WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
The Paradise Papers
Wilbur Ross, the United States commerce secretary and a major art collector who has a fondness for buying the work of René Magritte, has secretly kept an investment in the shipping company Navigator Holdings, which has significant business ties to an energy company owned in part by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law, as well as a Russian oligarch who has been subject to sanctions imposed by the U.S. The ties were revealed when a trove of documents from the offshore law firm Appleby were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, and then shared with publications involved with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, including the New York Times. The trove is being referred to as the Paradise Papers. [The New York Times]
The news comes two weeks after Democrats in the Senate called for an ethics probe into Ross’s finances. [CNN]
California, Here We Come
On Saturday, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held its annual fundraising gala, which has become one of the biggest events on the L.A. social calendar. It honored George Lucas and Mark Bradford, Annie Lennox performed, Brad Pitt was there, and $4.5 million was raised for LACMA. Sounds like a good party! [The Los Angeles Times]
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that, down south in Laguna, the California Coastal Museum has canceled a work—Seascape, by Pablo Vargas Lugo—due to environmental concerns. [The San Francisco Chronicle]
Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight doesn’t quite love the Adrián Villar Rojas show at Geffen Contemporary’s space in that city’s Little Tokyo. As Knight writes, “An extended if very familiar meditation on the modern museum, the grandiose installation, titled The Theater of Disappearance, suffers from a sense of exhaustion not dissimilar to that of the frozen, dilapidated bicycle wheel so puckishly entombed.'” [The Los Angeles Times]
Architectural Digest checks out L.A. artist Jonas Wood’s new show, which is now open at David Kordansky Gallery. [Architectural Digest]
And if you’re in New York tonight and not the sunny City of Angels, you can swing by Karma, the beloved East Village gallery and bookstore, where Jonas Wood will be signing copies of his new book, Clippings, at 6:00 p.m. [Karma]
Around the Country
In W magazine, Fan Zhong writes about the reopening of the Bass Museum in Miami Beach, which has been closed for a few years due to renovations. It has once again opened its doors, and will no doubt be visited by the masses who come to town for Art Basel Miami Beach in December. But the museum is already, as W puts it, an “Instagram hit.” [W]
Daniel Kany, a reporter for the Press Herald, a newspaper in Portland, Maine, writes that he did not particularly enjoy Nan Goldin’s 1996 Whitney retrospective. But he loves the artist’s new retrospective at the Portland Museum of Art. As he put it, “For starters, this is the best use I have ever seen of the PMA’s notoriously difficult first floor gallery space. The installation is gorgeous, more because of what curator Jessica May has brought to the table than Goldin: Curtained-off areas become excellent spaces for the slide shows.” [The Press Herald]
The Nevada Arts Council is celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the Las Vegas Art Commission. “It’s definitely about getting art into people’s everyday life,” Ally Haynes-Hamblen, the director of the Las Vegas Office of Cultural Affairs, told the Las Vegas Review Journal. [The Las Vegas Review-Journal]
New York State of Mind
Performance Space 122 will return to its home in the East Village of Manhattan this January after six years of occupying various locations around the city. Its director Jenny Schlenzka, who joined earlier this year from MoMA PS1, and said that it will kick off its return to the space—which is in a former school built in the late 19th century on First Avenue—with the Coil festival, and then will move on to regular programming. It’s the 13th edition of the festival, and the last, because, as Schlenzka tells Joshua Barone at the New York Times, “There is not the same need for a performance festival in January as there was when Coil started.” [The New York Times]
The Dia Art Foundation had its Fall Night Sunday, and had on view at its Dia:Chelsea space on West 22nd Street work by François Morellet. [Dia on Instagram]
Kimberly Drew, who is the social media manager at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, got her nails done with filmmaker Reina Gossett at Chillhouse on the Lower East Side. [them.]
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise opened a show of new work by Alex Katz Sunday night at the gallery’s space in Harlem. The dealer took to Instagram to share a picture of the artist with his son and grandson. As the caption reads, “Three generations of Katz.” [Gavin Brown’s Enterprise on Instagram]
Rest in Peace
The street artist Richard Hambleton, who tagged the Lower East Side with silhouettes under the moniker “the Shadowman,” and was alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring as a pivotal figure in the Club 57 scene that exploded on St. Marks Place in the 1980s, has died. He was 65. [The New York Times]
The Boston art dealer Thomas Segal, who gave Jasper Johns his first-ever Boston solo show at his eponymous gallery on Newbury Street on 1981, died last month. He was 77. As Adam Sheffer, a partner at New York gallery Cheim & Read and the president of the ADAA, told the Boston Globe, “Tommy was hard-wired into the New York art scene and had a keen eye for what was considered avant-garde. And he brought that to Boston and showed people with an interest in art how that could be accessible to them.” [The Boston Globe]