Mariner Kemper, CEO and chairman of UMB Financial Corp (UMB Bank) and a trustee of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri is facing pressure to resign over connections to President Trump’s controversial immigration policies.  UMB Bank represents the bondholders for the publicly owned and privately operated Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls, Rhode Island, which houses detained immigrants. (more…)

Alex Prager’s new work is profiled in the New Yorker, as the artist turns her camera lens on the landscapes and people of Los Angeles.  The works explore new perspectives and frames for the artist, expanding on her intriguing body of crowd-based photography. (more…)

John Currin gets a profile in GQ this week, with the artist holding court on a range of topics from his taste in cars to his style of painting.  “I sometimes think I’m trying to paint like I am Sean Connery,” he says, “but the closest I’ll ever get is Clint Eastwood.” (more…)

Amy Sadao is stepping as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Art News reports.  “I fulfilled and surpassed all of my goals, so this is the perfect time to think about my next step,” she says. “This is the right time for me to be able to write, research, and conduct interviews with people I admire, and it’s the right time for the ICA. I’m excited to see where ICA goes from here.” (more…)

Elizabeth Murray, DuckWabbit (1992), via Pace Gallery

The work of American painter Elizabeth Murray gets its first UK exhibition this summer in London, with Camden Arts Centre showcasing an impressive selection of the artist’s work from across her multifaceted career. Documenting Murray’s continued engagement with the languages of abstraction and conceptualism, the artist’s work delves into various iterations of painterly expression, from studies in violent action to nuanced investigations of the canvas as a form and medium in and of itself. (more…)

The altarpiece of Saint Catherine by Jacopo Tintoretto, formerly owned by David Bowie, has been returned to Venice, after Belgian collector Marnix Neerman purchased the work and loaned it to the Palazzo Ducale. (more…)

Brazil’s National Museum, which was ravaged by fire last year, is aiming to reopen a wing in 2022 for the bicentennial of Brazilian independence. “The Louvre’s director should visit the museum next year, when we will seek to deepen conversations around possible donations,” says Denise Pires de Carvalho, the dean of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). (more…)

Olafur Eliasson is interviewed on CNN this week, as he discusses his views on climate change and his vision of how artists might be able to help increase the speed of response. “I’m afraid we can’t wait for them to do the work for us. Because they are not going fast enough,” he says of politicians working on the crisis. (more…)

Peter Saville, Blue Monday (1983), via Sprueth Magers

Culling together a selection of works that chart the landscape of British art as it moved through the landscape of industrial collapse through the neoliberal ascendancy of the 1980’s and into the 1990’s, Sprüth Magers is currently presenting New Order: Art, Product, Image 1976 – 1995 at its London exhibition space. The exhibition originates from a discussion about the cultural status and art historical positioning of one of Peter Saville’s best-known works for Factory Records made in the early 1980s, an object that helped in blurring the boundaries between art, design, pop and product. (more…)

Over $8 billion was spent last year to build a total of 148 new museums worldwide, according to the third yearly Cultural Infrastructure Index published by AEA Consulting this past week.  “We have been looking for indicators that suggest peak cultural infrastructure investment has been reached,” the report notes, “but the number of announced projects has remained remarkably stable over the past three years and the number of completed projects has increased each year over the same period.” (more…)

LA’s loved Ooga Booga Store has closed up shop, and will operate online, as well as through a pop-up at The Hammer  Museum through the end of the year.  The closure was announced on Instagram yesterday. (more…)

Sterling Ruby’s work in fashion gets a New Yorker profile this week, as he recaps his recent work and the encouragement he’s felt during his venture into making clothes. “The dealers were so mad at me,” he says, going on to describe his show with Raf Simons. “Everybody was standing up, cheering. At that moment, I thought, Fuck being an artist—this is wonderful.” (more…)

The New York Times celebrated Labor Day yesterday with a piece documenting the work and contributions of various creative laborers, including dancers, performers and frame manufacturers. “The frame sort of needs to disappear,” says Bill Schunk, who makes frames with his wife Rose Pappalardo at Frames New York. “If you’re noticing the frame, maybe something is wrong.” (more…)

Artist Conrad Shawcross has an interview in Art News this week, as the artist reaps praise for his show at Saatchi Gallery celebrating the raw energy of rave culture. “I have a personal connection to it because I experienced it and enjoyed it when I was younger,” he says. “I have a love of it, from a personal perspective.” (more…)

Simone Fattal, Works and Days (Installation View), via Art Observed

On view through the end of August, MoMA PS1 is presenting the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of the work of Simone Fattal. The Lebanese-American artist whose commanding body of work weaves together disparate elements and sources to create new stories and concepts. The show brings together over 200 works created over the last 50 years, featuring abstract and figurative ceramic sculptures, paintings, watercolors, and collages that draw from a range of sources including war narratives, landscape painting, ancient history, mythology, and Sufi poetry to explore the impact of displacement as well as the politics of archeology and excavation.

Simone Fattal, Works and Days (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Tarkulnga (1988) Ronnie Tjampitjinpa , © Copyright Agency. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2019 Photo: Rob McKeever, Courtesy Gagosian

Following up on the much-praised New York exhibition documenting the leading painters from the Central and Western Desert regions of Australia, Gagosian’s Los Angeles exhibition space has pulled together a second iteration of Desert Painters of Australia, a strikingly powerful show documenting the indigenous art traditions of the country.
In the late 1960s, the Australian government moved several communities from the Western Desert region—primarily Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri, and Arrernte peoples—to the Papunya settlement, about 150 miles south of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, a forced displacement that simultaneously centered the Indigenous Australian art community around a centralized hub where artists would gather to create murals works on canvas, and other forms drawing on ceremonial decorations and sand art. The result was a transposition of historically-resonant modes to the physical media of contemporary art and which has since presented a new outlet and opportunity for Papunya Tula artists to reexamine the imagery and present their culture to outsiders through transcendental visual codes. (more…)

Two names have come out in support of the sale of works from the di Rosa Foundation, including one from Gloria Marchant, the widow of di Rosa collection artist Roy De Forest. “There are many works of Roy’s in this collection, but not often on display,” Marchant writes. “If some were sold to help continue the di Rosa, it would be like Roy giving back the generosity and support Rene gave him. It is the time for artists whose lives were touched by him, as Roy’s life was, to step up too.” (more…)

Artist Nicholas Party gets a profiled in the NYT this week, and talks about his creative, often surreal takes on the gallery dinner.“It all teetered on the brink of being debauched — there was an aura of decadent Rome,” says Alanna Heiss, the founder of MoMA PS1 and director of the arts nonprofit Clocktower Productions, “but my feeling is you can be as silly as you want as long as it wakes people up to thinking.” (more…)

Atlanta-based philanthropists Doris and Shouky Shaheen will donate a selection of Impressionist works to Atlanta’s High Museum, including pieces by Monet and Matisse. “Their collection is really a godsend,” says director Rand Suffolk. “It’s the kind of blessing that we would not be able to orchestrate on our own.” (more…)

Richard Serra is interviewed in the NYT this week, as he prepares to open a series of shows in New York. “If you’re are dealing with abstract art, you have to deal with the work in and of itself and its inherent properties,” he says of his work. “The focus is mainly on mass, weight, material, gravity and so on.” (more…)

Ed Moses and Qin Feng via Blain|Southern

Currently on view at Blain|Southern’s London exhibition space, the work of Ed Moses and Qin Feng are placed into a fluid, flowing conversation across cultures, conducted in a shared artistic language. Relying on the two artists’s various interests in composition as a combination of varied gestural actions and interventions in the space of the canvas, the show is a striking look at the styles and ideas between two divergent perspectives in contemporary art in both the U.S. and China. (more…)

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art will put Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room―My Heart is Dancing Into the Universe on permanent view at the museum.  “Yayoi Kusama is an incredibly important figure in art, and her ‘Infinity Rooms’ are really something special,” says Alejo Benedetti, an assistant curator at the museum. “We like to have as much of the collection on view as possible. It seems natural to have it permanently on view.” (more…)

Orazio Gentileschi’s The Finding of Moses will potentially be acquired by London’s National Gallery, Art Newspaper reports. The work is currently on from Graham Kirkham, the founder of the DFS sofa company, who is looking to sell a selection of his works. (more…)

Wangechi Mutu will soon open an exhibition of work at the Met, which will go on view outside the museum facing 5th Avenue. “It’s a way of bringing in contemporary art and engaging with our collection that is perhaps more bold and more playful than before,” says director Max Hollein. “Any sculpture on the facade of a building of this kind has a custodial nature, and I think these will be very different custodians than you would expect.” (more…)