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January 04, 2022 at 6:00pm

David Zwirner to Establish Montauk Artists’ Retreat

Mega gallerist David Zwirner and his wife Monica Zwirner are in the process of establishing an artists’ retreat in the newly tony Long Island getaway town of Montauk. The news was first reported by the East Hampton Star, which revealed that the Zwirners’ plan encompasses seventeen cottages on the shore of Lake Montauk not far from their own mansion, pool, and yoga pavilion. The couple would subsidize the rental fees for the little cabins, which would henceforth be known collectively as the Bridgeford Cottages. An asphalt-and-gravel road leading to the lake would be removed and replaced with

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January 04, 2022 at 5:16pm

Courtenay Finn Named Chief Curator of Orange County Museum of Art

The Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) yesterday revealed the appointment of Courtenay Finn as chief curator. Finn will assume her new role in March, departing the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, where she has served as curator since 2018. At OCMA, she will helm the curatorial department and oversee the exhibitions taking place in OCMA’s new home, slated to open in Costa Mesa in October 2022.
OCMA’s new $93 million facility is to open October 8 with the California Biennial serving as its inaugural exhibition. General admission will be free to the public for a decade following the opening.

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January 03, 2022 at 5:49pm

Teresa Iarocci Mavica Out as Director General of Moscow’s V-A-C Foundation

Italian-born curator Teresa Iaroccci Mavica is departing Moscow’s V-A-C Foundation, the arts organization she cofounded over a decade ago with Leonid Mikhelson, the billionaire owner of Russian natural gas megaproducer Novatek. She is also stepping down from her role as director of the GES-2 House of Culture, the foundation’s sprawling Renzo Piano–designed cultural complex, which opened in December. According to the Moscow Times, she will remain on VAC’s board of directors and work at the foundation’s Venice branch, where she will assist with the staging of “When Gondola Engines Were Taken to

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December 26, 2021 at 5:30pm

Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021)

California-based painter Wayne Thiebaud, who blurred the distinction between commercial and fine art with deceptively ordinary still lifes of Americana staples like candy apples, gumball machines, and ice cream cones, has died at age 101. The news was announced by his New York gallery, Acquavella. Thiebaud launched his prolific seven-decade career in the early 1960s under the banner of Pop art, a label he resisted: At a time when many of his contemporaries appropriated everyday objects and mass imagery to skewer the American dream, Thiebaud stood out by sugarcoating it, confecting his evocations

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December 22, 2021 at 2:29pm

Jeff Koons Sued Over “Made in Heaven” Series

Jeff Koons has been accused of incorporating without approval another artist’s sculpture in several works from his controversial 1989 “Made in Heaven” series. Artist Michael Hayden earlier this month filed suit in New York’s Southern District Court, claiming that Koons appropriated a work he made in two paintings and a sculpture. Hayden created the work, a sculpture featuring a serpent and a rock slab, as a stage prop for politician Ilona Staller. The work is depicted in the cited works as a support for the amorous interactions of Staller (formerly known as the porn star Cicciolina) and Koons,

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December 21, 2021 at 2:17pm

Tate’s Sook-Kyung Lee Named Artistic Director of 2023 Gwangju Biennale

Sook-Kyung Lee, senior curator of international art at London’s Tate Modern, has been announced as the artistic director the fourteenth iteration of South Korea’s Gwangju Biennale, to run April 7–July 9, 2023. The Biennale, one of Asia’s most prestigious art events and typically one of the world’s best-attended, was pushed back a full year from its originally scheduled 2022 date after the thirteenth edition, which itself had been moved ahead a year owing to Covid, saw a dearth of visitors as the pandemic rattled on.
Lee is the the first Korean-born curator since Kim to lead the event. Prior to

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December 21, 2021 at 9:30am

Jenni Crain (1991–2021)

Jenni Crain, a fast-rising New York–based artist, curator, and art dealer who foregrounded feminist theory and practice and whose spare, minimal sculptures addressed memory, embodiment, and construction of space, died at the age of thirty on December 16 due to complications related to Covid-19. The news was announced by her New York gallery, Gordon Robichaux.
“Jenni’s commitment to and interest in fellow artists encompassed their entire human experience,” the gallery wrote. “She formed immeasurable, lifelong bonds with those she worked and collaborated with, and touched all who knew her with her

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December 20, 2021 at 5:40pm

Sotheby’s Reports Record Sales, Contemplates Public Offering

Sotheby’s today announced 2021 sales of $7.3 billion, the highest recorded since the auction house’s founding in 1744, The Art Newspaper reported. The amount represents a 68 percent increase over 2020 sales, which totaled $5 billion, and does not take into account the more than twenty sales still pending before year-end. The auction house credited its digital livestreaming format for the surge, noting that 92 percent of bids were received digitally. Also driving growth were new buyers: 39 percent of buyers and 44 percent of bidders were new to Sotheby’s. Buyers in Asia, where the art market is

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December 17, 2021 at 6:16pm

Phillips Announces New Hong Kong Headquarters

Global auction house Phillips has revealed plans for a new Asia headquarters in Hong Kong. Expected to open in fall 2022, the flagship will occupy 48,000 square feet across five and a half floors in the city’s West Kowloon Cultural District Authority Tower overlooking Victoria Harbor, a stone’s throw from the newly inaugurated M+ museum of contemporary art.
The news comes on the heels of a significant jump in sales for the Russian-owned auction house, which raked in a record $1.2 billion in 2021, about 32 percent more than it generated in 2019. Private sales saw a 35 percent increase between 2019

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December 17, 2021 at 5:21pm

Purdue Pharma Settlement Overturned in Federal Court

A federal judge yesterday overturned the closely scrutinized September 1 settlement of thousands of lawsuits filed against drug maker Purdue Pharma in relation to its aggressive marketing of the powerful opioid OxyContin. Judge Colleen McMahon of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York cast a cold eye on a provision in the settlement that shielded the members of the Sackler family who owned the company from future civil lawsuits related to the drug.
The family members had sought immunity from such lawsuits in exchange for $4.5 billion of their personal wealth, which they

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December 16, 2021 at 2:49pm

Lesley Lokko to Helm 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale

Top architectural academic Lesley Lokko will organize the 2023 iteration of the Venice Architecture Biennale, becoming the first Black curator to oversee the event. Lokko is also one of the few women to ever lead the Biennale, after Kazuyo Sejima in 2010 and Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara in 2018.
The Dundee, Scotland–born Lokko, who grew up in Ghana and holds a PhD in architecture from the University of London, has for decades championed the idea that architecture and race are intertwined, a notion she illuminated in the 2000 volume White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Space and Architecture

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December 16, 2021 at 2:07pm

Rencontres de Bamako Reveals Participating Artists for 2022 Edition

Organizers of Rencontres de Bamako (Bamako Encounters), the Mali biennial dedicated to African photography and video, have released a list of artists who will participate in the event’s thirteenth edition, taking place between October 20, 2022, and December 20, 2022. The exhibition was earlier this year postponed from its original November 21, 2021, start date.
Titled “Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono: On Multiplicity, Difference, Becoming, and Heritage” (The Persons of the Person Are Multiple in the Person), this edition will “pay a powerful tribute to the spaces in between, to that which defies

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