Philanthropist and Tate trustee Elisabeth Murdoch has announced a £100,000 annual award to a mid-career, female U.K. artist this week. Phyllida Barlow will serve on the selection committee “Women artists in mid-career are still woefully under-represented in the art world and this award aims to raise their profile,” Murdoch said in a statement.
Artists Elmgreen and Dragset will erect an enigmatic public sculpture at Rockefeller Center, a four and a half ton swimming pool turned on its side in a reference to Vincent Van Gogh’s severed ear. “Nobody really knows how that story came about, if it’s true, if it’s proven,” says Ingar Dragset. “Maybe Gauguin and Van Gogh invented the story together? It’s a fascinating thing.” (more…)
The Art Newspaper’s annual account of museum attendance figures has yet again placed the Louvre at the top of the most attended museum list, but has a surprise with National Palace Museum in Taipei’s Chen Cheng-po retrospective seeing the highest single exhibition attendance at 12,000 visitors a day. (more…)
The New Yorker has an interesting profile on David Wojnarowicz this week, as writer Rebecca Mead visits his personal archives with writer Olivia Laing, whose recent book chronicles loneliness and the lives of artists in New York, “So much of my book is about gender, and frustrations of gender, and that desire to be an anonymous person in a city in a way that I think you only can if you are a man—and a woman never is, because a woman is always on some level a desirable or non-desirable sexual object,” Laing says. (more…)
The Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas is expanding to a now defunct Kraft cheese plant for additional space to show contemporary art. “This project is going to be huge for the younger generation, the millennials,” says Tom Walton nephew of the museum’s founder, Alice L. Walton. (more…)
Joe Bradley is profiled in the New York Times this week, as the artist prepares to open his first show of new paintings with Gagosian Gallery in New York. “Oil paint has so much life. It really behaves like it wants to behave,” he says. “You’ll go into a painting with an idea of what you want to do, and 40 seconds later your plan has been upended. You always have to deal with these little skirmishes on the canvases.” (more…)
Sarah Meyohas, the artist who recently bought and sold stocks in real-time at 303 Gallery, has reportedly had her Charles Schwab trading account suspended, ostensibly over her manipulations of the stocks she traded. (more…)
Greene Naftali Gallery has announced a temporary exhibition space in Williamsburg, which will open April 8th with a show by Lutz Bacher. The gallery forecasts “dynamic, open, and spontaneous programming” at its new location at 227 Leonard Street. (more…)
The charges against Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky for igniting the doors of the FSB Headquarters have been changed by prosecuting investigators from vandalism to “damaging a cultural heritage site.” The artist himself has been asked to be tried under charges of terrorism. (more…)
The Untitled Art Fair is expanding to San Francisco, announcing plans for a January 2017 exhibition with 40 to 60 in the city’s Pier 70 space. “We want to make it manageable, we want to focus on quality, we want to make a very strong program,” says spokesman Jeffrey Walkowiak added. “This will be an opportunity for us to work with galleries we haven’t been able to work with before because of Art Basel in Miami.” (more…)
Renowned architect Dame Zaha Hadid has passed away at the age of 65. Hadid has been a foundational voice of contemporary architecture over the course of the early 21st Century, including London’s Olympic Aquatic Centre, the Guangzhou Opera House, and the MAXXI in Rome. (more…)
Vincent Van Gogh’s Night Cafe will remain hanging at Yale University, after the US Supreme Court rejected an appeal over its ownership by Pierre Konowaloff, who claims the work was stolen from his family during the Russian Revolution. “This is the end of the road,”Konowaloff’s lawyer, Allan Gerson says. “There is not much I or anyone can do except respect the rulings of the court, but I do believe there has been a miscarriage of justice.” (more…)
The WSJ notes the increased use of irrevocable trusts as a way for art collectors to transfer their holdings while still maintaining them in their personal collection. “Basically, you are sheltering the appreciation,” says Michael Kosnitzky, a tax lawyer at Boies, Schiller & Flexner. (more…)
Asad Raza, who previously hosted the Home Show in his Manhattan apartment late last year, has announced a selection of exhibitions at Brussels’s Boghossian Foundation that will negotiate and “an analogous dialogue between the intimacy of the private home and the democratic spirit of the public space.” One highlight is Répétition, a “choreographed” exhibition featuring works by Shannon Ebner, Robert Rauschenberg, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and many others. (more…)
Alex Da Corte is interviewed in the New York Times this week, as the artist opens a major exhibition at Mass MOCA. “If taste is the thing that guides you, then how can you step outside that and try to look at everything every day as if it’s new? To live somewhere up here?” he says. “I always like to hope that I have no taste, which is not the same thing as tastelessness.”
Continued Protests have led The Frick Collection to reconsider its approach to a renovation project that would have destroyed its garden space. “We’re looking at existing subterranean spaces and nonpublic spaces that could be utilized,” says director Ian Wardropper. “We’re at the point now where we want a fresh approach.” (more…)
Anri Sala is interviewed in the New York Times this week, where he discusses Hu his exhibition at the New Museum, and his relationship to both classical and pop music. “The detachment from today’s culture is something that interests me. We love many classical pieces, but they are far enough away that they have become like archaeological objects we can approach with some form of objectivity,” he says. “That wouldn’t be the case with pop music. It’s too recent, and manipulates us in ways that we have not yet completely decoded.” (more…)
Dealer Yvon Lambert is profiled in W Magazine this week, as he opens a show of his collection at a new exhibition space in Avignon, a gift to the French nation. “Often, the collection of an art dealer is mostly the pieces he wasn’t able to place,” he says. “But I chose these works from the beginning. It was very easy to say to a client, ‘That one’s already taken,’ without mentioning that it was sold to me.” (more…)
Copenhagen research group Freemuse has found an increase in the rate and degree of art censorship around the globe, the Art Newspaper reports. “Artistic creativity demands an environment free from fear and insecurity,” says Freemuse researcher Magnus Ag. “I think we should learn from journalists and make sure any artist facing hardship around the world knows that, if she is being silenced by censorship, threats or imprisonments, the international arts community will stand behind her and fight those who fear the power of creative expressions.” (more…)
Ellsworth Kelly and Yo-Yo Ma have been awarded the J. Paul Getty Medal for their contributions to the arts. “With this medal we honor two of our nation’s greatest artists: Yo-Yo Ma for his distinguished contributions to the conservation and understanding of the world’s many and diverse cultures, and Ellsworth Kelly for his mastery in paintings and sculptures of the highest quality and originality,” says board of trustees chair Maria Hummer-Tuttle. (more…)
The Park Avenue Armory will play host to Martin Creed’s first U.S. retrospective this June, titled The Back Door. The planned installation will take up both the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, as well as a number of other spaces in the building. Creed will also be presenting an installation of his Work No. 2630, UNDERSTANDING concurrently at Brooklyn Bridge Park. A collaboration with Public Art Fund, the massive red neon piece will be viewable from both sides of the river. (more…)
Art Basel has announced a new initiative, titled Art Basel Cities, which is targeted towards developing connections with local artistic communities worldwide, forging links between regional events and the flagship Art Basel fair events. We are excited to bring our expertise and network to new partner cities, and to work with them to amplify their commitment to arts and culture,” says Patrick Foret, Director of Business Initiatives with Art Basel. (more…)
Damien Hirst is curating an exhibition of Jeff Koons works at his Newport Street Gallery, featuring more than 30 works from the range of the artist’s career. “I believe art should be experienced by as many people as possible and I’ve felt guilty owning work that is stored away in boxes where no one can see it, so having a space where I can put on shows from the collection is a dream come true,” Hirst has said of his gallery. (more…)
The Wall Street Journal profiles a recent growth of San Francisco’s arts scene, charting a number of important projects that are cultivating a new generation of artists in the city. Performance art space The Lab and Jessica Silverman Gallery are listed among the chief players. (more…)