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  • Emily Hesse.
    November 10, 2022 at 1:17pm

    Emily Hesse (1980–2022)

    British multidisciplinary artist Emily Hesse, whose work examined materialism, class, the Anthropocene, and the relationship of land to the formation of societies, died of ovarian cancer November 4 at the age of forty-two. News of her death was confirmed by the UK’s Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), which holds her work in its collection. In a practice that was frequently collaborative and intensely local, Hesse explored topics surrounding the modern narratives attached to working-class and rural communities, of which she herself was a member. “Drawing on your own experiences allows

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  • Rendering of the Beirut Museum of Art. Photo: BeMA.
    November 10, 2022 at 1:12pm

    Plans for Beirut Museum of Art Revealed

    Officials connected with the Beirut Museum of Art (BeMA) detailed their vision for the yet-to-be-built institution at a talk taking place this week at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as reported by Artnews. Present at the discussion were BeMA codirectors Taline Boladian and Juliana Khalaf, and architects Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, of the firm WORKac, which has been tasked with designing the museum. BeMA president Joe Saddi and MoMA director Glenn Lowery served as moderators.

    Currently slated to open in 2026, the hotly anticipated institution will gather together some 2,000 works created

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  • The de Young Museum. Photo: Andrei Zmievski/Flickr.
    November 10, 2022 at 12:27pm

    San Francisco Museums to Offer Free Admission Weekend

    Twenty-one San Francisco arts institutions will waive admission fees for visitors the weekend of December 3–4, thanks to a gift from an anonymous donor. Museums already offering free admission will provide free entry to special events and exhibitions that would otherwise cost money to attend. The donation, of an unspecified amount, comes as the City by the Bay battles its image as a soulless tech hub in cultural and fiscal decline, as limned in a recent article in the New York Times. Thanks in varying measures to the Covid-19 crisis, which emptied office buildings throughout the city, and to

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  • Lee Bontecou at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1966. Photo: Fred W. McDarrah/MUUS Collection/Getty Images.
    November 09, 2022 at 11:49am

    Lee Bontecou (1931–2022)

    Lee Bontecou, who gained widespread notice for her industrial assemblages, plush cavity–pocked canvases, and vacuum-formed plastic sculptures of organic shapes, died November 8 at her home in Florida at the age of ninety-one. Bontecou rose to prominence in the 1960s as one of the few women artists feted on the burgeoning New York scene before shocking the art world by decamping to Pennsylvania for thirty years. She quietly continued to make work there, commuting to teach art at Brooklyn College for two decades before finally agreeing to a 2003 retrospective at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum that

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  • Brian O’Doherty in 2018. Photo: Clare Keogh.
    November 08, 2022 at 3:47pm

    Brian O’Doherty (1928–2022)

    Brian O’Doherty, the Irish-born polymath renowned for his influential art criticism and for his pseudonymously made post-Minimalist and Conceptual artwork placing agency with the viewer, has died at the age of ninety-four. His death was announced by his New York gallery, Simone Subal. O’Doherty’s groundbreaking three-part essay “Inside the White Cube,” which first appeared in the pages (and on the cover) of Artforum’s March 1976 issue, remains essential reading today. In the essay, contained in the 1976 volume Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, O’Doherty argues that the

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  • The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Photo: US Embassy London/Flickr.
    November 07, 2022 at 1:15pm

    London Arts Organizations See National Funding Slashed

    Major cultural institutions across London are facing extreme budget cuts as funding from Arts Council England moves to suburban areas and smaller cities around the country at the behest of the UK government. From 2023, regional arts organizations in seventy-eight municipalities outside London will see a 95 percent increase in funding, with £32 million ($36.7 million) extracted from monies typically allotted to the capital city’s cultural institutions, and an extra £43.5 million set to be disbursed annually to the regional organizations for the next three years.

    The redistribution, ordered earlier

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  • Members of proppaNOW. Photo: Rhett Hammerton/proppaNOW.
    November 04, 2022 at 6:10pm

    Aboriginal Collective proppaNOW Wins Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice

    The Vera List Center for Art and Politics has announced Australian Aboriginal artist collective proppaNOW as the recipient of the 2022–24 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice. The Meanjin/Brisbane–based collective was chosen for the honor, which is attended by a $25,000 cash prize, for its  2021 exhibition “OCCURRENT AFFAIR,” at the University of Queensland Art Museum, showcasing new and recent works by its members and addressing “current sociopolitical, economic and environmental issues while celebrating the strength, resilience and continuity of Aboriginal culture,” according to a

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  • A work by Claire Fontaine displayed at Paris+ par Art Basel last month. Photo: Art Basel.
    November 03, 2022 at 6:01pm

    UBS and Art Basel Collectors’ Survey Shows Booming Art Market

    “A Survey of Global Collecting in 2022,” this year’s iteration of a report jointly published since 2014 by investment bank UBS and art-fair giant Art Basel, reveals wealthy art buyers to be eagerly reaching for their wallets as the pandemic and its attendant restrictions fade. The survey’s author, Clare McAndrew, and staff queried roughly 2,700 high-net-worth collectors in the US, Europe, and Asia, and learned that the appetite for physical art is especially robust, as is the desire to attend art fairs and auctions in person. Of note, the market for NFTs, which saw tremendous growth in 2021,

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  • Just Stop Oil protestors blocking traffic around London’s Parliament Square. Photo: Just Stop Oil.
    November 03, 2022 at 3:30pm

    Just Stop Oil Vows to Escalate Protests if Demands Go Unmet

    UK-based environmental activist group Just Stop Oil announced on November 1 that they would pause their protest actions until November 4 after more than a month spent carrying out disruptions, but warned that they would return to the field with fresh fury should the government fail to take action on their demand that it cease issuing new oil and gas licenses. The udpate arrived in the wake of new UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s reversal of his decision not to attend the COP climate-change summit in Egypt next week, and followed on the heels of Just Stop Oil’s efforts to bring widespread notice

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  • Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978.
    November 01, 2022 at 5:39pm

    Cindy Sherman Joins Board of International Center of Photography

    New York’s International Center of Photography Center (ICP) has announced Cindy Sherman as among its five new trustees. Assuming their positions on the board alongside Sherman are Uzodinma Iweala, chief executive of the Africa Center in Harlem; Toronto-based gallerist Jane Corkin; real estate developer and philanthropist Robert Fribourg, of New York; and Wall Street veteran Jonathan R. Furer.

    “I sensed that the organization, in asking me to participate, wanted to branch out from its more traditional roots and be seen in a broader sense of how photography is being used today,” Sherman told the

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  • Piet Mondrian, New York City 1, 1941. Photo: Walter Klein, Düsseldorf. © Mondrian/Holtzman Trust, c/o Beeldrecht, Amsterdam, Holland Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
    October 31, 2022 at 4:05pm

    Mondrian Painting Discovered to Have Been Hanging Upside Down for 75 Years

    A work by Piet Mondrian was found by an art historian to have been displayed upside down for the past three-quarters of a century—and there are no plans to correct the error. Curator Susanne Meyer-Büser discovered the mistake while conducting research for the exhibition “Mondrian: Evolution,” which opened this past weekend at K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. After carefully looking at Mondrian’s New York City I, 1941, a grid of narrow yellow, red, and blue tape stripes that grow denser at the bottom of the canvas they occupy, and then looking at similar works made by the

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  • Frances Morris. Photo: Tate.
    October 31, 2022 at 3:02pm

    Frances Morris to Depart as Director of Tate Modern

    Frances Morris, who in 2016 became the first woman to be named director of Tate Modern, will leave her role at the London institution in April 2023. She has worked at Tate since 1987, when she arrived as a curator; she was made head of displays at Tate Modern in 2000, the year the museum was founded, and became director of its international art collection in 2006. During her long tenure at the museum, she tirelessly advocated for the work of artists from the Middle East and the Asia Pacific region and was responsible for adding works by many to the collection. She was also instrumental in

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