Protesters with groups like Climate Organizing Hub, New York Communities for Change, and Reclaim Our Tomorrow came to call on MoMA to drop its board chair, Marie-Josée Kravis.

Kravis is married to Henry Kravis, cofounder and co-executive chairman of KKR, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, and a major stakeholder in the Coastal GasLink Pipeline. Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis are major MoMA donors whose names appear on the walls of the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, where performance- and time-based art is shown.

The protesters handed out fliers with a QR code leading to an open letter that demands that the museum sever all ties with the Kravises. MoMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“MoMA can’t claim to be a sustainable organization that wants to fight climate change but at the same time have a fossil fuel investor as the chair of the board, with their names on the walls,” said Jonathan Westin, an activist with the Climate Organizing Hub, as nervous looking partygoers passed by the small crowd of protesters stationed outside the MoMA entrance. “This is directly inspired by what Nan Goldin and other activists did to get to get rid of the Sackler name at the Met.”

Activist Roni Zahavi-Brunner explained that unlike publicly traded investment groups such as BlackRock, KKR is a private equity group, meaning it is not always beholden to public pressure or regulations. “There’s no one to keep them accountable,” Zahavi-Brunner said.

KKR’s involvement in the controversial Coastal GasLink Pipeline is another reason. Amnesty International reported that the Coastal GasLink Pipeline is in danger of violating human rights laws as they intimidate and harass peaceful protesters on and near the construction site of the pipeline, which has not yet been completed. Indigenous land defenders with the Wet’suwet’en tribe have attempted to block construction of the pipeline for years, claiming that the project violates their sovereign rights and threatens to pollute the land they live on.

One of the protesters rallied his fellow activists, making a connection between the state of the sky and the cause of their protest, saying, “we literally can’t breathe our air because people like Kravis are keeping the fossil fuel industry alive.”

Little more than a dozen protesters eventually marched around the block, where they set up outside the MoMA garden’s gate. MoMA security and police followed them, and by the end of the protest, nearly outnumbered them.

Once the protesters reached the garden gate, through which they could see the partygoers and hear the music, they began their chants again, shouting, “KKR, we see you, we deserve a future too,” “We need clean air, not another billionaire,” and “Henry Kravis you can’t hide, we charge you with ecocide.” Guests milled around, ignoring the protesters until MoMA staffers set up a screen on the other side of the gate.

Police asked protesters to stop using microphones and told them to move their DIY oil rig. They advised that “if you flip that over the gate, that’s attempted murder.” Westin responded, “We weren’t planning on doing that,” before shifting the rig over a few feet. Eventually, police told protesters they had one more warning before arrests would begin, which prompted them to quiet down and begin dispersing.

Activist Alice Hu noted that while police have been more aggressive in attempting to curb protests in the past few weeks, protesting at the museum felt safer than doing so in the lobby of KKR, where activists were quickly arrested.

According to the activists, Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis were at the party, which this year honored artists Barbara Chase-Riboud, Marlene Hess, Ed Ruscha, and Darren Walker, and featured a performance by the band MUNA.

“Look, I personally love the MoMA, but with the climate crisis threatening the future of our planet, this important institution shouldn’t be giving them the license to operate socially,” said Hu. “If I was at a party with friends and a bunch of people I was trying to impress, and people outside started heckling me, I’d leave!”

At the Sotheby’s Modern Evening sale next month, an oil painting by Edward Hopper, Cobb’s Barns, South Truro (1930–33), will hit the block with an estimate of $8 million–$12 million. That work is one of eight on the auction docket in May owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, which is also selling pieces of lesser value by Hopper, Maurice Prendergast, and John Marin.

Yes, the Whitney is dabbling in deaccessioning, the institutional art world’s perennial bogeyman. Sell-offs have a tendency to evoke spite and bile among the art world’s old guard. But, for many, it is now just part of a natural progression. 

“We want to grow the collection,” Jane Panetta, curator and director of the collection at the Whitney, told me over the phone last week. “This is part of hitting that goal, and it’s a goal we’ve had for a while, really since the museum moved to its current location in 2015.” 

“The permanent-collection hang held following the Whitney’s move to the Meatpacking District in 2015, “America Is Hard to See,” was a catalyst that initiated the curators to look at the holdings anew, Panetta said.”

Panetta also framed deaccession as within Whitney’s founding principles, in particular its mission to show work by living American artists. Changing the collection is about acknowledging that the America of today is starkly different from what it was decades ago, much less a century ago.

“We’re always thinking about how one defines ‘the museum of American art,’ being mindful of wanting the collection to accurately represent the United States,” Panetta said. “We think that means the collection has to evolve. We have to try and close critical gaps, and having endowment funds for acquisitions is a key means to doing that.”

This is not the first time the museum has grappled with what it means to be an American artist. During Thomas N. Armstrong III‘s run as museum director in the 1970s and ’80s, an artist without a US passport or a green card was not considered a true American, and the museum even considered deaccessioning works by artists without proper paperwork. One near casualty of that rule: Japanese-born artist Yayoi Kusama’s 1962 Air Mail Stickers. Luckily, the rule was ousted in 1990. 

Among the most vocal critics of deaccessioning has always been the prominent industry group Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD). While the AAMD has no legal power, it can and has sanctioned museums that deaccession works for any reason other than bolstering their collection. An AAMD sanction essentially bans offending museums from loaning artworks, sharing resources, or engaging in other collaborative efforts with the association’s member institutions. 

Meanwhile, those in favor of deaccessioning, like San Francisco Museum of Modern Art director Christopher Bedford, are often considered radical. In Bedford’s previous position at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), he came under fire in 2020 for attempting to sell works, primarily those by white male artists like Andy Warhol and Brice Marden, for up to $65 million. That money was to be earmarked for “collection care” and to acquire contemporary works by women and people of color, thus freeing up other money for salary increases. The effort was abandoned after severe pushback from BMA board members, staff, and art critics. Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight famously wrote that the proposed sell-off made the museum “the leading poster child for art collection carelessness.”

(Bedford’s predecessor at SFMOMA, Neal Benezra, was also a deaccessioner, selling off a cherished $50 million Rothko from the museum’s collection in 2019.) 

One can’t help but wonder what Knight might have said to Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of MoMA in New York, who mandated that works in the collection that were more than 50 years old be sold to other institutions, so that MoMA could acquire works by living artists and stay, well, modern.

The writer Ben Lerner, whose most recent piece of fiction published in the New Yorker, “The Ferry,” touches on matters related to museum collections, has a theory similar to Barr’s. “A work of art or a library or museum collection or any significant form requires subtraction as much as addition, right? It requires omission, deaccession, etc., not just hoarding,” he said in an interview with the New Yorker.

Oddly, the 2020 Sotheby’s sale in which the Baltimore Museum was to sell those works also included works from the Brooklyn Museum by Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, and Claude Monet. And, while the BMA pulled its works two hours before the sale, the Brooklyn Museum did not. It wound up making around $20 million.

Both sales were possible because the AAMD relaxed its rules in April 2020 around the use of “restricted funds held by some institutions” in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. While the association’s rules didn’t actually change, the group placed a “moratorium on punitive actions”  and granted leeway for using “proceeds from deaccessioned art to pay for expenses associated with the direct care of collections.” 

The AAMD codified that policy last year, permanently allowing museums to use funds generated by deaccessioned art for “direct care” of objects in a museum’s collection, with specific criteria for what constitutes “direct care.” Selling work to offset operating costs or salaries is still taboo. On the task force that wrote the policy: Bedford, along with Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art.

For those keeping track: Lowry and MoMA kicked off the last major news cycle about deaccessioning this past September, when Sotheby’s announced it was selling 80 works worth approximately $70 million that had been on loan to MoMA since 1990.

Not everyone was happy with AAMD’s decision. In 2021 Erik Neil of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, said to the New York Timesof the policy, “if you want to flip paintings, there are many other types of institutions where you can do that, and they are called commercial galleries.”

The Whitney’s deaccession plan may be in lockstep with AAMD guidelines, but then so was Bedford’s BMA plan, and we know how that turned out. The Whitney artworks, according to Panetta, are only from areas where the museum has “deep holdings, where we have stronger and similar examples by the very same artists—Prendergast, Marin, Hartley, and, of course Hopper.” The BMA argued the same thing about its Warhol holdings. 

Still, Panetta understands why the idea of deaccessioning works is considered verboten. “I think people get anxious with the deaccession because it seems to kind of undo that goal” of the museum being a “permanent steward of the objects that it collects,” she said.

While the Whitney plan doesn’t include a monumental work analogous to the Warhol that the BMA attempted to sell in 2020, Hopper’s name is all but synonymous with the museum. And while the painting going up for auction didn’t make it into the museum’s recent Hopper show, it did hang in the Oval Office during President Barack Obama’s tenure, which should at least keep the bid cards waving come May. 

As to whether the sale will generate a backlash, we’ll just have to wait and see. 

Timothy Reif and David Fraenkel, relatives of the Austrian Jewish collector Fritz Grünbaum, who was killed in 1941 at Dachau concentration camp, have filed lawsuits against the New York and California museums over a 1912 painting and 1915 pencil drawing, both portraits of women, respectively.

The suits, filed last week, allege that Grünbaum was forced to liquid his assets during his internment at Dachau. According to the filing against MoMA, Jewish Property Declaration documents show evidence that eighty-one artworks from Grünbaum’s collection had passed through Nazi ownership.

The 1912 painting Prostitute was registered in a 1956 Swiss auction house catalogue, according to the MOMA filing. However, the museum has no record for acquisition dates after that 1956 sale, the suit claims, accusing the museum of failing to carry out ‘appropriate diligence” before acquiring the work.

The second suit, which targets the Santa Barbara museum, claims that Schiele’s 1915 drawing Portrait of the Artist’s Wife was held by a New York dealer between the mid-1950s to 1960s, before being illegally transferred to another location.

A spokesperson for the museum told the Daily Beast, which first reported the news, that the museum was not unaware of the drawing’s historical record before it was acquired as a gift from a private donor.

The heirs have taken legal action against four other museums seeking to reclaim legal title of artworks from Grünbaum. In 2019, two works by Schiele were returned to Reif and Fraenkel from the London dealer Richard Nagy after a New York judge ruled in favor of the heirs. The two works, Woman in a Black Pinafore (1911) and Woman Hiding Her Face (1912) sold at Christie’s in November of 2022 for prices around $500,000 and $2.6 million, respectively.

In lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court on Monday, Cheri Pierson alleges that Black “brutally” raped her 2002 in the Upper East Side home of his financial advisor, the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

In the suit, Pierson claims that Epstein paid her $300 for a massage on five separate occasions before he engineered the meeting between her and Black, ostensibly also for a massage at the same rate. Pierson says she accepted the offer because she “desperately needed to help care for her young daughter” and needed the income. 

Pierson says that Black, who she claims is eight inches taller and twice her weight, assaulted her in a “secluded and private area” on the third floor of Epstein’s townhouse. After the encounter, which left her in “excruciating pain” and in a state of shock, the two left the townhouse together and Black “turned his back on her and left her standing at the curb.”

According to Reuters, Susan Estrich, a lawyer for Black, called Pierson’s lawsuit “categorically false and part of a scheme to extort money from Mr. Black by threatening to destroy his reputation…. We intend to defeat these baseless claims.”

Wigdor LLP, who represents Pierson, also represents Guzel Ganieva, a former model who in a March 2021 tweet accused Black of sexually harassing and abusing her “for years.” According to court records, Ganieva claims that Black had mentioned Epstein’s “sexual proclivities” multiple times and once flew her “to Florida without her consent, to satisfy the sex needs of Epstein, his ‘best friend,’” according to Vanity Fair.

Black has admitted to having a relationship with Ganieva but denied the rape accusations. In October 2021, Black sued the former model for defamation and claimed she was trying to “destroy” him, according to a report by the Daily Mail.

In March 2021, in the thick of rumors about his connections with Epstein, Black stepped down as MoMA board chair and as chief executive and chairman of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management Inc., which he led for over 30 years.

MoMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Black’s affiliation with the museum.

Black ranks on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, and according to Forbes has a net worth of around $9 billion. Last year, over 150 artists and activities signed a petition asking MoMA to cut ties with Black.

On Wednesday, Sotheby’s announced plans by Paley’s namesake foundation to sell off 29 of the some 80 artworks that have been in the MoMA’s care since Paley’s death in 1990. A majority of the proceeds will go towards expanding the museum’s digital footprint, Sotheby’s said in a statement. Plans for MoMa’s digital initiatives include the potential launch of a streaming channel and digital art acquisitions.

Among the works set to be auctioned off include Pablo Picasso’s 1919 Cubist still life Guitar on a Table, which carries an estimate of $20 million. It will be sold during a New York evening sale on November 14. Francis Bacon’s 1963 small-format triptych, Three Studies for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, will be offered with an estimate of $35 million on October 14 during a London sale. Other works by Andre Derain, Pierre-August Renoir, Joan Miro and Pierre Bonnard will also be sold during November and October evening sales.

Paley joined the museum’s board in 1937 just eight years after the institution was founded, while still a rising media executive and nascent in his career as a modern art collector. Going on to serve as the museum’s president and chairman, his donorship to the New York institution continued posthumously. Through the foundation, Paley constructed a partnership with MoMA that has allowed the museum for decades to decide how the collection could be displayed or how to use proceeds from an eventual sale of the works.

Glenn D. Lowry, MoMa’s director, described the forthcoming sale as, “a testament” to Paley’s “visionary philanthropy,” praising the move as part of Paley’s 1990 bequest, for “anticipating the needs of the museum” over the course of thirty years.

According to the foundation’s current president, the philanthropist’s son, Bill Paley, the organization worked with the museum’s curators to select which works would be auctioned. A portion of the sale proceeds will go towards the foundation’s causes, which supports institutions across the arts, medicine, and media.

The lithograph, Self Portrait en face (1904), depicts the artist at 37-years-old. Her face is rendered in varying neutral tones,. The museums were able to purchase the piece through funds from multiple donors, including ARTnews Top 200 Collectors Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, a longtime MoMA trustee and cofounder of Neue Galerie.

Kollwitz, who was born in 1867 in the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), is widely known for her subject matter that focused on the interior lives of women. Active in the late 19th century through to the early 20th century, she gained prominence among her male counterparts that ran in German Expressionist circles. Throughout her work she focused on depicting themes related to mourning, poverty, war, and the working class.

The present work will join 34 other prints by the artist in MoMA’s collection. Self-portrait en face is one of the few works that Kollwitz created in color; after 1905, she transitioned to a colorless palette, primarily working in black and white.

The news comes as museums around the world move to fill historical gaps in their permanent collections, primarily by acquiring work by women and artists of color, whose contributions to art history have long been overlooked and underrepresented in institutional collections .

The Museum of Modern Art plans to hold a major exhibition dedicated to the Kollwitz’s work in the near future, a statement from the museum confirmed. A large-scale exhibition focused artist opened at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2019.

Christophe Cherix, the chief curator of MoMA’s drawings and prints department, described the print as “a monument in the history of printmaking and a work that speaks as much to its time as ours,” adding, “Käthe Kollwitz’s legacy looms large over the 20th and 21st centuries.”

“Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,” an exhibition curated by Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson at the Museum of Modern Art, offers a thought-provoking blueprint. It marks the debut of the Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC), a nonprofit group of artists, designers, and architects who banded together to support each other and future endeavors after separate invitations to participate in the show. Their commissioned multimedia installations analyze race and space in ten cities, focusing on contemporary life but also invoking the unfinished business of emancipation; each of the sites, from Watts to Syracuse, is marked alongside the locations of freedmen’s colonies on a map of the United States. This layering of Black spaces over time creates a kind of speculative scaffold—a platform to reflect, as Robin D.G. Kelley writes in the catalogue, “on what it means for a people determined to be free to build for freedom, to retrofit a hostile and deadly built environment for the protection and reproduction of Black life.”

The first example of a hostile built environment is the museum itself. “Reconstructions” is installed in MoMA’s Philip Johnson Galleries, named for the once-celebrated architect and Nazi sympathizer who excluded work by nonwhite designers during his decade-long tenure as director of the museum’s department of architecture. Amid nationwide efforts to contest Johnson’s legacy, MoMA allowed the BRC to temporarily cover his name with their “Manifesting Statement,” which calls for the reinvention of architecture “as a vehicle for liberation and joy.” Its placement is emblematic of a spirit that reigns throughout the exhibition: combative, palimpsestic, and committed to planting a free future in the old order’s cracks.

View of Walter Hood’s installation Black Towers/Black Power, 2020, in “Reconstructions” at MoMA

The show (all works 2020) bristles with screens, speakers, and contraptions. Mario Gooden’s The Refusal of Space, a spare aluminum trolley flying a blackened Confederate flag, pays homage to a Black-owned streetcar line in Jim Crow–era Nashville. Archival footage of Civil Rights sit-ins plays in its rearview mirror. V. Mitch McEwen’s R:R imagines an alternative contemporary New Orleans in which an 1811 revolt—that also inspired Dread Scott’s 2019 “Slave Rebellion Reenactment”—had succeeded, transforming the city into a free enclave called Republica. A mock public-service video describes an eco-friendly metropolis where even architecture has been democratized. Any citizen can cheaply erect a floating hurricane-proof building using a mixture of bamboo and concrete, an implicit contrast with the aftershocks of displacement and gentrification that followed Hurricane Katrina.

There are flashes of utopia, but the artists pointedly avoid anti-racist problem-solving; often, they pay homage to historic survival strategies or forecast future hardships. The most provocative and carefully realized installation is Olalekan Jeyifous’s The Frozen Neighborhoods. It’s a slice of Crown Heights in an alternate world where the government fights climate change through a market-based system of “mobility credits,” leaving the wealthy free to travel and marginalized communities confined to their neighborhoods. Those cut off are forced to innovate: Jeyifous employs assemblage, prints, and digitally rendered video to showcase one district’s evolution into a vertical labyrinth of drone docks, “bubble farms,” bodegas, and storefront churches. (The anarchic density recalls Kowloon Walled City, an ingrown cube of fused high-rises that flourished lawlessly on the outskirts of Hong Kong until its demolition in 1994.) Jeyifous draws on a worldwide history of policing Black movement; in a wink at the MTA, the installation includes a “real” subway terminal controlled by hackers, with a screen that alludes to a revolutionary event called the “Breaching of the Turnstiles.”

Another standout is Immeasurability, a dreamlike evocation of Atlanta by Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood of the studio AD-WO. It centers on a disc-shaped diorama of model train–size miniatures, all coated in sparkling black sand: backyards full of tiny families, sections of homes and freeways, a Waffle House sign half-concealed by skeletal trees. Above this grisaille cityscape—dusted, we learn, in sea-floor sediment—looms a silk-embroidered textile map of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, figured as a red gash surrounded by tiny aqua jellyfish. Juxtaposing diasporic dispersal with the fragmentary commons of urban life, it’s a haunting entry in a tradition one might call the Black Atlantic Submarine, an architectural cousin of Ellen Gallagher’s ongoing series “Watery Ecstatic” (2001–), Mati Diop’s 2019 film Atlantics, and poet Derek Walcott’s 1990 epic “Omeros.”

Felecia Davis, Fabricating Networks: Transmissions and Reception from Pittsburgh’s Hill District, 2020, digital file, 24 by 24 inches.

The installations strive to enlarge architecture’s sphere of concern, stressing that stoops and spice cabinets, for instance, can be as critical to understanding the shape of Black life in American cities as subways and skyscrapers. But the exhibition’s conceptual freedom also leaves room for works that respond only tenuously to its challenge. I enjoyed Felecia Davis’s Fabricating Networks: Transmissions and Receptions from Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Flower Antenna, a computational textile wired to detect and amplify visitor movements, but struggled to discern its particular connection to the district in the few lines of wall text about networks and collectivity. Amanda Williams’s We’re Not Down There, We’re Over Here—which featured a mylar emergency blanket collaged with dates, quotes, coordinates, critical theory, and the mystifying phrase “black space will blackappoint you”—left me disoriented, and separated by a layer of abstractions from its subject, Kinloch, the first Black Free town in Missouri. Other works were only too reality bound. Walter J. Hood’s Black Towers/Black Power imagines a series of towers along Oakland’s San Pablo Avenue that residents of the city access through their dreams. Based on the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program, they resemble ordinary skyscrapers, one of which reserves special apartments for policemen.

Puzzlingly, for such a historically oriented show, none of the installations directly engage with the legacy of Black architects in the United States, such as Julian Abele, Vertner Tandy, or J. Max Bond Jr. (They receive a little more acknowledgment in the catalogue, which includes insightful essays by critics and scholars such as Aruna D’Souza and Christina Sharpe.) It feels like a significant omission in a show where Black people and localities sometimes threaten to disappear into Black concepts. There is more allusion than imagination, and a bricolage of references that gestures at a counter-architecture without always contributing to its elaboration. Even so, “Reconstructions” is worth seeing for its most insightful entries, and commendable in its demonstration that emancipation depends not only on securing rights but on clearing a space for their exercise. May it lay the groundwork for many other such exhibitions.

Armory Show to Launch Digital Exhibition Series Ahead of September Fair
Ahead of its in-person fair at the Javits Center in New York from September 9 to 12, the Armory Show has revealed that it will launch a series of virtual, curated exhibitions featuring works from galleries participating in the event. The first installment of the series, titled “The Pandemic is a Portal” and organized by Public Art Fund curator Daniel S. Palmer, opens on April 15. Inspired by an essay by Arundhati Roy published in the Financial Times in April 2020, the exhibition will feature works by Hank Willis Thomas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Firelei Báez, Nicholas Galanin, and others.

Veronica Ryan.

Thursday, March 25

Veronica Ryan Is Now Represented by Paula Cooper Gallery
Paula Cooper Gallery has added Veronica Ryan, a New York– and U.K.–based artist known for her sculptures meditating on trauma and memory, to its roster. In 2019, Ryan had a solo exhibition at the New York gallery, where she showed works paying homage to her West Indian ancestry. She is currently at work on a public sculpture devoted to the Windrush Generation for London’s Hackney Town Hall Square, and her art has previously appeared at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, the Camden Arts Centre, Tate St Ives, and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.

Wednesday, March 24

ICA Miami Announces New Curatorial Appointment and Promotions
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, has appointed Donna Honarpisheh to the newly created position of assistant curator of research for its Knight Foundation Art + Research Center. Honarpisheh is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the department of comparative literature and designated emphasis in critical theory program at the University of California, Berkeley. The museum has also promoted Stephanie Seidel, who has been with the institution for five years, to the post of curator. And Amanda Morgan, who has previously worked as curatorial assistant, curatorial and programs assistant, and research fellow at the ICA Miami, has been promoted to the role of assistant curator.

Fine Arts Work Center Names Next Executive Director
Sharon Polli, who currently serves as executive vice president of the Brooklyn arts center BRIC, will join the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as executive director on May 10. Polli has previously worked as chief revenue strategist to the vice president of advancement at BRIC, and prior to her tenure at that institution she was deputy executive director of the New York–based public art organization Groundswell.

Eric Motley.

Tuesday, March 23

National Gallery of Art Appoints Eric Motley as Deputy Director
Eric Motley, who most recently worked as executive vice president and corporate secretary of the Aspen Institute, a Washington, D.C.–based public policy organization, will join the National Gallery of Art in D.C. as deputy director on August 30. Before his tenure at the Aspen Institute, Motley served as counselor to the assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs and as director of the U.S. department of state’s office of international visitors. “I believe that we are witnessing a paradigm shift in our nation with respect to the role that museums play in our cities and communities—connecting people to transcendent ideas and inspiring creativity,” Motley said in a statement. “This is where the National Gallery is headed and I am honored to contribute to this journey.”

Jameel Prize Reveals 2021 Finalists
The V&A in London and Art Jameel have released the eight finalists who have been shortlisted for the Jameel Prize, which recognizes contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic tradition. The finalists for the award, which comes with £25,000 (about $34,500), are Golnar Adili, Hadeyeh Badri, Kallol Datta, Farah Fayyad, Ajlan Gharem, Sofia Karim, Jana Traboulsi, and Bushra Waqas Khan. In September, the V&A will open an exhibition of work by the eight finalists.

Leah Dickerman.

Monday, March 22

Leah Dickerman Named Director of Research Programs at MoMA
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has appointed Leah Dickerman as its director of research programs, a position that will see her reenvision the institution’s “Studies in Modern Art” books series and oversee partnerships with several universities. Dickerman was previously MoMA’s director of editorial and content strategy, as well as the co-lead of its creative team. In a statement, Dickerson described her post as “a new role that builds on MoMA’s core commitment to research for an innovative age of knowledge production and sharing is an extraordinary opportunity.”

Franklin Sirmans Joins Artists’ Legacy Foundation Board
The Oakland, California–based nonprofit Artists’ Legacy Foundation has appointed Franklin Sirmans, director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, to its board of directors. The organization was founded in 2000 by artists Squeak Carnwath and Viola Frey and community advocate Gary Knecht to support artists through grants and by managing their estates after their deaths. Each year, the foundation gives a $25,000 grant to a painter or sculptor; past awardees have included Howardena Pindell, Jim Nutt, Suzan Frecon, and John Outterbridge.

Hales Gallery Now Represents Anthony Cudahy
Hales Gallery, which maintains spaces in New York and London, has added Anthony Cudahy to its roster. Cudahy, who has previously exhibited work at 1969 Gallery in New York, Farewell Books Austin, and other venues, is known for his figurative paintings, many of which are informed by queer histories. The artist will open a solo exhibition with the gallery in New York in September.

Loango, Republic of the Congo, Power Figure (Nkisi), nineteenth–early twentieth century, wood and iron, 25 3/16 by 8 11/16 by 7 7/8 inches; at the Museum of Modern Art.

Co-organized by MoMA and two Parisian institutions, the Musée de l’Orangerie and the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, “Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde—from Signac to Matisse and Beyond” (on view through January 2) features Opus 217 along with dozens of paintings, posters, and ephemera by artists whom Fénéon wrote about and promoted. Notable among them are Henri Matisse and Paul Seurat, in whose careers he was particularly enmeshed, as well as Pissarro, Vuillard, Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vallotton. The show also includes an impressive array of the African and Oceanic sculptures—works Fénéon preferred to call les arts lointains (“distant arts”) rather than the more common art nègre, thus conscientiously avoiding the language of colonialism, against which he railed. And so we have charismatic personages from very different worlds. The eccentric denizens of Toulouse Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge, La Goulue (1891), a poster so desirable it was torn off walls almost as soon as it was pasted up (Fénéon encouraged the illegal practice, which would allow people of no means to become collectors), share the display space with an eerie power figure from the Congo in wood studded with pieces of iron. Cases of elegant statuettes from the Ivory Coast are surrounded by glowing Pointillist and Fauvist landscapes. Many of the works may be traced to Fénéon’s own collections, auctioned after his death in 1944 and here impressively sleuthed; others passed through Bernheim-Jeune, the gallery where Fénéon was artistic director from 1906 to 1924. All were in one way or another touched by the man.

Félix Vallotton, The Charge, 1893, woodcut, 7 7/8 by 10 1/4 inches; at the Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition documents Fénéon’s political activity and that of his radical associates. A Zelig-like character, dubbed celui qui silence (the silent one, or he who silences) by Alfred Jarry, Fénéon was ubiquitous yet discreet, operating mainly behind the scenes as an editor, art and literary critic, translator, journalist, dealer and collector. Paradoxically, given his position in tony circles, he was a lifelong anarchist, arrested in 1894 and narrowly acquitted of a bombing he likely committed. The show includes a famous mug shot of Fénéon on the eve of the notorious Trial of the Thirty, anarchists all, and samples of his largely anonymous political and journalistic writing. Especially delicious are examples of his Twitter-like “News in Three Lines,” brief, proto-surreal reports of crimes, published in Le Matin in 1906.

Fired from his position at, of all places, France’s Ministry of War, Fénéon was hired at La Revue blanche, probably the most famous of the dozens of petites revues circulating in Paris. He remained the chief editor until its demise in 1903. There he published covers and illustrations by his Nabis friends and writing by famous figures, from Jarry and Gide to Debussy and Thadée Natanson, one of the magazine’s founders, all of whom would drop by to chat. In the back office, Fénéon pored over manuscripts. There we see him, rapt, in portraits by Vuillard and Valloton, never suspecting he would become the perfect lens through which to refract those most intriguing times.

According to a report by Bloomberg, MoMA director Glenn Lowry said on a video conference call with other museum professionals that the museum’s staff of 960 employees has been reduced to about 800 workers. (In April, Hyperallergic reported that MoMA laid off all 85 of its contracted workers in the education department. A representative for the museum told ARTnews that the education department “remains fully and completely staffed.”) “We will learn to be a much smaller institution,” Lowry reportedly said.

He also revealed that the museum’s exhibition budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 has been slashed from $18 million to $10 million, and that its publications budget has also been reduced by half. The museum’s budget has sustained a $45 million cut overall, with a reduction from around $180 million to $135 million.

ARTnews has reached out to MoMA for comment.

MoMA has not yet announced a specific date to reopen its doors, though Lowry reportedly said it would welcome visitors again sometime between July and September. At that point, the institution will enforce social distancing practices that could include timed-ticket entry for just 1,000 guests at a time, removals of wall labels that visitors sometimes gather around, and rearrangements of artworks on display. As part of the reopening, the museum may also be forced to abandon or modify a plan to cycle out artworks displayed as part of its new permanent collection rehang.

Lowry reportedly expressed concern about the viability of small art institutions in the wake of the crisis, referencing recent furloughs at MoMA PS1. Bloomberg reports that Lowry said of MoMA PS1, “We’re going to make sure they survive.”

Update 5/6/20 11:30 p.m.: A comment from a MoMA spokesperson regarding the museum’s education department has been added to this article.