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The Headlines
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HUMAN RESOURCES. The 2024 Venice Biennale is steadily coming into focus. Adriano Pedrosa is curating its main show, it was revealed in December, and now Çağla Ilk, the co-director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, has been selected to curate Germany’s pavilion, Artforum reports. An artist has yet to be named. Meanwhile, the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia has tapped Harry Philbrick to be its interim executive director. Philbrick is the founder of the Philadelphia Contemporary arts organization and will fill a role that Christina Vassallo is vacatingto run the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. (Philbrick will become director emeritus of Philadelphia Contemporary, and a team of three will now lead it, per WHYY.) Over on the West Coast, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the African Diaspora, which are neighbors in the Yerba Buena area, are jointly establishing an assistant curator of the art of the African diaspora position, Datebook reports. The eventual hire will work at both places, but SFMOMA is funding the job. Prep your resume: They aim to make a hire this spring.
AUCTION ACTION. Sotheby’s is readying an auction of more than 300 items from the collection of the late actor Paul Newman and his wife, actress Joanne Woodward, according to the Hollywood Reporter. There is entertainment memorabilia, but also 19th-century American folk art and furntiure. More Sotheby’s news: At a recent sale at the house, the St. Louis Art Museum acquired a rare bimah (a cover for a synagogue reader’s podium) by artist Simhah Viterbo, a Jewish woman active in 18th-century Italy, the St. Louis Jewish Light reports. The museum now holds two Viterbo works.
The Digest
MoMA PS1 in New York will open a major Rirkrit Tiravanija exhibition—his largest to date—in October, with more than 100 pieces, including his storied 1990 interactive work untitled 1990 (pad thai), which serves that delicious dish to all-comers. Ruba Katrib and Yasmil Raymond are curating. [ARTnews]
After climate-control issues nixed its plan to open in January, the $120 million International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, said that it will begin welcoming the public on June 27. [The New York Times]
Collector Mitchell Rales made a $1.9 billion donation—in cash and stock—to the Glenstone Foundation, which operates the contemporary art museum that he and his wife founded in 2006 in Potomac, Maryland. Glenstone now has a cool $4.6 billion in assets, Tom Maloney reports: almost as much as the Met. [Bloomberg]
Just in time for Art Basel Hong Kong in a few weeks, the city dropped its requirement that people wear masks both indoors and outdoors. [NPR]
Archaeologists at the doomed city of Pompeii in Italy are about to begin excavating a previously unexplored section that is as big as a city block. “We are about to come into contact with the past, and it’s a big unknown; we don’t know what awaits us,” the archaeological site’s director, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, said. [The Times of London via New York Post]
PERSPECTIVES. For Artnet News, critic Ben Davis weighed in on the hotly debated show that the artist known as CumWizard69420 has up at Cheim & Read in New York: It is “a small sign that the ‘LOL nothing matters’ mindset is far more pervasive than people are able to say out loud,” he writes. Painter and writer Sam McKinniss tackled the show, too, in this month’s Artforum : “With a name like Cumwizard69420, you might think the artist is an idiot,” he writes. “I suspect he’s wonderful.”
The Kicker
NEW YORK STORIES. The great artist and filmmaker Charles Atlas has an exhibition up at Luring Augustine in New York through March 11, and answered “21 Questions” from Curbed. He has Nicole Eisenman prints above his couch, loves Times Square at night, paid $60 a week for his first apartment the city (in Alphabet City), and would like to redesign the “AIDS Memorial Park on Greenwich Avenue and 12th Street,” he said. “It’s so disappointing. It’s just ugly.” [Curbed]
Source: artnews.com