News

  • September 02, 2020 at 1:55pm

    Galleries Demand Refunds from Canceled Dallas Art Fair

    More than 30 galleries have requested refunds from the organizers of the Dallas Art Fair. The galleries have sworn not to participate in future iterations of the fair should refunds not be forthcoming. Originally slated to take place this past April, the fair, which focuses on modern and contemporary art, had been pushed to October owing to concerns surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic.

    The fair’s organizers announced its cancelation in early August, deeming it unwise to hold the annual event, which since its 2009 founding has grown to draw some 20,000 visitors from all over the world. Exhibitors

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  • The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
    September 02, 2020 at 12:23pm

    Walker Art Center Creates, Cuts Jobs in Initiative to Rethink Public Engagement

    The Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center has created nine new jobs, eliminated five positions, and changed three other roles in a restructuring initiative intended to help the institution better engage with the public, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports.

    Under the leadership of Mary Ceruti, who assumed the executive director post at the Walker in January 2019, the museum will be concentrating on “how we plan our programs from the perspective of what matters to people,” Ceruti said. “Not just what are artists thinking and excited about, but how do we connect that to what is important in people's

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  • Charles Gaines, Numbers and Trees: Central Park Series II: Tree #4 Steve, 2016.
    September 01, 2020 at 6:20pm

    California Art Schools Receive Millions to Support Black Academics

    Two philanthropists in recent weeks announced separate donations totaling $6 million to the California School of the Arts in Valencia and Otis College in Los Angeles, respectively.

    Late last week, it was announced that Eileen Harris, a cofounder of L.A.-based nonprofit Art + Practice, has awarded CalArts $5 million; the money is earmarked for research, creative initiatives, curriculum changes, and the Charles Gaines Faculty Chair. This new faculty position is named for Black conceptual artist Charles Gaines, who is on staff at CalArts and will hold the initial chair. According to a press release

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  • The National Museum of Beirut.
    September 01, 2020 at 3:55pm

    National Museum of Beirut Picks Up the Pieces a Month After the Blast

    Paris’s storied Louvre and the Directorate General of Antiquities in Lebanon have joined forces to help the National Museum of Beirut back to its feet in the wake of the devastating port-area explosion that killed some 180 people, injured thousands more, and leveled a large portion of the institution’s home city a month ago.

    The windows and doors of the museum, which is just south of the August 4 blast’s epicenter, were blown out and its security system badly damaged. The Art Newspaper cited a report by the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (Aliph) as saying

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  • The Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna.
    August 31, 2020 at 2:19pm

    Vienna’s Sigmund Freud Museum Reopens Following $4.8 Million Expansion

    The Sigmund Freud Museum, housed in the rooms of an 1890 Viennese building in where the father of psychoanalysis lived and worked for nearly five decades, reopened this past weekend after undergoing a $4.8 million expansion.

    When the museum opened in 1971, the public was only allowed into Freud’s waiting room and offices. Following the renovation and expansion, overseen by Hermann Czech, Walter Angonese and Artec Architects, visitors for the first time may step inside the Freud family residence.

    The residence and office have remained almost entirely unfurnished since Freud, fearing persecution as

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  • SFMoMA as seen from the Yerba Buena Gardens.
    August 31, 2020 at 12:40pm

    SFMoMA Furloughs Majority of Staff

    The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is furloughing all full-time and many part-time employees on a limited basis, effective at the end of September, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle.

    The furloughs, announced during an online meeting last week, will take place on Fridays, and will continue until the museum reopens, though the institution has not yet said when this will take place. The move means affected employees will lose one workday a week, or about 20 percent of their earnings.

    SFMoMA closed owing to the Covid-19 pandemic in March. Following the announcement of a $7

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  • Siah Armajani.
    August 28, 2020 at 5:04pm

    Siah Armajani (1939–2020)

    Iranian-American artist Siah Armajani, whose work across media bridged architecture, democracy, mathematics, and the commons, has died of heart failure in Minneapolis. Long underrecognized, the eighty-one-year-old was recently the subject of his first major United States retrospective, “Siah Armajani: Follow This Line,” which opened at the Walker Art Center in 2018 and traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Met Breuer in New York the following year.  “Public sculpture is a search for a cultural history which calls for structural unity between the object and its social and spatial setting,”

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  • The British Museum.
    August 28, 2020 at 4:11pm

    Strings Attached: UK Warns Museums to Adopt Profit-Driven Approach or Lose Funding

    According to a letter from UK culture secretary Oliver Dowden leaked to The Art Newspaper this morning, the government has told British museums they must “take as commercially-minded an approach as possible, pursuing every opportunity to maximize alternative sources of income.” Dowden warned museum directors that if they did not, he would not be in a position to make the case for any further financial support for the sector.

    The threat follows a $2 billion support package for arts and heritage institutions announced in July. That funding, of which some $133 million was directed toward Britain’s

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  • Celia Ho. Photo: Dor Lau.
    August 28, 2020 at 1:50pm

    Celia Ho Named Curator at Hong Kong’s Para Site

    Nonprofit Hong Kong art space Para Site announced this week that assistant curator Celia Ho will move up to become the center’s curator.

    Founded in 1996, a year prior to Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to mainland China, as an artist-run space, Para Site is one of the city’s oldest institutions focused on exhibiting contemporary art. Ho joined the organization in February 2018 as a project manager and assistant curator, bringing with her an interest in the relationship between artists, institutions, and communities, and a desire to foster alternative forms of artistic exchange that enable

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  • Pablo Picasso’s Bust of a Woman, 1944. Photo: Joe Shlabotnik/Flickr.
    August 27, 2020 at 3:51pm

    Man Who Punched Picasso Painting Gets 18 Months in Prison

    Architecture student Shakeel Massey, who late last year punched Pablo Picasso’s 1944 painting Bust of a Woman at London’s Tate Modern, was today sentenced to 18 months in prison. Massey, 20—who on December 28, 2019, gathered up a handful of padlocks, wrapped his fist in a scarf, and socked the painting multiple times, shattering the glass protecting it, penetrating the canvas, and horrifying onlookers—claimed at the time that the act was a “performance.”

    The painting, valued at roughly $26 million, is a semiabstract work depicting French photographer and artist Dora Maar, whose romantic liaison

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  • Corina Kent circa 1965. Photo: Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles.
    August 27, 2020 at 2:08pm

    Campaign Launched to Preserve Corita Kent’s Los Angeles Studio as Historical Landmark

    Under the leadership of Nellie Scott, director of the Corita Art Center in Los Angeles, a campaign has been launched to save the former L.A. studio of late artist Corita Kent (1918–1986) from demolition. The space, which currently houses a dry cleaner, is slated to be razed to make room for a parking lot.

    Kent, who would become known for her Pop screen prints, which embodied themes of love and social justice and is said to presage in many ways the work of Andy Warhol, occupied the space from 1961 to 1968, during which time she was a nun affiliated with the Immaculate Heart of Mary, having joined

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  • 1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, London. Photo: Alex Delfanne.
    August 26, 2020 at 3:27pm

    Lehmann Maupin to Open Artist-Led Outpost in London

    Lehmann Maupin gallery—which currently operates in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul—will unveil an artist-led London outpost in the fall. “The world is changing rapidly, and we are listening to it,” founder Rachel Lehmann said in a statement about the expansion, which opens October 5 and follows months of pandemic-fueled uncertainty about the future of the globalized art market. “I like to think of the space as an extension of our artists’ studios, a space for contemplation, innovation, and experimentation.”

    Lehmann Maupin London will be located inside South Kensington’s Cromwell Place, a new luxury

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