ARTnews In Brief: Hispanic Society Museum & Library to Develop New Architectural Plan, Christie’s to Host Aperture Fundraiser, and More from August 30, 2019

Friday, August 30, 2019

Christie’s to Host Aperture Fundraising Auction
On October 2, Christie’s in New York will host an auction to benefit the photography-focused Aperture Foundation, featuring 54 works that have all been donated by artists, collectors, and dealers, with a total estimate of $750,000. The proceeds from the sale, which includes work by artists such as Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, and Hank Willis Thomas, will support Aperture’s capital campaign for its upcoming move to a new space in Manhattan. First announced at the enterprise’s gala in June, it is not yet known where Aperture, which is currently based in Chelsea, is headed. The foundation said earlier in the summer that its aim is to find a location that provide “a flexible meeting, education, and event space” and supports its publishing operation.

Hispanic Society Museum & Library Picks Selldorf Architects to Develop New Architectural Plan
The Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York has selected a team to create a strategic architectural plan for its forthcoming renovation project. Selldorf Architects will serve as the initiative’s design architects, Beyer Blinder Belle will act as its executive architects, and Reed Hilderbrand will be its landscape architects. Through the project, the museum’s buildings, galleries, and Audubon Terrace will be restored. Mitchell Codding, the executive director of the Hispanic Society, said in a statement, “The Hispanic Society’s mission is of ever-increasing importance to the growing Hispanic and Latino communities in the U.S. It is imperative that we upgrade our facilities so that visitors can fully appreciate the breadth, depth, and quality of this world-renowned collection.”

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Harmony Hammond Retrospective Will Travel to Florida
After its well-received debut earlier this year at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield Connecticut, Harmony Hammond’s career retrospective, “Material Witness, Five Decades of Art,” will head to Florida. As part of its inaugural year of programming, the Sarasota Museum of Art will open the show, which tracks Hammond’s five decades of art, activism, and writing that champions the lives and lived realities of queer women, in March. In an interview with ARTnews about the exhibition, Hammond said, “Exhibitions allow us to physically occupy space, so we are visible to queer and non-queer folks alike. I’ve always been engaged with voices and forces that have been buried, or covered up, and assert themselves from underneath the surface of things.” —Maximilíano Durón

American Folk Art Museum Names New Curator
Emelie Gevalt will be the American Folk Art Museum’s new curator of folk art, replacing veteran curator Stacy C. Hollander who stepped down in June after over 30 years at the New York museum. Gevalt, who will begin at AFAM in November, was previously a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she was involved in organizing a collection show called “Collecting Stories: The Invention of Folk Art” that will open next May. She previously worked at Christie’s New York and in the management of a private collection in New York. “Emelie Gevalt is a leader in a generation of curators who are shifting the field of folk art with impressive intellectual rigor and boundless curiosity in connections between the past and present,” AFAM’s director, Jason T. Busch, said in a statement.

Istanbul’s Galerist Space Adds Four to Roster
The Istanbul-based enterprise Galerist now represents artists Nilbar Güreş, Nuri Kuzucan, Şahin Kaygun, and Yeşim Akdeniz. Güreş’s practice spans performance, video, sculpture, installation, and mixed media collage, and her work often examines social injustices, gender roles, and cultural identity. In his paintings of landscapes and cityscapes, Kuzucan grapples with the isolating effects of modernity. Kaygun, who died in 1992, combined photography, graphic arts, filmmaking, and painting in his work. And Akdeniz, who had her first solo show at Galerist in 2005, is a professor of painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Howardena Pindell Wins 2019 Artist Award
Howardena Pindell has been named the recipient of the 2019 Artist Award, an annual prize given by the Artists’ Legacy Foundation in Oakland, California, that comes with $25,000 in unrestricted funds. The first African-American woman to receive an MFA from Yale University, in 1967, Pindell was recently the subject of a widely lauded traveling retrospective that opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago last year. Her trailblazing work spans across mediums like collage, painting, performance, film, and photography. She was selected by a jury including artists Greg Colson, T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, and Melissa Meyer. Previous winners of the award include Nancy Chunn, Peter Saul, and Dona Nelson.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Palais de Tokyo Curator Heads to Paris’s Lafayette Anticipations
Starting October 1, Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel will be managing director of Lafayette Anticipations, a Rem Koolhaas–designed multidisciplinary art space that opened in Paris last year. The news comes as Lamarche-Vadel, who is currently a curator at the Palais de Tokyo museum in Paris, prepares to organize the forthcoming edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art. Before becoming a curator at the Palais de Tokyo, she held positions at the French Ministry of Culture and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. —Alex Greenberger

Chambers Fine Art Leaves Chelsea
After almost 20 years on West 19th Street in Chelsea, the gallery Chambers Fine Art will decamp from the neighborhood, opting for two spaces elsewhere in Manhattan. Chambers will open a by-appointment viewing space in Greenwich Village in November, and early next year, it will open a new exhibition space in the Lower East Side. The latter location, on Rivington Street, will include a project space and will focus on presenting new work by emerging artists as well as solo shows for mid-career artists. The gallery’s roster includes Ai Weiwei, Cao Yi, Lu Shengzhong, Pixy Liao, Shi Jing, Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen, and Zhao Zhao. Chambers will continue to maintain its gallery in Beijing and its Ai Weiwei–designed Artfarm in Upstate New York. —Maximilíano Durón

Philadelphia Museum of Art to Change Admission Prices this Fall
On October 1, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will adopt new admission fees for general admission tickets, which offer visitors two-day access to the museum as well as the nearby Rodin Museum and the Fairmount Park houses. Admission for adults will increase from $20 to $25, and seniors, who previously paid $18, will now be charged $23. Students will still pay $14 for tickets, and free admission, which was formerly offered to visitors 12 and under, will be extended to individuals up to 18 years old.

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Dallas Museum of Art Names First Latin American Art Curator
After receiving a gift from Jorge Baldor, the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas has established a curatorial position for Latin American art. The first person to fill that position will be Mark A. Castro, who recently served as a consulting curator for Latin American art for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he organized a landmark survey of Mexican modernism in 2016. He begins at the DMA on September 3.

Rose Art Museum Taps New Director of Development
The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts has named Marie A. Longo as its new director of development and external relations. Longo joins the museum after twenty years of working in development, most recently as the chief advancement officer at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick, Massachusetts.

Munich Gallery Share Program Details 2019 Edition
Various Others, a gallery share program in Munich, has revealed the list of participants in its 2019 edition. Among the out-of-town outfits set to show their wares in Germany are Gavin Brown’s Enterprise (of New York and Rome), Hollybush Gardens (London), and MX Gallery (New York). Their host will include Munich-based galleries like Deborah Schamoni, Barbara Gross Galerie, and Galerie Christian Mayer. (A full list of participants is available on the program’s website.) In addition to the gallery offerings, museums such as Haus der Kunst and the Museum Brandhorst will stage exhibitions and other events.

Goodman Gallery Names Director for New London Space
Ahead of opening in London in October, South Africa–based Goodman Gallery named a director for its new space: Emma Menell. Previously, Menell served as the founding director of London’s Tyburn Gallery, which, like Goodman, specializes in African art. Goodman Gallery, which also has spaces in Cape Town and Johannesburg, will open its London outpost on October 3; its British gallery is its first outside Africa.

Monday, August 26, 2019

Virgil Abloh Releases Special Merchandise for MCA Chicago Show
Grab your checkbooks, Virgil Abloh fans. The designer is offering three new handbags for sale in a pop-up shop that accompanies his first museum exhibition, “Figures of Speech,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and they are extreme limited editions. Only six Caravaggio Bags—printed with the Old Master’s The Entombment of Christ (1603–04)—are available at $1,275 a pop; an extra-large version comes in an edition of three and its price tag is $3,445. The final bag, white with an orange abstract print, is also an edition of six marked at $1,275. The show runs through September 29; the new merchandise will presumably run out much sooner.

Matthew Barney’s Latest Film to Screen Theatrically in New York
The latest film from artist Matthew Barney, which debuted at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, earlier this year, is getting a theatrical release in New York. Redoubt is set to show at Film Forum courtesy of Grasshopper Films, which has built its reputation on distributing under-the-radar, critically acclaimed festival darlings. Barney’s work focuses loosely on histories of violence and the American landscape and is also set to go on view at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in September. Mercifully, as opposed to other Barney works, like the six-and-a-half-hour “Cremaster Cycle” and the nearly-six-hour River of Fundament, the work clocks in at a manageable two hours. —Alex Greenberger

Barnes Foundation to Expand Virtual Reality Programming
With funding from the Philadelphia-based organization the Barra Foundation, the Barnes Foundation will expand its virtual reality programming. The initiative’s first phase launched in 2017 in collaboration with the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the inaugural project involved bringing VR headsets to five local libraries, which were programmed with a virtual tour of the Barnes’s art galleries. Those who used the headsets were given an Art for All Community Pass, which offers free admission to the Barnes for one year. The Barnes’s VR projects will now appear at 62 sites across Philadelphia, including senior centers, public parks, and recreation centers.