COURTESY HEATHERWICK STUDIOS
First looks
The first renderings of the estimated $200 million public art installation to be constructed at the Hudson Yards next year have been revealed. Thomas Heatherwick, the British designer responsible, says he was inspired by an “old discarded flight of wooden stairs.” The Gothamist describes it as looking like “a huge bedbug exoskeleton.” [Gothamist]
The American Museum of Natural History has revealed the new design for its much-contested $325 million expansion of the Gilder Center, which is set to eat into the surrounding park land. The museum assures angry residents that the renovation will preserve the park’s “character and function.” [DNA Info]
Here’s a sneak peak of the Smithsonian Institution’s new eight-story African-American museum in Washington, D.C., which is set to open next week. [Wall Street Journal]
MoMA
MoMA will soon make 33,000 exhibition installation photographs available online. Along with many of these previously unseen images, the museum will also include “800 out-of-print catalogs and more than 1,000 exhibition checklists … related to more than 3,500 exhibitions from 1929 through 1989.” [New York Times]
Immersive art
Artist Antonia Wright accidentally plunged into the frozen waters of a reservoir near Boston when she was a child. Now 36, the artist has reenacted the traumatic event in a video work for her new exhibition, aptly titled “Under the water was sand, then rocks, miles of rocks, then fire.” [New York Times]
The artist FKA Twigs will be hosting a Halloween-themed art exhibition later this fall in Washington, D.C. It’s being described as an “immersive and tactile” experience where viewers will be “encouraged on a journey of self-analysis.” Sounds spooky. [Dazed]
Controversies
More on the unfolding saga of the missing 6-foot-tall Donald Trump portrait paid for with charity money. According to a former aide to the artist who created the painting, it was sent straight from the benefit to the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester, New York. [Washington Post]
Someone please give Alec Baldwin a history of art lesson, pleads the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones. [The Guardian]
Extras
What do you do with a 400-piece collection of postwar Italian Arte Povera? If you’re collecting couple Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu the answer is open up a 20,000-square-foot private exhibition space in the Hudson Valley town of Cold Spring, New York. [Bloomberg]
The Cleveland park gazebo where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was fatally shot by cops two years ago has been dismantled for the purpose of eventually being displayed at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago. [NBC News]