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The Headlines
READY YOUR PADDLES! Back in May, Ernie Barnes’s exhilarating The Sugar Shack (1976) painting soared past its $150,000 low estimate at Christie’s to finish at $15.3 million with fees. His estate subsequently signed on to work with Andrew Kreps and Ortuzar Projects in New York. Now another one of his works is coming up for sale. Bonhams will feature his Solid Rock Congregation (1993)—an action-packed scene at a Black church service—in a single-lot sale on September 9 at its New York branch, Barron’s reports. It is estimated to sell for $500,000 to $700,000. The work was commissioned by gospel singer Margaret Bell, who can be seen wielding a mic in it.
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BINDING AGREEMENTS. At some point this is going to stop being news, but climate activists with Just Stop Oil alighted at another art museum in the United Kingdom on Tuesday and glued themselves to the frame of another famous artwork. This time it was the copy of Leonardo da Vinci‘s The Last Supper at the Royal Academy of Arts in London that is attributed to Giampietrino and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and dated to around 1515–20, CNN reports. The action also involved spray-painting “No New Oil” on a gallery wall. One protestor was quoted saying, “If the directors of this gallery really believe that art has the power to change the world then I demand that they claim that power, close, and refuse to open until the government commits to no new oil.”
The Digest
Philadelphia officials are facing criticism for selecting Wesley Wofford, a white male artist, to create a statue of Harriet Tubman without holding an open call, which protestors said would have drawn a diverse array of applicants. “If it was an open call and Wesley was chosen, it would be fine,” artist Dee Jones said. “But because the process wasn’t open, that’s the big issue.” [The Philadelphia Inquirer]
British abstract painter Jadé Fadojutimi, a star of the current Venice Biennale, has come aboard the Gagosian gallery. Fadojutimi will still be repped by Galerie Gisela Capitain, of Cologne, Germany, and Taka Ishii Gallery, of Tokyo, and is leaving London’s Pippy Houldsworth gallery. [ARTnews]
Sotheby’s will offer a 76 million-year-old Gorgosaurus skeleton later this month in New York with a $5 million low estimate. [The Associated Press/Bloomberg]
Chanel’s latest runway show in Paris featured set design by artist Xavier Veilhan, who installed a large silver mobile as part of the affair. “It had guests—including Marion Cotillard and Keira Knightley—gawping,” Thomas Adamson writes. [The Associated Press]
More than 200 masks that the artist Ruth Asawa made of members of her community in San Francisco are going on view today at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, which acquired them two years ago. They look great. [The Art Newspaper]
The Kicker
PUSHING SOME BUTTONS. After a Banksy mural that was affixed to his home in Lowestoft, England, was removed and sold, graphic designer Joe Thompson decided to replace it with a piece that depicts a vending machine stocked with copies of the vanished work, BBC News reports. “Part of me thought, well, if that’s what they want, maybe we need a vending machine where they can just press a few buttons and Banksys can just keep coming out,” he said. That sounds like just the kind of artwork that the wily street artist would love. [BBC News]
Source: artnews.com