ANDREWS MCMEEL PUBLISHING
MOCA Fallout
Members of the Los Angeles art world spoke with Deborah Vankin about the reported firing of Helen Molesworth as chief curator of MOCA L.A. by the museum’s director, Philippe Vergne. Connie Butler, the chief curator of the Hammer Museum in the city, said, “I think Philippe and Helen are both brilliant, and I can’t help but feel like there’s something else behind this and that she’s taking the fall for bigger problems in the institution. I don’t think it has only to do with Helen’s curatorial agenda. It’s a tremendous loss for Los Angeles and heartbreaking for MOCA.” [Los Angeles Times]
Berkshire Museum Fallout
Donald A. MacGillis, a Berkshire Museum member who is part of a lawsuit aimed at preventing the Pittsfield, Massachusetts-based institution from selling of works from its collection, has penned an op-ed calling for the state’s Supreme Judicial Court to closely examine a deal between museum leadership and the state’s attorney general that will see painting sales go forward. A justice on the court is currently reviewing the agreement. [The Boston Globe]
More Museum News
Construction began yesterday on George Lucas’s forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. It’s designed by Ma Yansong, estimated to cost $1 billion, scheduled to be finished in four years—and looks quite a bit like a spaceship! [The New York Times]
And construction also began on an expansion to the Seattle Asian Art Museum that involves renovating and building out the original home of the Seattle Art Museum. It’s slated to cost $51 million. [Curbed]
Toasting its 60th anniversary, the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale in Florida has added to its collection works by Theaster Gates, Jenny Holzer, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, and Serge Vandercam. [ArtfixDaily]
Artists
Julian Schnabel is gearing up for a show at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and editing his forthcoming van Gogh biopic, which stars Willem Dafoe. He’s also continuing to surf, and made a parallel between that sport and painting: “It’s like paddling out in big surf. There’s a wall there, and you are a certain size and the sea is a certain size and these paintings are a certain size. It happens so quickly you just want to relive that and be in that sensation again. Painting for me is like that. The joy of just doing it and being lost in the experience of that is compelling to me.” [The New York Times]
Damien Hirst on his new “Veil” paintings, on view at Gagosian in Beverly Hills: “I don’t even know what this kind of work is. They make me happy, they feel good to look at, they sort of confuse me.” [The New York Times]
Tony Lewis’s new show at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., takes as its inspiration the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. [Smithsonian]
Michael Morgner has won the first Schmidt-Rottluff Art Prize, which honors the life’s work of an artist and carries a $25,000 purse. [Artforum]
Actor, entrepreneur, and arts patron Robert De Niro said in a speech that “education without humanity is ignorance. Look at our president. He made it through [the] University of Pennsylvania, so he was exposed to a quality education, but he’s still an idiot.” [Page Six]
The Market
Nicolas Chow, who has been with Sotheby’s since 1999, was promoted to chairman of Sotheby’s Asia. [ArtAsiaPacific]
Potpourri
“Street artists are calling for a boycott on H&M” after the clothing retailer photographed a model in front of a mural in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by Jason ‘Revok’ Williams, who has voiced his displeasure about the ad. [Metro]
Speaking of garments, if you didn’t pick up Camille Henrot’s capsule collection for the Swiss Institute at the Independent art fair in New York last week, the pieces are on offer through the New York space, which will also sell them at Frieze New York in May. [Vogue]
Here are photographs of Will Benedict’s current show at Overduin & Co. in Los Angeles. [Contemporary Art Daily]