News

  • FIAC.
    October 17, 2018 at 7:26am

    FIAC to Open in Paris

    The forty-fifth edition of the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, better known as FIAC, will kick off in Paris this week. The fair, featuring 195 galleries hailing from twenty-five countries, will take place at the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais from Thursday, October 18 to Sunday, October 21.

    Among the exhibitors returning to the fair are Hauser & Wirth (London, Somerset, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Zurich); Gmurzynska (Zurich and St. Moritz); Canada (New York); Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles); High Art (Paris); Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels); Salon 94 (New York); and Tim Van Laere

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  • Edward Hopper, Chop Suey, 1929, from the Barney A. Ebsworth Collection.
    October 16, 2018 at 4:50pm

    Christie’s Partners with Blockchain-Secured Art Registry Service for Upcoming Sale

    The sale of the Barney A. Ebsworth collection will be conducted at Christie’s as part of a pilot partnership with the blockchain-secured digital art registry service Artory, which will provide complete transaction histories before bidding and produce digitally encrypted certificates for each of the more than ninety works on sale. The major collection of American modernist art, expected to net over $300 million at auction, includes works by Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Jasper Johns, and Jackson Pollock.

    “Artory’s mission is to protect and grow the prosperity

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  • Mel Ramos.
    October 16, 2018 at 3:35pm

    Mel Ramos (1935–2018)

    Mel Ramos, the Pop artist who won polarizing fame with farcical paintings of pinup girls, has died at eighty-three. The cause was heart failure. Ramos often staged his subjects—nearly always nude women—with consumer products: behind Coca-Cola glasses, astride cigars, emerging from candy wrappers or banana peels, leaning against tubes of Colgate, and, in one case, as an odalisque on a box of Velveeta. While acclaim arrived early for the artist, second-wave feminists, including the late art scholar Linda Nochlin, criticized his work for what many have argued is a retrograde depiction of

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  • Clément Cogitore. Photo: Le Bal.
    October 16, 2018 at 3:08pm

    Clément Cogitore Wins 2018 Marcel Duchamp Prize

    The Centre Pompidou and the Association pour la Diffusion Internationale de l’Art Français (ADIAF) in Paris have announced that the thirty-five-year-old filmmaker Clément Cogitore has won the eighteenth edition of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, an annual $40,000 award that aims to raise the profile of contemporary French artists. Artists Mohamed Bourouissa, Thu Van Tran, and Marie Voignier were also nominated for the prize.

    Born in Colmar in 1983, Cogitore is known for his numerous films, videos, installations, and photographs that often feature themes of collective memory, ritualism, and the figuration

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  • Goldsmith's photograph, left, and Warhol's portrait, right, with markings from court filings.
    October 16, 2018 at 12:57pm

    Lawsuit Over Warhol’s Portraits of Prince Fuels Debate Over Art and Appropriation

    The Andy Warhol Foundation and photographer Lynn Goldsmith both filed cross-motions for summary judgment in a Manhattan federal court last Friday, October 12, reports the Art Newspaper. Raising questions about artistic appropriation, the lawsuit in question began last year and concerns Warhol’s 1984 portrait series of Prince, which Goldsmith claims was derived from her photograph of the pop star from 1981, and which she granted a one-time license to be used as source material for an artist illustration for Vanity Fair. In addition to the illustration for Vanity Fair, Warhol produced fifteen

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  • Marisa Mazria Katz, editorial director of Eyebeam Center for the Future of Journalism.
    October 16, 2018 at 11:28am

    Eyebeam Launches Arts Grant Program for Journalistic Projects

    The Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in Brooklyn has announced the launch of the Eyebeam Center for the Future of Journalism (ECFJ), a program that will provide grants ranging from $500 to $5,000 to artists pursuing journalistic work on topics such as technology and data privacy, disinformation, artificial intelligence, and the 2018 and 2020 elections. Financed by Craig Newark Philanthropies, ECFJ will accept applications on a rolling basis and will be headed by Marisa Mazria Katz, founding editor of Creative Time’s publishing branch Creative Time Reports, where she facilitated partnerships with

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  • View of the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum.
    October 16, 2018 at 11:08am

    British Museum to Defend Collection in New Initiative: “Not Everything Was Looted”

    The British Museum is starting a program that aims to soften its reputation as a repository for plundered artifacts, according to The Guardian. The initiative, a series of monthly talks called “Collected Histories” that begins on Friday, is partially a response to art historian Alice Procter’s Uncomfortable Art Tours, trips that expose how major institutions in London “came into being against a backdrop of imperialism,” according to its website. Procter led a tour at the British Museum—which refuses to repatriate its looted treasures, including the Parthenon Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, and

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  • Wrightwood 659. Photo: Jeff Goldberg/Esto.
    October 16, 2018 at 10:08am

    New Tadao Ando–Designed Arts Space Opens in Chicago

    Wrightwood 659, a new exhibition space dedicated to architecture and socially engaged art, has opened in a former apartment building in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. The venue was designed by the Pritzker Prize–winning, self-taught architect Tadao Ando, who often works with reinforced concrete and is known for his mastery of light.

    Founded by media entrepreneur and philanthropist Fred Eychaner, who is president of the Chicago-based grantmaking organization the Alphawood Foundation, and architectural historian Dan Whittaker, Wrightwood 659 will present two exhibitions a year. Lisa Cavanaugh,

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  • Tavares Strachan. Photo: Andy Romer.
    October 16, 2018 at 8:23am

    Tavares Strachan Awarded VIA Art Fund’s $100,000 Frontier Prize

    The VIA Art Fund and the World Frontiers Forum announced that Tavares Strachan has been selected as the recipient of the 2018 Frontier Art Prize, an annual $100,000 award dedicated to honoring a visual artist whose practice reflects a pioneering spirit and whose work addresses global challenges. “The Frontier Art Prize continues to be an experimental project, one that aims to make direct and impactful connections between art and our future,” Bridgitt Evans, the founder of the VIA Art Fund, said in a statement.

    Born in the Bahamas in 1979, Strachan examines the intersection of art, science, and

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  • Gordon Wilkins. Photo: Peabody Essex Museum.
    October 15, 2018 at 4:37pm

    Gordon Wilkins Appointed Associate Curator at the Addison Gallery of American Art

    The Addison Gallery of American Art announced that Gordon Wilkins has been named its new associate curator of American art. Wilkins comes to the Addison from the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, where he has served as assistant curator for exhibitions and research. He will assume his post on October 29.  

    During his tenure at the Peabody Essex Museum, Wilkins helped organize exhibitions, publications, and other projects, including, most recently, “Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings” (2018), which was co-organized with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and “Japanomania!

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  • Self-portrait (Hand-me-downs), 2011, by 2018 Houston Artadia Award winner Francis Almendárez. Photo: Artadia.
    October 15, 2018 at 4:03pm

    Artadia Creates New Fellowship Program for Immigrant Artists in Houston

    Artadia, the national nonprofit organization that supports artists with unrestricted, merit-based awards, announced today that it has established a new fellowship program for immigrant and refugee artists based in Houston. Inaugural participants in the Artadia Houston Fellowship program will be given $2,000 in unrestricted funds and will each work with a mentor chosen from the pool of previous Artadia award winners.

    “We are thrilled to launch this program as it aligns with and broadens our mission to support visual artists in an open and accessible manner and through dialogue and exchange,”

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  • Takehisa Kosugi performing in 1988. Photo: Sabine Matthes.
    October 15, 2018 at 3:52pm

    Takehisa Kosugi (1938–2018)

    Takehisa Kosugi, the Japanese Fluxist composer, sonic installation artist, and avant-garde violinist who reimagined the boundaries of music for five decades, died last Friday at the age of eighty. In 1960, Kosugi cofounded Group Ongaku, a Tokyo-based collective widely considered the first improvisational music ensemble formed in both the country and the world. In the 1970s, he helped create the Taj Mahal Travelers octet. Between 1995 and 2011, Kosugi was the musical director for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. His collaborators included John Cage, David Tudor, Peter Kowald, saxophonist Steve

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