to Kanders, who helped financially back the museum’s current Andy Warhol

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December 07, 2018 at 1:40pm

Carlo Santamaria (1955–2018)

Dealer Carlo Santamaria, cofounder of the Naples-based gallery Raucci / Santamaria, died from cancer on November 18. He was sixty-three. Born in 1955 in Naples, Santamaria established his namesake gallery with Umberto Raucci in 1992. Since its founding, the gallery has been a pioneer in the Neapolitan art scene, fostering Italian artists including Maurizio Cattelan and Eva Marisaldi early on in their careers and exhibiting the work of artists such as Ugo Rondinone, Peter Doig, Cheyney Thompson, Cathy Wilkes, R.H. Quaytman, and Liz Deschenes in Italy for the first time. The gallery relocated to

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December 07, 2018 at 1:00pm

Smithsonian to Open Its First Latino Gallery

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, announced on Thursday that it will open its first permanent gallery dedicated to Latino culture. The Molina Family Latino Gallery, which was named in honor of the donors who gave $10 million to the institution, will feature 4,500 square feet of bilingual exhibitions on the US Latino experience. Located on the first floor of the National Museum of American History, the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, “Making Home: Latino Stories of Community and Belonging,” will be held in 2020.
“The establishment of the Molina Family Latino Gallery is an important

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December 07, 2018 at 11:50am

Pussy Riot Members to Receive $55,000 in Compensation for “Exceptionally Severe” Sentencing

On Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia must pay members of the art activist group Pussy Riot $55,000 in compensation for their 2012 arrest and detention. Three members—Maria Alyokhina, Nadya Tolokonnikova, and Katya Samutsevich—were arrested for staging a performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, during which they prayed to the Virgin Mary to rid the country of Vladimir Putin. They were sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” Samutsevich was released after a few months, and the two others were pardoned

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December 07, 2018 at 10:22am

“Assemble at the Whitney: No Space for Profiteers of State Violence” to Take Place this Sunday

The art activist group Decolonize This Place has planned an action in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art at noon on Sunday, December 9, in solidarity with the over one hundred Whitney staffers who signed a letter in protest of museum board member Warren B. Kanders’s ties to the tear gas manufacturer Safariland last week. Their letter also called for the institution’s director, Adam Weinberg, to answer for Kanders’s inclusion on the board. Kanders is currently chairman and CEO of Safariland, whose products have been used by armed police forces and border patrol agents against asylum-seekers

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December 07, 2018 at 10:18am

Nebraska’s Joslyn Art Museum Receives Gift of Works from Ed Ruscha

The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, has been promised a gift of eighteen works, including paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, by artist Ed Ruscha. The artist is also donating a collection of his artist’s books and about twenty pieces, dating from the 1960s through 2015, by Los Angeles–based artists such as Terry Allen, Richard Artschwager, Joe Goode, Ed Moses, and William Wegman.
“This gift by Ed Ruscha of his own work, in tandem with the works of other fixtures of the West Coast art scene over the past several decades, is one of the most significant gifts of contemporary art in

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December 07, 2018 at 8:06am

Anish Kapoor Settles Lawsuit with NRA over “Toxic Video” Featuring His Art

The British artist Anish Kapoor declared “victory” over the National Rifle Association on Thursday after the group agreed to remove an image of Cloud Gate, a well-known public sculpture in Chicago, from one of its promotional videos.
“This is a victory not just in defense of the copyright of my work, but it is also a declaration that we stand with those who oppose gun violence in America and elsewhere,” the artist wrote in a statement. “The NRA will not be allowed to use art in support of their propaganda.”
The NRA used the 110-ton stainless steel work, which is better known as “The Bean,” in a

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December 07, 2018 at 7:36am

Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Names 2019 Grant Recipients

The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) has announced the recipients of its 2019 Grants and Commissions Program Awards. Now in its seventeenth year, the annual initiative recognizes contemporary Latin American artists who engage with diverse themes across various media. Works by the winning artists will be exhibited at El Museo del Barrio in New York next fall.
“For El Museo del Barrio, generating strategic alliances with new cultural platforms is essential,” said Patrick Charpenel, executive director of the museum. “This is the reason why we are now embarking on a collaborative project with

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December 07, 2018 at 7:30am

Dia Acquires 155 Sculptural Works by Charlotte Posenenske

The Dia Art Foundation announced that 155 sculptural works by the German artist Charlotte Posenenske (1930–1985) will enter its collection, the largest acquisition of the artist’s works by a museum to date. The majority of the pieces are from four series created during Posenenske’s final two years of practice, 1967 and 1968.
“Charlotte Posenenske created an exceptionally innovative body of work within a focused and abbreviated period of time. While she exhibited widely during the years that she was active—alongside peers such as Hanne Darboven, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt—her contributions

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