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  • Daisy Nam. Photo: Ballroom Marfa.
    August 02, 2022 at 4:32pm

    Daisy Nam Tapped to Lead Ballroom Marfa

    Daisy Nam, who arrived to Ballroom Marfa as a curator in 2020, will take over as executive director of the noncollecting Texas art institution, The Art Newspaper reports. The post is being vacated by Laura Copelin, who had occupied the position since 2019. Nam, who will continue to serve as curator as well, will step into her new role immediately.

    I’m dedicated to supporting what the artists need, whether that’s space or research or connecting them with other people to create a body of work that we show here before it moves out into the world,” said Nam, who cast Ballroom Marfa’s brief as

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  • The British and Greek governments agreed in May to hold formal talks about the Parthenon marbles. Photo: Justin Norris.
    August 02, 2022 at 1:55pm

    British Museum Proposes “Parthenon Partnership” with Greece over Contested Marbles

    Jonathan Williams, deputy director of London’s British Museum, has suggested a plan for repatriating the Parthenon marbles to Greece, according to The Guardian. Loosely termed the “Parthenon partnership,” the scheme calls for Greek authorities and British Museum officials to agree to a program of lending and borrowing the objects—fifteen metopes, seventeen figural sculptures, and a portion of a frieze that graced the 2,500-year-old Parthenon temple on the Acropolis before being removed to the UK by Lord Elgin, then the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, early in the nineteenth century.

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  • Caitlin Berry. Photo: Sarah Marcella.
    August 02, 2022 at 9:08am

    DC’S Rubell Museum Appoints Caitlin Berry as Inaugural Director

    The Rubell Museum in Washington, DC, on Monday named Caitlin Berry as its first director. Berry, previously the director of the Cody Gallery at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, will oversee the museum in its new home, a 32,000-square-foot complex occupying the city’s former Randall Junior High School and slated to open to the public on October 29. An expert in Washington Color School, midcentury African American, and contemporary art, Berry will work with the Rubell family and with Juan Valdez, director of the Rubell Museum in Miami, to create exhibitions and programming at the

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  • Katy Siegel. Photo: Walley Films.
    August 01, 2022 at 9:29am

    Curator Katy Siegel Leaves Baltimore Museum of Art for SF MoMA

    Katy Siegel, senior programming and research curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) since 2016, is leaving that institution to accept the post of research director of special program initiatives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MoMA). She will inaugurate the role, which was created with her in mind by former BMA colleague Christopher Bedford, who earlier this year decamped as the director of the Baltimore institution to lead SF MoMA. At the San Francisco museum, where she’ll begin working in September, Siegel will “develop scholarly research related to modern and contemporary

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  • Annie Leibovitz. Photo: Robert Scoble/Flickr.
    July 28, 2022 at 5:40pm

    Annie Leibovitz Portraits of Volodymyr Zelensky Ignite Debate

    A series of portraits of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and first lady Olena Zelenska shot by renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz for a digital issue of Vogue have provoked dissent around the world. Zelensky—who on Russia’s unprovoked February invasion of Ukraine is famously reported to have met offers of evacuation with the retort, “I need ammunition, not a ride”—is depicted in his typical outfit of an olive-drab T-shirt and matching fatigues snuggling his wife in the presidential compound in Kyiv. Zelenska, wearing clothes attributed to various Ukrainian designers, appears solo on

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  • Documenta 15, curated by the ruangrupa collective, has become a magnet for controversy. Photo: Documenta/Nicolas Wefers.
    July 28, 2022 at 2:02pm

    Documenta Hit with New Allegations of Anti-Semitism

    The curators of the contentious Documenta 15, which opened in Kassel, Germany, June 18, are facing the latest in a string of allegations that they have allowed the display of anti-Semitic work. The complaints this time focus on a 1988 brochure by the Archives des Luttes des Femmes en Algérie, an Algerian women’s collective that seeks to situate the struggle for independence in Algeria alongside other battles, including that between Palestine and Israel. The brochure contains a portrayal of an Israeli soldier whose face resembles that of a monkey, with a Star of David on his helmet. The figure,

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  • The People’s Friendship Arch in Kyiv. Photo: Timon91/Flickr.
    July 28, 2022 at 10:48am

    Manifesta Director Nominates Ukraine to Host 2028 Iteration

    Hedwig Fijen, founder and director of nomadic European biennial Manifesta, has proposed Ukraine as the host of the event’s 2028 edition. Fijen put forth the idea at a press conference in Prishtina, Kosovo, last week, at which she named Kyiv as the prospective home of Manifesta 17. The city has twice sought to host the biennial, most recently submitting an application to welcome Manifesta 14, which opened in Prishtina July 22; wary of the continuing conflict in the Donbas region in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Manifesta officials rejected the suggestion. Russia’s violent invasion

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  • Brooklyn-based artist Yo-Yo Lin, among the recipients of the 2022 Disability Futures Fellowship.  Image Description: Mid-dance, long dark cables extend out of Yo-Yo’s body, connected to her skin with golden discs. She steadies herself with one hand on the floor and another raised high, her thin arm wrapped in cables, one knee on the floor her other leg extended. She gazes downwards, listening inwards.
    July 27, 2022 at 12:50pm

    Ford and Mellon Foundations Reveal 2022 Disability Futures Fellows

    The Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation have named the recipients of the 2022 Disability Futures Fellowship. The only one of its kind in the United States, the fellowship was established in 2020 to elevate and celebrate the work of disabled practitioners working across multiple creative fields, including those of arts and culture, journalism, and documentary film. Aimed at raising the visibility of disabled artists and creative practitioners and at bringing attention to the financial and professional challenges they face, the Disability Futures Fellowship distributes $1 million among twenty

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  • Jennifer Bartlett. Photo: Takaaki Matsumoto.
    July 27, 2022 at 11:38am

    Jennifer Bartlett (1941–2022)

    Jennifer Bartlett, who rejected the distinction between figurative and abstract painting in order to create vibrantly energetic works that elude any categorization but their own, died July 25 in Amagansett, New York, at the age of eighty-one. News of her death was confirmed by Paula Cooper Gallery, which represented Bartlett from the earliest stages of her career. One of the very few female artists to gain broad recognition in the 1970s and ’80s, Bartlett elevated the mundane and the modest in paintings that comprised multiple small panels and in installations that paired three-dimensional

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  • The Louvre in Paris. Photo: Pedro Szekely/Flickr.
    July 26, 2022 at 6:00pm

    French Officials Detain Archaeologists Connected to Louvre Trafficking Investigation

    French authorities on July 25 detained two top archaeologists who were previously employed by international consultancy Agence France Muséums (AFM) in connection with an antiquities-trafficking investigation that has touched the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris. French daily Libération reports that Jean-François Charnier, an adviser for French agency Afalula, which works to develop cultural projects in Saudi Arabia, and Noëmi Daucé, a curator at the Louvre, were taken into custody by representatives of the Central Office for Combating Trafficking in Cultural Property

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  • The Singapore skyline. Photo: Unwicked/Wikipedia Commons.
    July 25, 2022 at 5:20pm

    Sotheby’s to Host First Singapore Auction in 15 Years

    Signaling its interest in Singapore’s young, rich, and quickly expanding collector base, international auction house Sotheby’s on August 28 will hold its first sale in the tiny Southeast Asian city state in a decade and a half. Citing demand that has increased “exponentially,” Sotheby’s in a press release revealed that the auction would concentrate on contemporary and modern art from both Southeast Asian and international artists, reflective of the current tastes in a region populated by expats and financiers. The Global Financial Centres Index ranks Singapore as the world’s sixth-largest finance

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  • Perry Rubenstein in 2013. Photo: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images.
    July 25, 2022 at 3:17pm

    Perry Rubenstein (1954–2022)

    Perry Rubenstein, a gallerist known for his uncanny ability to predict the art world’s next hot locus, as well as for his imprisonment on grand theft charges, died July 21 at his home in Los Angeles at the age of sixty-eight. His former wife, Sara Fitzmaurice, confirmed his death, which she cited as owing to natural causes. Rubinstein was one of the first gallerists to open shop in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, now well-known as an arts district, and turned his sights on Los Angeles before most of his peers did. Though LA ultimately became an arts hub drawing blue-chip galleries, major fairs,

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