COURTESY STUDIO SANFORD BIGGERS
Remixed Art History
In next week’s issue of the New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham profiles Sanford Biggers, whose work braids together various artistic styles and strands of black history. “What I want to do is code-switch,” Biggers says. “To have there be layers of history and politics, but also this heady, arty stuff—inside jokes, black humor—that you might have to take a while to research if you want to really get it.” [The New Yorker]
This March, Damien Hirst will follow up his big—and, according to many, bad—Venice exhibition with a show of 50 new spot paintings at Houghton Hall, a Palladian mansion in Norfolk, England, the Guardian reports. According to a curator at the mansion, the works will replace Old Masters paintings, and will, in fact, be “displayed like Old Masters paintings,” which is . . . something. [The Guardian]
Lives
Kynaston McShine, the curator of such exhibitions as “Information” and “The Museum as Muse,” has died at 82, ARTnews reports. Both shows, as well as “Primary Structures,” which he organized during a stint at the Jewish Museum, have gone down as some of the most important exhibitions in American art history. [ARTnews]
In case you missed it: Eugene V. Thaw, a prominent collector and dealer, and the co-author of Jackson Pollock’s catalogue raisonné, has died at 90, the New York Times reports. “[G]reat art collecting need not be based on a great fortune; education, experience and eye are more important,” Thaw once said. [The New York Times]
The Talent
Stephen Reily is officially the director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, Insider Louisville reports. He had been interim director at the museum since its last director, Ghislain d’Humières, departed in March 2017. [Insider Louisville]
Museums
The Morgan Library & Museum in New York has received a $5 million grant from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, according to Artforum. The museum plans to put the grant toward funding a position in its conservation department and restoring its building’s exterior. [Artforum]
For CNN, Jillian Steinhauer tackles the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent change in its admissions policy, writing, “Museums weren’t founded as democratic spaces, but that’s the role our society has assigned them, and it’s a valuable one. They owe it to their public to play it.” [CNN]
Meanwhile, in an interview with Hyperallergic, the Met’s president, Daniel H. Weiss, admits that museums should be free, but that sometimes, that model simply isn’t feasible. In the Met’s case, by hoping to make out-of-towners pay a mandatory $25 fee, the museum hopes to bring in roughly $6–11 million more in revenue. [Hyperallergic]
Debates over whether Salvator Mundi is a true Leonardo painting have barely settled, but here comes another work that now also might be by the Renaissance artist. The Worcester Art Museum argues that a painting previously thought to be produced by Verrocchio’s workshop may indeed be a Leonardo in a new show, according to the Art Newspaper. “We are not afraid of any controversy,” Matthew Waschek, the museum’s director, said. [The Art Newspaper]
Collecting
The New York Times takes a look inside collector Laurie M. Tisch’s Manhattan apartment and at her collection, which includes a newly acquired Georgia O’Keeffe that hangs on her wall. She also describes her foundation and the way it uses “the arts almost as a healing tool.” [The New York Times]