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          February 3, 2023

                                    Dispatch: This Week in the Art World

                         Alfred Leslie, 1986. Photo: Jack Mitchell/Getty Image.

                Alfred Leslie (1927–2023)

                Leslie, whose monumental, planar grisaille portraits of the 1960s at once rejected abstraction and the romanticization of the figure, died on January 27 in Brooklyn of complications related to Covid-19. He was ninety-five. Leslie’s colossal grayscale canvases, featuring stark, harshly lit depictions of human subjects who meet the viewer’s gaze directly, were no less shocking to audiences than Abstract Expressionism had been a generation before. “Leslie’s subjects seem as if they are about to enter the spectator’s viewing space,” wrote Kirby Gookin in a 1992 issue of Artforum. “Their expressionless stares are ominous, which gives them a mural-like presence. One thinks of the monumental work of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera and the abstract fields of Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. Leslie’s paintings unite the psychological and the physiological to produce phenomenologically confrontational paintings.” 

Also: New York welcomed its first public work by Anish Kapoor, and a union protest outside a Whitney fundraiser pointed to the art-world class divide.

                         Anish Kapoor’s new sculpture underneath New York’s “Jenga” tower. Photo: Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock.

                Anish Kapoor Bean Makes New York Scene

                The shiny curved colossus, which closely resembles the British artist’s famous Chicago Cloud Gate, is his first public sculpture for the Big Apple. Measuring nineteen feet high and forty-eight feet wide and weighing forty tons, the pleasingly rounded form appears to be squeezing its way out from under the Herzog & de Meuron–designed “Jenga” tower at the corner of Church and Leonard Streets in the Tribeca neighborhood.

                         New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Shinya Suzuki/Flickr.

                Frustrated Whitney Union Members Demonstrate Outside Museum’s Posh Fundraiser

                Unionized employees of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art on January 31 staged a protest outside a fundraising event at the institution over stalled contract negotiations. Workers greeted passersby and attendees of the Art Party, a $500-per-ticket gala, with flyers notifying readers that “the Museum is still rejecting proposals for higher wages despite historic inflation and the very high rates that they are hiring managers at.”

                         Jenny Moore. Photo: Douglas Friedman.

                Jenny Moore Named Inaugural Director of Montana’s Tinworks

                Moore arrives to the four-year-old Bozeman, Montana–based arts organization from Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, which she led for nearly a decade. She is charged with building Tinworks’ contemporary art program, commissioning site-specific works, developing the museum site, and expanding and formalizing operations. Moore will assume her new role in March.

                         Ebony G. Patterson. Photo: Frank Ishman.

                Ebony G. Patterson Wins High Museum’s David C. Driskell Prize

                Atlanta’s High Museum of Art announced the Jamaican-born Patterson as the winner of its 2023 David C. Driskell Prize for her contributions to the field of African American art. Patterson rose to prominence with her ongoing series “Gangstas for Life,” begun in 2008, which examines concepts of masculinity within the context of dancehall culture. She will receive a $50,000 cash award and will be honored at a gala event to take place April 28.

                         The British Museum. Photo: Ham/Flickr.

                Museum Staffs Across the UK Plan Strikes

                Members of the PCS Culture Group, a branch of the UK’s Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), will strike in February to protest low wages after the government offered workers raises of just 2 percent, compared with the national inflation rate of 9.2 percent as of December 2022. Employees at the British Museum, the Wallace Collection Historic England, National Museums Scotland, and the National Museum of Liverpool are among those participating in the action.

                                                    What’s new on artforum.com

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