Activist, philanthropist, and Napa Valley vintner Suzanne Deal Booth has donated $1 million to The University of Chicago’s department of art history to support its art conservation program. “What truly sets UChicago’s approach apart from specialized conservation programs elsewhere is how it is embedded in a liberal arts education and graduate studies in art history and the humanities,” says professor and chair Christine Mehring. “There is so much untapped potential for students on our campus to investigate relations between the science and the meanings of artistic materials.” (more…)

Mary Anne Carter has been confirmed as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “I look forward to continuing to lead a talented and dedicated staff of professionals in our important work of ensuring that every American – in every community and in every neighborhood – has access to the arts,” she said. (more…)

A piece in Art News surveys various museums’ exhibition programs, and how they have improved or failed to change exhibition programs predominantly focusing only on white artists. The piece notes the Whitney and the Smithsonian among the most improved, and the Getty among the least. (more…)

A union has accused Arts Council England of failing to enforce union standard wages on the projects it funds. “What is the point of having a policy if it isn’t being enforced?” says Paul Fleming, head of the Equity Theatre Workers Union. (more…)

Artforum eulogizes the late dealer Katherine Mulherin, who passed away suddenly this month. “Katharine was a champion of the hoser, the scamp, the outsider,” writes artist Lex Vaughn. “She was working-class nobility, and it showed in some of her curations” (more…)

MoMA Chair Leon Black’s Apollo Global Management has provided almost $1.8 billion of debt financing to support New Media Investment Group Inc.’s acquisition of Gannett Co., bringing 200 newspaper publications under one roof. (more…)

The Pérez Art Museum Miami has received a major gift of art from the American South, with 26 artists joining its archives for the first time. The collection of 46 pieces comes from Los Angeles–based collector Gordon W. Bailey.“These great artists . . . are still underrepresented in our nation’s museums, and have so much to offer in the understanding of the human impulse to create,” says PAMM director Franklin Sirmans. “Here in Miami this gift will further elucidate the work of our region and highlight one of our city’s greatest artists, in Purvis Young, who has been part of the collection since 2005.” (more…)

The Louvre, the most visited museum in the world, will require a reservation for all visits by the end of the year, an attempt to alleviate overcrowding at the museum. “Reservations smooth the entry for the public throughout the week,” says Vincent Pomarede, deputy general administrator of the Louvre.  “Until now a reservation system has not been obligatory (but) we will put in place an obligatory reservations system, as many other museums have done, and, by the end of the year, all visitors will have to reserve.”  (more…)

A 17-year-old boy is being held in custody for attempted murder after throwing a French child off the balcony of the Tate Modern. “Tate is working closely with the police,” the museum said in a statement. “All our thoughts are with the child and his family.” (more…)

Dealer Joseph Nahmad has plead guilty to two charges of assault after being arrested for assaulting his girlfriend Georgia Barry. “This is in the context of a considerable beating — banging her head against a wall,” prosecutor John Fairhead said. “Both parties drank to excess and she on two occasions says she was tipsy.” (more…)

Price gains over the last six years for works by women artists at auction have seen price gains of about 72.9 percent on average, compared with just 8.3 percent for works by men, a group at Sotheby’s reports. “The value of art is changing,” says Sotheby’s Michael Klein. “The value of female art is changing even more.” (more…)

Dealer Dennis Yares will take over Mary Boone’s former space in Midtown, Art News reports.  Boone had occupied the space since 2000, and closed this past year as she prepared for her prison sentence for tax evasion. (more…)

Alex Katz at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise (Installation View), via Gavin Brown

Artist Alex Katz is still painting daily at the age of 92, working at an impressively quick pace that sees the artist continuing to produce his elegant, smooth style of portraiture and landscape across a wide array of subjects and scenes. Acclaimed for his iconic portraits and impressionistic landscape depictions, the artist has inspired generations of painters. For his most recent exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem, the Brooklyn-born artist has compiled an impressive number of pieces, exploring the expanding reaches of his world and his painterly abilities. (more…)

Cindy Sherman at National Portrait Gallery (Installation View)

What more can be said of the work of Cindy Sherman? An artist who has consistently produced works that interrogate and rework the notions of image construction and understanding through the use of her own image, Sherman’s photographic output has moved through an exceedingly broad selection of focal points and interests. There’s her selection of film still works, placing her image onto prints in a manner that seems to reference some disembodied section of an unseen classic, while elsewhere, her collection of hyper-specific portraits mines the notions of identity construction and affiliation in the modern cultural landscape. (more…)

Five Parisian galleries will open spaces in a new four-building arts complex in the suburb of Romainville, an 11,000-sq m industrial venue named Komunuma. Among the galleries are Air de Paris and Jocelyn Wolff.  (more…)

Nelly Zagury, The Giant Stalker & The Cannibal Flower (2019), via Art Observed

Taking over the impressively appointed former William Ulmer Brewery at 81 Beaver Street in Bushwick, local gallery The Chimney has initiated an impressive installation, taking over six large rooms in the building to present a series of large-scale installations and selections of works by nine American and international artists. (more…)

A drawing by Egon Schiele has been found in a Queens thrift store, estimated at $100,000 to $200,000. “If you look at the way this girl is lying on her back, and you look at the foreshortening both on the rib cage and on her face, and the way you see that little nose pointing up—think about how difficult that is to do,” says Jane Kallir, the world’s foremost Schiele scholar. “There are very few people in the history of art who can draw like that.”  (more…)

The Guggenheim Museum has received an endowment from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to establish a conservation fellowship to preserve, care for, and research the photography in its collection. “We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Mapplethorpe Foundation and applaud its commitment to the long-term research and stewardship of the Guggenheim’s growing photography collection,” says director Richard Armstrong. “This endowment allows the Guggenheim to create a professional fellowship program, instilling conservators and curators with the knowledge to safeguard our collection for future generations.” (more…)

A piece in the NYT this week asks if the transgressive character of Robert Mapplethorpe’s images have lost their power in the modern age of image distribution.  Mapplethorpe “was a pretty good commercial photographer who photographed things people weren’t accustomed to seeing in mixed company,” according to John Szarkowski, MoMA’s influential photography director at the Museum of Modern Art.  “It’s not photographically interesting.” (more…)

A new study on activist and about climate change points to art’s effectiveness as a form of activism, specifically when the works offer hope for the future.  Effective works “have the potential to retell the stories of climate change in a way that activates the slumbering potential in our societies,” say Laura Kim Sommer and Christian A. Klöckner of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. (more…)

Damián Ortega has won ICA Miami’s first sculpture prize. which includes fabrication of a new commission installed in the ICA’s Sculpture Garden and $15,000. “We see this as a wonderful place to honor the achievement of an artist who has innovated with sculpture throughout their career,” says Alex Gartenfeld, the museum’s artistic director. “Damián has been an artist who has consistently reinvented the form of sculpture, considered the role of the work in public, and experimented with materials and forms, perhaps like no one else of his generation.” (more…)

The J. Paul Getty Trust has purchased the archive of images from Ebony and Jet Magazine from Johnson Publishing, for a price of $28.5 million. The archive includes millions of shots of African-American figures like Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr., and Billie Holiday. (more…)

Almine Rech now represents New Jersey–based artist Vaughn Spann, a young artist who has received impressive attention of late. He will open his first show with the gallery in January 2020. (more…)