Category: visual

“This is not a Confederate monuments project; it is a monuments project,” says Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander. That means addressing the larger issue of what values and ideas about identity are embedded in this country’s public architecture of history and memory. What is preserved, what is forgotten and what is suppressed? – Washington Post

The new initiative was devised as a way to create buzz about Gagosian exhibitions even as the gallery faces an extended period with limited in-person attendance. The online celebrity programming also helps to keep artists from feeling shortchanged by the moratorium on glitzy opening parties and swanky artist dinners that traditionally help woo collectors. – Artnet

“During the height of lockdown in April, the Association of Art Museum Directors … loosened its guidelines on how members could use the proceeds of art sold from their collections. Now, … museums in the United States are likely to make more than $100 million through the sale of art this fall, according to an analysis by Artnet News. Some welcome this result as a sign that institutions are taking practical steps to change systems that were long considered intractable; others say it is a troubling indication that museums are taking the easy way out and turning their collections into cash machines.” – Artnet

“The remains of the series of ornately decorated rooms were discovered when engineers were carrying out the earthquake-proofing of the 1950s residential building in 2014. Archaeologists were called in to undertake €3 million excavations funded by BNP Paribas Real Estate, the company that owns the apartment block. The archaeologists found a complex of lavish rooms with black and white mosaic flooring. The site will soon be accessible to the public as a subterranean museum.” – Forbes

Artists who have benefited either directly or indirectly from the Studio Museum’s famous residency program—as well as from an art market that is no longer undervaluing their work as much as it has in the past—are building spaces of their own to strengthen the infrastructure available to artists of color. – Artnet

“Peter Zumthor, who despises monuments, finds himself responsible for a building intended to anchor a diffuse and sporadically planned city, where the forests catch fire every fall. A year ago, when I visited him in Haldenstein, an ancient village in the low Alps where he lives and has his atelier, it seemed to him as if the project might, at the final moment, fail, and ruin his good name. He was despondent, familiarly so. “Maybe it happens, maybe it won’t,” he told me. “I always get burned.” – The New Yorker

“Yes, these colorful, see-through stalls turn opaque when occupied. When not, you can literally see right through them. … The architect behind these one-of-a-kind Tokyo toilets is Shigeru Ban, winner of none other than the Pritzker Prize, the world’s most prestigious architectural prize. And when you take a deeper look into the work of the architects behind these transparent restrooms, the source of such creativity becomes more than obvious.” – Metropolis (Tokyo)

2,600 years ago, the world’s largest Doric temple to Zeus stood in southwestern Sicily, and its façades incorporated 38 towering statues of Atlas, seeming to hold up the roof the way the Titan held up the sky. All but one of those statues have long since fallen to pieces, but the monument’s director wants to use pieces of the ruins to reproduce eight of the ancient Atlas figures and incorporate them into a contemporary sculpture. Archaeologists are appalled. – The New York Times

A former finance director says Ms. Phillips told her to mislead the museum’s board about a cash shortfall. Art handlers say they were forced to work overnight at times to meet onerous deadlines. A former exhibitions director says that when the museum could not locate a work of art, its top officials suggested just making a copy, without telling the artist. – The New York Times

The Monuments Project, the largest initiative in the foundation’s 50-year history, will support the creation of new monuments, as well as the relocation or rethinking of existing ones. And it defines “monument” broadly to include not just memorials, statues and markers but also “storytelling spaces,” as the foundation puts it, like museums and art installations. – The New York Times