To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.
The Headlines
THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR. The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, has tapped Matthew Hargraves to be its director. Hargraves has been with the Wadsworth since June 2021, when he joined as interim chief curator, after being chief curator of art collections at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. Tom Loughman stepped down as director and CEO in April of 2021, and in November, the Hartford Courant reports, the museum split the position into two jobs. (Jeffrey N. Brown took on the CEO role.) “With an extraordinarily committed and professional staff and an exceptional senior leadership team, we can reaffirm the Wadsworth’s rightful position as the leading arts institution in our region,” Hargraves said in a statement, “and reassert its international reputation as North America’s most pioneering art museum.”
Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
ART AND LABOR. Workers at the Baltimore Museum of Art voted to unionize on Thursday, the Baltimore Business Journal reports. The vote was 89 to 29 to join the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Over in Pennsylvania, staffers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art held a rally on Wednesday amid contract negotiations, the Art Newspaper reports. Employees have been without a contract since unionizing in 2020. And Artforum reports that the Maryland Institute College of Art announced layoffs in the wake of a recent successful union vote. Around 10 percent of the union’s bargaining team is expected to be let go in the move. In a statement, MICA said that the restructuring is “a response to the short-term impact of the pandemic on enrollment as well as long-range strategic considerations.”
The Digest
Perrotin is taking a second space in Seoul, with plans to open in the metropolis’s luxe Gangnam neighborhood in early September. Gallery partner Alice Lung said that a Los Angeles outpost could be a “natural next step” for the international firm. [Financial Times]
Nightlife king Mark Fleischman, who owned the storied Studio 54 club in New York in the 1980s, died by assisted suicide in Switzerland on Wednesday. He was 82, and had a degenerative condition. “I have done everything and been everywhere and met everyone I want to meet,” he told the New York Post last month.
[BBC News and The Washington Post]
A court in Eastern Russian cleared artist and activist Yulia Tsvetkova of pornography charges for posting artworks on social media that her supporters say are efforts to promote body positivity. She had faced six year in prison. Prosecutors can appeal. [The Moscow Times]
A work by artist Yu Buck at the Jeonnam Museum of Art in Gwangyang, South Korea, that involves goldfish slowly dying in IV bags drew animal-cruelty accusations, and the fish have been removed. Yu has framed the work as a commentary on the violence of human nature. [The Korea Times]
An exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno features photographs that Janna Ireland has taken of buildings by the pioneering Black architect Paul Revere Williams. [The New York Times]
David Zwirner toasted the one-anniversary of its online platform, Platform, with a party at the Bowery Hotel in New York. [Vogue]
The Kicker
TOUGH TALK. In a profile in Wallpaper, artist Cecilia Vicuña shared a harrowing story about feedback she received after pitching a show of her work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1970s. She said that ICA cofounder Roland Penrose told her, “You are a great artist, but my board is absolutely adamant that you should not have an exhibition here. They think that you are worthless. But be sure, you will encounter this throughout your life, but you have to know within yourself that that’s not true.” He ended up giving her a show in a hallway, and Vicuña is, of course, now one of the most widely exhibited artists on the planet. [Wallpaper]
Source: artnews.com