COURTESY AMAZON STUDIOS
Museums
Christopher Knight writes on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition “In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art,” which he writes is, for the most part, “topically insular and unengaging.” [Los Angeles Times]
British authorities have found a teenager guilty of attempting to plot a terrorist attack at the British Museum in London. The teenager was reportedly working as part of an all-female ISIS cell. [CNN]
The Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia could run into problems if it doesn’t start focusing more on its exhibition programming, according to an op-ed published by the Art Newspaper. Too much attention, the piece argues, has gone into building a costly extension. [The Art Newspaper]
Writings
Steven Nelson tells the story of how an essay he wrote about Deana Lawson’s Time magazine photographs was allegedly rejected from a publication put out by Aperture, then from Frieze. The rejections, Nelson says, came because Lawson had objected to him writing about these works as examples of her fine-art practice. [Hyperallergic]
A host of art professionals and artists have signed an open letter denouncing the Pit gallery’s Glendale Biennial, which, despite being situated in a Los Angeles neighborhood with a large Armenian population, features zero Armenian artists. “We are calling for a boycott of the Pit Gallery,” they write. [Hyperallergic]
Women
“Design and architecture,” Alexandra Lange notes, “have been, and remain, professions dominated by men.” And so, in a new essay, Lange delves into the hidden history of women designers, specifically ones who worked on objects for children. [The New Yorker]
See a trailer for Widows, the new film by the Turner Prize–winning artist Steve McQueen which stars Viola Davis as the mastermind behind a heist. [Indiewire]
And while you’re at it, why not have a look at the teaser for Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, the remake of Dario Argento’s classic horror movie about a witches’ coven at a ballet school? It comes with a score courtesy of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. [Variety]
Mentors
Dominique Lévy on being a gallerist: “It’s such a man’s world. I recently realized that my mentors were all men, but be assured that today we finally have so many women mentors, too!” [Forbes]
According to the artist Lynda Benglis, she still doesn’t draw much inspiration from other artists. “I got excited about the Grand Canyon once,” she notes instead in a new interview. [Artnet News]