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  • Noah Horowitz. Photo: Art Basel.
    October 28, 2022 at 3:30pm

    Noah Horowitz Appointed CEO of Art Basel

    Noah Horowitz has been named CEO of Art Basel, effective November 7. Horowitz, who previously worked for the organization as director of the Americas from 2015 to 2021, will take the reins from global director Marc Spiegler, who is stepping down to pursue other opportunities in the art world. Spiegler, who notably launched Art Basel Hong Kong and oversaw the event organizer’s recent entry into Paris with the closely watched Paris+ art fair, will help Horowitz get settled in his new role by year-end; he will remain with Art Basel in an advisory capacity through June 2023.

    “We are especially pleased

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  • The Columbus Museum of Art. Photo: Ɱ/Wikipedia Commons.
    October 28, 2022 at 2:30pm

    Columbus Museum of Art Workers Vote to Form Union

    Staff at the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) in Ohio on October 27 voted overwhelmingly to unionize as the Columbus Museum of Art Workers United (CMAWU) under the aegis of AFSCME Ohio Council 8, the local branch of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The vote comes less than two months after employees announced their intention to form a union. The staff at CMA join their compatriots at museums across the United States who have moved to unionize in recent years, among them Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Philadelphia Museum

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  • The first volume of Cookie Jar. Photo: The Book Photographer.
    October 28, 2022 at 9:32am

    Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Announces New Pamphlet Series

    The Andy Warhol Foundation Writers Grant is launching a new pamphlet series, Cookie Jar, titled after Warhol’s lifelong fascination with the object—at his death, he owned about 175, sourced from flea markets, thrift stores, and estate sales—and marking sixteen years of ongoing support for critical arts writing. Edited by Pradeep Dalal and Shiv Kotecha, Cookie Jar will feature new writing by former grantees and will be available through regular distribution channels and through the Arts Writers Grant’s website; additionally, epub and pdf versions will be made available as free downloads.

    The debut

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  • The Turner Contemporary in Margate. Photo: DeFacto/Wikipedia.
    October 27, 2022 at 4:18pm

    Matthew Slotover Named Chair of Turner Contemporary

    Matthew Slotover has been announced as the new chair of Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK, effective January 1, 2023. He will succeed Clive Stevens, who has occupied the role since 2016. Slotover is a cofounder of Frieze magazine, which he helped establish in 1991, and of the first Frieze art fair, launched in 2003. The event, which began in London, has expanded across the globe, with iterations additionally taking place in New York, Los Angeles, and Seoul. Slotover stepped away from the day-to-day running of the fairs in 2020. From 2006 to 2021, he served as chair of the South London Gallery;

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  • Rendering of the new Grand Course entrance of the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York. Image: Marvel.
    October 27, 2022 at 10:14am

    Bronx Museum of the Arts Unveils $26 Million Renovation Plan

    New York City’s Bronx Museum of the Arts today revealed the schematic design for the planned $26 million rehabilitation of its Grand Concourse entrance. Scheduled to be completed by 2025 and jointly funded by the city and state, the renovation will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the institution, New York’s only contemporary art museum that is free to visitors year-round.

    The restoration is being done by New York– and San Juan, Puerto Rico–based urban architecture firm Marvel, under the guidance of the New York City Economic Development Corporation on behalf of the New York City Department of

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  • Pierre Soulages in his atelier in Paris’s fifth arrondissement, 2007. Photo: Derek Hudson/Getty Images.
    October 26, 2022 at 3:44pm

    Pierre Soulages (1919–2022)

    French painter Pierre Soulages, known for his luminous black monochrome paintings, died October 26 at the age of 102. Characterized in 2014 by France’s then-president François Hollande as “the world’s greatest living artist,” Soulages over a career that spanned more than eight decades relentlessly focused on the inky hue that he claimed had first attracted him as a child, producing massive, gleaming works that ultimately earned him France’s Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, a retrospective at Paris’s renowned Centre Pompidou, and his own museum. “My instrument is not black but the light

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  • Mike Davis. Photo: Verso.
    October 26, 2022 at 7:52am

    Mike Davis (1946–2022)

    Radical American activist and historian Mike Davis, who mapped geographies of power in works of gripping scholarship that sought to shape the future as well as the past, died at age seventy-six on October 25 of esophageal cancer, according to The Nation. Davis rose to international prominence in 1990 with his bestselling book City of Quartz, a landmark work of social history that pierced the sunny mythologies of Los Angeles by portraying a postmodern dystopia taken over by developers, corrupt politicians, and a racist criminal justice system; it preceded the L.A. uprisings by two years. Davis

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  • Dan Flavin’s Untitled on the exterior of Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof. Photo: Jacklee/Flickr.
    October 25, 2022 at 1:45pm

    Hamburger Bahnhof Switches Off Iconic Flavin Work as Energy Crisis Looms

    In an effort to save on energy costs, officials at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof have turned off the green and blue fluorescent lights of the massive Dan Flavin work that has greeted visitors since the museum opened in a nineteenth-century former train station in 1996. Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, the institution’s codirectors, on October 18 cut power to the artist’s Untitled, 1996, a site-specific work illuminating the museum’s stone facade and historical wings and visible from far across the city. Flavin, who died four weeks after the museum opened, intended the work to remain on at all times

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  • Julio César Morales. Photo: Rembrandt Quinallo.
    October 25, 2022 at 12:30pm

    MoCA Tucson Reveals New Leadership Team

    The Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson has named Julio César Morales as its new executive director and cochief curator, beginning December 1. Laura Copelin will move up from her current role as the institution’s interim director and curator-at-large to become its deputy director and co-chief curator. According to the museum, the pair’s collaboration is meant to “experiment with new ways small museums can function both organizationally and as responsive agents within their communities, serving as a locus for consequential projects with international reach.”

    Morales, a practicing artist who uses

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  • Rodney Graham in 2022. Photo: Sven Boecker. © Rodney Graham.
    October 24, 2022 at 5:25pm

    Rodney Graham (1949–2022)

    Pathbreaking Photoconceptualist Rodney Graham, who frequently made himself the subject of his own work, died of cancer October 22 at the age of seventy-three. The news was collectively announced by the many galleries who represented him, spearheaded by Hauser & Wirth. A true polymath, Graham worked across media including painting, sculpture, film, video, and photography, culling influences from music, literature, psychoanalysis, and popular culture to create a multivalent body of work that examines social and historical cultures through humor and manipulations of perception. “We all know that

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  • Banners depicting the face of Mahsa Amini were unfurled at New York’s Guggenheim museum. Photo: Anonymous Artists for Iran.
    October 24, 2022 at 3:35pm

    Artists Make New York’s Guggenheim Site of Protest Against Killing of Mahsa Amini

    The New York–based collective Anonymous Artists for Iran on October 22 staged a demonstration at the city’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in protest of the killing earlier this fall by Iranian “morality police” of Mahsa Amini. Members of the activist organization ascended to the top of the Guggenheim’s iconic spiral staircase and unfurled a dozen bright red banners bearing the likeness of the twenty-two-year-old Amini alongside the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom.” The action was concurrent with protests around the world supporting women’s rights in Iran, which were ignited by the murder of Amini,

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  • Members of Lezte Generation souse Monet’s Meules, 1890, with mashed potatoes. Photo: Lezte Generation.
    October 24, 2022 at 2:16pm

    Climate Activists Pelt $110 Million-Dollar Monet with Mashed Potatoes

    Two members of German climate change action group Lezte Generation (Last Generation) soused Claude Monet’s 1890 painting Meules with mashed potatoes on Sunday in an effort to bring attention to the climate crisis. Each activist then glued one hand to the wall and knelt before the spud-soaked work, valued at $110.7 million, to address those gathered. Their effort, which took place at Potsdam, Germany’s Museum Barberini, closely echoed that earlier this month by a pair of demonstrators from the activist group Just Stop Oil, who sloshed tomato soup across Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at London’s

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