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News
The Philadelphia Art Commission voted to remove the city’s statue of Christopher Columbus in Marconi Plaza and place it in temporary storage. [WHYY]
Staff at the Milwaukee Art Museum have announced plans to join the union that already represents the institution’s security guards. [The Art Newspaper]
India Stoughton writes, “Beirut’s once-thriving cultural community was already at breaking point. Then the blast hit.” [CNN]
Philip Kennicott reviews the newly opened Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, which grapples with “how to memorialize people whose names and stories are mostly lost to history.” [The Washington Post]
The board of the San Diego Art Institute announced it will be taking a 60-day “reset” to figure out how to reopen, which also includes not renewing the contract of its executive director. [The San Diego Union-Tribune]
Art History
In an new essay for the New York Times, art historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis writes, “a broad, understudied history of photographic agency by generations of Black suffragists uncovers invaluable documents about their thwarted and central roles in the collective history of women’s rights.” [The New York Times]
In a new book, titled Stealing from the Saracens, Diana Darke details the ways in which hallmarks of European Gothic architecture—from rose windows to the recipe for stained glass—originated in Arab and Islamic cultures. [The Guardian]
Sebastian Smee waxes poetics about Monet’s La Grenouillère (1869), which is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and is often called “one of the very first identifiably ‘impressionist‘ paintings.” [The Washington Post]
Misc.
The Boros Collection in Berlin has teamed up with the city’s famed—and notoriously hard to get into—nightclub Berghain to present an exhibition of contemporary art. [The Art Newspaper]
Art Market Monitor analyzes the data from the recent June and July auctions, where lots by Francis Bacon, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell, Joan Miró and Jean-Michel Basquiat led the sales. [Art Market Monitor]