The Headlines

ON THE PENINSULA. In recent years, galleries from the United States and Europe, like Gladstone and König, have been opening outposts in Seoul, hoping to tap into South Korea’s burgeoning art market. Now, Melanie Gerlis reports in her weekly Financial Times column, White Cube is joining them. It plans to open a location in the city’s Gangnam district this fall. The London-based firm is apparently in expansion mode, as it also plans to open a New York branch in the fall. Peres Projects recently inaugurated a grand new gallery in the South Korean capital, and rumors persist about other dealers that might soon take the plunge. Gerlis also reports that Thaddaeus Ropac, which has had a Seoul venue since 2021, is taking on more space.

THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR. Almost exactly a year after the National Gallery of Canada’s previous leader, Sasha Suda, announced that she was decamping to run the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Ottawa institution has a new director and CEO: Jean-François Bélisle. He is currently the director and chief curator of the Musée d’art de Joliette in Quebec. The national museum has faced criticism of late, following the dismissal of four senior staffers amid an effort to reach a more diverse audience, as the Global and Mail reports. “I believe that art can change society, and look forward to collaborating with the gallery’s staff, as well as artists from across the country, to ensure our institution continues to be a fantastic force for good,” Bélisle said in a statement.

The Digest

Artist Sterling Wells has created a modestly size barge that is now floating in Los Angeles’s Ballona Creek. Wells is planning to paint aboard the craft for the next month, and will open a solo show at Night Gallery in the city on July 8. [Fox 11 Los Angeles]

The billionaire former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has given $130 million to the under-construction Perelman Performing Arts Center (more than its namesake, art-collecting businessman Ronald O. Perelman, donated). Bloomberg’s totals to the multifarious Shed also now total $130 million. [The New York Times]

As dangerous wildfire smoke gripped parts of North America on Wednesday, some galleries closed their doors or canceled openings and other events. Among them was Pace, which shut down in the middle of the day due to the air quality. [Pace Gallery/Instagram]

Lehmann Maupin global comms director Sarah Levine and photographer William Jess Laird were married in beautiful Marfa, Texas, with Levine wearing a Vera Wang dress inspired by the work of artist and noted Marfa resident Donald Judd. [Vogue]

New York City filed suit against architect Steven Holl and his namesake firm, arguing that their acclaimed design for a Queens library does not meet the requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act. A company spox noted that the city approved the project and said, “Accessibility is a core value of our work.” [The New York Times]

Archaeologists excavating a former temple complex on the Greek island of Kythnos found more than 2,000 clay figures, apparently left there to worship the goddess of agriculture, Demeter. The area is believed to have been inhabited from the 12th century B.C.E. to the 7th century C.E. [The Associated Press]

The Kicker

THE MAJOR LEAGUES. The artist Rick Lowe just opened two exhibitions of his scintillating paintings in Athens, at the Benaki Museum and Gagosian. When T: The New York Times Style Magazinecaught up with Lowe in advance of those shows, he said that he was working as many as 16 hours a day, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. “You know, I feel like this moment right now for me, getting ready for these shows in Athens, this is like my N.B.A. playoffs,” he told the magazine. “There’s no stopping. As Kobe [Bryant] once said, ‘You rest at the end.’ ” Do what you’ll love, as they say, and you’ll never work another day in your life. [T]

The Headlines

THE TOP JOB. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid has a new leader, curator Manuel Segade, the Art Newspaper reports. He is currently the director of the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in the Spanish capital; his curatorial credits include helming Spain’s pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, which featured a solo show by Jordi Colomer. The Reina Sofía’s previous director, Manuel Borja-Villel, abruptly stepped down in January, after 15 years at the helm of the museum; he is co-curating the next Bienal de São Paulo. Borja-Villel had presented an acclaimed, progressive program at the institution that faced criticism from some right-wing outlets. Shortly after his departure, many artists and academics signed an open letter in his support.

HITTING PAUSE. The National Gallery of Australia has postponed an exhibition of work by Indigenous artists, pending an investigation into the creation of those pieces, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. The art in the show is to come from the APY Art Centre Collective. Back in April, the museum said that it was looking into allegations reported in the press that white studio assistants with the collective had altered art by artists there in order to make it more marketable. The collective has denied those claims and said in a statement that “we are content to wait for the independent panel to make their findings.” The show was supposed to open this month and run into October. Government officials in the country have also launched an investigation.

The Digest

Hauser & Wirth has added to its roster the revered sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud, Alex Greenberger reports. She will show at the mega-gallery’s forthcoming location in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood when it opens in October. [ARTnews]

Members of Italy‘s government are mulling a plan to reduce the country’s import duty on art from 10 percent to 5.5 percent. If adopted, the move could cut into the art market in France, which currently applies a 5.5 percent rate, the lowest in the European Union. [The Art Newspaper]

Climate protesters demonstrated outside a major MoMA fundraising event last night, calling on the museum to cut ties with its board chair, Marie-Josée Kravis, because KKR—the private equity firm cofounded by her husband, Henry Kravis—has a major stake in the controversial Coastal GasLink Pipeline. [ARTnews]

Speaking of board chairs, Robert W. Lovelace has been named the next chair of the J. Paul Getty Trust’s board of trustees. Lovelace is vice chair and president of the finance-focused Capital Group Companies; he has been on the Getty’s board since 2016. [Press Release/Getty Center]

Artist Larry Achiampong currently has a show at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England, and got the profile treatment in the Financial Times. Some of his work draws on video games, and he said, “Games are just like a piece of literature, and they can sit with you, and become timeless.” [FT]

Artists Margot DeMarco and Grace Miceli’s 350-square-foot Manhattan home got a close-up in Architectural Digest. They’ve both decorated elements of the rental, with DeMarco creating design pieces and Miceli handling painting. [Clever/Architectural Digest]

The Kicker

POWER PLAYERS. In the New York Times, Robin Pogrebin has a story about how the job of art-museum director has changed in recent years, with leaders grappling with unionization efforts, social-justice pushes, climate protests (see above), and a great deal more. But while they are facing new pressures, much in the field remains the same, the art historian Claire Bishop argued. “Zero has changed structurally,” Bishop told the paper. “The director’s job is to extract as much money as possible from the ultrawealthy, while reassuring them that their values and collection remain secure and unthreatened.” [NYT]

The Headlines

STARMAN. The Wende Museum in Los Angeles is currently showing rarely seen photographs that Geoff MacCormack took while traveling across the Soviet Union in 1973 with David Bowie, riding the Trans-Siberian Express and spending a couple days in Moscow. The Los Angeles Times has published a few of those images—they are delightful—along with commentary by MacCormack, who said that, despite being told not to photograph certain places, “We took photographs and film of lots of stuff. Probably because we were stupid and didn’t know the real consequences of our actions.” Speaking of the late superstar, the Guardian has an interview with the painter Peter Howson, who said that, when his art about the Bosnian War was generating controversy in the U.K. in the 1990s, “I ended up having to go on to the radio and explain it. But then that thing happened with David Bowie buying the main painting.”

HUMAN RESOURCES. Pace Gallery has hired Laura Attanasio away from Berlin’s König Galerie, where she is a partner, to lead a new office in the city, Alex Greenberger reports in ARTnews. Attanasio joined König in 2014, and she has worked with artists like Alicja Kwade and Katharina Grosse. ● Former Artforum editor-in-chief and Kitchen director Tim Griffin was named executive director of the Los Angeles opera producer the Industry, which was started in 2010, Artforum reports. The group’s co-artistic directors are Malik Gaines, Ash Fure, and founder Yuval Sharon. ● The Phoenix Art Museum and the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography tapped Emilia Mickevicius to be assistant curator of photography, a position shared by the institutions. She’s been an SFMOMA curatorial assistant since 2019, per ArtDaily.

The Digest

London’s Simon Lee Gallery and artist Sonia Boyce, who won a Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, are no longer working together. Neither gave a reason. The gallery has reportedly been involved in a tax dispute that Lee told The Art Newspaper “has now been resolved.” [TAN]

While the estate of the late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen has been offloading his art and real estate in accordance with his desire to give most of his fortune to charity, his sports teams—the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers—have remained off the market, frustrating would-be suitors. [The Wall Street Journal]

The Bezos Learning Center at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., will be designed by Perkins&Will, whose projects have included the Shanghai Natural History Museum and the University of Minnesota Bell Museum in St. Paul. Much of the funding is coming from Jeff Bezos’s $200 million gift to the Smithsonian. [Press Release/Smithsonian Institution]

The bar from the television series Cheers (1982–93) went for $675,000 at Heritage Auctions in Dallas on Sunday. It was offered as part of a sale of classic TV material collected by James Comisar that totaled more than $5 million. [The Associated Press]

The venerable Manhattan appetizing shop Zabar’s has said that it is caring for the last remaining Banksy on public view in New York, which is near its Upper West Side storefront. One ardent Banksy fan claims it has not been doing so, and he has been cleaning it himself, sparking a true “only in New York” dispute. [The New Yorker]

The Serpentine Gallery in London has unveiled its annual Serpentine Pavilion, which was designed by the Lebanese-born architect Lina Ghotmeh, who is based in Paris. [Dezeen]

The Kicker

ANOTHER DAY AT THE OFFICE. In 1967, artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, who were then married, got the commission of a lifetime: The cover for the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But as Haworth tells it in an interview with the Financial Times, she did not have any special passion for the project. “They were a white boy band,” she said. “I wasn’t that interested in that music.” She added, “It’s just a record cover and I don’t think that’s very important.” Many Beatles fans would, of course, disagree. In any case, her latest commission, a mural with her daughter Liberty Blake, will go on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London later this month. [FT]

The Headlines

HANS-PETER FELDMANN, the revered German conceptual artist whose deadpan projects quietly carry dashes of wit and profundity, has died at the age of 82, Alex Greenberger reports in ARTnews. Those efforts included an installation displaying the front pages of more than 100 newspapers immediately following the September 11, 2011, terrorist attacks, and another that involved pinning 100,000 one-dollar bills—his award for winning the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize—to the walls of that New York museum. “Many of Feldmann’s artworks would have been considered stunts if they were done by lesser artists,” Greenberger writes. In a statement, his galleries said in part, “His unique personality and his artistic understanding of the world we are living in will stay alive in the art he has left behind.”

PATRON POLITICS. It’s official: After a 27-year partnership, BP (née British Petroleum) is no longer a sponsor of the British Museum, according to disclosure documents reviewed by the Guardian. The oil giant’s funding for the institution had been a long-running target of climate activists, and many other U.K. arts institutions have concluded their arrangements with the firm. “It is important that institutions like the British Museum do not give Big Oil the opportunity to look like a force for good in society,” novelist (and former British Museum trustee) Ahdaf Soueif told the paper. The company itself did not comment, and the museum shared this comment with the outlet: “BP is a valued long term supporter of the museum, and our current partnership runs until this year.”

The Digest

Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak made the case for her institution’s latest show, “It’s Pablomatic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” which has been receiving quite negative reviews. “Ours is an exhibition that invites complexity,” she writes. “And I’m confident Picasso can handle a little complexity.” [The Art Newspaper]

The recent decision by Nigeria’s outgoing president to transfer ownership of returned Benin Bronzes to a descendent of that kingdom’s ruler has led some to question whether museums should continue to repatriate the stolen artifacts. [The New York Times]

Sook-Kyung Lee—the artistic director of the current Gwangju Biennale and senior curator of international art at Tate Modern—has been hired as director of the Whitworth at the University of Manchester in England. The museum’s previous leader, Alistair Hudson, was reportedly forced out over a pro-Palestinian statement by an exhibiting collective. [University of Manchester/Press Release]

The Rijksmuseum’s blockbuster Vermeer show ended on Sunday, after welcoming 650,000 over 16 weeks. A small consolation for the many who were unable to get tickets: Six Vermeers are remaining on view at the Amsterdam institution: four from its collection and two on loan. [ARTnews and The Associated Press/ABC News]

What could have been? In an interview, designer Gaetano Pesce revealed that he almost collaborated with Piero Manzoni, who died in 1963, at only 29. “He was very conceptual, a very intelligent artist,” Pesce said. “We had an exchange of letters; we discussed working on a round theatre project.” [Financial Times]

ZWIRNER UPDATE. Dealer David Zwirner just opened his long-awaited Los Angeles branch, and Nate Freeman’s Vanity Fair column is about how it all came together. Also, Zwirner’s 52 Walker space in Lower Manhattan recently opened a library, Curbed reports. Anyone can sign up to borrow books.

The Kicker

SHOPTALK. Artist Oscar Murillo gave a candid interview to the Guardian with more good lines than can be quoted here, but one highlight is his assessment of his decision to split the 2019 Turner Prize with its other nominees: “a win-win for everybody at the end, because the Tate [which organises the prize] was seen as progressive, but I think they are not progressive at all!” He also talked a bit about the process behind his messy abstract paintings. “I work on canvases over years,” he said. “It’s like making really good wine, it takes years.” [The Guardian]

The Headlines

TROUBLE IN SOHO. New York’s Georges Bergès Gallery, which represents artist and presidential son Hunter Biden, contacted the NYPD on Thursday to investigate a possible hack of its financial records, according to the New York Post. A client reportedly received a fake invoice asking for payment to a non-gallery account and alerted the firm. (This has been a popular scam of late.) Bergès did not comment. The gallery has also been dealing with a congressional investigation of Hunter Biden’s art career; Republicans argue it could be a conduit for corruption. If you’re in the mood to go down the Hunter Biden-art rabbit hole (it’s a Friday, why not?), critic Donald Kuspit has an essay on the oeuvre, and the artist himself has appeared on the Nota Bene podcast.

JOB POSTINGS. The Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford in England has named Frédérique Duyrat to be its director of collections and—cool job title—keeper of the Heberden Coin Room, Museums + Heritage Advisor reports. Duyrat is coming from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where she is general curator of libraries and director of the department of coins, medals, and antiques. Also in the United Kingdom: Louise Fedotov-Clements has been tapped to be director of the Photoworks, the multifarious photo-focused nonprofit. She is currently national curator of contemporary art at Forest England (also a cool job title), whose purview is some 1,500 forests.

The Digest

The National Gallery of Canada’s interim director, Angela Cassie, is stepping down after almost a year at the helm, and the museum’s board chair said that a permanent leader will be named “soon.” A recent workplace survey showed that staff confidence in leadership has declined since the last poll, in 2018. [The Globe and Mail]

The Dutch art collective KIRAC (aka Keeping It Real Art Critics) is embroiled in a highly public showdown with the French author Michel Houellebecq over a film they made about him. (One tidbit: The writer called the group’s leader “a cockroach with a human face.”) Some wonder if the fracas is a stunt by all involved. [The New York Times]

At Galerie Christophe Person in Paris, the legendary Cameroonian-born photographer Samuel Fosso is currently showing vivid and imaginative portraits of himself in various guises that he made in 1997 on commission from Tati, the late-lamented department store in the French capital. [The New York Times]

Over the past 20 years, only two works by the 15th-century Italian giant Fra Angelico are known to have come to auction. Now a third will hit the block, at Christie’s London next month: A ca. 1419–24 scene of Christ on the cross that was identified in the early 1990s. Its high estimate is £6 million (about $7.52 million). [The Art Newspaper]

This year is the 10th anniversary of David Lewis’s gallery in New York, and he chatted about how he made the move from critic to dealer. In recent years, he has been showing the late, great Thornton Dial, and he said that “the shift to more historical material started to bring more serious collectors and much higher prices in very quickly.” [Cultured]

SURREAL. Some TikTokers have been apparently been trying to “cancel” the avant-garde legend Salvador Dalí, Artnet News reports. Among their issues: He had a certain fascination with Hitler, and when he was five, he pushed a friend off a bridge. Meanwhile, over in Shrewsbury, England, three large Dalí sculptures are going on view in Shrewsbury, England, BBC News reports.

The Kicker

MISE-EN-ABÎME MAGIC. In the Washington Post, critic Sebastian Smee has a crisp, illuminating essay about “one of those hall-of-mirrors moments that museums can sometimes generate, bringing on brief bouts of dizziness.” What occasioned this? An intriguing photo that Jim Gagnon took surreptitiously in the 1950s at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—that is now hanging at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a winning image. Click to give it a look. [The Washington Post]

The Headlines

THE GANG’S ALL HERE. Today Frieze announced the lineup for its second Seoul fair, which will be open to the public September 7–9, and Maximilíano Durón has a rundown in ARTnews. The big four—Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, and David Zwirner—will be among the more than 120 galleries convening at the COEX Convention & Exhibition Center. The event’s Focus section, for solo shows by emerging Asian galleries, will feature 10 outfits, including Capsule Shanghai, Singapore’s Yeo Workshop, and four Seoul ventures, including Cylinder and White Noise. Like last year, Frieze Seoul is partnering with the long-running Kiaf fair, which has grown from 164 exhibitors to 210 for this next outing (also at COEX). Head to ARTnews for more.

A HOMECOMING. A 16th-century Alessandro Turchi painting, Madonna with Child, which was looted in Poland by the Nazis amid the Second World War, was returned to the country at its Tokyo embassy yesterday, the Associated Press reports. Last year, Polish officials spotted the piece listed at an auction house in the Japanese capital, and its owner and the company agreed to return it. In the early 19th century, the work resided in the collection of the Polish aristo and art patron Henryk Lubomirski, and it is known to have traded at a New York auction house in the late 1990s, according to the AP.

The Digest

Over in London, a “stock exchange for art” named Artex is getting ready to offer shares in a 1963 Francis Bacon triptych (or 70 percent of a Francis Bacon triptych, to be exact), Melanie Gerlis reports. The consigner bought the work at Christie’s for $51.8 million. Shares will be priced at $100 a pop. [Financial Times]

The market for the Singaporean painter Georgette Chen (1906–93) is hot. A ca. 1965 still life by her just sold at Christie’s Hong Kong for $HK14.3 million (about US$1.82 million), a new auction record for the artist—the third time in less than a year that that has happened. [The Straits Times/Asia News Network/The Star]

The US Latinx Art Forum named the 15 artists it has tapped for its third annual Latinx Artist Fellowship, which is part of the Latinx Art Visibility Initiative backed by the Mellon and Ford Foundations. They include Beatriz Cortez, Postcommodity, and Diana Solís. Each will receive $50,000. [Press Release/Mellon Foundation]

More than 200 works by the storied experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs have been sold to the Museum of Modern Art, joining 14 more in its collection. Now 90, Jacobs said that when he visited MoMA in his teens, it “plunged me . . . into the unexpectedness of art.” [The Art Newspaper]

Painter Angel Otero currently has a show up at Hauser & Wirth in Hong Kong, and writer Aaina Bhargava paid a visit to his Brooklyn studio before its opening. A wave figures in some of his recent works, which he sees as a “metaphor for bringing and taking, hiding and revealing,” he said. [Tatler Asia]

ARCHITECTURE ACTION.Shigeru Ban has unveiled a curvaceous design for a pavilion at the Expo 2025 Osaka, Dezeen reports, and Architectural Digest has handsome photos of David Adjaye’s newly completed Abrahamic Family House, an interfaith center in Abu Dhabi.

The Kicker

A PUBLIC SPECTACLE. In Buenos Aires, a newly installed statue of the celebrated soccer player and coach Marcelo Gallardo has been generating a fair amount of criticism, with some terming it “vulgar,” the Associated Press reports. One issue: In the 23-foot-tall piece, which was commissioned by his longtime club, River Plate, Gallardo has a rather sizable bulge at his crotch. Its creator, Mercedes Savall, described that as a symbol of courage, telling the AP, in part, that it “is a gesture toward the fans with a lot of respect. It is no joke.” The club’s director said that if “we can correct it, we will correct it.” [AP]

The Headlines

IN THE COURTROOM. The Palm Beach, Florida art dealer who was accused of knowingly selling fake works by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Banksy, and others, Daniel Elie Bouaziz, was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison, the Associated Press reports. He was also ordered to pay a fine of $15,000. Bouaziz pleaded guilty to money laundering in February, and prosecutors agreed to drop 16 other charges against him. Law-enforcement officials have said that he offered fake Warhols at prices between $75,000 and $240,000, with one customer giving him a down payment of $200,000. A hearing on restitution is on the calendar for later this summer.

A DOUBLEHEADER IN JAPAN. The sui generis fair Art Collaboration Kyoto announced the 64 galleries that will be in its third edition, running October 28 to 30. Taking place at the Kyoto International Conference Center, ACK pairs Japanese galleries and international colleagues in shared booths. This year’s matchups include Misako & Rosen with 47 Canal and Kotaro Nukaga with Almine Rech, and more. Meanwhile, Art Week Tokyo is returning for its third outing November 2 to 5, and it just released its lineup, which features 50 galleries and institutions. The event is again being presented in collaboration with Art Basel, and this year’s affair will include a curated section at the Okura Museum of Art, Ocula reports.

The Digest

The Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi, who was also a noted historian and educator, died yesterday at 92. He was president of the Venice Biennale’s architecture section for more than a decade, and his projects included the Mosque of Rome and the Church of Sacra Famiglia in Salerno, Italy. [Designboom]

The 2023 edition of the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Ramsay Art Prize, which goes to an Australian artist under the age of 40, has been won by Ida Sophia. The award comes with AU$100,000 (about US$66,100). [ArtAsiaPacific]

The great sculptor Reverend Joyce McDonald, who’s making her U.K. debut at London’s Maureen Paley gallery this week at the age of 72, got the profile treatment from Dominic Rushe. “My art has helped heal old wounds and has freed me from the bondage that once oppressed my mind,” she has written. [The Guardian]

More than 50 years ago, a 1963 painting by the Australian Brett Whiteley was loaned to the Dallas Museum of Art—and never retrieved. Efforts to locate its owner were unsuccessful, and so the museum just sold the piece through Heritage Auctions for $575,000. [Financial Review]

Art dealer Joe Nahmad reportedly married model Madison Headrick at a hotel on the Italian island of Sardinia this past weekend, and attendees included Leonardo DiCaprio and Serena and Venus Williams. [Page Six]

Locals hope that the reopening of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (née the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) next month, after an extensive expansion, will juice tourism to the area. It’s “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reintroduce Buffalo to the traveling public and to the traveling media,” one official said. [The Buffalo News]

The Kicker

PEER PRESSURE. Painter Jacqueline Humphries is about to open twin shows with the Modern Art gallery in London, and in an interview with the Financial Times, she recalled her time at the vigorously conceptually Whitney Independent Study Program in the 1980s. “A bunch of the fellows got together one day and marched into my studio as a group and told me I had to stop painting,” she said. Her response: “Wow, this is great, I’m doing something right! They took the time to pay attention.” That is how you do it, artist! The rest is history. [FT]

Correction, 6/1/23, 10:20 a.m.: A previous version of this article misstated the number of galleries and institutions participating in Art Week Tokyo. It is 50, not more than 50.

The Headlines

ARTIST ILYA KABAKOV, whose imaginative and incisive installations helped rocket him from the Soviet Union’s underground art scene to international acclaim, died on Saturday at the age of 89. His “visions were unsparing, sad, and explicitly critical of the state, and were, in that way, quite unlike the government-approved art being made in the Soviet Union,” Alex Greenberger writes in ARTnews. Collaborating with his niece and later wife, Emilia, beginning in 1989, he exhibited widely, from the Grand Palais in Paris, which staged a major display in 2014, to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, which presented a 2008 retrospective. Writing in Artforum in 2018, art historian Claire Bishop in termed Kabakov “the paradigmatic installation artist.”

OFF COLOR. The rippling Snøhetta-designed facade on SFMOMA’s east side, which is normally white, is covered with “multistory smears of dirt and grime,” urban design critic John King reports in the San Francisco Chronicle. Its custom-built cleaning device is broken, according to a SFMOMA spox, who said, “We are aiming to identify alternate ways of cleaning the facade.” Over in Venice, part of the Grand Canal turned bright green on Sunday, baffling observers, per the Guardian. Police reportedly investigated if climate activists were responsible (the Ultima Generazione group said it “wasn’t us,” NPR notes), and tests revealed the cause: fluorescein, which is used to test wastewater. Officials did not say from where the substance may have come.

The Digest

Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities said that archaeologists have unearthed embalming workshops in Saqqara, about 20 miles south of Cairo. They are believed to date to the fourth century B.C.E. [Reuters/Yahoo!]

Three years after the explosion in Beirut’s port damaged the Sursock Museum‘s building and art holdings, the institution reopened on Friday. More than $2 million has been raised to support its restoration efforts. [The Associated Press]

At a charity auction at last week’s amfAR Cannes gala, which raises money for AIDS research, Damien Hirst’s 2016 “Spin Painting” portrait of actor Leonardo DiCaprio sold for $1.3 million. The piece was donated by collector Christian Levett, according to Simon de Pury, who gaveled the sale. [Variety and @simonedepury/Instagram]

A late-18th-century painting of a dog—perhaps Marie Antoinette’s Pompon!—by the little-known French artist Jacques Barthélémy Delamarre sold at Sotheby’s on Friday for $279,400, quite a bit above its $5,000 high estimate. [Hyperallergic]

ARTISTS SPACE. Sculptor Thomas J. Price, now showing at Hauser & Wirth in L.A., is in the L.A. Times; the category-eluding Darren Bader, who is selling his practice, is in the New York Times; and painter Hurvin Anderson, exhibiting at the Hepworth Wakefield, is in the Financial Times, with a guide to Cambridge, England, where he lives.

ON THE MOVE. Artist Anicka Yi has addedEsther Schipper as one of her dealers, per Ocula; Mirela Back has been tapped to run the Salzburger Kunstverein, per Artforum; and Dennis Scholl is retiring as president and CEO of Oolite Arts, per ArtDaily.

The Kicker

ELITE INSIGHTS. In this week’s New Yorker, Evan Osnos has a rollicking article about the market for superstar musicians playing private concerts that features a guest appearance from Anthony Scaramucci. The financier and ill-fated White House comms director offered some thoughts about how people spend money. “You’ve got to think about it as a pyramid,” he told Osnos. “The widest part is eating at McDonald’s. The narrowest part is ‘I paid two hundred million for the Basquiat.’ Because that’s one of a kind. I’m taking a piece of the immortality that artist created, and I’m owning it. Freud said we’re ultimately hysterical because of our own demise.” [The New Yorker]

The biennial Bennett Prize is granted exclusively to women painters, addressing a stark institutional disparity in the field. Per the terms set by the Prize’s co-founders, husband-and-wife art collectors Steven Alan Bennett and Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt, any woman artist who paints in a figurative realist style and is pursuing a career as an artist is eligible to apply.

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With $12 M. Donation, Michigan's Muskegon Museum Will Look to Build Wing Dedicated to Women Artists

The $50,000 Bennett Prize is Back for Its Third Edition

Of a record number of entrants, ten finalists were selected for the third biennial Bennett Prize: Ruth Dealy, Shiqing Deng, Ronna S. Harris, Haley Hasler, Sara Lee Hughes, Monica Ikegwu, Laura Karetzky, Linda Infante Lyons, Mayumi Nakao, and Kyla Zoe Rafert. “Rising Voices 3,” which runs May 18 – Sept. 10 at the Muskegon Museum of Art in Muskegon, Mich., will exhibit 30 works by these finalists. Concurrently on view will be “The Lessons I Leave You,” the solo show of 2021 Bennett Prize winner Ayana Ross of McDonough, Ga. The work, according to Ross, “will depict the divine in everyday moments.” Following the Muskegon Museum of Art, “Rising Voices 3” will have subsequent tour stops at: the Bo Bartlett Center in Columbus, Ga.; the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, N.Y.; Studio Incamminati in Philadelphia; the Customs House Museum in greater Nashville, Tenn.; and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

This third cycle is the strongest yet. “It’s been exciting to see the artists in this show working at the boundaries of what representation can be: paintings that hover on the edge of abstraction, that engage with the modern world, and that tell stories from inside communities that have often been excluded from the history of Western painting,” says artist and 2023 Bennett Prize juror Zoey Frank.

Also announced, for the first time ever, was The Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt Prize for Achievement in Figurative Realism, which includes $10,000, and was awarded to Ruth Dealy, of Providence, Rhode Island.

Creating an art prize, along with a traveling exhibition featuring women artists, is not an endeavor for the faint of heart. It requires an ability to accept rejection. Though the Prize is backed by a multimillion-dollar endowment at the Pittsburgh Foundation, Bennett recalls that “pretty much nobody was interested in getting behind an art prize for women figurative painters” at the time they first started conceptualizing The Bennett Prize in 2016.

“When we started introducing the concept to museum directors, curators, and other leaders of the art world, the response was yawning indifference. Women hadn’t caught fire yet and figurative realism was still considered square while abstraction, installation art, and video were hip,” he says. “Everyone assumes that figurative realism is the equivalent of photographic realism with figures, but nothing could be further from the truth. We take the view that if it is a figure and a viewer can discern that it’s a figure, that’s sufficiently real to be considered.”

And figurative realism—increasingly deployed by artists to grapple with harrowing events of recent years, from police brutality to the pandemic—has since come roaring back. Schmidt and Bennett, who are among the country’s top collectors of figurative realist art, have found their instincts fully ratified. They have already notched remarkable achievements in the four years since the initiative launched. The 20 artist alums from cycles 1 and 2 have exhibited in 24 solo and 67 group shows, and collectively, they have been the subject of over 50 features in industry publications. Over half have gained gallery representation. The market, too, has validated these artist’s achievements, selling over 100 paintings between them at sales prices which have increased by nearly half.

“We’ve been lucky enough to watch a whole new group of women artists become known and appreciated by a larger art-world audience,” said Bennett.

The Bennett Prize’s “Rising Voices” exhibition will be on view at the Muskegon Museum of Art, May 18–Sept. 10, and will travel the country. Details about The Bennett Prize can be found at thebennettprize.org, and you can learn more about the exhibition at muskegonartmuseum.org.

Interested in becoming a host venue? Visit muskegonartmuseum.org/bennett-prize-prospectus.

The Headlines

AWARDS SEASON. Brooklyn artist Stephanie Dinkins has won the inaugural LG Guggenheim Award, a prize for tech-focused art that comes with a $100,000 purse, the Art Newspaper reports. Dinkins’s “artistic range, engagement with socio-cultural values, and leading AI explorations are crucial reflections of the evolving future of technology-based art,” the Guggenheim Museums‘s deputy director, Naomi Beckwith, said in a statement. Meanwhile, the €50,000 (£53,800) Loewe Foundation Craft Prize has gone to Japanese ceramicist Eriko Inazaki, the Guardian reports. Inazaki’s piece—on view at the Noguchi Museum in Queens alongside work by the 29 other Loewe finalists—is “a captivating orb covered in fine, plant and flower-like extrusions, each intricately made by pinching the clay by hand,” Wallpaper writes.

JOB POSTINGS. Edgar Miramontes has been hired as executive and artistic director of the Center for the Art of Performance (CAP) at UCLA, the Los Angeles Times reports. He’s joining from REDCAT, where he has been executive director since 2019; he was also a co-curator of “Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA.” Miramontes is the first person of color to hold the top job at CAP. ● The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles announced a trio of new hires, per Flaunt: Danielle Bias, a Whitney Museum vet, as chief communications officer; Colleen Russell, returning to the job of chief advancement officer from the Cleveland Museum of Art; and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, a MOCA alum, as its first chief of public engagement, learning, and impact ● The Philadelphia Museum of Art has tapped Valarie McDuffie to be its CFO and Maggie Fairs to be its vice president for communications.

The Digest

The Chicago-based billionaire real-estate giant Sam Zell—who collected modern and contemporary art with his wife, Helen Zell—died on Thursday, at 81. His many passions included motorcycles, and he established a riding group with friends called Zell’s Angels. [The Associated Press]

The five-member jury for this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, which opens to the public this weekend, includes Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and architect and curator Tau Tavengwa, who is serving as the panel’s president. [Press Release/La Biennale]

The 2024 edition of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto’s “Greater Toronto Art” triennial will be led by MOCA’s curator, Kate Wong, and two guest curators: Ebony L. Haynes, who runs David Zwirner’s 52 Walker space, and Toleen Touq, co-founding director of the Spring Sessions residency in Amman, Jordan. [MOCA Toronto]

Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador cannot decree certain development projects national security matters, as he has done for a Yucatan train project slammed by archaeologists for endangering artifacts. The full effects of the ruling were not immediately clear. [The Associated Press/ABC News]

Dealer, writer, and curator Kenny Schachter has developed an NFT game called Pop Principle that involves “a battle that pits key names in the traditional arts scene against pioneers in the digital realm,” Ravail Khan writes. Among the people features as avatars in the project are Larry Gagosian, Yayoi Kusama, and Beeple. [Designboom]

WEEKEND DELIGHTS. Two Washington Post critics—Philip Kennicott, who covers art and architecture, and Tom Sietsema, who does food and dining—talked about key artworks depicting food. On a related subject, the 1911 tea room at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, has reopened after a renovation, the Los Angeles Times reports, and it is offering caviar service, delectable-sounding desserts, and a great deal more.

The Kicker

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE. For decades now, actor Pierce Brosnan has been painting, and at the moment, he’s presenting his first solo exhibition, in Los Angeles. (It is titled “So Many Dreams”—you can take a look at the work here.) The former James Bond has been making the media rounds, and told the Associated Press that part of his reason for finally deciding to show is that he’s just turned 70. “It’s my own birthday gift to myself to have the courage to say, Come and see my artwork,” he said. Artists: It’s never too late to bet on yourself. [AP]