News

  • Yung Ma. Photo: Seoul Museum of Art.
    August 06, 2019 at 2:52pm

    Centre Pompidou’s Yung Ma to Direct 2020 Seoul Mediacity Biennale

    The Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) announced that Yung Ma will serve as artistic director for the eleventh edition of the Seoul Mediacity Biennale, which opens in September 2020. Next year’s biennial will mark the twentieth anniversary of the event, which “focuses on forging new grounds between art, media, and the urban fabric.” SeMA director Beck Jee-sook said that she hopes the upcoming edition will be a “new chapter for the biennale to synchronize with other global cities, transcending ideas of borders and time.”

    Yung Ma is a curator of contemporary art at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, where he organized

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  • Caroline Longo, a student in the Suzanne Deal Booth Seminar “The Material Science of Art,” prepares to use x-radiography to examine The Penitent St. Jerome at the Smart Museum of Art. Courtesy of the University of Chicago.
    August 06, 2019 at 12:36pm

    Suzanne Deal Booth Gives University of Chicago $1 Million for Art Conservation

    The University of Chicago’s department of art history has received a $1 million gift from activist, philanthropist, and Napa Valley vintner Suzanne Deal Booth in support of its art conservation program. The funds will be used to establish an endowment that builds upon the university’s five-year conservation initiative, which launched in the spring of 2018. The pilot program created a new professorship, courses, and other opportunities for students to learn about art conservation and conservation science on campus and includes an annual internship in the field.

    “What truly sets UChicago’s approach

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  • Sister Gertrude Morgan, God’s Greatest Hits, ca. 1970. Courtesy of Gordon W. Bailey.
    August 06, 2019 at 11:41am

    Pérez Art Museum Miami Gifted Forty-Six Works from Collector Gordon W. Bailey

    The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) has received a donation of forty-six artworks from Los Angeles–based collector and scholar Gordon W. Bailey. Included in the gift are drawings, paintings, and sculptures by a number of artists from the southern United States, such as Thornton Dial, Sam Doyle, Lonnie Holley, Clementine Hunter, Herbert Singleton, Sister Gertrude Morgan, and Purvis Young. The works join fourteen pieces that Bailey gave to the institution in 2016.

    “Because of the sustaining generosity of Mr. Pérez and Franklin’s leadership, PAMM is establishing a reputation as one of America’s most

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  • Tate Modern. Photo: Jim Stephenson.
    August 06, 2019 at 10:29am

    Teenager Charged with Attempted Murder for Throwing Boy from Tate Modern Balcony

    A teenager who was arrested for tossing a six-year-old boy off of Tate Modern’s popular viewing platform over the weekend was charged with attempted murder at Bromley Youth Court in London on Tuesday. According to the New York Times, the prosecutors gave a short statement before a magistrate referred the case to a higher court, where the minor is expected to appear on Thursday.

    The seventeen-year-old accused was detained on Sunday, August 4, after witnesses saw him throw a younger boy, a French national who was visiting the museum with his family, from the tenth-story balcony. The boy fell

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  • Anthony White, To a Flame, 2019; and Ko Kirk Yamahira, Untitled, 2019. Courtesy of the Seattle Art Fair.
    August 05, 2019 at 4:20pm

    Frye Art Museum Acquires Four Works from Seattle Art Fair

    The Frye Art Museum in Seattle has added four new works to its collection. The acquisition is part of a two-year partnership with the Seattle Art Fair, which awarded the institution a total of $50,000 in support of the expansion of its contemporary art holdings. “We are again grateful to the Seattle Art Fair for the opportunity to broaden and diversify the Frye’s contemporary collection with works by this extraordinary group of artists,” said museum director and CEO Joseph Rosa.

    At the fair’s fifth edition, which was presented by AIG, the institution purchased works from four Pacific Northwest

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  • Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung, Statue of a Girl of Peace, 2011. Photo: Kyodo News.
    August 05, 2019 at 1:28pm

    Aichi Triennale Exhibition Closes Following Threats over “Comfort Woman” Statue

    Three days after the 2019 Aichi Triennale kicked off in Japan, an exhibition at a museum in Nagoya was shut down after organizers received dozens of threats by phone, email, and fax over the inclusion of a statue of a “comfort woman,” an Asian woman who was forced to serve as a prostitute, or ianfu, in Japanese brothels during World War II. The subject remains highly controversial in Japan and has been a source of tension between the country and South Korea, which claims that Japan needs to do more to compensate the descendants of the victims of sexual slavery.

    According to the South China Morning

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  • Tate Modern.
    August 05, 2019 at 11:42am

    Teenager Arrested for Pushing Six-Year-Old Boy Off Tate Modern’s Viewing Platform

    A six-year-old boy who was thrown from a tenth-story viewing platform at Tate Modern in London on Sunday, August 4, is in critical but stable condition, the New York Times reports. The authorities arrested a teenager on suspicion of attempted murder following the incident; he remains in police custody. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said that they do not believe that he knew the victim.

    Emergency personnel were called to the museum around 2:45 PM. They treated the boy, who landed on the building’s fifth-floor rooftop, at the scene before airlifting him to a nearby hospital. Around

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  • Sam Gilliam, 10/27/69, 1969. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.
    August 05, 2019 at 10:00am

    Mary Boone’s Former Galleries Find New Tenants, Sam Gilliam Now Represented by Pace, and More

    Yares Art, Dennis Yares’s gallery, which specializes in Color Field painting, is moving into Mary Boone’s former space at 745 Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. According to Artnews, Yares opened a gallery across the hall from Boone’s in 2016. Following its expansion into the new space, Yares’s gallery will be eight thousand square feet. Boone, who is currently serving a thirty-month sentence in federal prison for tax evasion, had leased the space since 2000.

    Gagosian is also taking over a space formerly occupied by Boone. She used to share 7,900 square feet in a building adjacent to Gagosian’s

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  • Don Suggs. Photo: Paul O’Connor, 2005.
    August 02, 2019 at 6:20pm

    Don Suggs (1945–2019)

    American artist and teacher Don Suggs, a longtime instructor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has died. He was seventy-four years old.

    Suggs was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1945, and moved to Los Angeles in 1962 to complete his undergraduate and graduate studies at UCLA. He taught at the university from 1983 to 2014, and at the Florida State University, Tallahassee; Franconia College, New Hampshire; and Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, throughout the 1970s and ’80s. He had shown with LA Louver gallery since its founding in 1976.

    “Suggs’ photoworks are strong and

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  • Mickalene Thomas, Tamika sur une chaise longue avec Monet, 2012. Photo: the artist and Lehmann Maupin.
    August 02, 2019 at 2:25pm

    Baltimore Museum of Art to Devote 2020 to Celebrating Women Artists

    The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) is launching a yearlong program of exhibitions dedicated to the presentation of female-identifying artists. The initiative is part of the BMA’s efforts to address race and gender diversity gaps within the museum field. It also coincides with the hundredth anniversary of the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, which was ratified on August 18, 1920 and guaranteed women in the US the right to vote.

    Beginning in the fall, the museum will stage thirteen solo exhibitions and seven thematic shows, including “By Their Creative Force: American Women Modernists,” “Adorned:

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  • Department of Cultural Affairs press conference on August 1. Photo credit: Matthew Lapiska / NYCDDC.
    August 02, 2019 at 1:05pm

    New York City Announces Record $212 Million Cultural Budget for 2020

    New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) announced that $212 million have been allotted for the 2020 fiscal year budget for the arts. The sum, which is the highest amount ever awarded to the cultural sector, is $13 million more than last year’s record of $198.4 million and is $57 million more than the National Endowment for the Arts’ annual budget for the entire country.

    At a press conference at Materials for the Arts in Queens on Thursday, August 1, city officials and cultural stakeholders convened to celebrate the second anniversary of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s comprehensive

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  • Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Untitled. Courtesy of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
    August 02, 2019 at 10:42am

    Wisconsin’s Kohler Arts Center Acquires Thousands of Works by Eugene von Bruenchenhein

    The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has acquired more than 8,300 artworks by the self-taught American artist Eugene von Bruenchenhein (1910–1983). The collection, which comprises paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, slides, and photographs that span the entirety of von Bruenchenhein’s career, join the more than six thousand objects by him that are already in the center’s holdings.

    “I am delighted to have worked with Karen Patterson at the Kohler Arts Center and Terri Yoho at the Kohler Foundation in placing my collection of Eugene von Bruenchenhein’s art work with

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