COURTESY HENRY HOLT & COMPANY
Big News/Small News
The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has gifted some 400 artworks to the Whitney Museum in the midst of a winding-down process that stands as an option for artist-endowed foundations of its kind. [The New York Times]
Omar Kholeif has left his post as senior curator and director of global initiatives at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. [New City Art]
Page Six goes hot and heavy over news that actress Jennifer Lawrence is allegedly “quietly dating” Gladstone Gallery director Cooke Maroney, who gets called “mysterious Maroney” and is characterized as someone “known to be seen at high-end art openings around town and formerly worked at the famed Gagosian gallery.” [Page Six]
The Future
Teer Art, Iran’s first-ever art fair, opens in Tehran this month with eleven galleries slated to show contemporary work. [The Art Newspaper]
“Kevin Abosch is turning the technology behind cryptocurrencies into art, stamping blockchain addresses in his own blood and selling a virtual neon Lamborghini.” [The New York Times]
California
“Made in L.A. 2018: Why the Hammer biennial is the right show for disturbing times,” by Christopher Knight. [Los Angeles Times]
The “Bay Area Now” exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco will feature 19 artists plus six architects and design collectives. [San Francisco Chronicle]
Hair, fingernails, and breasts figure prominently in “curious, terrific” paintings by Julie Curtiss on show at the gallery Various Small Fires. [Los Angeles Times]
Gay Paris (Review)
The Paris Review has an excerpt of a new book about the famed “Naked City” photographer Weegee by Christopher Bonanos. A taste: “He could spin off polished wisecracky anecdotes rat-a-tat while delivering four-hour impromptu lectures on the craft of news photography to anyone who’d have him, lingering until the last member of the audience had grown tired of asking questions.” [The Paris Review]
The Paris Review also gave the cover of its summer issue (plus a portfolio of paintings within) to its first trans cover artist, Edie Fake. [The Paris Review]
Misc.
Lyndel King, “the ‘grandmother’ of the Twin Cities art scene,” is stepping down after 40 years as director of the University of Minnesota’s Weisman Art Museum. [Minneapolis Star-Tribune]
Washington, D.C., is home right now to a run for a “culture-wars play” that comes across as a “historically free-spirited fantasia” about “Sandro Botticelli, a notorious playboy who swings every which way, and his young assistant, Leonardo da Vinci.” [Washington Post]