Hank Willis Thomas has been tapped to design a memorial for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, Art News reports. “Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King are monumental examples of the capacity of love to shape society,” he said. “I can only hope The Embrace can be a reminder and a call to action to each of us to never forget what they’ve taught us.” (more…)

Christie’s will offer Robert Rauschenberg’s Buffalo II at auction this May in New York, carrying a $50 estimate that should smash the artist’s current record. “Everyone has been waiting for this painting,’’ says Sara Friedlander, Christie’s international director and head of its postwar and contemporary art department in New York. “It’s the very best of the silkscreen paintings that’s left in private hands.’’ (more…)

Damien Hirst has unveiled a specially-designed suite at the Palms Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. “I love what Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta have done with the Palms,” Hirst said in a statement. “It’s amazing being able to work with them because they are great collectors and totally understand art. They have allowed me to create a suite in the hotel and design everything and completely fill it with my art.” (more…)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has tapped Rita Gonzalez, a long-running curator at the museum, as its new head of contemporary art.  (more…)

Matthew Barney gets a profile in Art News this week, as he recaps his recently completed new film Redoubt, and reflects on its dwellings on alchemy, animals and the unknown. “The new film is very different,” he says. “It’s an American narrative, a kind of portrait of a region.” (more…)

A work by Carmen Herrera, Blanco Y Verde (1966–67), has set a new auction record of $2.9 million at a charity auction at Sotheby’s this past week.  (more…)

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has tapped Janet Bishop its new chief curator, Art News reports, alongside a number of other appointments.   “We are so fortunate to have Janet and Chad [Coerver, the museum’s new chief education and community engagement officer], two leaders with rich experience, strong relationships with the art community, expansive institutional knowledge and years of producing critically-acclaimed projects, ready to inspire and lead our teams to advance the goals of our new strategic plan.” (more…)

The New York Times profiles Jan Six in a recent profile, the Dutch aristocrat who discovered a pair of unattributed Rembrandt works.  “What sets Rembrandt apart is his ability to paint the person,” he says. “When I go through a museum and there’s a Rembrandt, I’ll pass it the way you do a person, looking out of the corner of my eye, thinking, Oh, who’s that? like it might be somebody I know. It’s a living human being.”  (more…)

Dealer Alexander Khochinsky has been detained by French authorities at Charles de Gaulle Airport.  Khochinsky has been engaged in an ongoing dispute with the Polish government over the ownership of an Antoine Pesne painting, Girl with Dove (1754). (more…)

Sotheby’s reported net income of $85.7 million for the fourth quarter of 2018 today during a call with investors, marking a 12 percent increase over the $76.7 million earned during the same period in 2017.  (more…)

Artist David Hockney found himself trapped in an elevator yesterday in Amsterdam yesterday, after an overloaded carriage stopped between floors.  The artist was rescued by Dutch firefighters.  (more…)

French dealer Marc Labarbe will auction off the recently rediscovered Caravaggio painting Judith and Holofernes (ca. 1607), carrying a €150 million (about $171 million) estimate.  The work’s authenticity has been called into question in past years. (more…)

The Rothko Chapel in Houston will close for the first step of a $30 million restoration and campus expansion by Architecture Research Office. “We’re trying to restore the sanctity of the chapel, very close to what my father had intended for the space,” says Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son who is steering the building committee and capital campaign. (more…)

The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal has tapped former MOCA head Philippe Vergne as its next director. “Philippe Vergne brings to Serralves an extraordinary expertise in contemporary art and culture, as well as in museum management,” Serralves board president Ana Pinho said in a statement.  (more…)

Turkish-Kurdish artist Zehra Dogan has been released from a Turkish jail after 25 months.  Dogan was convicted of “spreading terrorist propaganda” according to a Turkish court.  “I was waiting for the day when my sentence would come to an end, I am very happy. I extend my thanks to every single person who supported me during this process,” Dogan said. (more…)

The exhibition of the Barack and Michelle Obama Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery has grown the museum’s attendance by leaps and bounds, with 1 million more tickets sold this past year than the year prior, the Washington Post reports.  “I thought this is the closest that I’ll probably ever get to [Obama], and of what he represented — hope and love and progress,” says attendee Kamilah Chambers of Katy, Tex. (more…)

Art News has a piece this week on Pace Gallery‘s recent experimentation with charging admission for its more immersive, digital installations at galleries in Beijing and Palo Alto. “We are pondering it,” says CEO Marc Glimcher. “We are trying to come up with an idea.” (more…)

Raymond Pettibon gets an interview in GQ this week, where he retraces his favorite baseball jerseys, discusses his time in Los Angeles. “Well I haven’t really been in LA for so long,” he says “It’s been ten years, maybe with a few trips in between, places like Bunker Hill are non existent anymore, or places like MacArthur Park have a different feel…so much has changed, at least this is what I‘ve heard.” (more…)

Ghana will participate for the first time this year in the Venice Biennale, opening a national pavilion featuring an impressive lineup of artists including John Akomfrah, El Anatsui, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, among others.  “This is a historic moment for us in Ghana,” Catherine Afeku head of the nation’s Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture. “Arts and culture are the very soul of a nation, and with our maiden entry to the Venice Biennale, under the leadership of His Excellency, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, I can say, we have arrived.” (more…)

Following her sentencing for tax evasion, Mary Boone has announced she will close her gallery, Art News reports.  “I had 49 wonderful years in art,” she says. “If I’m going to be the Martha Stewart of the art world, I would hope to do it with the same humility, humor, grace, and intelligence that she did. I’m trying to be optimistic and see this as a learning experience.” (more…)

The full collection of sculpture in the holdings of the British Nation will be catalogued online, the Guardian reports. “The variety, the range, is just stunning and what is extraordinary is that it is going to be so much more global,” says Andrew Ellis, director of Art UK, the non-profit in charge of the project. “Paintings are predominantly a western European tradition but the sculpture collection we are bringing together is from across the world, and you can see that already. There are Buddhas, there are Hindu reliefs in Northampton from the 12th century and that is just the first thousand records.” (more…)

The State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg was evacuated on Thursday, February 21 due to a bomb threat, Artforum reports. A number of other institutions in the city received similar threats the same day. (more…)

A new report from SMU DataArts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas notes a drop in large institutions’ non-profit arts funding in recent years, Art News reports.  “With art museums you see a pretty sober picture,” says Zannie Voss, director of SMU DataArts. “If you look at size, small- and medium-size organizations saw an increase in returns on fund-raising over time. It was the large organizations that saw a decrease. What it says is that it’s the large institutions that are encountering the most struggle in this area.” (more…)

The Met has received a gift of ten 17th and 18th century works from Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia from Sao Paolo-based collector James Kung Wei Li. “These are outstanding examples of colonial-era Andean painting, and this gift is truly a turning point in our efforts to expand our holdings of Latin American art,” says director Max Hollein. (more…)