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…)

A group of museum heads speak with the Art Newspaper today, as the magazine explores how the recent protests and ousters at museum boards might change charitable giving at museums in the future. “We have not developed a list of acceptable industries or investment strategies or unacceptable ones,” says Daniel Weiss, the president and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Rather, we take a look at individuals we’re working with in a holistic way in order to get a sense for who they are, what are their motivations for working with us, what their background is.”  (more…)

Art News has a piece today charting the varied connections between Jeffrey Epstein and the art world, including his place as a board member at the New York Academy of Art, where he met one of his victims, artist Maria Farmer. “I just kept telling Maria, ‘You’ve got to get out of there. You’ve got to get out of there,’” says Eric Fischl, a mentor to the young artist. (more…)

Nan Goldin and members of P.A.I.N., her activist group founded to combat the opioid crisis, have been arrested outside Governor Cuomo’s Mansion in New York. “I came here to tell you today that good luck and good fortune are not very good health management strategies,” said Jaron Benjamin, an activist from Housing Works. “There are too many people in New York City dying of overdoses.”  (more…)

Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, the Sharjah art collector is pushing for 50-50 gender partiy in artists shown at the Sharjah Art Museum. “In US museums, only 13 per cent of the art on display is by women,” says Al Qassemi. “If you’re thinking pre-20th century, I understand, because women didn’t have the same opportunities as men. But in the 20th century, there is no excuse not to have equal representation.” (more…)

Jeff Koons’s controversial installation of his sculpture Bouquet of Tulips in Paris will move forward, and is set to open by the city’s Nuit Blanche on October 5th.  Costing €3.5m, the installation is financed by French and American sponsors. (more…)

A new art fair, Future Fair, is set to open May 7th to the 9the next year during Frieze New York, will bring together 36 galleries and pay them a percentage of the fair profits.  “Coming from a gallery background, I have a huge amount of respect for the work galleries do and the risks they undertake,”  founder Rebeca Laliberte says. “I felt immediately that a model that focuses on the needs of the gallery in this way was really, really exciting.” (more…)