News

  • MoMaCha's original logo and design.
    October 02, 2018 at 5:34pm

    Judge Rules in Favor of MoMA’s Copyright Infringement Suit Against Bowery Teashop MoMaCha

    A Lower East Side tea shop formerly known as MoMaCha has been issued a preliminary injunction to stop using its name, logo, and website, momacha.com, as US district judge Louis L. Stanton sided with almost all of the accusations of copyright infringement brought forth by New York’s Museum of Modern Art against the business, reports Artnet.

    MoMA filed a trademark-infringement lawsuit against the tea shop after its owners—photographer Eric Cahan, filmmaker Nev Schulman of MTV’s Catfish, and his wife, Laura Perlogo—opened its doors on the Bowery in April. The museum’s lawyers argued that

    Read more
  • Tents installed outside the National Museum in Rio are exhibiting surviving objects from the collection. Photo: Museu Nacional.
    October 02, 2018 at 4:51pm

    One Month After Ruinous Fire, Rio’s National Museum Starts Rebuilding

    The National Museum in Rio de Janeiro is beginning the process of reengaging with the community a month after a massive fire ravaged the institution, which was once home to twenty million historical artifacts. Outside the charred building, museum employees have installed tents to display pieces that were stored in other Brazilian locations, reports the Art Newspaper. The museum has also started a crowdfunding campaign to relaunch a program that loans objects from its collection to local schools. It’s nearly halfway toward its $12 million goal. 

    Museum director Alexander Kellner recently announced

    Read more
  • Various works by artists Actually Huizenga (of Patriarchy), Sascha Jahn & TheBoundCollective, Euripides Laskaridis and Osmosis, Rachel Maclean, Signe Pierce, Heji Shin, The Agency, and Young Boy Dancing Group that will be featured in the Sixth Athens Biennale.
    October 02, 2018 at 12:26pm

    Athens Biennale Reveals Artists Participating in Its 2018 Edition

    The 2018 Athens Biennale has released the full list of artists participating in its sixth edition, which will open on October 26 and run through December 9. Curated by Stefanie Hessler, Kostis Stafylakis, and Poka-Yio, and titled “ANTI,” the exhibition will consider attitudes of opposition, nonconformity, and marginality. According to a release, the biennial “dissects the way we polarize, fight and antagonize in post-digital times: in the age of social media, of neo-reactionary movements, of post-truth nihilism, and of conspiracy theories developed by the alt-right. ‘ANTI’ is about inventing

    Read more
  • Shirin Aliabadi.
    October 02, 2018 at 11:02am

    Shirin Aliabadi (1973–2018)

    The Dubai-based gallery the Third Line announced that the Iranian artist Shirin Aliabadi died yesterday in Tehran. Born in Tehran in 1973, Aliabadi studied art and archaeology in Paris before beginning her multidisciplinary practice, through which she investigated the ways in which traditional Iranian laws and culture intersect with urban lifestyles, youth, consumerist culture, and globalization in her home country. In her “Miss Hybrid” series, young women in hijabs are shown proudly wearing bandaged noses, a mark of a recent nose job; chewing bubblegum; talking on the phone; leaning over

    Read more
  • Anton Vidokle, Citizens of the Cosmos, 2018. Photo: NADA.
    October 02, 2018 at 10:14am

    NADA Miami Names 2018 International Gallery Prize Recipients

    The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) announced that Arcadia Missa from London and ASAKUSA from Tokyo have been named as the 2018 recipients of the third annual NADA Miami International Gallery Prize. The initiative grants galleries based outside of the United States the opportunity to participate in NADA Miami for the first time in a booth sponsored by the fair. “It has been a great way for us to direct attention to the quality of programs from galleries around the world,” said NADA executive director Heather Hubbs.

    Arcadia Missa will present works by two emerging British artists: otherworldly

    Read more
  • Hundreds march in protest of the brutal killing of LGBTQ activist Zak Kostopoulos in Athens, Greece, on Wednesday, September 26. Photo: To Vima.
    October 02, 2018 at 7:49am

    Documenta 14 Artists Decry Death of LGBTQ Activist as Violence Against Minorities in Greece Rises

    More than 140 artists, organizers, and other participants in Documenta 14 have penned an open letter in protest of the death of the thirty-three-year-old LGBTQ activist and performer Zak Kostopoulos, who died after being brutally beaten in the streets of Athens on Friday, September 21. The signatories condemn the growing number of violent crimes against minorities and marginalized communities in Greece and are calling out the “fascist mindset that propels such incidents.”

    According to NBC, the attack on Kostopoulos was recorded and is currently being circulated by Greek media outlets and on social

    Read more
  • Valerie Hillings. Photo: Isaac James.
    October 02, 2018 at 7:11am

    Valerie Hillings to Lead the North Carolina Museum of Art

    The North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) in Raleigh has named Valerie Hillings as its next director. Hillings joins the institution from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where she currently works as a curator and the associate director of curatorial affairs for the Frank Gehry–designed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi museum, which has been in development for over a decade. She will succeed Larry Wheeler, who is retiring after twenty-four years at the helm of the institution, and will take up the post on November 1.

    “We are excited about the appointment of Dr. Hillings as director of the North

    Read more
  • Phyllis Kind in front of an artwork by Ray Yoshida, c. 1980s. Photo: Bill Bengtson.
    October 01, 2018 at 5:05pm

    Phyllis Kind (1933–2018)

    Phyllis Kind, an influential American gallerist and dealer largely considered the doyenne of “outsider art,” died in San Francisco last Friday, September 28, at age eighty-five. As a champion of marginalized visionaries, Kind helped introduce now-celebrated self-taught artists such as Henry Darger, Martin Ramírez, and Joseph Yoakum to wider audiences through her galleries in Chicago and New York. 

    Phyllis Cobin was born in New York in 1933. In the 1950s, she enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where she studied chemistry and met Joshua Kind, her future husband. After resettling

    Read more
  • Hadeel Ibrahim.
    October 01, 2018 at 2:00pm

    Hadeel Ibrahim Elected Chair of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts

    The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London has selected Hadeel Ibrahim—the founding director of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, which was established in 2006 to support leadership and governance in Africa—as its new chair. Ibrahim serves on the board of the Clinton Foundation; as the cochair of the board of directors of the Africa Center in New York; and on the Dean’s Advisory Board for the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also a member of Amnesty International’s Secretary General’s Global Board.

    Commenting on her appointment, Ibrahim

    Read more
  • Rachel Adams. Photo: Sara Heidinger.
    October 01, 2018 at 11:04am

    Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Names Rachel Adams Chief Curator and Director of Programs

    The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, has hired Rachel Adams as its new chief curator and director of programs. She will be responsible for organizing and mounting between six and nine temporary exhibitions annually and for overseeing its residency program.

    “After a highly competitive international search, Rachel’s philosophical approach to working with artists, vast experience organizing exhibitions, and involving community and inspiring energy made her the perfect candidate for our organization’s culture and aspirational future.”

    Adams was previously the senior curator of

    Read more
  • The Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
    October 01, 2018 at 11:03am

    Berkshire Museum to Auction More Works

    The board of trustees of the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, has announced that two works will be auctioned at Sotheby’s American art auction set to take place in New York on November 16. The pieces—Hunter in the Winter Wood by George Henry Durrie and The Last Arrow by Thomas Moran—are part of the second group of works that will be sold as part of the institution’s controversial deaccessioning plan, which was approved by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on April 5, 2018.

    When the institution first announced that it wanted to sell works in order to fund a renovation

    Read more
  • MacKenzie Stevens.
    October 01, 2018 at 9:57am

    MacKenzie Stevens Named Director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Visual Arts Center

    The Visual Arts Center (VAC) at the University of Texas at Austin announced today that MacKenzie Stevens has been appointed its new director. Stevens joins the organization from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where she served as a curatorial associate. “For eight years, the VAC has served a crucial role at the university and central Texas as a non-collecting, university gallery committed to staging distinct and defining projects,” Jack Risley, chair of the department of art and art history, said in a statement. “Stevens joins us at a time that is ripe for transformative ideas and programing.”

    Read more