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The Headlines
THE WAR IN UKRAINE. Even as fighting continues, the Lviv National Art Gallery has reopened some of its 18 branches in western Ukraine, the New York Times reports. “Putin now has the goal of turning Ukrainians into nobody, into nothing,” director Taras Voznyak said, explaining that the move was “to show that we are alive.” Many works remain hidden in secure locations, but Voznyak said that he may bring the institution’s main space back into operation in June. Meanwhile, Oleksandra Kovalchuk, the Odesa Fine Arts Museum acting director, fled to Boston and has been helping coordinate efforts to safeguard collections back home, the Boston Globe reports. “We are a young country that is only now coming to realize who we are and what we want,” she said. “It kills me that right now we are standing on this edge of existence.”
Related Articles
ARTIST TALKS. Sculptor Lauren Halsey, who has the inaugural show at Los Angeles dealer David Kordansky’s new New York gallery, is in the New York Times. Tied to a show of her sharp-witted collages at the San José Museum of Art in California, Jean Conner is in the San Francisco Chronicle, which asks, “How could an extraordinary artist working alongside a famous San Francisco art group fly under the radar for six decades?” And Jonny Banger chatted in the Guardian with Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and fellow artist Jeremy Deller, who proposed that being an artist means “trying to make sense of things around you that you’re not happy about or that confuse you.”
The Digest
Young Chinese collectors are becoming increasingly powerful players in the art and collectible market, according to experts. “They’ve only known an upwardly trending market, so they’re fearless,” according to collector Mark Cho, 38, who lives between Hong Kong, London, and New York. [The Wall Street Journal]
Ping Lin, who stepped down as director of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in early 2021, has been named director of the Taiwan Fine Arts Foundation, which promotes the nation’s artists and runs a program that rents artworks to various entities. [ArtAsiaPacific]
After 16 years at the helm of the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, Rob Sidner is retiring. Jessica Hanson York, the institution’s deputy director and chief advancement officer, will take his place. [The San Diego Union-Tribune]
The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, just opened a show that marks the centennial of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., with artworks and multimedia displays featuring the president’s statue. That statue’s sculptor, Daniel Chester French, worked in Stockbridge. [Associated Press]
The redoubtable New York gallery Canada, whose roster includes Matt Connors and Xylor Jane, is opening a branch out in East Hampton in the same building as Jack Hanley’s space there. It is also adding a gallery across from its current Tribeca home. [Vanity Fair]
A Maud Lewis painting that an artist once traded for meals at a restaurant in London, Ontario, is expected to fetch around $27,000 on the block this month. [The Guardian]
The Kicker
ON THE BLOCK. In the Los Angeles Times, art critic Christopher Knight slammed the Toledo Museum of Art’s plan to sell three works—by Cézanne, Renoir, and Matisse—at Sotheby’s this month to grow its acquisitions endowment and diversify its holdings. “The museum is turning its celebrated art collection into a market-timed piggybank to pay for essential structural change,” Knight writes. The Renoir had been at the museum since 1955; the others longer. As it happens, the critic was a fellow at the TMA in the 1970s. “Back then,” he writes, “it never occurred to me that the word ‘permanent’ in the museum’s stellar permanent collection apparently meant 67 years, max.” [LAT]