Amid a New York State Attorney’s investigation and the resignation of five board of trustee members at Cooper Union, the University’s embattled President Jamshed Bharucha has resigned. Bharucha headed Cooper during its controversial decision to begin charging tuition, and has been the subject of numerous protest actions since. He will take a position as visiting scholar at Harvard. (more…)
London’s Royal Academy of Art has unveiled a £50 million expansion plan that will link the institution’s two buildings in the British capital’s Mayfair district. “You will be able to go from an exhibition in Burlington House to a lecture in Burlington Gardens through the vaults of the building,” says Sir David Chipperfield, who designed the project. “You will see the cast corridors, you will see where the schools have been all this time. It’s a small amount of architecture for a profound result.” (more…)
New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has launched an investigation into the financial decision-making at Cooper Union in New York, where protests and lawsuits erupted following the school’s decision to charge tuition after nearly two hundred years of offering free college education to admitted students. (more…)
An article in the New Statesman takes a hard look at the state of British art schools this week, noting tuition fees higher than anywhere else in Europe, and a change in the curriculum that has changed how students practice, both of which have limited access to education for lower income classes and discouraged Britain’s famously egalitarian higher education system. (more…)
Vik Muniz has ventured to Brazil for his newest project, opening an art and technology school in the Vidigal neighborhood of São Paulo for young students. Developed in conjunction with MIT, The Escola do Vidigal (Vidigal School) follows a similar arts and technology centre Muniz worked on in 2006 in Rio. “We want to prepare kids to live and exist in a very visually challenging environment and to be able to act as producers as well as consumers,” Muniz said last year in an interview with Art Newspaper. (more…)
A group of professors, admitted students and alumni from the Cooper Union have filed a lawsuit against the school’s Board of Trustees, in an attempt to halt the charging of tuition against students next fall, and to force an investigation into how the board has handled the school’s finances over the past several years. “The Board of Trustees has permitted the school to engage in numerous financial transactions that bear no reasonable relationship to the educational purposes of The Cooper Union,” the lawsuit alleges. (more…)
Peter Doig, Burger King (1984), all images courtesy Michael Werner Gallery
On view at Michael Werner Gallery in London is a show from Scottish painter Peter Doig that explores his earliest works, even ones from his student days at St. Martin’s College in London, when he was still finding his voice as a painter. Included alongside some of the artist’s most iconic and important artworks from his first years of widespread success, the show is an intriguing study into Doig’s continually shifting and specific stylistic tendencies.
After a number of considerations have been addressed, the takeover of the Corcoran by the National Gallery of Art is set to get underway, with George Washington University also preparing to take over the institution’s art school. “I think there’s a euphoria that we have a wonderful solution here,” says Corcoran interim director and president Peggy Loar. “The one thing we need to work at is to maintain that synergy between the collections and curators along with the faculty and the students.” (more…)
The 2014 Turner Prize shortlist has been announced, including the artists Duncan Campbell, Ciara Phillips, James Richards and Tris Vonna-Michell, all of whom are noted as working in “non-traditional media.” “The four shortlisted artists share a strong international presence and an ability to adapt, restage and reinterpret their own and others’ works, very often working in a collaborative social contexts,” says Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis. (more…)
The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC has announced that it will be taken over by the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University, part of a new plan for the longstanding arts institution. The plan would see the Corcoran School of Art and Design made part of George Washington University, with the University covering the millions of dollars in much-needed renovations. “There is no way to continue the Corcoran as we knew it or as we know it,” said Peggy Loar, interim director and president of the Corcoran. “That’s going to be the kernel of pain for some people.” (more…)
A new project aimed at British schools is bringing major art works to the classroom. Masterpieces in Schools, as it is called, will lend a series of masterworks to schools across Great Britain, in an attempt to attract children who would not normally attend a gallery or museum exhibition. The project began this week, when a classic Monet landscape was sent to a school in Northern England. “We hope all the children will be left with the lasting memory of the day a Monet, Turner or Gainsborough came to their school,” says Andrew Ellis, director of the Public Catalogue Foundation. (more…)
