ARTnews in Brief: Pérez Art Museum Miami Launches Caribbean Cultural Institute Fellowship—and More from December 4, 2020

Friday, December 4

Pérez Art Museum Miami Launches Caribbean Cultural Institute Fellowship
The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) has launched the Caribbean Cultural Institute Fellowship, a new initiative intended to produce new scholarship on Caribbean art while also providing opportunities for cultural exchange between artists, researchers, and curators in the Caribbean with those its diaspora. The recipients of the inaugural CCI Fellowship are artist Ronald Cyrille in collaboration with Mémorial Acte in Guadeloupe, and researcher Julián Sánchez-González. Cyrille, whose practice spans paintings, drawings, and sculptures, will develop a new body of work from a studio in Guadeloupe. Sánchez-González’s fellowship is composed of a virtual residency in Bogotá, as well as a research visit to Miami centered on art and spiritualities in the Caribbean.

Art21 Receives Major Gift from Agnes Gund
The nonprofit Art21, which recently released the 10th season of its documentary series Art in the Twenty-First Century, has received a major gift from arts patron and philanthropist Agnes Gund, who has appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. The gift will endow the organization’s executive director position, which will be renamed in honor of its late founder Susan Sollins.

Bark Frameworks Inc. Names New CEO
Susan Greenberg Fisher, who has previously served as director of collections and curatorial affairs at the Brooklyn Museum and executive director of the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation, has been named CEO of Bark Frameworks Inc., an art services and manufacturing company based in Long Island City, New York. In her new post, Fisher will expand the company’s new art services division, which includes art installation, crating, and storage.

Thursday, December 3

New Prize for Latin American Female Artists Names Inaugural Winner
Voluspa Jarpa has won the first Julius Baer Art Prize for Latin American Female Artists, a biennial prize established by the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá (MAMBO) and the Swiss wealth management group Julius Baer. Jarpa will receive a $25,000 cash prize and will open an exhibition at MAMBO in July 2021. The artist was selected from a shortlist that included artists Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, Sandra Monterroso, Rosângela Rennó, and Mariela Scafati.

Pérez Art Museum Miami Appoints Three Trustees
Roger Ballou, Jim Bildner, and Kimberly Marshall have joined the Pérez Art Museum Miami‘s board of trustees. Ballou is a retired investor who formerly served as president of CDI corporation and has worked with Thayer Capital Partners. Bildner is CEO of the philanthropy firm Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation​, and he is also an adjunct lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School.  Marshall is an investor and advisor currently working with Goldman Sachs on their Launch With GS investing strategy, and she is also a founding board member of Black Angels Miami.

The Norton Museum of Art Names New Director and CEO
The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, has named Ghislain d’Humières as its next director and CEO. D’Humières has previously served as the director and CEO of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, director and chief curator of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma, and assistant director of the de Young Museum in San Francisco. He will assume his post in January.

David Kordansky Gallery Now Represents Tobias Pils
Tobias Pils, who is known for his mixed-media paintings featuring complex combinations of abstracted figures, has joined David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, where he will have his first solo exhibition in November 2021. Additionally, a new work by the Vienna-based artist will debut in an online presentation by the gallery in January 2021. Pils’s work can be found in the collections of the Albertina in Vienna, the Kunstmuseum Bonn in Germany, and other institutions.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash Now Represents Gideon Appah
Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York has added Accra-based painter Gideon Appah to its roster. Appah has exhibited at institutions including Casa Barragán in Mexico City and Gallery1957 in Accra, Ghana. His work is held in the collection of the Absa Museum in Johannesburg and the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden in Marrakesh, Morocco, among elsewhere. “Blue Boys Blues,” Appah’s first solo show with the gallery, is currently on view through December 5. Mitchell-Innes & Nash director Courtney Willis Blair said in a statement, “When I first encountered [Appah’s] work on a trip to Accra, I was eager to see more,” adding that his “attention to texture, color, and perspective mirrors his ambitious approach to showcasing Ghanian life in myriad ways and makes way for his very compelling vision.”

König Galerie Now Represents Basim Magdy
König Galerie in Berlin now represents Egyptian artist Basim Magdy. Trained as a painter, Magdy’s practice now spans paper, film, photography, and installation. His work often centers psychedelic dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives which explore themes such as the subjective readings of history, racism, and nationalism. Magdy has exhibited widely internationally, and his works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim in New York, and the MCA Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.

Wednesday, December 2

Almine Rech Now Represents Marcus Jansen
Almine Rech now represents New York–based artist Marcus Jansen in Europe, the United Kingdom, and Asia, and the artist will have his inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery at its Paris outpost in January 2021. Almine Rech will also work with the artist in the United States in collaboration with Richard Beavers Gallery in Brooklyn, which has represented Jansen since 2007. Jansen is best known for his paintings of post-apocalyptic landscapes and urban environments and for his 2012 “Faceless” series of portraits focused on governance and exercises of political power.

Embajada Adds Two Artists to Roster
The San Juan–based gallery Embajada now represents the artist duo ASMA and artist Ramades “Juni” Figueroa. ASMA, which includes artists Matias Armendaris and Hanya Belia, is known for works incorporating a variety of materials and exploring notions of exchange. Figueroa, whose work figured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York and is this year’s winner of Artissima’s illy Present Future Prize, is known for his paintings, sculptures, and installations focused on life in Puerto Rico, where he was born and is based.

Tuesday, December 1

Baseera Khan Wins Brooklyn Museum’s Uovo Prize
The Brooklyn Museum has awarded Baseera Khan its second annual Uovo Prize, which honors the work of emerging Brooklyn-based artists. Khan’s practice centers narratives of colonial history, surveillance, and xenophobia through performance and sculpture. They will receive a solo exhibition at the museum, a commission for a public art installation on the façade of Uovo’s storage facility in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, and a $25,000 unrestricted cash grant. The public installation and museum exhibition, the artist’s first solo show, will debut in fall 2021.

Director and CEO of Aga Khan Museum Steps Down
Henry Kim, who has served as director and CEO of the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto for eight years, has stepped down from the position. Having joined the institution in 2012, Kim oversaw the completion of the construction of the museum and the organizing of exhibitions including “A Garden of Ideas: Contemporary Art from Pakistan” (2014), “Syria: A Living History” (2016), and others. Ulrike Al-Khamis, director of collections and public programs at the museum, has been named interim director and CEO.

Monday, November 30

Pace Gallery Now Represents Robert Nava
Robert Nava, a young painter known for his figurations focused on mythology, has joined the roster of Pace Gallery, which has locations in New York, London, Hong Kong, Seoul, Geneva, and Palo Alto, as well as pop-ups in East Hampton and Palm Beach. Nava’s paintings of winged horses, hybrid beasts, and carnage have been shown at Vito Schnabel Gallery (St. Moritz, Switzerland, and New York), Night Gallery (Los Angeles), and Sorry We’re Closed (Brussels), all of whom will continue to represent him, and his work will be featured in Pace’s Art Basel Miami Beach viewing room this week. “Robert Nava’s work reveals a new contemporary mythology,” Pace Gallery president and CEO Marc Glimcher said in a statement.

Kohn Gallery & P.P.O.W Gallery Now Represent Chiffon Thomas
Kohn Gallery (Los Angeles) and P.P.O.W Gallery (New York) will now co-represent Chiffon Thomas. Thomas’s interdisciplinary practice centers around embroidery. With their fabric works, painted canvases, and photographs, they offer intimate scenes featuring families. This week, P.P.O.W will present new work by Thomas at Art Basel Miami Beach’s online viewing room, and in March, Kohn will host its first solo exhibition with the artist.

European Cultural Manager of the Year Award Names 2020 Recipients
Yvette Mutumba and Julia Grosse, founders and artistic directors of the Berlin-based multimedia arts platform Contemporary And (C&), have received the European Cultural Manager of the Year Award for 2020. Mutumba is a lecturer at the Institute of Art in Context, University of Arts in Berlin, and she is curator-at-large at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Grosse is an art historian, journalist, and lecturer at the Institute for Art in Context at the University of the Arts in Berlin.