Four participants in the Whitney Biennial have withdrawn their work following the museum’s continued involvement with Warren B. Kanders, its vice-chair. “We were angry when we learned of Kanders’ role as CEO of Safariland, a company that manufactures teargas and other weapons of repression,” Korakrit Arunanondchai, Meriem Bennani, Nicole Eisenman, and Nicholas Galanin. (more…)
Members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union have expressed solidarity with Ahdaf Soueif over the author’s resignation from the British Museum board of trustees over its BP funding and other issues. The letter claims that BP “is allowed to propagate the myth that, without its existence, we would not have access to the collections of our publicly funded museums and galleries.” (more…)
Jamian Juliano-Villani, Let’s Kill Nicole (Installation View), via Massimo de Carlo
Currently on view at Massimo de Carlo in London, Jamian Juliano-Villani’s new exhibition, Let’s Kill Nicole, seems to emphasize the same sort of alternating morbidity and innocence of an adolescent suggestion of violence. In the same way that a child might suggest death as a way of solving a minor dispute, Juliano-Villani’s works seem to balance a timeless, vivid energy with simplistic, even banal scenes and subject matter. (more…)
The David Smith Estate has named Jennifer Field its new executive director, as it continues to expand and work on the artist’s catalogue raisonné. “I am thrilled to have the opportunity to join the Estate of David Smith in a capacity that draws upon my range of professional and scholarly experiences,” she said in a statement, “yet allows me to focus in a sustained way upon Smith’s remarkable artistic contributions.” (more…)
A group of artists and curators, including Hannah Black, have written a powerful piece in Artforum this week, challenging the artists in this year’s Whitney Biennial regarding their refusal to protest the show over the Whitney’s tacit support of board member Warren Kanders. “A boycott would boost the force of every one of these statements and actions,” the piece reads. “But the art world imagines itself as a limited sphere of intellectual and aesthetic inquiry, where what matters, first and foremost, are inclusion, representation, and discussion. ” (more…)
Artist Leo Villareal has launched the first phase of his Illuminated River Project, which will install lights on the bridges spanning the Thames in London. “It was important for me to make something that felt appropriate and inspired by the life and history of the river, rather than using the bridges as a pedestal for my own ego,” Villareal says. (more…)
Tobias Ostrander, head curator at the Perez Art Museum of Miami has announced he will step down. “I’m proud of all I did at PAMM,” Ostrander said. “We left it strongly positioned nationally and internationally, and I’m leaving with a great sense of accomplishment.” (more…)
Directors at the Tate in London have declared a “climate emergency,” and will immediately set to work reducing the museum’s carbon footprint by 10 percent within the coming four years. “We will interrogate our systems, our values and our programs, and look for ways to become more adaptive and responsible,” the directors said in the announcement. “As an organization that works with living artists, we should respond to and amplify their concerns. And, as our audiences and communities across the world confront climate extinction, so we must shine a spotlight on this critical issue through art.” (more…)
Beijing’s Long March Space will stop participating in art fairs. The gallery plans to “innovate business models and enter a new stage of art market work,” according to an announcement. (more…)
A piece in the NYT this week charts the damage caused by the fire at Notre Dame, and just how close the cathedral came to collapsing. “There was a feeling that there was something bigger than life at stake,” says Ariel Weil, mayor of the city’s Fourth Arrondissement, “and that Notre-Dame could be lost.” (more…)
“Wolf of Wall Street” producer Joey McFarland has agreed to give up items he says he received as gifts from Low Taek Jho, the man behind the theft of billions of dollars from the Malaysian 1MDB fund, including a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The Louvre has removed the Sackler name from all of its galleries following protests this month, claiming that the statue of limitations on the donor name rights had expired. “We protest against this attempt to rewrite history and call on [Director] Jean-Luc Martinez to rectify his statements as soon as possible in order to make official the removal of the Sackler name from the Louvre,” the P.A.I.N. activist group said of the news. (more…)
The Andy Warhol Foundation has given $3.81 million to 41 arts organizations in the United States and Canada for its spring 2019 grant cycle, which will go to support exhibitions, publications, and institutional programming. Awards include a Barbara Kruger show at the Art Institute of Chicago and shows at the The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. (more…)
Wolfgang Tillmans, Greifbar 77 (2018), via Maureen Paley
Culling together a selection of new works and recent projects by Wolfgang Tillmans, Maureen Paley in London has opened an expansive and exploratory show that documents the artist’s multifaceted approach to image-making, featuring new and previously unseen works from the mid 1980s to the present day. (more…)
The NYT has a piece this week on 25 art works that defined the contemporary era, from Hans Haacke’s MoMA Poll to Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. The piece features interviews and comments on the work from a range of artists and critics. (more…)
The Public Art Fund has promoted Kellie Honeycutt as its deputy director and Daniel S. Palmer as curator. “A key aspect of Public Art Fund culture is to nurture creative talent, and that includes our own extraordinary team. Both Kellie and Daniel are outstanding professionals, leaders in our field, and wonderful colleagues,” says Chief Curator and Director Nicholas Baume. “As we continue to embrace new opportunities to fulfill our mission, I’m excited to further our collaboration in their new roles.” (more…)
The Pérez Art Museum Miami has received $1 million the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation towards the institution’s new Caribbean Cultural Institute. “It’s something that is in our DNA, and we’ve been talking about this for a long time,” says Franklin Sirmans, PAMM’s director. “Now we’re really going to be able to move the dial.” (more…)
The Rothko Chapel has received $2 million from the Houston Endowment, which will help fund the chapel’s renovation plan. “Houston Endowment envisions Houston as a vibrant community where all people have the opportunity to thrive, and a vibrant community needs a strong arts ecosystem,” says Long Chu, the program officer of the Houston Endowment. “Fulfillment of the master plan will elevate Rothko Chapel’s role as one of Houston’s significant cultural institutions and expand its ability to contribute to Houston’s vibrancy.” (more…)
Artist Ibrahim Mahama is interviewed in The Guardian this week, talking the paper through his recent show at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery, and his conceptual interests. “Not everything is about Brexit,” he says when asked about the show’s ties to the British vote to leave the EU. “But sure. It’s about Brexit among other things. Ghana is very connected with Britain even now. So why not Brexit?” (more…)
Gina Beavers, Cake (2015), via MoMA PS1
In her visceral, vexing, often grotesque paintings, New York–based artist Gina Beavers welcomes an experience of pop culture, and of the history of its depiction in modern art, as a swirling vortex of techniques and transformations. Using sourced digital images appropriated from social media and the Internet, Beavers’s work sees her repurposing the digital graphics into thickly layered compositions that border on sculpture. Hot dogs and hamburgers, human lips and sporting implements all burst forth from the surface of the canvas, a sort of exercise in both dimensionality and texture that underscore their strange abstraction, both from the original scene captured, and from the image’s prior home online. For her exhibition at MoMA PS1 this summer, the artist continues her explorations of these cultural formats. (more…)
After several years of struggles, Munich’s Haus der Kunst may lay off two-thirds of its part-time or replace jobs with outsourced labor. The museum has suffered from financial troubles in the past months. Sources say the layoffs come “because we are aiming for a partial closure rather than a complete closure during the due renovation.” (more…)
Chris Ofili, Dangerous Liasions (Installation View), via David Zwirner
Currently on at David Zwirner’s 34 East 69th Street townhouse in uptown New York City, artist Chris Ofili is presenting a series of new works unified under the title Dangerous Liaisons. Referencing René Magritte’s eponymous painting of 1935, which Ofili explores in drawings that employ the compositional organization of the Surrealist’s work as a structure for his own rich and layered exploration of color and line, the exhibition underscores Ofili’s abilities as an expressive and emotive painter whose craft with the brush is complemented by his rich conceptual practice. (more…)
Two chairmen of the Biennale Paris’s vetting committee have resigned over the inclusion of exhibitors targeted by criminal investigations in the fair. The fair has seen controversies mount since a 2016 investigation over the inclusion of forged works. (more…)