VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Lives
Dennis Adrian, an art historian who championed Chicago artists, has died. He contributed criticism to Artforum, ARTnews, and other publications, and helped organize the important 1979 exhibition “Who Chicago?: An Exhibition of Contemporary Imagists.” [Artforum]
The Italian painter Getulio Alviani, who was part of the Groupe de Recherche d’Arte Visuelle, which experimented with motion and sculpture, has died at 78. He designed the logo for Flash Art, and the magazine plans to pay tribute to him in an upcoming issue. [Flash Art]
Market
The Outsider Art Fair will launch a Basel satellite this summer. It will be on view at the same time as Art Basel, from June 13–17. [The New York Times]
A censorship controversy reportedly did not affect sales at this past weekend’s ARCOMadrid fair. A work by Jesus Rafael Soto was scooped up for €800,000, and the Reina Sofía Museum spent €224,480, adding works by Rosa Barba and Joachim Koester to its collection. [The Art Newspaper]
Peculiar Museum Visitors
New York state officials warned that, earlier this month, an Australian tourist infected with measles visited one of Manhattan’s most important art destinations: the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The risk of developing measles is low, however, which means out-of-towners can spend their time thinking about the museum’s new admissions policy instead of worrying about getting a disease. [New York Daily News]
Robert Gentile, who is believed to be one of the few living people associated with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum case, is expected to face sentencing in a weapons case. He has pleaded guilty to owning firearms, which is illegal because he is a convicted felon, and he now faces three to six years in prison. [Fox News/Associated Press]
Emergent Sensibilities
It’s an ad agency, it’s an art collective, it’s . . . the Propeller Group! The New York Times profiles the Vietnamese artists’ collective, which is now the subject of its first-ever retrospective, at the San Jose Museum of Art in California. “A lot of topics most artists deal with, we can’t touch,” Tuan Andrew Nguyen, one of the group’s members, said of the collective’s slyly political work. [The New York Times]
Peter Schjeldahl takes on the New Museum Triennial, which, he says, “comes off as willfully naïve.” But, he adds, “there’s insight to gain about emergent sensibilities in world art.” [The New Yorker]
Film and TV
Touch Me Not, a sexually explicit film about a woman dealing with intimacy issues, has won the Golden Bear award at the Berlinale film festival. Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs took home the Silver Bear for Best Director, while Museum, in which two students break into an anthropological museum in Mexico and steal Mesoamerican artifacts, won the award for Best Screenplay. [Variety]
Ahead of a new season of the FX series Atlanta, the New Yorker profiles the show’s creator, Donald Glover, and we’ve been gifted with an extra treat: new portraits of the actor by Awol Erizku. [The New Yorker]