ARTnews in Brief: Leonard Lauder Pens Memoir, John Connelly Leads Santa Barbara City College Gallery, and More from August 23, 2019

Friday, August 23, 2019

John Connelly Will Lead Santa Barbara City College’s Exhibition Space
Former New York dealer John Connelly has been hired as director of the exhibition space of the Santa Barbara City College in California, the Atkinson Gallery. “I am honored to be in this environment where many students are contemplating for the first time embarking on a career in the arts,” Connelly said in an email. Connelly ran his gallery, John Connelly Presents, in Manhattan from 2000 to 2010, and prior to that was a director at Andrea Rosen Gallery. After closing his space, where he showed Justin Samson, Scott Hug, Kim Fisher, and others, he was director of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation in New York from 2010 to 2014. Since then, he’s worked as a curator and consultant, with Santa Barbara as a home base. In his new role, he told me, he wants to introduce students “to important historical movements and artworks while also bringing new work by emerging and established artists to both our campus and greater arts community.” —Andrew Russeth

Thursday, August 22, 2019

‘Time’ Picks Damien Hirst–Designed Las Vegas Suite as One of Its ‘100 Greatest Places’
A hotel suite designed by Damien Hirst that takes up top two floors at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas has made Time magazine’s list of “100 of the World’s Greatest Places.” The one-of-a-kind “Empathy Suite” costs $200,000 for a two-night stay, and features approximately $10 million worth of art by the artist, such as one of his signature sharks in formaldehyde pieces, titled Winner/Loser (2018).

ICA Los Angeles Will Be First Fully Solar-Powered U.S. Museum
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, has launched a 30-day crowdsourcing campaign with Kickstarter Arts to raise $25,000 for the installation of a solar-power system atop its roof. Samuel Vasquez, the ICA’s deputy director, said that it plans to have it installed by the time exhibitions of work by Nayland Blake and Sadie Barnette open at the museum on September 29.

Vasquez said in an interview that the ICA LA’s solar initiative aligns with its socially-engaged programming and purview. “We are a public institution and we have our community’s invested interest and their well-being at the heart of what we do,” he said. “To me, this an extension of that mission. This kind of social awareness has always been part of our DNA.” He said that the effort will make the ICA the first U.S. museum to be 100 percent solar.

The ICA LA will get a partial rebate from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power for the project, which is slated to cost $156,000. Vasquez added that solar power “is part of a much bigger plan” for the museum, and that the endeavor “is not just about going solar, it’s about integrating what going solar means into our operations. We really need to emphasize the fact that this is changing how we view the operations of a museum.” –Claire Selvin

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Noguchi Museum Adds Four to Board
The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens, has added four new trustees to its board: real-estate developer Maximilian Coreth, art-market analyst and co-founder of art/tech company Lobus, Sarah Wendell Sherrill, dealer Sundaram Tagore, and architect and founding partner/creative director of wHY Architecture, Kulapat Yantrasast.

Estate of Karel Appel Heads to Almine Rech
Almine Rech, which has spaces in Paris, New York, Brussels, London, and Shanghai, now represents the estate of the late Dutch artist Karel Appel, who died in 2006 at the age of 85. The gallery will present an exhibition of his work, which spans painting, drawing, and sculpture, in Paris from October 12 through November 16. Appel was born in Amsterdam in 1921 and was a founder of COBRA, the freewheeling European avant-garde movement—its initials stand for Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam—that favored a wildly expressionist, deskilled approach to art-making. He died in 2006 at the age of 85. The Appel estate is also represented by Blum & Poe in New York and Los Angeles, Max Hetzler in Berlin, Jahn & Jahn in Munich, Galerie Lelong Paris, and Galerie Ulysses in Vienna.

Second Season of Alex Israel’s As It Lays 2 Series Now Online in Full
Alex Israel’s latest video series, As It Lays 2, which screened at New York gallery Greene Naftali in collaboration with Reena Spaulings Fine Art earlier this year, is now completely online and available for your viewing pleasure. The program features a deadpan Israel interviewing some of Los Angeles’s finest, from Kris Jenner to Steve Martin to Billy Idol, in front of an Israel vaporwave-style backdrop. The videos are located on a YouTube channel that also includes the first season of the series, shot in 2012. Please enjoy the artist’s Q&A with Goonies star Corey Feldman.

Two Los Angeles Museums Mint Partnership
Aiming to cut costs and ensure their future stability, two small museums in Culver City, California, have put together a plan to share space in a proposed “creative community center,”  a kind of cultural hub that could welcome other nonprofit institutions. The organizations in question are the Wende Museum, which focuses on art and artifacts from the Cold War, and the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum, which is devoted to African-American art, media, and literature. The Wende has led an effort to turn a city-owned building into the creative community center, and invited its former neighbor, MCLM, to join it. The initiative comes after the MCLM was evicted from a building owned by Los Angeles County. Its holdings are currently in storage space provided by West L.A. College.

Palm Springs Art Museum Picks New Chief Curator
Rochelle Steiner has been tapped to be the new chief curator and director of curatorial affairs and programs at the Palm Springs Art Museum in California. Steiner starts on September 3, and comes from the Vancouver Art Gallery, where she worked as associate director and chief curator. In Vancouver, she organized shows of work by artists such as Cindy Sherman and Emily Carr. She previously worked at the University of Southern California as a professor of art and dean of its school of art and design.

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Kamel Lazaar Foundation Picks Kiluanji Kia Henda for Major Commission
The Kamel Lazaar Foundation in London has named Kiluanji Kia Henda the winner of its 2019 sculpture commission, which is presented annually in collaboration with 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. Kia Henda was selected from an applicant pool of more than 100 applicants from 21 different African nations. Her sculpture, The Fortress, which blends modern urban materials with material from desert ruins, will be unveiled on October 3 at the Somerset House in the British capital during the run of 1-54 and Frieze. Kia Henda lives and works between Luanda and Lisbon, and is represented by Goodman Gallery in South Africa.

Monday, August 19, 2019

Künstlerhaus Stuttgart Taps Eric Golo Stone to Be Artistic Director
Eric Golo Stone has been hired as artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart in Germany, and will begin in the new job on January 1, 2020. Stone was a curator at LAXART in Los Angeles from 2013 to 2017 and, last year, organized the exhibition and program “Contractual Situations We Live By” at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, which looked at how—to simplify things dramatically—contemporary artists have been using contracts as part of their practices. “I look forward to building on a history of the Künstlerhaus in which the organizing of policy is realized as deliberate and substantive, restless and unruly, artistic experimentation,” Stone said in a statement. The Künstlerhaus job is a unique one in that leaders are appointed for a fixed term of no more than five years; Stone is following Fatima Hellberg, who has been in the role since 2015.

JTT Gallery in New York Adds Three Artists
Elaine Cameron-Weir, Issy Wood, and Sam McKinniss have joined New York gallery JTT, whose multigenerational roster includes Doreen Garner, Marlon Mullen, Jamian Juliano-Villani, and Diane Simpson.

Cameron-Weir, who makes bewitching, inventive sculptures that channel, in uncanny fashion, the human body and natural environments using everything from slices of copper to giant clamshells, will have a solo show at the Lower East Side space that opens September 8. The New York–based artist has had solo exhibitions at the New Museum in Manhattan and the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, and has shown work with JTT in group shows, fairs, and presentations through the gallery-share program Condo.

McKinniss, meanwhile, has made his name with seductive paintings of potent cultural tropes and moments, from Madonna on the album cover of Ray of Life, to Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl, to Arnold Schwarzenegger astride a motorcycle in Terminator. He had a solo show with Almine Rech in Brussels in January, was in the 2017 JTT show “Dirge,” and has previously shown in New York and Los Angeles with Team Gallery. He’s based in New York, and will have a one-person show at his new gallery that opens February 16, 2020.

Last but not least, the London-based Wood is known for paintings that can be by turns surreal, macabre, and comic. They charm, darkly. She had a one-person show earlier this year at Goldsmiths CCA in the British capital, was in a two-person outing this summer at JTT (with Margaret Wharton), and has been in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and Tate St. Ives in England. Mark your calendars on January 8, 2020, for Wood’s first solo show with JTT. —Andrew Russeth

Red Bull Arts Detroit Details 2020 Artist Residency and Curatorial Fellowship
Artists and curators looking to spend some quality time living and working in Detroit, take note: Red Bull Arts Detroit has announced details for its 2020 artist residency and curatorial fellowship. The residency will now last two months, instead of the previous three, a shift the organization characterized as an effort to make it more manageable for participants. Additionally, residency terms will no longer culminate with an exhibition of work by the artists-in-residence. Instead, the Red Bull Arts team will curate public exhibitions in the gallery. The curatorial fellow will receive a $5,000 unrestricted stipend and a $15,000 budget for an exhibition. The selection committee, which will choose nine artists-in-residence and one curatorial fellow, includes the artist, writer, and curator Michelle Grabner; Legacy Russell, artist, writer, and associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem; 2018 Red Bull Arts Detroit artist-in-residence Joiri Minaya; and art historian and theorist Michael Stone-Richards. Applications are due September 30.

Moody Center for the Arts Appoints Two Associate Curators
The Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston has named Ylinka Barotto and Frauke V. Josenhans associate curators. Barotto previously served as assistant curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and Josenhans was formerly associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. Alison Weaver, executive director of the Moody Center, said in a statement, “We’re looking forward to the creative contributions these two talented women will make in support of the Moody’s mission to foster interdisciplinary conversation through the arts.”