John Giorno, Do the Undone (Installation View), via Sperone Westwater

Opened this month at Sperone Westwater, celebrated poet and artist John Giorno has unleashed a selection of new sculptural works, canvases and other pieces centered around his ongoing explorations of language, energy and space. Having lived and worked on The Bowery for over 50 years, the show marks something of a return home for the artist, emphasizing his presence on the famed street while also emphatically marking his a renewed vivaciousness in his work. (more…)

Felix LA will return in 2020 with an expanded exhibitor list of 60 gallerists.  “We are thrilled to expand Felix’s community and welcome an incredible slate of new and returning exhibitors for the second edition,” founders Dean Valentine, Al Morán, and Mills Morán said in a statement. “The growth and diversification of our roster attests to the burgeoning Los Angeles art scene and the desperate need for the new type of art fair experience that Felix offered collectors and exhibitors alike.” (more…)

Four departments at the Tate Modern have brought on new talent under the title Curator, International Art, signaling an expanded focus for the institution’s programming.  “Their significant experience and expertise will play an important part in expanding our knowledge of modern and contemporary art from Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, furthering our ambition to present a truly international story of art through our program and collection,” says Frances Morris, Tate Modern’s director. (more…)

Artist Nicholas Galanin has a piece in Art News this week as he discusses his decisions to pull work from this year’s Whitney Biennial.  “My decision to remove my work from the Whitney came when my hope for meaningful conversation was met with inaction—on the part of many but, most fatefully, by the museum, which for weeks and then months failed to issue any meaningful response to protests mounting within its walls,” he says. “For me, that inaction translated to complicity with militarized denial of the right of Indigenous people to freely move through land that we belong to.” (more…)

Larry Gagosian gets an interview in GQ this week, talking about his rise through the ranks of the art world, and his views on running a business in the arts. “All businesses are competitive,” he says. “If you’re not in a competitive business, you’re probably in a shitty business.” (more…)

March Avery, Sofa Companions (1967), via Blum & Poe

Currently on view at Blum & Poe through the end of this week, the New York based artist March Avery marks her first solo exhibition with the gallery, and uses the platform to develop a masterful exhibition around still moments and subtle gestures, a fitting first intro to the artist’s body of work, which now spans over five decades. (more…)

Gagosian has taken over representation of the estate of artist Simon Hantaï, Art News reports. “If the works are of good quality, it’s always a good opportunity,” says Jean-Olivier Després, a director of Gagosian Paris. “There’s no strategy of focusing on living artists or estates. We’re focusing on good things.” (more…)

NYC Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Tom Finklepearl has a piece in the Art Newspaper this week emphasizes that the importance of diversity and inclusion in New York cultural institutions, and emphasizes the improvements to workplace culture that steps to emphasize these values can have at arts organizations. “Today, we are developing new plans that we hope will open our institutions’ doors wider than ever,” he writes. “It matters who leads and who makes decisions at these organizations: diversity, equity and inclusion at all levels will make our cultural community more dynamic, open and intellectually complex. (more…)

Nick van Woert, Untitled (detail) (2019), via Art Observed

Opening a show of new works at GRIMM New York under the title Body Parts, artist Nick van Woert returns to the city with a studied and at times strange investigation of embodiment, persona and material, arranging assemblages of human limbs, cast off materials and furniture to create a striking investigation of humanity and its functions in social space. (more…)

The Whitney has awarded its $100,000 Whitney Biennial Bucksbaum Award to Tiona Nekkia McClodden. “McClodden’s work is bold and original and her contribution to the Whitney Biennial is extraordinarily rich with cultural, historical, and spiritual resonances,” says museum director Adam Weinberg. (more…)

A piece in Bloomberg this week looks at the market for Vija Celmins, and how the artist’s growing market stature might explode after her show opens this fall at the Met Breuer. “Her collector base grew from the initial people who were interested to other people who saw her museum shows and wanted a work in their collection,” says dealer Renee McKee. “It was always as difficult to get her to release her work as it was to get her to raise her prices. That’s Vija.” (more…)

Art News reports on a clash between art handling company The British Shop and Chicago’s Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, after the company lost a work by artist Clotilde Jimenez.  “Where we are now is in a moment of a fight,” Ibrahim says. “I’m not going to let this go and pass by. It’s not something I or the artist should accept.” (more…)

The Met has settled long-running negotiations with its HVAC workers, agreeing to a 63% pay hike for all licensed professionals after reports of overwork and underpay. “For about a year the Met Engineering Dept. had only 15 engineers, down from 35,” says Council Rep Dan McCabe. “They frequently worked double shifts and at times triple shifts, six or seven days a week. Because the museum paid significantly lower wages, no one applied for the HVAC postings or they’d only stay a year and leave for better pay elsewhere.”

(more…)

Mary Abbott, an abstractionist whose works filled the canvas with color and energy,  has passed away at age 98. The artist’s work was known for its fervent energy and her evolving approach to her compositions. “They change as you paint them,” she said of her works. “They are alive and they vibrate.” (more…)

Critic William Feaver has published a portion of his biography of Lucian Freud in The Guardian this week, a book that reflects on the artist’s work and the pair’s long friendship. “With him on the line, how blurred at any hour of day or night were the distinctions between personal and impersonal, between the private and the renowned,” he writes. (more…)

Sotheby’s and Ugo Rondinone are working together this fall to sell a selection of works to benefit bladder cancer research.  (more…)

For the fifth edition of Made in L.A., the Hammer Museum will partner with the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California to share the exhibition between the various venues. “We’re really looking at the legacy of our founders, Henry and Arabella Huntington,” says Christina Nielsen, the Huntington Museum’s director. (more…)

Wangechi Mutu gets a profile in the NYT this month, as the artist prepares to place her new sculpture commissions for the Met on view, and reflects on her life growing up in Kenya after the end of British colonial rule. “The one thing that’s always missing — I think it’s part of the trauma — is the personal element,” she says. “My parents don’t often talk about their experiences in terms of how it made them feel.” (more…)

Christie’s will sell the collection of renowned architect I.M. Pei over a series of sales in the coming months.  “The Pei name is one that resonates around the world, integrated into the landscape of the dozens of cities that feature a Pei-designed art museum, concert hall, university, hospital, office tower or civic building,” says Marc Porter, Chairman for Christie’s Americas. (more…)

P.P.O.W will move to Tribeca in the fall of 2020. “There are things we could get [in Tribeca] that we just couldn’t get in Chelsea anymore,” says Wendy Olsoff, the gallery’s cofounder. “We’re able to gain a beautiful space in a neighborhood we felt comfortable in…. Chelsea just got to be too corporate for us and our identity. It just didn’t match anymore.” (more…)

Artist Tavares Strachan will give part of the proceeds from his upcoming shows to fund disaster relief in the Bahamas. “These things are more organic than we would like to admit,” he says. “I think the issues will be different in a week as people get evacuated and then it’s rebuilding effort. At this time, people on the ground need to be sheltered and fed.” (more…)

Dis, January 9, 2008 (2019), via Project Native Informant

The New York collective Dis has long reveled in a mixture of the politically-incisive and the socially-mischievous, putting further a body of work that dwells on revolution and change, modes of sociality in the digital age, and the mass-media phenomena that populate the world around us. After a year in which the group moved back into online publishing, embracing a “pivot to video,” trumpeted by social media giant Facebook (which, ironically, was later revealed to be based on a false premise), the collective has opened a show in London at Project Native Informant, compiling a range of recent works that explore the idea of the 2008 economic crisis as a missed opportunity for economic revolution. (more…)

London’s Victoria & Albert Museum  headTristram Hunt said he sees no problem with receiving support from  fossil fuel firms such as BP.  “I think that the pre-history of fossil fuel companies in muddying the science about climate change, in lobbying, in their political acts, have been pretty criminal and they will be judged on that,” he says. “But, I also think they will be part of the solution to dealing with climate change and they are engaged with it. It’s their technological reach, it is their facilities that will also be part of the solution and I think they’re getting there.” (more…)

The UK Government will increase its culture budget by 4.1% in real terms to £1.6bn, after inflation is taken into account, Art Newspaper reports.  This announcement follows several years with no increase in budget. (more…)