News

  • Wong Ping, The Modern Way to Shower, 2019. Courtesy of the ICA Miami.
    December 09, 2019 at 2:10pm

    ICA Miami Acquires Works by Shara Hughes, Wong Ping, and More

    The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, has been gifted three new works by up-and-coming artists Jadé Fadojutimi, Dalton Gata, and Shara Hughes by donors Andre Sakhai, Ed and Helen Nicoll, and Alberto Chehebar, respectively. The institution also recently purchased a new video work by artist Wong Ping, which debuted at the museum last week. The news comes on the heels of ICA Miami’s announcement that it has acquired more than one hundred works for its collection.

    “ICA Miami’s acquisitions during Miami Art Week reflect our unique role in the global conversation around contemporary art and emerging

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  • Andrea Viliani at the inauguration of Michael Rakowitz’s exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli on October 7. Photo: Getty Images. Courtesy of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea.
    December 09, 2019 at 1:04pm

    Andrea Viliani Joins Italy’s Castello di Rivoli Research Institute

    The Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Rivoli, Italy, has announced the appointment of Andrea Viliani as manager and curator of its Research Institute, which comprises a library and multimedia archive. Currently the director of the Madre Museum in Naples, Viliani previously worked at the Castello di Rivoli as an assistant curator from 1999 to 2005. He will begin his new role on January 7, 2020.

    “Andrea Viliani is among the most competent, precise, and creative figures in our Italian cultural panorama,” said Castello di Rivoli director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. “Esteemed internationally,

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  • Tate Modern Switch House. Photo: Maciek Lulko/Flickr.
    December 09, 2019 at 9:01am

    Teen Pleads Guilty to Pushing Boy Off Tate Modern’s Viewing Platform

    Jonty Bravery, the teenager who allegedly threw a six-year-old boy off of the tenth-story viewing platform at Tate Modern in London on August 4, has pleaded guilty to one count of attempted murder, the BBC reports. The boy, a French national who was visiting the museum with his family, suffered a bleed to the brain and is still recovering from his injuries, which have been described as “life changing,” after falling one hundred feet. Bravery, who is eighteen years old and from Ealing, a borough of west London, will be sentenced in February.

    According to the Crown Prosecution Service, a public

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  • Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
    December 09, 2019 at 8:30am

    Australia Cuts Federal Arts Department

    Australian prime minister Scott Morrison announced on Thursday, December 5, that the government’s Department of Communications and the Arts will be eliminated, reports SBS News. The move is part of a major federal services restructuring, which will scale back the overall number of federal departments from eighteen to fourteen. Cultural policy development and grants management will soon be incorporated under the new Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, and Communications.

    “Having fewer departments will allow us to bust bureaucratic congestion, improve decision-making and

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  • MoCA Grand Avenue. Photo: Elon Schoenholz. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
    December 09, 2019 at 8:00am

    LA MoCA Will Voluntarily Recognize New Union

    Two weeks after more than 120 staffers of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles, launched a campaign for union representation, the institution declared on Friday that it would voluntarily recognize the new union. Initially the museum responded to the organizing efforts by saying that it did not believe the union drive was in the best interest of its employees. The turnaround means that the employees will not have to participate in a formal National Labor Relations Board election—instead, an independent auditor will verify the employees’ union cards so that contract negotiations

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  • Courtesy of Harlan Levey Projects.
    December 06, 2019 at 6:29pm

    Zona Maco Reveals Gallery List for 2020 Edition, Untitled, Art Miami Beach Awards Otazu Art Prize, and More

    Zona Maco has announced that more than one-hundred galleries hailing from twenty-six countries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia will participate in its next edition, which will take place in Centro Citibanamex in Mexico City from February 5 to February 9, 2020. For the first time, Zona Maco will present its modern and contemporary art, design, photography, and antiques fairs simultaneously in the same location. 

    Among the exhibitors to the seventeenth iteration of the modern and contemporary art fair are Espacio Continuo (Bogotá), Galería La Caja Negra (Madrid), Galerie LeLong & Co. (New York

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  • Kenny Rivero, New Hat, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Charles Moffett.
    December 06, 2019 at 3:00pm

    Pérez Art Museum Miami Announces NADA Acquisition Gift

    The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) and Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) have announced the selection of the third annual NADA acquisition gift for the museum. PAMM associate curator María Elena Ortiz and assistant curator Jennifer Inacio have selected New Hat, 2019, by Dominican-American artist Kenny Rivero from Charles Moffett’s booth for the institution.

    “We are thrilled to have acquired Kenny Rivero’s exceptional painting into our collection as it dialogues with PAMM’s commitment to Latinx and Caribbean artists,” the curators said. “We are grateful for NADA’s support and for presenting another

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  • Worker Gabe Ryan removes a sign that includes the name Arthur M. Sackler at an entrance to Tufts School of Medicine, on Thursday, Dec. 5, 2019. Photo: AP/Steven Senne.
    December 06, 2019 at 11:00am

    Tufts University Rids Sackler Name from Its Buildings

    Tufts University in Massachusetts will remove the Sackler name from several buildings on its campus, as well as from its programs, over the family’s role in the United States opioid crisis. The school also announced that it will establish a $3 million endowment to support education, research, and civic engagement programs aimed at the prevention and treatment of addiction and substance abuse. Tufts is believed to be the first university to take down the Sacklers’ name.

    “Our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and others have shared with us the negative impact the Sackler name has on them each day,

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  • The Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida.
    December 06, 2019 at 10:00am

    The Ringling Gifted Major Photography Collection by Stanton and Nancy Kaplan

    The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, has received a significant donation of more than one thousand photographs by artists such as Eugène Atget, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston, as well as an undisclosed amount of funding that will endow both a curatorial position in photography and the museum’s Photography and Media Arts Program. The gift from arts patrons Stanton B. and Nancy W. Kaplan also includes a collection of Asian scholars’ rocks—naturally occurring stones, variously called viewing stones, spirit stones, and respect stones (gongshi), that are

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  • Hannah Starkey, Pussy power, Women’s March, London 2017. Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London.
    December 05, 2019 at 2:02pm

    Hepworth Wakefield Wins $132,000 Freelands Award

    The Freelands Foundation has selected Hepworth Wakefield as the fourth recipient of its $132,000 Freelands Award, which will support the presentation of a major exhibition of work by the Belfast-born photographer Hannah Starkey in 2020. The survey will be the artist’s first solo exhibition to take place at a major institution. It will include a new body of work that will be centered on shifting female identities within communities that were once strongly defined by coal mining and industrial manufacturing.

    “Starkey’s emotionally evocative body of work created over the last twenty years, subtly

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  • Solveig Øvstebø. Courtesy of Astrup Fearnley Museet.
    December 05, 2019 at 12:02pm

    Solveig Øvstebø Named Executive Director of Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museet

    Solveig Øvstebø, the director and chief curator of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, will join the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo as its new executive director in May 2020. Øvstebø succeeds Gunnar B. Kvaran, who has led the museum since 2001.

    Øvstebø announced in August that she planned to step down from the helm of the Renaissance Society after a seven-year tenure, during which time she bolstered the institution’s endowment, launched a new series of programming dedicated to performance, and oversaw twenty solo exhibitions of work by artists such as Kevin Beasley, Alejandro

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  • Hans van Manen, Taco Dibbits, and Henk van Dijk with some of the donated Robert Mapplethorpe photographs. Photo: Jan-Kees Steenman/Rijksmuseum.
    December 05, 2019 at 11:34am

    Rijksmuseum Receives Donation of Early Mapplethorpe Works

    The Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen and his husband, Henk van Dijk, have gifted the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam twenty-four works by the late American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989). Among the pieces included in the donation are twenty-one photographs and three porcelain plates featuring photographs of flowers. “I have been looking at them for forty years,” van Manen said. “Now other people will be able to enjoy them.”

    While the Rijksmuseum has approximately 150,000 photographs that were taken in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries in the Netherlands and abroad in

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