April 8, 2015: Tiffany Will Sponsor the Next Three Whitney Biennials & the British Museum’s Director Retires
Opening
In New York …
“Mary Hrbacek: Life Before Life” opens at CREON; “Adam Katseff: Rivers and Falls” opens at Sasha Wolf Gallery.
In Los Angeles …
“Babak Emanuel: Abeyance” opens at LA Artcore Union Center for the Arts.
In Milan …
Photograph of the new Whitney Museum building, courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art. View from the West side, September 2014. Photograph by Tim Schenck.
Tiffany & Co. has pledged a gift of $5 million to be given incrementally to the Whitney Museum of American Art, launching the company into a partnership with the museum that will last through 2021 and will see Tiffany as the main sponsor of the next three installments of the Whitney Biennial. (via The Observer)
The director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, will retire at the end of this year, after holding the position for 13 years. Perhaps one of the institution’s most successful directors, he forged international ties and ensured the museum’s focus on current issues. Following his departure, MacGregor will devote his time to chairing a board that will advise the German culture minister on multi-cultural presentations at Berlin’s Humboldt-Forum. (via The Art Newspaper)
Portrait of Silvia Koch courtesy of Pickles PR
Contemporary Istanbul has named a new director for its 10th edition: Silvia Koch, who has organized art exhibitions and worked at galleries in Berlin and comes from a recent seven-year tenure at artnet. The fair’s upcoming installment will also feature new programming, including education series and projects from nonprofits. (via Artforum)
Bow Arts, an education arts charity with five outposts throughout east London, has established a new complex of 90 artist studios, which it converted from Rupert Murdoch’s publishing company’s former offices. The site, which has housed several news companies over its history, is slated to open in June and will be welcome opportunity for many young artists struggling to meet the city’s rising rents. (via The Art Newspaper)
Artist Maya Lin has been selected to redesign Smith College’s Neilson Library, in partnership with the Shepley Bulfinch firm. Lin, most widely known for creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, has never before worked on a college library building; however, Smith holds personal significance for the artist, as her mother attended the college after immigrating from China. Further, the college has stated that Lin’s engagement with the natural world in her practice is in line with the campus, which doubles as a botanical garden. (via the New York Times)
The Bloch Family Foundation has announced that it will fund an $11.7 million renovation of the impressionist and post-impressionist galleries at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, as well as donate 29 works of art—by Morisot, Matisse, and Seurat, among others—from Henry and Marion Bloch’s collection earlier than originally pledged. With the project’s completion, expected for spring 2017, the museum will display over twice as many impressionist and post-impressionist works as it does currently. (via The Kansas City Star)
Facebook has announced plans to add two additional office buildings designed by Frank Gehry to its Silicon Valley headquarters, having moved into a new building designed by the architect less than two weeks ago. Initially resistant to the idea of working with Gehry, Mark Zuckerberg was pleasantly surprised when the first building came in under budget and ahead of schedule. In addition to open-plan offices, the completed project will also include a large public park and pedestrian/cycle paths between the buildings. (via Dezeen)
Best of Instagram
Via @miartmilano: “Work in progress. #miart2015”
Via @dustinyellin: “The Kennedy Center”
Via @cooperhewitt: “Final weeks! Don’t miss ‘Beautiful Users,’ closing 4/19. Installed in our first-floor Design Process Galleries, the exhibition features nearly 120 objects that illustrate the evolution of ‘user-centered’ design—from the mid-20th-century work of Henry Dreyfuss to the complex systems and services that today’s designers are developing. #cooperhewitt #BeautifulUsers”
Good Reads
“The Battle for the Frick: Can Thousands of Garden-Loving Activists Stop a Museum?” (via New York Observer)
“The Radical Art of Archiving Performance, as Practiced by Martha Wilson” (via Hyperallergic)
“Museums Begin Returning Artifacts to India in Response to Investigation” (via the New York Times)
Artist of the Day
Undeniably a—if not the—founding father of modern art in the 20th century, Pablo Picasso (who passed away on this day in 1973) initially began his career as a highly skilled painter, draftsman, and sculptor in the realist style before going on to pioneer Cubism, an artistic style that would go on to influence movements as far-flung as Pop Art. Picasso’s unparalleled innovation has indeed been recognized not just in the minds of the public but also by the commercial art world, with 2010 witnessing what was then the highest price brought in for an artwork at auction for a painting he completed over the course of a single day in 1932. Next month, a sale of his Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) (1955) is expected to break that record anew.
Want to catch up with the rest of this week’s news? Review past Daily Digests here.
