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  • The M+ Museum in Hong Kong. Photo: Virgile Simon Bertrand/Herzog & de Meuron.
    September 08, 2021 at 7:16pm

    Hong Kong’s M+ Gears Up to Open, Removes Ai Weiwei Work

    Officials at Hong Kong’s hotly anticipated M+ Museum have announced that the institution will welcome the public on November 12 with an exhibition titled “Hong Kong: Here and Beyond,” and a show of works gifted to the institution by Swiss collector Uli Sigg, whose trove of Chinese contemporary art is one of the most comprehensive in the world. Admission will be free for Hong Kong residents during the institution’s first year.

    The opening of the 70,000-square-foot Herzog & de Meuron–designed contemporary- and modern-art museum has been delayed many times, most recently pushed from the beginning

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  • Billy Apple.
    September 07, 2021 at 9:40pm

    Billy Apple (1935–2021)

    New Zealand Pop artist Billy Apple, who cast himself as a brand decades before the commercial practice gained widespread prominence thanks to the use of social media, died September 6 at the age of eighty-six. Apple, whom Anthony Byrt in 2011 characterized in Artforum as having “arguably done more for Conceptualism in [New Zealand] than any other figure,” was hugely influential both in his own country and abroad, exhibiting alongside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein at the peak of their popularity and founding one of New York’s first alternative art spaces.

    Born Barrie Bates in Auckland in 1935,

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  • Lew Thomas, Self Portrait #2, 1972. Photo: Philip Martin Gallery.
    September 07, 2021 at 12:32pm

    Lew Thomas (1932–2021)

    Pathbreaking Conceptual photographer Lew Thomas died in August in Petaluma, California, at the age of eighty-eight. The news was announced by the Los Angeles–based Philip Martin Gallery, his longtime representative. The Bay Area artist beginning in the early 1970s created memorable bodies of work, typically in black-and-white, themed around words’ relationship to one another, the pictorial embodiment of language, and the passage of time. Alongside artists including Lutz Bacher, John Baldessari, Hal Fischer, Barbara Kruger, and Cindy Sherman, he was a part of the Photography and Language movement,

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  • The statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia. Photo: Mobilus In Mobili/Flickr.
    September 03, 2021 at 7:50pm

    Viriginia Supreme Court Rules for Removal of Robert E. Lee Monument

    The Virginia Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that a statue of General Robert E. Lee that has stood in the state capital for more than a hundred years can be taken down. The ruling responded to two separate lawsuits seeking to protect the twenty-one-foot-high bronze sculpture, which looms over Richmond’s Monument Avenue from atop a forty-foot-high pedestal set inside a traffic circle and depicts the Confederate army leader astride a horse and clad in full military regalia.

    Following the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the attendant global rise of the Black

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  • The branch will open in Seoul’s Gangnam District. Photo: Joop/Flickr.
    September 03, 2021 at 2:35pm

    Gladstone Gallery to Open Outpost in Seoul

    New York–based Gladstone Gallery has announced that it will open a branch in Seoul. The outpost will be the sixth location for the modern and contemporary art gallery, which only this summer launched an office in Los Angeles in addition to its three galleries in New York and its space in Brussels.

    “We are very happy to share the news that Gladstone will officially begin to expand its physical footprint to Asia,” said gallery founder Barbara Gladstone. “We have a long history of artists showing at some of Korea’s most prestigious institutions, including a significant exhibition for Matthew Barney

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  • Johanna Burton. Photo: Erin Leland.
    September 02, 2021 at 3:00pm

    Johanna Burton Named Executive Director of Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

    The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (LA MoCA), announced today that Johanna Burton will take up the post of executive director of the institution, working alongside artistic director Klaus Biesenbach. Burton, the longtime executive director of the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus, will step into the newly created role on November 1. A staunch champion of artists known for her commitment to institution-building and her engagement with education in all formats, she is expected to guide the museum in a more inclusive and community-minded direction.

    “It’s

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  • Nan Goldin, The Sackler Courtyard, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2017.
    September 02, 2021 at 2:02pm

    Sackler Family Pays $4.5 Billion to Settle Opioid Lawsuits as Purdue Pharma Is Dissolved

    Thousands of lawsuits relating to the aggressive marketing of the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin were brought to a close yesterday as Judge Robert Drain of the US Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, New York, ordered that the drug’s maker, Purdue Pharma, be dissolved and that its owners, members of the Sackler family, pay $4.5 billion of their personal wealth toward the creation of addiction and prevention programs. The Stamford, Connecticut–based Purdue had been charged with assertively marketing OxyContin and providing kickbacks to doctors who prescribed the powerful opioid while downplaying

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  • Florence Müller will lead the museum’s new Institute of Textile Art and Fashion. Photo: Marc Piscotty.
    September 02, 2021 at 10:30am

    Denver Art Museum Receives $25 Million to Form Textile Art and Fashion Department

    An anonymous donor has gifted the Denver Art Museum (DAM) $25 million in support of its Textile Art and Fashion Department, the museum announced today. The money will allow DAM to establish a new Institute of Textile Art and Fashion, which will be led by Florence Müller, who since 2015 has served as the museum’s Avenir Curator of Textile Art and Fashion. Fifteen million dollars of the transformational gift will provide an endowment underpinning scholarship and programming, including restoration and maintenance of the collection, while the remaining $10 million will go into an endowment fund

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  • Visitors from outside the EU must provide proof of vaccination, and all fairgoers must contend with complex rules laid out by the Swiss government. Photo: Art Basel.
    September 01, 2021 at 3:07pm

    Art Basel, Hobbled by New Covid-19 Restrictions, Forges Ahead

    Art Basel, which in June 2020 was forced to cancel its in-person iteration and go online as Covid-19 ravaged the globe, has encountered new restrictions related to the virus’s surging Delta variant as the fair approaches the opening of its flagship Swiss edition, The Art Newspaper reports. The event, which is to take place September 21–26 (the first three days are preview days), has been complicated by the United States’ advisory to its citizens, issued August 30, that they not travel to Switzerland owing to a rise in Covid-19 cases there. Additionally, the fair must abide by the complex rules

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  • Lévy Gorvy’s gallery on Madison Avenue.
    September 01, 2021 at 12:08pm

    New York Dealers Lévy Gorvy, Amalia Dayan, Salon 94, Announce Merger

    Two New York galleries—Lévy Gorvy and Salon 94—and dealer Amalia Dayan have announced that they are joining forces to establish a single consortium, called LGDR, whose flagship will be situated on the city’s tony Upper East Side. The news, first reported in the New York Times, is said to have come as a shock to a number of the galleries’ artists, whose fate is unclear.

    The new entity, which takes its name from the last initials of its owners—Dominique Lévy and Brett Gorvy, cofounders of Lévy Gorvy; veteran dealer Amalia Dayan; and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the owner of Salon 94—will occupy digs

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  • Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. Photo: Adrian Grycuk.
    August 31, 2021 at 7:15pm

    Ujazdowski Castle Sparks Protests with “Anti–Cancel Culture” Exhibition

    Throngs of demonstrators gathered outside the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Warsaw on the evening of August 27 to protest the museum’s staging of “Political Art,” an exhibition CCA officials have characterized as celebrating free speech and challenging “cancel culture.” Critics of the show have branded it racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Islamist, and say that the show is being used as an excuse to give voice to and justify right-wing hate speech.

    The exhibition is the second staged by Piotr Bernatowicz, a member of the far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS), who was appointed

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  • Beijing’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. Photo: Simon Frank/Wikipedia Commons.
    August 31, 2021 at 3:31pm

    UCCA Center for Contemporary Art Expands to Chengdu, Shopping Mall

    Beijing’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art has announced that it will open a branch in the Sichuan province capital of Chengdu in 2024, The Art Newspaper reports, and that it will inaugurate a cobranded exhibition space in a Beijing shopping mall late this year. The Chengdu location will be the museum’s fourth: In addition to its original venue in Beijing, the museum operates outposts in coastal Bedaihe and in Shanghai, having opened the latter, christened Shanghai EDGE, this past May. The Chengdu museum will be part of a new cultural hub being developed by the Hong Kong–based Sunwah Group. The

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