David Alfaro Siqueiros’ America Tropical mural on Olvera Street near downtown L.A. has been covered up for decades and is due to be unveiled again on October 9th. Close to $10 million spent in a public-private partnership, the mural has been conserved to the degree it was possible, as there are no existing photographs of the original. Whitewashed and completely painted over in the 30s, the incendiary 18 x 80-foot fresco was executed in 1932 with imagery of an indigenous Mexican man tied to a cross with an American eagle perched above. (more…)

Shanghai is opening two state-run museums today, celebrating China’s National Holiday. It will inaugurate the China Art Palace in the former China Pavilion of the 2010 Expo, as well as The Power Station of Art in a converted factory, formerly The Expo’s Urban Best Practices Area. The Power Station of Art will be China’s first national contemporary art museum. The 2012 Shanghai Biennial opens there tomorrow and runs through March 2013. The museum is also planning an Andy Warhol retrospective. (more…)

Frieze Projects promises to showcase the more colorful side of the fair’s various components this year, with the chef of Moro cooking Canada Goose and hairy bittercress. DIS, billed as a “post-internet lifestyle magazine”, will host nighttime photo shoots including 20 breast-feeding women, African street sellers selling real Chanel bags and a faked scene in which a gallery owner has a heart attack. (more…)

Blum & Poe Gallery is expanding, and is set to open in Tokyo in the coming months. Tim Blum, a co-founder, says that it is a “major moment for post-war Japanese art. There seems to be a real dialogue going on right now.” The gallery plans to strengthen relationships with artists and present secondary-market material from both Japanese and Western historical art movements. (more…)

Image: Richard Phillips, Black Water, 2012 via Gagosian

Currently on view at Gagosian’s 24th Street location is a solo show of the work of Richard Phillips.  The imagery mostly revolves around three internationally-renowned female celebrities: Lindsay Lohan, Sasha Grey and Adriana Lima, with the inclusion of one painting of the ocean at night. Through three videos and ten large-scale paintings, Phillips examines the superstar beauties and posits our fascination with them against one simple yet punctuating image.

Image: Richard Phillips, Installation View, via Gagosian

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Turkey has asked for the return of what it calls cultural patrimony, sparking international debate about who owns antiquities after centuries of shifting borders. Major museums such as The Met, The Getty, The Louvre and The Pergamon in Berlin are being asked to return works from their collections to Turkey under a 1906 Ottoman law that banned the export of artifacts, even though Turkey ratified the Unesco convention in 1981, which allows museums to acquire objects that were outside their countries of origin before 1970. (more…)

The Royal Academy of Arts plans to mount the first major British exhibition of the portraits of Edouard Manet. It will include over 50 works, many of them not generally known as part of the artist’s oeuvre. The show will run from January 26th – April 14th, 2013. (more…)

Klaus Biesenbach, the chief curator at large of MoMA P.S.1, is profiled in The Wall Street Journal, discussing his approach to art. “In America, art is free, but it’s not understood as a viable, necessary function in society. Art is still thought of as something luxurious or elitist, but it’s not.”

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Image: Jean-Michel Othoniel, My Bed, 2003, via Brooklyn Museum

In a collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, The Brooklyn Museum is currently showing a large-scale retrospective of the work of French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel, whose colorful glassworks and sculptures stand between tangible reality and a reconstituted dream world.  Entitled “My Way,” the show provides an in-depth look at Othoniel’s 25 year career. (more…)

David Zwirner talks to the Financial Times about educating his clients and his new gallery in London’s Mayfair district. On October 5th, Zwirner will open his five-story exhibition space in a townhouse with an exhibition entitled “Luc Tuymans, Allo!”.  The gallery sees the expansion as a way to reach collectors from Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
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The Wall Street Journal reports on the union of art and food, with the boundaries of the gallery and dining experiences becoming “increasingly blurred”.  From members’ only dining clubs to casual restaurants featuring street art, the WSJ explores the trend by highlighting Mark Hix’s Tramshed, Colombe d’Or, Sketch and others. (more…)

Michael McGinnis has taken on the role of CEO at auction house Phillips de Pury & Co. McGinnis will replace Bernd Runge, who will function as a special advisor to the shareholders. McGinnis has been head of the contemporary department since 1999.
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Christie’s will offer a seminal Yves Klein Sponge Relief from 1958, unseen on the market since 1960. The work is consigned by The Brooklyn Museum for the November 14th New York sale and will be used to fund the purchase of work by contemporary artists. Accord Bleu (Sponge Relief) is one of the first of the artist’s reliefs using sponges, a metaphorical medium in his work. The presale estimate is $7,000,000-10,000,000.  (more…)

Image: Elad Lassry, Untitled (Presence), 2012

Elad Lassry‘s new show, Untitled (Presence), is on view at The Kitchen through October 20th. The solo exhibition includes 20 new photographs, a short run of performances featuring members of The American Ballet Theatre and The New York City Ballet, as well as a short 16 mm abstract film projected onto the wall. The exhibition was preceded by Lassry’s billboard, Women (065, 055), which appeared along the Highline Park as part of its ongoing series of work by various artists. The 25 x 75 foot-work at 18th street and 10th avenue was on view for a month until the show’s opening at the Kitchen on September 7th.
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Christine Macel will curate the Anri Sala exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale French pavillion. Macel has been chief curator at the Musee National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou for the last 12 years. The artist and the curator have been discussing a collaboration between France and Germany and a decision will be reached in the next couple of weeks. (more…)

The residential Museum Tower building in Dallas issues a formal letter stating that it is working to resolve issues that its highly reflective surface has created for the Nasher Sculpture Center, an outdoor “roofless” museum. The New York times reports that due to the glare, the reflection from Museum Tower is burning the plants in the center’s garden and virtually blinding museum goers. (more…)

The auction of the “flea-market Renoir“, which was purchased by a woman in West Virginia for $7, is cancelled after reporters discover records indicating that it had allegedly been stolen from The Baltimore Museum of Art prior to winding up at a flea market in West Virginia. The original owner of “Paysage Bords de Seine”, Saidie May, had written records showing that she had lent the painting to the museum in 1937. Until title is cleared, the painting’s sale is pending. The value is estimated to be about $75,000-$100,000. (more…)

Image: Matthew Higgs introducing performers Malcolm Mooney and Sun Foot. All images by Heather Hannig for ArtObserved.

The Seventh Annual NY Art Book Fair opened last night at Moma/P.S. 1., presented by Printed Matter, Inc., with a performance by Malcolm Mooney and Sun Foot. The fair presents artists’ books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines presented by 283 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, artists, and independent publishers from twenty-six countries. Lucy Lippard and Paul Chan are the keynote speakers for this year’s Contemporary Artists’ Books Conference. (more…)

Phillips de Pury & Co. is set to auction AK-47 weapons decorated by Damien Hirst and other artists in October in London. The guns, decorated by more than 20 different artists, are on display at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London until Sept 30th and Phillips will host the auction on Oct 4th. (more…)

Peter Brant is recapitalizing his newsprint business, according to state regulatory filings, by pledging 56 artworks to the lending arm of Sotheby’s (BID), including pieces by Warhol, Richard Prince and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Other filings show a pledge by Brandt of pieces to a unit of Deutsche Bank AG, including a 1963 Warhol that could be worth as much as $35 million. (more…)

Lauren Cornell has announced that she will be accepting a full-time position at The New Museum with the title “Curator, 2015 Triennial, Digital Projects, and Museum as Hub”. She was previously executive director at Rhizome and adjunct curator at the New Museum. She is co-curating the 2015 triennial with artist Ryan Trecartin. (more…)

Parkett announced that it will open an exhibition space in the Löwenbräu art building in Zürich. Part of its permanent installation will be a reading room, complete with all sixty Parkett volumes. It plans to host exhibitions, projects, events and talks with artists and curators. (more…)

Jeffrey Gundlach, the bond trader and art collector whose Santa Monica home was burglarized last week, says that the works have been safely returned. “The focus was on recovering the artwork, and it was all recovered. The thieves had worked on moving the property, but we were able to get a good lead and apprehend them. It’s a great day for the art world, ” said Gundlach. (more…)

All photos taken on site by Aniko Berman

On Monday, September 24, Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl, the New York gallery for the famed Los Angeles print workshop, hosted its Artists for Obama event celebrating the Artists for Obama 2012 limited edition portfolio created and sold to support Obama’s reelection efforts. For the campaign, 19 artists have come together to create a portfolio of limited edition prints, with all proceeds going to the Obama Victory Fund. Of the 150 examples, 60 have already sold at $28,000 each; at the end of the project, Gemini G.E.L. hopes to raise 4.2 million dollars for the campaign. An additional sweepstakes offers supporters a chance to win the full portfolio for a $250 contribution to the fund.

Image: Artist James Rosenquist

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