News

  • 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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  • Frank Bowling’s Texas Louise 1971, included in “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” at Tate Modern, London in 2017.
    August 26, 2020 at 1:58pm

    Artist Frank Bowling Takes Hales Gallery to Court over Money, Paintings Owed

    Painter Frank Bowling has severed ties with Hales, his gallery of nearly a decade, and is suing them to retrieve $2.4 million he contends is currently owed him. Additionally, he is asking for the return of some 110 paintings he says the gallery is holding hostage. The works’ total worth is estimated at $18.5 million.

    Hales, which has spaces in New York and in London, has filed a countersuit claiming that Bowling’s family members are trying to wreck the 86-year-old artist’s relationship with the gallery.

    The British Guyana–born Bowling, who has seen a resurgence of interest in his work of late,

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  • Okwui Enwezor at New York’s Asia Society in 2014. Photo: Elsa Ruiz/Flickr.
    August 26, 2020 at 1:05pm

    Venice Biennale Awards Posthumous Golden Lions to Curators Okwui Enwezor and Germano Celant

    The organizers of the Venice Biennale have announced that they are awarding four special Golden Lions this year, all posthumously, to former curators of the Biennale. Among the winners of the prestigious prize are Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019), who in 2015 became the storied Biennale’s first (and to date, only) Black curator, and Germano Celant (1940–2020), who oversaw the 1997 iteration.

    The other two recipients are Maurizio Calvesi (1927–2020) and Vittorio Gregotti (1927–2020), who each curated two editions of the Biennale in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. 

    Celant, a tireless supporter of the

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  • The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Photo: Shinya Suzuki/Flickr.
    August 25, 2020 at 4:23pm

    Whitney Museum Cancels Show Amid Artists’ Outcry over Acquisition

    New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art has canceled a show amid a fierce backlash from its artists, who discovered via email that their work had been acquired by the museum without their knowledge or consent and that the works would be appearing in an exhibition there slated to open within weeks. “Collective Actions: Artist Interventions in a Time of Change” was scheduled to open at the Whitney on September 17 and to focus on responses to Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement through prints, posters, and photographs.

    Much of the wrath directed at the Whitney centers around the fact that

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  • Still from Whittle’s upcoming film, to debut as part of Frieze London.
    August 25, 2020 at 1:03pm

    Alberta Whittle Wins 2020 Frieze Artist Award

    Filmmaker Alberta Whittle has been named the recipient of this year’s Frieze Artist Award. The prize is awarded annually to an international emerging artist. The Barbados-born Whittle, an interdisciplinary artist who earned her MFA from the Edinburgh College of Art and lives between Glasgow and Johannesburg, has described her work as “motivated by the desire to work collectively towards radical self-love.” Common themes in Whittle’s oeuvre include the African diaspora and the drive to decolonize Western history.

    Whittle’s winning proposal is for a new moving-image work based on the writings of

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  • Zoë Ryan. Photo: Clare Britt.
    August 24, 2020 at 8:25pm

    Zoë Ryan Named Director of Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art

    The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania announced earlier this month the appointment of Zoë Ryan as director, effective November 5, 2020. Ryan arrives at the ICA—a noncollecting contemporary art institution based in Philadelphia—from the Art Institute of Chicago, which she joined in 2006 and where she most recently served as John H. Bryan Chair and curator of architecture and design. At the Art Institute, Ryan focused on developing and redefining the institution’s holdings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century architecture and design. In 2017, her research

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  • Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo.
    August 24, 2020 at 3:07pm

    Future Uncertain for São Paulo’s Cinemateca Brasileira

    The fate of Cinemateca Brasileira, home to the largest collection of films in South America, remains in jeopardy owing to the efforts of Brazil’s conservative government, led by Jair Bolsonaro, who in January 2019 dismantled the Ministry of Culture.

    Cinemateca Brasileira, founded in 1940, is the longest-running cinema institution in Brazil. Among its holdings are a quarter-million rolls of film, including the complete collection of Cinema Novo figurehead Glauber Rocha and every game aired on soccer channel Canal 100 between 1958 and 1986.

    Following the dissolution of the ministry, Bolsonaro’s

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  • Little Saint James in the Virgin Islands.
    August 24, 2020 at 1:20pm

    MoMA Chair to be Subpoenaed in Connection with Epstein Case

    Leon Black, chair of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and a man worth $8.3 billion, is to be subpoenaed by the Virgin Islands as the territory’s attorney general, Denise George, attempts to discover the sources of Jeffrey Epstein’s vast wealth. Epstein, who was jailed on charges of trafficking minors, some as young as 11, died by suicide in prison in August 2019.

    A noted art collector, Black is also a cofounder and the CEO of private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Unlike other large donors, Black did not sever ties with Epstein when the latter was arrested in 2008 and charged with soliciting

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  • Joseph C. Thompson.
    August 23, 2020 at 8:35pm

    Longtime MASS MoCA Director Joseph C. Thompson Steps Down

    Joseph C. Thompson will step down as director of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts after steering it for thirty-two years, the North Adams institution announced on Friday. With ambitious programming that made room for large-scale artworks as well as musical performances and other outdoor events, Thomson led MASS MoCA from its stumbling start to its current status as a major cultural destination in the Berkshires and the largest organization devoted to new art in the United States.

    “After more than three decades as director, it is high time for me to step away from day-to-day management

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