News

  • The Louvre in Paris.
    December 11, 2020 at 6:10pm

    French Museums to Remain Closed Through January 7

    French arts institutions, already enduring their second pandemic-related shutdown since spring, will remain dark through January 7 of next year, in accordance with new measures introduced by the country’s prime minister, Jean Castex. The new date is three weeks beyond the originally projected reopening date of December 15 and represents a crushing financial blow, as the holidays are typically a time when museums see a surge in visitors.

    Instead France, like many regions around the world, is seeing a surge in Covid-19, with new daily cases reaching 13,750 on December 10, a markedly higher number

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  • Philip Tinari.
    December 11, 2020 at 5:30pm

    Philip Tinari to Curate Inaugural Saudi Arabian Biennial

    Philip Tinari, director and curator of Beijing’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, has been named as the curator of the inaugural Ad-Diriyah Biennale, to take place in 2021. The event is Saudi Arabia’s first international contemporary art biennial, and is expected to be divided into six sections featuring a total of more than seventy Saudi and international artists.

    Established by Saudi Arabia’s newly formed Ministry of Culture and organized by its subsidiear Thunaiyat Ad-Diriyah Foundation, which is charged with establishing two recurring art festivals. The second of these which will occur

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  • Nevelson Chapel in Midtown, New York. Photo: Thomas Magno.
    December 10, 2020 at 12:11pm

    Louise Nevelson’s Chapel Launches $6 Million Refurbishment Fundraising Campaign

    Louise Nevelson’s chapel, a small structure tucked away in Lutheran St. Peter’s Church in New York’s Midtown district, has launched a campaign aimed at raising $6 million to repair and conserve the interior of the 1977 installation, Artnet News reports. The effort is anchored by a gift, of an undisclosed amount, from Pace, which represents the artist’s estate.

    Nevelson Chapel, also known as the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, is relatively unheralded compared to such artist chapels as Rothko Chapel in Houston or Matisse’s La Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence in France. Able to seat just twenty-four

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  • Ute Meta Bauer, Amar Kanwar, and David Teh. Photo: Istanbul Biennial.
    December 10, 2020 at 11:43am

    Istanbul Biennial Announces Curators for 2021 Edition

    The Istanbul Biennial, perhaps Turkey’s most prestigious art event, has announced that curator Ute Meta Bauer, artist Amar Kanwar, and art historian David Teh will helm the seventeenth iteration of the biennial, which will take place September 11–November 14, 2021.

    The German-born Bauer is the founding director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore, and a professor at the School of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang Technological University. A co-organizer of Documenta 11, she curated the 2004 Berlin Biennale. Kanwar, who is based in New Delhi, addresses social issues and themes of

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  • Courtney Willis Blair. Photo: Jacolby Satterwhite.
    December 09, 2020 at 2:31pm

    Mitchell-Innes & Nash Promotes Courtney Willis Blair to Partner

    Mitchell-Innes & Nash has promoted Courtney Willis Blair, a director at the New York gallery, to partner, The Art Newspaper reports. According to the gallery, Willis Blair, who joined the organization as an artist liaison in 2016, is one of the first of just a handful of Black partners at white-run galleries across the country and likely one of the few to ever hold a stake in a white-owned blue-chip Chelsea gallery.

    “I feel really excited for this step in my career,” said Willis Blair, a founder of the Black art dealers’ and advisers’ collective Entre Nous, who previously worked at Mary Ryan

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  • Harold Budd. Photo: Wikipedia.
    December 09, 2020 at 1:30pm

    Harold Budd (1936–2020)

    Avant-garde composer Harold Budd—whose body of work spanned minimalism, dream pop, jazz, drone, and ambient music, and influenced generations of experimental composers and musicians—has died of Covid-19 at the age of eighty-four. Budd was known for his wide range of collaborations, most of all with Brian Eno, who produced his 1978 album The Pavilion of Dreams. He and Eno would go on to compose together on the landmark albums Ambient 2: The Plateau of Mirror (1980) and The Pearl (1984).

    Born in Los Angeles, Budd was thirteen when the death of his father plunged the family into dire straits. In

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  • Amy Lipton.
    December 08, 2020 at 3:15pm

    Amy Lipton (1956–2020)

    Curator, gallerist, writer, and nonprofit director Amy Lipton, who operated a namesake gallery in New York’s SoHo and cofounded the ecological art nonprofit ecoartspace, died of cancer on December 6.

    Lipton was born in Philadelphia in 1956. After receiving her BFA from CalArts in 1980, Lipton briefly worked as the art director of the pornographic magazine Hustler before making the move to New York City. Six years later, she would open Loughelton, her first commercial gallery, with artist Barbara Broughel in SoHo. In 1990, Lipton became the venue’s sole proprietor, changing its name to Amy Lipton

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  • Larissa Harris. Photo: Douglas Ross.
    December 08, 2020 at 2:56pm

    Larissa Harris Appointed First Director of Teiger Foundation

    Teiger Foundation has named Larissa Harris its first executive director. In her new role, Harris will be charged with expanding the grantmaking initiative of the nonprofit, which was established in 2008 to promote the vision of contemporary art collector David Teiger, who died in 2014. Additionally, she will work to further the philanthropic foundation’s mission in support of new scholarship, interpretation, and exhibition development in the field of contemporary art, and oversee the establishment of a permanent home for the organization in New York City.

    Harris, who has more than two decades of

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  • The recipients of 2021’s Creative Capital Awards.
    December 08, 2020 at 1:52pm

    2021 Creative Capital Award Recipients Announced

    Creative Capital today announced $1.75 million in Creative Capital Awards. Thirty-five projects will each receive up to $50,000 in project funding, with career development services being offered to the forty-two artists working on them.

    The projects were chosen from among more than four thousand entries, by an eight-member multidisciplinary panel who considered each project together, regardless of genre. The winning artists, who range in age from their twenties through their seventies,  are scattered across twelve states and territories, with 76 percent identifying as BIPOC, 55 percent as female,

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  • *Joseph Beuys, 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks), inaugurated at Documenta in 1982. © Joseph Beuys/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation, New York.
    December 07, 2020 at 12:48pm

    Dia Chelsea to Reopen in April Following $20 Million Expansion

    Dia Chelsea is expected to open in April following a $20 million renovation and expansion that connected its three neighboring buildings on West Twenty-Second Street. Admission, as at Dia’s four other New York City locations, will be permanently free.

    The renovation and redesign of the buildings were done under the auspices of the Architecture Research Offices, and unites the structures, comprising 32,500 square feet of space, behind a single façade. Dia also extended Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks), an iteration of a work first made in 1982 that lines the street on which Dia Chelsea is

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  • Tania Bruguera.
    December 07, 2020 at 10:03am

    Tania Bruguera Under House Arrest Following Detention, Interrogation as Protest in Cuba Surges

    Tania Bruguera remains under house arrest at her home in Cuba, unable to leave to buy water or food, The Art Newspaper reports, with Deborah Bruguera, her sister, contending that the state government is attempting to build a penal case against the artist. The news comes amid weeks of protest in Havana over artistic freedom, sparked by the arrest of rapper Denís Solis on charges of contempt of authority under Decree 349, which stipulates that artists must gain government approval of their work before presenting it to the public. On November 26, members of the collective San Isidro Movement

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  • View of Gretchen Bender’s Total Recall, 1987, in “Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless” at Red Bull Arts in New York. Photo: Red Bull Arts.
    December 04, 2020 at 8:42pm

    New York’s Venturesome Red Bull Arts to Close Permanently

    Energy drink company Red Bull is shutting down its New York art space, a short-lived venue on West Eighteen Street that invigorated the city’s art scene with audacious programming that hewed toward the emerging and overlooked. Artist and creative director Akeem Smith’s “No Gyal Can Attest,” a multimedia tribute to dancehall that closed on November 15, was the spacious two-floor institution’s final show, ending a six-year run defined by offbeat presentations and for providing major surveys to neglected artists such as Gretchen Bender and Rammellzee. 

    “After six years, we are closing the physical

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