The Museum of Modern Art will stay open until 9PM on Fridays and Saturdays for the rest of the year, effectively extending its hours of free Friday admission as well. The museum’s late hours will offer extended opportunities for visitors to browse the collection through December 30th. (more…)
A set of drawings found in a London antique shop are believed to be lost works by Alberto Giacometti, The Guardian reports. The works were found while archiving the holdings of antiques dealer Eila Grahame, whose estate records showed some indication that the works might exist, but gave little detail of their contents. “At the time we didn’t know if it was two pieces of paper, two large sketches, whether they were done on the back of a cigarette packet or whether they were done on large canvases,” says Martin Millard, a director at Cheffins auction house, which is in charge of sorting through Grahame’s estate. “We didn’t know what we were looking for.” (more…)
A group of artists have been evicted from their homes and studios in the Caochangdi art district of northeastern Beijing by the Chinese government, Artforum reports. The homes had been slotted for demolition, causing protest and resistance from their residents. (more…)
The Met Museum has a blog post this week on its continued Open Access initiative, noting impressive gains in traffic and engagement with the museum’s collection, which has been uploaded in full to its website. “Overall traffic to the online collection has increased by 17%, image downloads have increased by 64%, and we’re seeing that users who download an image have a significantly stronger engagement with the collection: they spend five times longer on the site, and visit five times more pages,” Digital Officer Loic Tallon writes in the piece. (more…)
Mexico City-based dealer Brett Schultz has embarked on a new project in the Glendale area of Los Angeles County, opening a collaborative exhibition space run by a group of five Latin American art galleries. Members are Galería Agustina Ferreyra (San Juan), Lodos (Mexico City), Proyectos Ultravioleta (Guatemala City), Carne (Bogotá), and Schultz’s BWSMX, formerly Yautepec (Mexico City). (more…)
A Willem de Kooning painting stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art over 30 years ago has been found in a New Mexico antiques shop. “For us, it was the equivalent of finding a lost wallet and returning it,” says David Van Auker, who found the piece. “It was a no-brainer.” (more…)
Following the clashes between white supremacists and counter-protestors in Charlottesville, VA this weekend, Louisville’s mayor Greg Fischer has directed the Louisville Commission on Public Art to begin a review of all publicly held art to determine if any of its pieces could be interpreted as honoring bigotry, racism or hatred. “I recognize that some people say all these monuments should be left alone, because they are part of our history,” Fischer said in a statement. “But we need to discuss and interpret our history from multiple perspectives and from different viewpoints. That’s why a community conversation is crucial.” (more…)
Installation View. All images via Pace Gallery.
Pace Gallery and Pace/MacGill Gallery present Border Cantos, a collaborative multimedia exhibition by artists Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo. Misrach, an American photographer, and Galindo, a Mexican-American experimental composer, have been working together since 2011, blending musical scores and photography, instrumentation and sculpture, to discuss and represent the increasingly militarized 1,969-mile border wall between the United States and Mexico. The work in Border Cantos spans photography, sculpture, and sound, integrated seamlessly to create an impression of the presence of tragedy and tenuousness. (more…)
Robert Grosvenor, Untitled (2014-2017), via Art Observed
Three cars parked side by side make up Robert Grosvenor’s Untitled (2014-17), a single work presented as the artist’s second solo exhibition at Karma’s downtown exhibition space. We can’t be certain that the term “parked” accurately describes these objects, however, as it implies movement that was halted, and a close assessment of the vehicles does not yield a consensus on their past or present mobility. Our fascination with Grosvenor’s sculptures runs parallel to our suspension in this perpetual state of uncertainty, in which the work of art becomes the site of an investigation into the identity of an object.
Robert Grosvenor, Untitled (detail) (2014-2017), via Art Observed
A piece in the Art Newspaper traces the initially contentious history of Pablo Picasso’s now iconic public sculpture in downtown Chicago, which earned considerable derision and criticism when it was first unveiled in 1967. “The tone, and I remember it so vividly, was that we had been had, this alien beast or whatever it is with no name arrived and some poseur artist has played a joke on the city,” says Mark Kelly, Chicago’s current cultural commissioner of its first showing. “I would like to believe that I became a little more open and curious to my urban surroundings and to what was considered art.” (more…)
PBS has a piece on the recent controversy over the Berkshires Museum’s decision to deaccession a collection of 40 paintings from its collection, including pieces by Alexander Calder, and the protests raised in response. The museum has claimed the works it wants to sell were “deemed no longer essential to the the Museum’s new interdisciplinary programs,” but is facing criticism over its treatment of the pieces as a rote financial asset. (more…)
The New York Times profiles Dupont Underground, a former subway station in Washington D.C. that has been converted into an arts space. “It’s one of those spaces in the city that becomes mythical because it just hasn’t been open to the public for so long,” said Brianne Nadeau, a member of the City Council. (more…)
The Guardian has a piece on Vermeer’s extensive range of techniques in the creation of his works, including copying and manipulating images to arrive at their masterful final form. According to new research, the artist may have also used various technological methods, including polished lenses and camera obscuras to create his works. (more…)
John Currin has painted actress Jennifer Lawrence for the cover of Vogue Magazine this month, part of the magazine’s 125th Anniversary celebration. “To be in a situation of producing a cover for this famous magazine, I’m a little scared,” Currin said in an interview. “I do worry about decorum.” (more…)
The SCMP has a piece on China’s China Guardian auction house, as the organization expands to go head to head against Sotheby’s in Hong Kong, and prepares a move to a massive new compound in Beijing. “With the extra space in Hong Kong, we can experiment with new categories – watches, jewellery – and new formats, such as a dedicated sale of local architect James Kinoshita’s art and furniture collection,” says China Guardian Chief Executive Hu Yan Yan. “It will be designed to resemble his home, as we want to encourage buyers to live with their collection rather than just keep it in a warehouse.” (more…)
The NADA New York art fair is moving locations again next year, and will set up shop for its 2018 edition at Skylight Clarkson Sq. in West SoHo this coming March. “NADA is dedicated to producing a distinctive New York art fair in March, and we are looking forward to developing a new environment for exhibitors in the pristine studios at Skylight Clarkson Sq,” Heather Hubbs, NADA’s executive director, said in a statement. “As an alliance of professionals working to stage and support contemporary art, we are always creating unique opportunities to assist galleries, and engage the larger community with cultural programming.” (more…)
Jenny Sabin, Lumen, via Art Observed
Marking its embrace of the hot summer months in New York, MoMA PS1‘s popular Warm-Up summer concert series has returned to New York City, bringing with it the annual Young Architects Program design for an outdoor canopy structure to shade and entertain visitors and concert-goers in the museum’s open courtyard. This year, the museum has tapped Jenny Sabin Studio, a Cornell-based design group known for its tech-first design concepts and use of woven, photo-reactive materials, spreading a photo-luminescent tent structure, and robotically-woven chairs across the space. (more…)
New figures released by the UK Government show employment in the cultural sector up by 20% in the past 5 years. “The creative industries are out-gunning the rest of the economy several times over but this is not guaranteed to continue,” says John Kampfner, CEO of the Creative Industries Federation. “The government must make the creative industries a priority in Brexit negotiations and address the Federation’s concerns regarding immigration, trade and intellectual property rights.” (more…)
Andrea Zittel and Tom Burr, Concrete Realities (Installation View), via Art Observed
Over the course of their respective careers, Andrea Zittel and Tom Burr have both negotiated an enigmatic and thorough interest in the built environment, addressing questions of site-specificity, subjectivity, and the body through spaces and environments that pull lived space and imagined realities into a shared domain. This month at Bortolami, the pair’s respective visions will also share a common site, grappling with similar visual languages and interests in text, assemblage and architecture to challenge readings of space, and the strategies we employ to exist within our given environments. (more…)
Florence’s Uffizi Gallery has been forced to close its doors as a result of a sweltering heatwave currently hitting the city. Problems with the institution’s air conditioning led to unsafe conditions for visitors, and create complications for preserving paintings in the museum galleries. (more…)
London’s National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery are currently in the middle of a conflict over an expansion project at the National Gallery that its neighbor argues will obscure its views of the city. “We have not received a briefing on the scheme from the National Gallery, but would welcome the opportunity to work collaboratively with them to address our concerns,” a statement from the National Portrait Gallery reads. (more…)
Collector couple Roman Abramovich and Dasha Zhukova have split, the New York Post’s Page Six reports. “We are committed to jointly raising our two children. We will also continue to work together as co-founders of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and the New Holland Island cultural center in Saint Petersburg,” the couple said in a joint statement. (more…)
Ai Weiwei, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Hansel and Gretel (Installation View) at Park Avenue Armory. Photo by James Ewing
Exploration of surveillance and its corresponding limits has long remained a prominent thread in Ai Weiwei’s aggressively political multimedia practice, particularly following his detainment and imprisonment by Chinese authorities in 2011 due to his vocal dissent of the country’s governmental policies on human rights. Hansel & Gretel, Weiwei’s Park Armory tour-de-force in collaboration with architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, furthers his past surveillance-themed projects such as 2012’s WeiweiCam, for which the artist had installed fifteen cameras around his Beijing residence to stream a 24-hour live footage of his home. Coinciding with the one year anniversary of his detention by the Chinese government, the comparison the artist built between actual imprisonment and systematic violation of privacy echoes with his current occupation of Park Armory’s Guild Hall, transforming the column-free exhibition space into a pitch black zone of uncertainty and peril. (more…)
Julie Mehretu is profiled in the New York Times this week, as the artist takes the paper to view the monumental new commission for SFMoMA she is currently working on in an abandoned Harlem church. The piece was inspired by early American landscape painting. “I was attracted to these landscape paintings that were trying to describe a really intense moment historically, of what this country was becoming, on all these different levels,” she says. (more…)
