Art Industry News: 93-Year-Old Artist Betye Saar Will Paint MoMA the Color Purple + Other Stories

by admin

Sep 5, 2019

artnet

Art Industry News is a daily digest of the most
consequential developments coming out of the art world and art
market. Here’s what you need to know on this Thursday, September
5.

NEED-TO-READ

Kemper Museum Trustee Under Fire
for ICE Jail – Pressure is
growing on the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas
City, Missouri, to remove a controversial trustee, Mariner Kemper,
who has become the latest museum backer to wind up in the
crosshairs of activist critics because of his business
links. Kemper’s UMB
Financial Corporation has a stake in a detention center accused of inhumane
treatment of undocumented immigrants, and artists and activists including Carmen Moreno,
Sarah Ray, Molly Crabapple, Alex Martinez, and Kiki Serna have been
speaking out after it emerged that UMB has a financial
interest Wyatt Detention Facility, a jail in Central Falls, Rhode Island, that
has been used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
(Observer)

How Safe Are African Artifacts in
European Museums? – European museums’ lackluster caretaking
of African artifacts stored in their basements is under scrutiny as
they face growing calls for
restitution of cultural heritage from source countries. The
German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung found that many of the objects destined for
Berlin’s Humboldt Forum have been kept in substandard conditions
for decades. While officials at Berlin’s Ethnological Museum denied
reports of flooded storerooms, they admit that aging buildings and
lack of resources are problematic, confirming that ceilings
sometimes leak and that researchers wear protective gear because of
toxic dust from chemical treatments that were used on artifacts in
the past. Museum
expert Dirk Heisig claims
the directors of some German art institutions have a Darwinian
approach to their collections: “You put an object in the depot for
10 or 20 years, and you look to see if it has survived the depot
situation,” then you might display them, he says.
(New York Times)

Betye Saar Will Paint MoMA the Color Purple –
The 93-year-old artist who has two
major exhibitions, one at MoMA in New York and the other at LACMA,
has now gotten a New York Times profile, too. “It’s
about time,” she tells Holland Cotter, referring to the
shows. The Watts-born
artist— who has always lived in Southern California, or, in
her own words, “The other side of the planet”—gave Cotter a tour of her
home and studio, which is full of her assemblages, watercolors,
and, of course, found objects. Big reveal: Saar says that for her
MoMA show the normally white gallery walls will be painted purple,
“for the first time ever.” (NYT)

Kate Moss Teams Up With Museum Director – The supermodel has gotten a new makeover, this
time as a fashion curator. Kind of. Kate Moss has teamed up
with Jorge Yarur Bascuñán,
the director of the Museo de la Moda in Santiago, Chile, to publish a book featuring
items in its collection and pieces from her wardrobe plus fashion
tips. Called Musings on
Fashion and Style: Museo de la Moda, the lavishly illustrated book (published by
Rizzoli) is due out this month. Bascuñán seems to have casual
approach to deaccessioning surplus items. Moss tells
Harper’s Bazaar
magazine: “The museum has a lot of
1930s tea dresses, and Jorge actually gave me one from his
collection,” adding, “They’re very feminine—perfect for a garden
party.” (Harper’s Bazaar)

ART MARKET

Katherine Martin Appointed Head of
New York’s Asia Week – The managing director of Scholten Japanese Art,
Martin has been named the new chairman of Asia Week New
York, which takes place
over 10 days every March. (Artfix Daily)

Nina Katchadourian Joins Pace
Gallery – The Brooklyn- and Berlin-based
artist best known for her
whimsically art historical self-portraits in airplane bathrooms has
joined Pace, which will share representation with her San Francisco
gallery, Catharine Clark. (ARTnews)

German art dealer Angela Gulbenkian Denies Art Theft –
The German art dealer and
socialite, who married into the Gulbenkian dynasty, has denied
stealing more than £1 million ($1.2 million) in art belonging to
Hong Kong-based Art Incorporated Limited. A judge in London has
set Angela
Gulbenkian’s trial date for
early May. (Guardian)

COMINGS & GOINGS

Museo Tamayo Names New Director
– The curator Magalí
Arriola has been named the director of the Mexico City museum. A
former curator there, she has organized shows at the Museo Jumex
among other institutions. She is also organizing Art Basel Miami
Beach’s new section of large-scale works. (ARTnews)

Amy Sedao Resigns From ICA
Philadelphia – The
director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of
Pennsylvania, Amy
Sadao, is stepping down.
Over the past seven years Sadao has championed the work of numerous
overlooked artists. (Artforum)

FOR ART’S SAKE

Romania Will Open an Anti-Communist
Museum – A long-planned museum
will be created to commemorate the crimes of the Communist era in
Bucharest. The state-funded institution will be housed in part
of Nicolae Ceausescu’s
former “people’s palace,” a vast building in the center of the
city. (Podcastjournal)

Paris’s King Tut Show Sets a New
Attendance Records – The
blockbuster show at Paris’s Grande Halle of La Villette featuring
150 treasures from the boy pharaoh’s tomb has been a box-office
hit. More than 1.3 million tickets have been sold, its organizers
have announced. The touring show heads next to London’s Saatchi
Gallery. (AFP)

A Bust of Hitler in the Basement
Surprises French Politicians – Many senators were surprised to discover that a
metal bust of the German dictator and a Nazi flag are kept in a
basement store room in the upper chamber of the French parliament.
The newspaper Le
Monde’s revelation was
initially rejected as “fake news” but the senate’s chief architect
admitted that the relic of the German Occupation existed but
stressed: “It’s never been taken out.” (Times)

Ai Weiwei Wins an Award on a
Politically Charged Night – The
Chinese activist-artist was at Tate
Modern on Tuesday, September 3, to accept the GQ
magazine Artist of the Year award—and he used the glitzy occasion
to remind the audience of police violence against pro-democracy
campaigners in Hong Kong, which has claimed the sight in one eye of
a young female demonstrator. At the same event the former
Conservative minister Rory Stewart received the magazine’s
Politician of the Year Award. He tweeted that he accepted it less
than an hour after rebelling against Boris Johnson’s hard-Brexit
government. Johnson purged Stewart and 20 other rebel MPs from
the parliamentary Conservative Party the same night with a
ruthlessness that has been called Stalinist. (Evening Standard)