ARTnews in Brief: Four U.S. Museums Acquire Works from Souls Grown Deep—and More from November 15, 2019

Friday, November 15, 2019

Four U.S. Museums Acquire Works from Souls Grown Deep
The Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland, the Asheville Art Museum in North Carolina, the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, and the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle, have added works from the Atlanta-based foundation Souls Grown Deep to their collections. The Asheville Art Museum will receive sculptural pieces by Joe Minter, Ralph Griffin, and Aaron Jesse, as well as a quilt by Amelia Bennett. Pending its formal acquisition process and board approval, the BMA will get 21 works by Purvis Young, Mary T. Smith, Lucy T. Pettway, and others. Headed to the Henry Art Gallery is Mary Louise Bennett’s “Housetop” quilt, which will go on view in fall 2020, and the Toledo Museum of Art will acquire 10 works, including five Gee’s Bend quilts and pieces by Thornton Dial, Richard Dial, and Thornton Dial Junior. Souls Grown Deep serves to place artworks by African American artists from the Southern United States in the permanent collections of museums around the world through a combination of gift and purchase agreements. The foundation has now added over 375 works by more than 100 artists to 20 international institutions. Maxwell L. Anderson, president of Souls Grown Deep, said in a statement, “Having these artists and their stories represented in major collections is crucial to a full and nuanced understanding of the art historical canon.”

2019 Sobey Art Award Announces Winner
Stephanie Comilang is the recipient of the 2019 Sobey Art Award, which comes with $100,000 CAD (about $76,000) and is given annually to a Canada-based artist age 40 or younger. The artist’s filmic and video work, which examine notions of class mobility, labor, and capital, have been shown at the Ghost:2561 triennial in Bangkok, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Asia Art Archive in America in New York, and other venues. The finalists for the award, who will each get $25,000 CAD (about $19,000), are Nicolas Grenier, Kablusiak, Anne Low, and D’Arcy Wilson. Twenty-five long-listed artists will each receive $2,000 CAD (about $1,500).

Carnegie Museums Name New President
Steven Knapp will join the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh—which comprise the Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Science Center, and the Andy Warhol Museum—as the institution’s 11th president in February. Knapp is president emeritus of the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he is a professor of English. At GW, Knapp oversaw the university’s collaboration with the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Gallery of Art and its partnership with the Textile Museum. He has previously served as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Kaari Upson Joins White Cube
The gallery White Cube, which has outposts in London and Hong Kong and an office in New York, now represents Los Angeles–based artist Kaari Upson. Upson’s work, which spans sculpture, video, painting, and performance, often explores themes of physicality, memory, and the lingering effects of psychological trauma. Her best-known work is the ongoing series The Larry Project, begun in 2003, which was shown at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2008. For the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the artist contributed soft sculptures that took the form of various types of furniture. And at this summer’s Venice Biennale, she presented THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OUTSIDE (2017–19), a towering sculpture and video installation in the likeness of a miniature dollhouse. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, among other U.S. institutions.

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Madrid Art Fair ARCOmadrid Announces 2020 Exhibitor List
Some 210 galleries from 30 countries will appear in the 2020 edition of the contemporary art fair ARCOmadrid, led by first-time director Maribel Lopez. The 39th iteration of the event, which will take place at Feria de Madrid, is scheduled to run from Feb 26 to March 1. Among the exhibitors returning to the fair include Perrotin (Paris, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Shanghai), Hauser & Wirth (New York, Los Angeles, London, Hong Kong, Zurich, Somerset, Menorca, Gstaad, and St. Moritz), Thaddaeus Ropac (Salzburg, Paris, Paris, and London). First-time participants in ARCOmadrid include Art Nueve (Madrid), Krakow Witkin Gallery (Krakow), and Anglim Gilbert Gallery (San Francisco).

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Pérez Family Foundation Names Inaugural CreARTE Grantees
The family foundation for ARTnews Top 200 Collector Jorge M. Pérez has named the 23 Miami-based organizations that will receive grants to promote arts and culture across South Florida. Pérez initially announced in May that he would establish the CreARTE Grants Program, which he said would give $1 million in art-related grants each year through an open-call program. (It wound up awarding $2 million in grants.) Among the awardees are Oolite Arts, which received $50,000 in support of its residency program; Fountainhead Residency Inc., which got $75,000; the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, which will receive $100,000 to create a new campus in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood; and the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County, which received $200,000, the largest sum given to any of the grantees. In a statement, Pérez said, “The funds distributed will have far reaching effects, supporting initiatives, ranging from artist residencies to writing fellowships to physical spaces for creation, and we cannot wait to experience the powerful results.”

Allison Janae Hamilton Joins Marianne Boesky Gallery
Marianne Boesky Gallery of New York and Aspen now represents Allison Janae Hamilton. The gallery will include work by Hamilton in its presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach in December, and it will present a solo show by the artist at one of its Chelsea locations in fall 2020. Through installation, sculpture, photography, and video, she explores histories, mythologies, and the changing characteristics of physical landscapes and waterways, especially in the American South, mining socioeconomic and political issues that define the current moment. Often incorporating natural materials like wood and found animal hides in her pieces, Hamilton has previously exhibited at MASS MoCA, MoMA PS1, the Storm King Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and other institutions. “I’m always thinking about the actual materials of land as a storyteller,” the artist has said. “For me, the work is not about the South; it’s about looking at the land as a way to try to understand where we are now.”

Artists Njideka Akunyili Crosby and John Edmonds Named on Time 100 Next List
TIME magazine’s TIME 100 is typically considered to be the definite list of the people who have had the most impact in various sectors in a given year. Now the magazine has expanded that brand with the TIME 100 Next. While the magazine identifies the honorees as “rising stars,” those named this year range in age from 14 to 44. Two artists made the cut: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, who was included in the main exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale, “May You Live In Interesting Times,” and John Edmonds, whose photographs were among the biggest surprises in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Edmonds also recently won the Brooklyn Museum’s UOVO Prize, which comes with a solo show at the museum next year. Other high profile honorees include Pete Buttigieg, Awkwafina, Camila Cabello, Lil Nas X, Kwame Onwuachi, Mj Rodriguez, D.J. “Shangela” Pierce, and Jeremy O. Harris. The full list is available here.

The Met Elects New Honorary Trustee
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has named a new honorary trustee, Nita Ambani, who is the founder of the Mumbai-based nonprofit Reliance Foundation. Through the foundation, which funds programs in urban renewal, rural transformation, health, and education throughout India, Ambani provided major funding to the Met’s 2016 retrospective of Nasreen Mohamedi, the first for the artist in the United States. She has also given money to support the mounting of other exhibitions that explore art from India, including solo shows for Raghubir Singh and Mrinalini Mukherjee and the just-opened “Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 B.C.–A.D. 400.” In a statement, the board’s chairman, Daniel Brodsky, said, “Mrs. Ambani’s commitment to the Met and to preserving and promoting India’s art and culture is truly exceptional. Her support has an enormous impact on the museum’s ability to study and display art from every corner of the world.”

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

A Giorno Tribute at Gladstone
When the artist John Giorno died last month at the age of 82, New York lost one of its great poets, performers, and organizers, and one whose involvement in the city’s art worlds stretched back more than half a century. Now his husband, Ugo Rondinone, is planning a memorial exhibition to his longtime partner at Gladstone Gallery in New York. Opening November 23 at Gladstone’s West 21st Street in Manhattan, it will showcase Rondinone’s large-scale video portrait of Giorno, thanx 4 nothing (2015). The piece focuses on the poet as he recites a poem on his 70th birthday, back in 2006, which touches on his friends, his life, his psyche, and a great deal more. The text, which provided the video’s name, begins, “I want to give my thanks to everyone for everything, / and as a token of my appreciation, / I want to offer back to you all my good and bad habits / as magnificent priceless jewels, / wish-fulfilling gems satisfying everything you need and want, / thank you, thank you, thank you, / thanks.” —Andrew Russeth

Phillips Appoints New International Specialist, Modern and Postwar, Paris
Thibault Stockmann will join Phillips as an international specialist in modern and postwar based in Paris. Stockmann spent a decade at Christie’s, specializing in Impressionist and modern art while working in Belgium. He moved to Christie’s Paris in 2016, working with Clara Rivollet, who is now a specialist in 20th-century and contemporary art at Phillips. “Thibault’s expertise and deep relationships with collectors will add even greater depth to Phillips’ growing presence in France,” said Jean-Paul Engelen and Robert Manley, worldwide co-heads of 20th century and contemporary Art, in a statement.

Bangkok Art Biennale Reveals Partial Artist List
The Bangkok Art Biennale has named 16 international artists who will participate in its second edition, which will open in the Thai capital on October 10, 2020. The first group announced includes Anish Kapoor, Dinh Q. Lê, Leandro Erlich, Julia Fullerton-Batten, Thanet Aowsinsiri, and Lu Yang. The presentation’s theme will be “Escape Routes,” with a focus on environmental, social, and political issues. The artists “will offer art practice as mind escapism where meditation, contemplation, ritualism, healing, and performance become the essence of hope and optimism,” Apinan Poshyanada, artistic director of the exhibition, said in a statement. The biennale’s curatorial team includes Sook-Kyung Lee, senior curator of international art at the Tate Modern in London; Wutigorn Kongka, assistant professor in the departments of architecture and fine art at King’s Mongkut Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in Bangkok; and Ong Puay Khim, former deputy director of curatorial programs at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

Mohamed Bourouissa Wins Top Photography Prize
Artist Mohamed Bourouissa is the 2019 winner of the Deutsche Börse Prize, one of the world’s most esteemed photography awards, which comes with £30,000 (about $36,000). Bourouissa, who figured in the first New Museum Triennial, “Younger Than Jesus,” in 2009, is best known for images of African-Americans that subvert traditional images of cowboys, some of which were on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris last year. Bourouissa was shortlisted for this year’s award alongside Anton Kusters, Mark Neville, and Clare Strand.

ICA VCU Names Inaugural Research Fellows
The Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond has named its inaugural research fellows: artists Paul Rucker and Nontsikelelo Mutiti. Rucker will oversee an initiative focused on race and the arts and facilitate a dialogue series, and Mutiti will work on publications for the museum. The museum also named two new curatorial appointments. Egbert Vongmalaithong, the museum’s current retail manager, will now be its assistant curator for commerce and publications, and Amber Esseiva, an assistant curator, has been promoted to associate curator.

Monday, November 11, 2019

National Gallery Launches Campaign to Purchase Orazio Gentileschi Work
The National Gallery in London is seeking donations to help raise the last £2 million (about $2.5 million) needed to buy Orazio Gentileschi‘s painting The Finding of Moses (ca. 1630), which has been on long-term loan to the museum from a private collection for nearly 20 years. The work is one of several pieces painted by Gentileschi during his 12-year residence in London at the court of King Charles I. The full cost of The Finding of Moses is £22 million (about $28.2 million), though the net cost to the National Gallery is £19.5 million (about $25 million) by a private treaty sale arranged through Sotheby’s and Pyms Gallery. According to a release, the institution has until the end of the year to buy the painting, or “it may be lost to the nation.” Donations can be made via the museum’s website, over the phone, and checks sent in the mail.

Prix de Rome Names 2019 Winner
Artist Rory Pilgrim has won the 2019 Prix de Rome, which comes with €40,000 (about $44,100) and a residency at the American Academy in Rome. Pilgrim, who lives and works in Rotterdam, makes films, performances, music, drawings, and more that have focused on activism and social change. He received the award for his film The Undercurrent (2019–ongoing), which focuses on the lives of a group of young people in Boise, Idaho, and examines notions of sanctuary. Other nominees for the prize included Esiri Erheriene-Essi, Femke Herregraven, and the duo Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen. The finalists’ work will figure in an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.