VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Protest and Celebration
Several months ago, word came out that Kara Walker’s commissioned project for Prospect.4 wouldn’t be ready in time for the art festival’s opening. Now a New York Times report details why: organizers disagreed with Walker about the cost of shipping her work, a wagon-like sculpture that includes a calliope and will be a place for “black protest and celebration,” to New Orleans. But “fences were eventually mended,” the report notes, and the work will go on view this weekend. [The New York Times]
Please enjoy this Q&A between Solange and Toyin Ojih Odutola. It includes the two artists meditating on the nature of sound and architecture, as well as the difficulties and joys of being a black woman creator, and it comes with an added bonus: new portraits of them by the photographer Awol Erizku, who took their picture at the Noguchi Museum in New York. [Cultured]
Removals, Sales, and Cancelations
The ARCOMadrid art fair has removed a work by Santiago Sierra that featured pixelated images of jailed Catalan politicians. Helga de Alvear, who brought the work to the fair, said that the work was removed because her gallery “[did] not want to have trouble over the issue of Catalonia.” [BBC News]
The designer Tommy Hilfiger is selling his Florida mansion, which he and his wife, Dee, bought in 2013 primarily to house their collection of Pop Art. You, too, can own it for a mere $23.5 million. (That’s down from $27.5 million, the initial price tag it bore when it was first listed a year ago.) [Architectural Digest]
Following earlier reports of suspicion that the Museum of Fine Art in Ghent, Belgium, was exhibiting fake Russian avant-garde works, a panel investigating the pieces was suddenly disbanded. The next day, the city of Ghent revealed that the loan from the Dieleghem Foundation had been canceled and that the works were on their way back to where they came from. [The Art Newspaper]
The Stolen Thumb
An unnamed Chinese official has demanded swift punishment for the man who stole the thumb of a terracotta warrior in December at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. The museum also deserves to pay for allowing this to happen, they said in the Communist publication Beijing Youth Daily. [Hyperallergic]
Influencers
Metropolitan Museum of Art social media manager Kimberly Drew writes on the art world’s power structures and how to circumvent them. “What if the artworld was constantly held to account for exclusion, with every opportunity?” she asks. [i-D]
Social media maven and Jewish Museum director of digital Jiajia Fei discusses her chic clothes with the Cut. She wears Acne ankle boots to work, she says, and on Mondays, she’ll usually wear a comfortable outfit, maybe something by Issey Miyake. [The Cut]
Alex Israel Takes Pyeonchang
For your entertainment: Alex Israel is at the Olympics, and there’s an Instagram to prove it. [Instagram]