News

  • June 28, 2018 at 10:02am

    Gibney Names Eva Yaa Asantewaa Curatorial Director

    Gibney, the New York–based performing arts and social justice nonprofit, has appointed curator and cultural leader Eva Yaa Asantewaa to the newly created position of curatorial director. Yaa Asantewaa will be responsible for leading all public performance, residency, and discourse programs across all of Gibney’s sites and for expanding the nonprofit’s curatorial model.

    “Art is an urgent force that transforms individual lives, preserves and expresses the core values of communities, and speaks truth to power,” Yaa Asantewaa said in a statement. “Dance has been the center of my professional life

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  • June 27, 2018 at 3:03pm

    Sabina Ott (1955–2018)

    Sabina Ott, an artist and educator who was nicknamed the “artist mother of Chicago,” has died at age sixty-two after nearly four years of cancer treatment. In addition to being an acclaimed painter, sculptor, and installation artist, Ott was a longtime professor of art at Chicago’s Columbia College and the founder of Terrain Exhibitions, an alternative gallery space run from her front porch and yard that encouraged and exhibited the work of local artists.

    Born in Los Angeles in 1955, Ott completed her BFA in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979 before receiving an MFA in painting

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  • June 27, 2018 at 8:00am

    New Cultural Hub to Open in the West Bank

    A new 82,000-square-foot arts space will serve as the permanent home of the A.M. Qattan Foundation, which was established in London by the late Palestinian philanthropist Abdel Mohsin Al-Qattan in 1993, Aimee Dawson of the Art Newspaper reports. Now chaired by his son, Omar Al-Qattan, the foundation first began building the cultural center in 2012, but the constraints of working in the Israeli-occupied territory stalled the project.

    “The biggest challenge, apart from money and obviously the Israeli occupation, is human resources,” Al-Qattan told the Art Newspaper. “It is virtually impossible to

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  • June 27, 2018 at 7:30am

    Baltimore Museum Sold Art by White Men to Add Underrepresented Artists to Its Collection

    As part of an effort to diversify its collection, the Baltimore Museum of Art has deaccessioned works by white male artists. Proceeds from the sale of seven works by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Franz Kline, among others, have been put toward the acquisition of twenty-three new works by underrepresented artists.

    Entering the museum’s collection are pieces by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Odili Donald Odita, Amy Sherald, Jack Whitten, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye; a sculpture by Wangechi Mutu; prints by Enrique Chagoya, Bruce Connor, Yun-Fei Ji, and Adam Pendleton; films by Isaac Julien, and Mary

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  • June 27, 2018 at 6:00am

    Interactive Digital Art Museum Opens in Tokyo

    A new art museum, billed as the world’s largest institution dedicated to digital and interactive art, opened in the Odaiba district of Tokyo on June 21. Called the Mori Building Digital Art Museum: teamLab Borderless, it is a collaboration between the property developer Mori Building Company and the interdisciplinary art collective teamLab.

    Within the museum’s space, which measures more than 107,000 square feet, are fifty digital artworks, 520 computers, and 470 projectors. As indicated by the institution’s name, the interactive works are meant to be “borderless” and can freely move out of rooms,

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  • June 26, 2018 at 8:04pm

    Frick Collection Gets Green Light for Expansion Despite Backlash from Preservationists

    The Frick Collection in New York received permission to move forward with its latest expansion plans despite protests from activists. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission voted six to one in favor of the project, which is the institution’s fourth proposal in twenty years.

    At a hearing held earlier today, the Frick’s director, Ian Wardropper, and architect Annabelle Selldorf presented a revised proposal that addressed the concerns the commission had raised in May. While some applauded the design—Peg Breen, the president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, which opposed the

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  • June 26, 2018 at 6:01pm

    Hidden for Nearly Thirty Years, Keith Haring Mural Is Uncovered in Amsterdam

    After nearly three decades, a forty-foot mural by Keith Haring was revealed in Amsterdam last week, the New York Times reports. The artist completed the work—which features a massive hybrid creature being ridden by one of his iconic X-marked figures—when he was visiting the city for his first solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in 1986. Located on the brick exterior of the institution’s former storage facility, the piece was covered with aluminum insulation panels only a few years later.

    The Dutch graffiti artist Aileen Middel (Mick La Rock), a longtime admirer of Haring’s work,

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  • June 26, 2018 at 4:00pm

    Mary S. Byrd Gallery Receives $40,000 Ellsworth Kelly Award

    The Foundation for Contemporary Art, the New York–based charitable organization established by John Cage and Jasper Johns in 1963, announced today that the Mary S. Byrd Gallery of Art at Augusta University is the third recipient of the Ellsworth Kelly Award. The $40,000 annual grant supports exhibitions at regional US museums and college art galleries. 

    The funds will be used to stage a solo exhibition of new multimedia works by the Atlanta-based sculptor Bojana Ginn. Opening in the fall of 2019, the show will be curated by the institution’s inaugural director, Shannon Morris.

    “The Mary S. Byrd

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  • June 26, 2018 at 12:19pm

    Mead Art Museum Appoints Emily Potter-Ndiaye Head of Education, Curator of Academic Programs

    The Mead Art Museum at Amherst College announced that Emily Potter-Ndiaye has been named its new head of education and curator of academic programs, effective August 20. Potter-Ndiaye will be responsible for helping the college’s faculty and students engage with the museum’s nineteen-thousand-work collection.

    Potter-Ndiaye comes to the Mead from the Brooklyn Historical Society, where she has been director of education since August 2013. During her tenure, Potter-Ndiaye has grown the organization’s programs across all three of its sites—its flagship building at 128 Pierrepont Street and its

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  • June 26, 2018 at 10:36am

    Berkshire Museum to Sell Nine More Works from Its Collection

    The Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, has announced that it will sell nine more works as part of a controversial deaccessioning plan that has been heavily criticized by museum professionals across the nation.

    After a lengthy legal battle that sparked several protests, the institution won the right to sell up to forty works in order to raise $55 million. While the museum claims that the funds are needed to keep it afloat, as well as to fund an expansion, those who oppose the plan argue that allowing the institution to deaccession works from its collection for any other purpose besides

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  • June 26, 2018 at 9:00am

    Jessica Porter Named Director of ArtTable

    ArtTable, the New York–based nonprofit dedicated to advancing the leadership of women in the visual arts, has appointed Jessica Porter as director, Claire Selvin of Artnews reports. Porter comes to the organization from the New York Artists Equity Association, where she has been executive director since July 2017.

    Previously, Porter served as the founding director of Porter Contemporary, a Chelsea gallery that presented exhibitions of emerging and established artists. She also established her own consulting company in 2003, through which she offers legal services to artists and cultural organizations.

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  • June 25, 2018 at 1:45pm

    David Goldblatt (1930–2018)

    David Goldblatt, a titan of photography who bore witness to South Africa’s daily plights—from apartheid and poverty to AIDS and gentrification—to become one of the world’s most renowned documentarians, has died at the age of eighty-seven. Goldblatt became internationally recognized in the early 1960s and ’70s for his powerful, understated black-and-white images that captured South Africa’s repressive regime of forced racial division. For over six decades he reflected on the resounding social tensions of South Africa with deep empathy, through images that were often formally deadpan

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