A group of artists including Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher and Julie Mehretu, have pooled their money and purchased the birthplace and childhood home of Nina Simone in Tryon, North Carolina.  “It wasn’t long after the election that this all began to happen, and I was desperate like a lot of people to be engaged, and this felt like exactly the right way,” says Johnson.  “My feeling when I learned that this house existed was just an incredible urgency to make sure it didn’t go away.” (more…)

New York publication and exhibition space OSMOS will host a wake for artist Martin Kippenberger this upcoming week, commemorating twenty years since the artist died at the age of 44, and opening an exhibition dedicated to the artist.  “There will of course be the consumption of alcohol,” says founding director and publisher, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, “I’ve personally never hosted a wake.” (more…)

Detroit-based artist and curator Ingrid LaFleur has announced her candidacy for the mayorship of the Michigan city, announcing her candidacy this week.  “The truth is, my experiences as a creative and as a Detroiter have led me to this decision,” she says.  “As a curator, I observe, research, investigate, and then bring together the elements to make a cohesive statement and/or action. As an artist I tend to focus on out-of-the-box ways to resolve issues that I face. I am using all of those skills to create a healthy, sustainable city.” (more…)

New York’s Salon 94 gallery is embarking on a new design program called Salon 94 Design, and will begin exhibiting shows exploring forward-thinking and historically relevant design works.  “Design has a participatory way of communicating with us—it’s very, very direct,” says Gallery director Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. “You automatically know that a chair is to be sat in, so there’s already a dialogue.” (more…)

Collector J Tomilson Hill is in the Guardian this week, defending his decision not to give up the £30 million Jacopo Pontormo painting sought by the National Gallery in London, saying that he said he refused to take a loss on the painting after its purchase.   “They went ahead, despite the warning,” he says.  “Their argument that they wasted all this time and effort to raise the money, only to have the offer rejected, rings very hollow.” (more…)

Independent NY, via Art Observed

Marking its eighth edition and second in its new home at Spring Studios in Tribeca, Independent NY opened shop this afternoon for another year operating in conjunction with the high-end glitz of the Armory Show several neighborhoods to the north.  Offering a more nuanced, mellow browsing experience in conjunction with the fair’s invite-only exhibitor structure and immense glass windows, the fair has built a reputation as a boutique event with impressive draw, with this year only strengthening that appeal. (more…)

The New York Times’s Holland Carter has a piece reflecting on the challenges faced by Thomas Campbell over the course of his tenure at the head of The Met, and the steps the museum may take moving forward after his departure.  “A new emphasis on contemporary art was reinforced by people who ran the museum itself,” he writes. “They made Mr. Campbell’s pursuit of the contemporary a condition of hiring. Did no one notice that any buying would be at the top of a bloated market? That a Jeff-Koons-whatever would cost more than [former director Philippe] de Montebello’s $45 million-plus Duccio, ‘Madonna and Child?'” (more…)

Armory Show, via Art Observed

The doors are open and the 23rd edition of The Armory Show is underway in New York, kicking off the annual hustle and bustle of the March art calendar and its increasingly loaded week of fair sales, openings and events.  Spread out across the lengthy convention center spaces on Piers 92 and 94 on Manhattan’s West Side, the fair, Benjamin Genocchio’s first as director, seems to have taken advantage of the fresh start afforded by its new leader.

Yayoi Kusama’s Platform Installation, via Art Observed

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MoCA Los Angeles has received a major gift of twenty-two works from collectors Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard, including pieces by Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Catherine Opie.  “As with many American museums, MoCA would not exist without the selfless engagement of its patrons. With this gift, Alan and Curt join a family of collectors who have changed museums in this country forever,” director Philippe Vergne says. “Their gifts to MoCA benefit the museum and its artists, the city of Los Angeles, and its citizens. This is true philanthropy at the highest level.” (more…)

Painter Jack Whitten is interviewed in the Paris Review, as the artist reflects on his works currently on view at Hauser & Wirth in New York, and the process used in creating his works, particularly in his use of units of paint he calls tesserae.  “The tesserae, in my mind, is the unit, it’s the thing that makes them. I can build anything I want with the tesserae, using all acrylic paint, built layer by layer by layer until I get the thickness that I want,” he says.  “As a rule, I work with a thickness of a quarter of an inch to three sixteenth of an inch. I have ways that I can calculate the thickness that I want. There is a lot more, deeper material than the paint, of course—all the psychological stuff.” (more…)

The Art Newspaper sits down with George Goldner, former head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s department of prints and drawings, to discuss the Thomas Campbell’s ouster, and the issues the museum was facing.  “I think they did a disservice to the institution because it’s impossible for Tom to improve morale in that kind of atmosphere,” he says.  “It is unconscionable that the pension of a person making $60,000 a year is cut through no fault of his or her own, whereas senior board members, who must in part take responsibility, have borne no part of the blame or burden.” (more…)

Collector Dmitriy Rybolovlev has taken a 74% loss on the sale of a Paul Gauguin canvas Te Fare (La Maison) yesterday at Christie’s, Bloomberg reports.  The Russian collector bought the work in 2008 through dealer Yves Bouvier, who he is currently suing for allegedly overcharging him on the purchases of a series of works.  “As Singapore’s highest court noted, the buyers in this case ‘obtained the masterpieces which were precisely what they wanted, and these were all transacted at prices they agreed to pay,”’ says Ron Soffer, Bouvier’s lawyer. (more…)

1:54, the art fair dedicated to the works of African artists, is establishing a new edition of its event in the Moroccan city of Marrakech, opening in February at La Mamounia Hotel.  “Because of space, the selection will be more specific,” founder Touria El Glaoui says. “We want North African and Moroccan galleries to feel included in the project.” (more…)

Pace Gallery will now represent the estate of artist Tony Smith, the Art News reports, taking over from Matthew Marks Gallery.  “Sometimes it’s time for a change—and that’s happened to us, to0,” says president Marc Glimcher. “It’s just part of the dynamic now.” (more…)

Gustav Klimt, Bauerngarten (Blumengarten) (1907), via Sotheby’s

Following a strong outing by Christie’s this week in London, Sotheby’s has taken its turn at the Impressionist, Modern and Surrealist markets, capping a tightly-run sale this evening that continued a week of unexpectedly strong outings for both auction houses, ultimately tallying a final of £177,022,250 for the auction house’s Impressionist and Modern sale (with 4 lots going unsold over the course of the evening), and £17,671,250 for its Surrealist sale shortly after (which saw only 2 lots go unsold).   (more…)

Juan Garcia Mosqueda, the founder of Chamber Gallery in New York, has been detained at the U.S. Border and forced to return to Buenos Aires.  The dealer and curator has issued an open letter detailing his rough treatment and the apparent oppression now faced by foreigners under the Trump administration.  “This thirty-six hour nightmare is nothing but clear evidence of a deeply flawed immigration system in the United States,” he says, “carried out by an administration that is more interested in expelling people than admitting them.” (more…)

The various organizations and groups of New York’s Lincoln Center have banded together in a call to save the National Endowment for the Arts, issuing a joint statement calling for the preservation of its funding.  “The total cost of the N.E.A. is less than one dollar a year for every American,” the statement reads. “But because it is so successful and its imprimatur so prestigious, every dollar the N.E.A. contributes leads to nine additional dollars being donated from other sources.” (more…)

Art News visits Jordan Wolfson this week, profiling the artist’s VR work soon to go on view at the Whitney Biennale, in which the artist pummels a digitally-rendered figure to near death.  “One of the problematic things with a medium like VR is that through its nature, people call it an experience,” he says.  “An experience means that something is hypothetically interactive, and I don’t think that interactive things make for good art.” (more…)

Paul Gauguin, Te Fare (La maison) (1892), via Christie’s

As New York City gears up for the rush and bustle of Armory Week, London has its own series of sales in swing, opening two weeks of major evening sales this evening with an impressively steady outing at Christie’s that offered some reassurance for towards alarmists and critics of the market’s current strength and consistency.  The pair of sales, kicked off by Impressionist and Modern works, and capped with a brisk sale of Surrealist pieces shortly after. (more…)

A show cancelled in Turkey over alleged censorship has found a new home in Stuttgart, the Art Newspaper reports.  The show, which featured works from Russian, Turkish, Palestinian and Dutch artists, drew on interrelated concepts of war and peace.  “We need these kinds of support structures in the international art world more than ever,” artist Köken Ergun says. (more…)

Magazzino, the Hudson Valley exhibition space dedicated to Italian Post-War and Contemporary Art, will open to the public this June with an exhibition on the impact of dealer Margherita Stein. “She was consistent with the exhibitions she was putting on. She believed in this group, in what the avant-garde was,” says Director Vittorio Calabrese.  “It was not just about exhibiting the artists’ work, but about living with them.”
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Following new legislation by the U.S. Congress over the recovery of expropriated art, a lawsuit by the heirs of an Austrian Jewish entertainer over a body of Egon Schiele works will go forward, Artforum reports.  The new law seeks to ensure “claims to Nazi-confiscated art are not unfairly barred by statutes of limitations and other similar time-based nonmerits defenses,” according to sponsoring Senator Ted Cruz. 
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Lisson Gallery is doubling down on its New York presence, opening a second space in Chelsea in less than a year.  “I started looking into it, and I realized we don’t have a space to show single-work exhibitions, or things that are a little more intimate. It was something that met the needs of a lot of our artists that make smaller work that we don’t exhibit all the time,” director Alex Logsdail said.  The new space is located at 136 Tenth Avenue.

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Artist Danh Vo has unveiled a new permanent, large-scale sculpture exploring the roots of the United States and its current political conflicts with Mexico in Beirut.  “I was really interested in this idea of exploring the time when [the US] fought for independence, and then became the dominant world power,” the artist says. “What I’m really interested in is the continual misuse of power, and that’s always a changing subject.” (more…)