MoMA released a video trailer for the upcoming Björk retrospective and video installation next month, which will take the name Black Lake from one of the songs off the artist’s most recent album, Vulnicura.  The exhibition opens March 8th. (more…)

Following the success of its exhibition Matisse: The Cut-Outs, MoMA will return Henri Matisse’s full room installation The Swimming Pool to its permanent collection galleries, beginning in April.  “MoMA’s viewers will now be able to encounter this important work in the context of the museum’s collection,” says exhibition co-curator Karl Buchberg. (more…)

Creative Time has announced a new project set to open this coming may, Drifting in Daylight, which will install a series of works through the winding pathways of Central Park in New York.  “The six-weekend show will tempt visitors to transcend their busy lives, losing themselves along a playful trail of sensory experiences,” the project website says. (more…)

Mamma Andersson, Behind the Curtain (Installation View)

Currently on view at David Zwirner is Behind the Curtain, a new body of work by one of the most recognized contemporary artists from Sweden, Mamma Andersson. The Stockholm-based artist has gained international acclaim in recent years with her solo shows in Aspen Museum of Art, Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin and a mid-career survey that travelled to Finland and UK after its Swedish premiere several years ago. (more…)

Artist Mickalene Thomas is interviewed in the New York Magazine this week for the paper’s ongoing “21 Questions” segment, discussing her favorite New York sushi restaurants, her methods of working, and her nostalgia for the old Times Square.  “’It’s interesting because it was a really sort of crazy under-culture of different types of people walking around expressing themselves, and trying to make their dreams happen. Now you just don’t have that anymore.” (more…)

Yael Bartana, Inferno (2013)

Yael Bartana’s new body of work, containing two video pieces, two photographs and a neon installation, is currently on view at Petzel Gallery. The Tel Aviv and Amsterdam-based artist has become one of the strongest artistic voices from her home in Israel, a territory Bartana, in her own words, aims to ‘treat as a social laboratory’. Living abroad gives the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design graduate the opportunity to maintain a neutral outside perspective towards her country that has always remained embedded in political, religious and social turmoil. (more…)

The 2015 Edition of Frieze New York will include a “Projects” section with works by Korakrit Arunanondchai, Pia Camil, Samara Golden, Aki Sasamoto and Allyson Vieira, the fair has announced.  The section is curated by Cecelia Alemani, and will include a series of massage chairs by Arunanondchai, and an intricate underground installation by Golden. (more…)

Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Walter Liedtke was one of the victims of this week’s tragic MTA North crash outside of Valhalla, NY, the New York Times reports.  “He had a wonderful way with words and engaged people through those unexpected approaches in language,” says Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., curator of Northern Baroque paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. “He had strong opinions about things, and he was not shy about expressing those opinions.” (more…)

Leigh Morse, the former gallery director who was convicted of selling over 70 works from the estates of artists like Robert De Niro Sr. and never notifying the beneficiaries, is in the news this week, after failing to pay the $1.7 million in restitution ordered by the court. “Her restitution tab to date is over a million dollars. She has paid, to date, $22,000, in cash, 2.2 percent,” says Prosecutor Kenn Kern. “What’s so unbelievably upsetting and appalling is that every time you give very clear directions somehow we end up back here.” (more…)

New York Magazine columnist Jerry Saltz is the first art critic to receive a National Magazine Award for a Column, following the announcement of the American Society of Magazine Editors’s annual awards.   (more…)

The New York Times profiles Dick Polich, the foundry owner and metalworker who has worked closely with some of the world’s most ambitious contemporary artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Jasper Johns, Louise Nevelson, and Frank Stella.  “He told me, ‘You’re trying to push the envelope, and I’ll go there with you,’” says sculptor Rona Pondick. “And then he said, ‘And while I’m going there with you, can I show you a few things I’m playing around with?’ ” (more…)

John Waters, Beverly Hills John (2012)

Marianne Boesky Gallery is hosting its third collaboration with John Waters, a pioneer of American camp and “trash culture” since the 1970’s, particularly through his feature breakthrough Pink Flamingos in 1972.  Throughout his career, Waters has constantly redefined the elements that constitute American culture, at a time when the nation was premature to notions such as homosexuality or kitsch, and used these often marginalized cultures within a studied cinematic and artistic framework.

John Waters, Still from Kiddie Flamingos (2014) (more…)

Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait Of A Young Man With A Book, Via Christie’s

Old Masters Week has concluded in New York, following a set of auctions over the past few days that saw mixed results at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s. (more…)

Polly Apfelbaum, HWP 10-20 (2014), via Art Observed

The White Columns Annual offers a particularly resonant opening note for New York’s art world each year.  Refusing an overly objective approach to the curation of a “year in review” style group show, the event encourages, and even emphasizes subjectivity, turning the keys over to one group or person each year.  This year, the all-female art collective Cleopatra’s has been handed the reigns for the Annual’s 9th Edition, with the end result being a colorful, expansive show that is at turns somber, wry and compelling. (more…)

The Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York has announced a new residency program, opening in conjunction with the long-running Shandaken Project Residency, which is putting its own program on hold during the partnership.  The new program will “encourage artists to engage with Storm King Art Center in new ways.” (more…)

The New York Times profiles artist Daniel Arsham, and his legion of high-profile fans and collectors, among them Usher and Jay-Z.  “I couldn’t tell you how it happened,” Mr. Arsham says of his popularity. “I work with a lot of people who aren’t famous, too. And in some cases, it’s been the celebrities who gravitate towards me.” (more…)

In a recent discussion during the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos, noted economist and NYU Professor Nouriel Roubini has called for more rigid regulation of the art market.  Roubini is known for predicting the explosion of the US subprime housing market, and noted the art world’s frequent anonymity among buyers as one contributor to the ongoing use of the market to launder money.  “While art looks as if it is all about beauty, as a business it is full of shady stuff,” he said. “We should correct it or it will be undermined over time.” (more…)

The Wildenstein & Company art gallery is suing the nation of Qatar, after the nation reneged on its agreement to purchase the gallery’s Upper East Side location for the record price of $90 million.  “The purchase of the property, and its record price, came under review in Doha, where there was a reluctance to be seen as profligate,” the lawsuit states. (more…)

Sara Raza has been appointed the new Guggenheim curator for the Middle East and North Africa, and will continue the museum’s UBS Map initiative, the museum announced this week.  “Her work will complement and extend the research that the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi curatorial team is undertaking,” says Guggenheim Director Richard Armstrong. (more…)

Diana Thater, Science, Fiction (2014), via Art Observed

Diana Thater’s new exhibition on view at David Zwirner’s 19th Street Exhibition is an exercise in restraint.  Consisting of a pair of video compositions and a monumental structure in a light-saturated installation piece, the artist moves towards an experience of space, both in an immediate and more figurative sense, that engages the magnitude of human experience on both macro and micro scales. (more…)

Mary Weatherford, La Noche (2014), via Art Observed

The Museum of Modern Art’s highly anticipated exhibition of contemporary painting, curated by Laura Hoptman, presents a cursory survey of current trends in this ever-evolving medium. Taking the concept of nonlinear time as its conceptual crux, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World attempts to parse the impact that the daily experience of digital media has had on painting specifically, and on visual culture more broadly.  (more…)

Henri Matisse, The Snail (1953), via Art Observed

There’s a moment at the end of Henri Matisse’s landmark exhibition of his late “cut-out” works, currently on view at MoMA in New York, when the viewer emerges into the last room to view Matisse’s final canvases, immense explosions of color and form that immediately arrest the viewer with their dynamic, minimal surfaces. (more…)

The Corning Glass Museum in Upstate New York has reportedly acquired a number of contemporary art works heavily relying on glass as part of its new $64 million wing construction.  Works from Roni Horn, Klaus Moje, Ayala Serfaty, Jeroen Verhoeven and Fred Wilson will be included in the new space, among others. (more…)

The Still House Group will open a new space at 3 Howard Street this week, where the group will be presenting programming and gallery exhibitions for the next year, as announced by the collective earlier today.  The space, fittingly titled Howard St, opens Saturday night with a show of new work by Brendan Lynch.   (more…)