©SUCCESSION H. MATISSE AND ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/THE BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART, THE CONE COLLECTION, 1950
Friday, July 26, 2019
Martos Gallery Adds Raque Ford to Roster
New York’s Martos Gallery now represents the Brooklyn-based artist Raque Ford, who will have a solo show at the gallery next year. Ford works mainly in painting and sculpture—disciplines she often blurs together to create 3D pieces that look at questions of female identity. She’s had solo shows at 321 Gallery in Brooklyn, Capital in San Francisco, Species in Atlanta, and elsewhere.
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Los Angeles Department of Arts and Culture Awards $5.5 Million in Funding for 2019
Los Angeles’s Department of Arts and Culture announced it has awarded $5.5 million in funding for 2019. Some $4.5 million of that sum was designated for two-year grants to 213 nonprofit arts organizations through a county-funded Organizational Grant Program (OGP). The remaining $922,000 has gone to 47 L.A. county school districts funded through an Arts Education Collective Advancement Grant Program.
Denver Art Museum Names New Assistant Curator in Native Arts Department
The Denver Art Museum has named Dakota Hoska as a new assistant curator with the Native Arts department. She begins with the museum July 31, following her time as a curatorial assistant in the Arts of Africa and the Americas department at the Minneapolis Museum of Art, where she worked on the major traveling exhibition “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists.” At DAM, she will assist with the museum’s reinstallation of its permanent Native arts collection. In a statement, Hoska said, “I appreciate DAM’s commitment to the collection of Native art, both historical and contemporary, and I look forward to stewarding and growing this collection, hoping it will serve as a great source of inspiration and strength for Native people today and into the future.”
Westport Arts Center Rebrands
The Westport Arts Center in Connecticut will become MoCA Westport when it opens its new space at 19 Newton Turnpike on September 22. Along with a new name, the nonprofit will present two works by Yayoi Kusama this fall, including one of the artist’s “Infinity Mirror Rooms.” Amanda Innes, the institution’s executive director, said in a statement, “To be able to expose the next generation to the quality of artists we have in mind, is a game changer. And it seemed like a natural evolution for us to claim that stake for Westport.”
A Center for Matisse Studies in Baltimore
The Baltimore Museum of Art has received a $5 million gift from the Ruth Carol Fund to support the establishment of the Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies, which will provide opportunities for research, symposia, and exhibitions surrounding the artist’s life and work. Ruth R. Marder was a Baltimore-based philanthropist who served on the BMA Council. In 2004, she created the Ruth Carol Fund for causes important to her. The center is scheduled to open in 2021 with a presentation culled from the BMA’s collection of over 1,200 pieces by Matisse.
DAVID HEALD
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Guggenheim Will Start Photography Conservation Fellowship
The Guggenheim Museum in New York has received an endowment from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to fund a conservation fellowship for photography at the museum. Fellows will use the museum’s photography collection for research, as well as work to preserve it. Additionally, the endowment will allow for a three-year interdisciplinary project, called the Robert Mapplethorpe Collection Research Initiative focused on the museum’s holdings of the late photographer’s work, acquired as part of a gift from the artist in 1993 along with $2 million in funds. The Guggenheim is currently hosting a two-part, year-long retrospective of his, titled “Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now.”
Wallace Foundation Taps New Director of Research
New York’s Wallace Foundation has named Bronwyn Bevan as its new director of research. Bevan begins his role on August 19, after serving as University of Washington Seattle’s senior research scientist in the college of education. He succeeds Edward Pauly, who retired earlier this summer.
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
A New Artist in Residence at Ikon Gallery
The Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, has named Dean Kelland, an artist from the area, as its new artist in residence. Kelland will work with the HMP Grendon, a local prison, for the next three years to create work alongside the incarcerated community that will ultimately be showed in exhibition at HMP Grendon yearly. The residency will also include public programming that will look at art’s relationship to the criminal justice system.
Seattle Art Fair Renews Museum Acquisition Fund
For the second year in a row, the Seattle Art Fair will offer the city’s Frye Art Museum a $25,000 budget for purchasing works on view in the show. At last year’s fair, the museum used the funds to buy works by Toyin Ojih Odutola and Ellen Lesperance. The fair runs August 1 through 4 this year.
Warhol Foundation Names Spring 2019 Research Fellows
The Andy Warhol Foundation in New York will award $224,000 in spring research grants this year, with fellows receiving up to $50,000 each. Funds will support research by curators Peter S. Briggs (of the Museum of Texas Tech University), Jaime DeSimone (Portland Museum of Art in Maine); Polly Nordstrand (Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College); Catherine Taft (LAXART in Los Angeles); and Olga Viso (El Museo del Barrio). Joel Wachs, the foundation’s president, said in a statement, “Each of these curators will explore important, previously unexamined work by experimental artists and forgotten movements. Their projects will introduce new perspectives and approaches to exhibition making while also influencing the field of contemporary art scholarship.”
NIC BOTHMA/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
Monday, July 22, 2019
A $10 M. Gift for the Worcester Art Museum
The Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts has received a $10 million donation from the C. Jean & Myles McDonough Charitable Foundation, the largest single donation in the institution’s history. In 2015, the foundation gave the museum a $4 million endowment gift for its directorship. Matthias Waschek, WAM’s director, said in a statement that the gift “reflects Jean’s lifelong devotion to the museum, which she describes as her second home. For years, she served as a forward-thinking trustee and as a docent extraordinaire, who introduced thousands of school children to the museum collection.”
CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain Bordeaux Gets New Director
The CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporarin Bordeaux in France has picked Sandra Patron as its new director. Patron is currently the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sérignan, France, and she will start in her new position in September. She fills a position that has been open for about a year, after Maria Inés Rodriguez, the museum’s former head, was fired, sparking controversy.
Zeitz MOCAA Makes Two Curatorial Appointments
The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town has hired Storm Janse van Rensburg as senior curator and promoted Tandazani Dhlakama to the position of assistant curator. Janse van Rensburg most recently served as head curator of exhibitions at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, and he has curated shows elsewhere in the United States, South Africa, and Germany. Dhlakama, who joined Zeitz MOCAA in 2017, has worked as education manager at the museum’s Centre for Art Education.