Category: visual

This isn’t the first time MoMA’s unionized workers protested for their rights. In a scene very similar to that of 2015, “chanting ‘Modern art, ancient wages’” and ‘Shiny new building, shabby old wages,’ about 100 members and supporters of UAW (United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers) Local 2110 — the union that represents some 250 workers at MoMA including curators, librarians, store staff, members services workers, graphic designers, and catalogue editors — took the opportunity of the museum’s biggest annual fundraiser to draw attention to their fight for a contract that protects their health care, job security, and wages.”

Investing the resources to hire a senior staffer to focus solely on diversity and accessibility is a growing trend in tech and higher education, but the Phillips is one of the first art museums in the country to do so. Makeba Clay can count on one hand the number of people she knows with similar jobs in the museum world.

“The hunt for Frida Kahlo’s long-lost painting La Mesa Herida (The Wounded Table, 1940) has been revived in Mexico, where a researcher says he expects to track it down within five years. The work, a holy grail for Kahlo scholars, went missing after the artist donated it to the former Soviet Union. Last seen in an exhibition in Warsaw in 1955, it disappeared on its way to Moscow.”

“A laborious x-ray scan of the painting’s canvas has discovered that Vincent van Gogh used two different types of a chrome yellow paint, one of which is more liable to degrade under light. The change in the 1889 painting, one of a series of sunflowers by Van Gogh, is so far not visible to the human eye but, over time, the painting is set to lose some of its vibrancy in the pale-yellow background and the sunflowers’ bright yellow petals and stems, where the sensitive pigment was mixed to achieve the right green hue.”

“Through last year, the garage was used to service and show cars manufactured by Citroën, who agreed to leave the space as part of a deal brokered with the city of Brussels in 2015 that involved transitioning the garage into an arts institution. … When Kanal is completely renovated it will encompass not only a museum of modern and contemporary art, but also the collections of the local CIVA Foundation, as well as public spaces devoted to culture, education, and leisure.”

The reasons had been building for months, but the clincher came when the collector, fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev, resold the “Salvator Mundi” for $450 million during last year’s fall art auction season, more than triple the amount he paid, one of the people said. Had the case proceeded, Rybolovlev’s windfall could have enabled the defense to claim that he wasn’t a fraud victim because he profited in the end.

Michael DeMarsche and Bob Ekelund: “We believe that the position against deaccessioning has become increasingly untenable, given increasing storage costs and the decreasing likelihood that a large portion of great art will rarely, if ever, be shown.” (Most art museums have only a small minority of their holdings on display.) “This regulation also restricts necessary mission changes and financial preparation for an uncertain future. We propose an update to the [American Alliance of Museums’] current position, one that would give museums the flexibility and autonomy to refine and hone their collections, while ensuring they have the resources needed to best serve their communities.”

Inside Harlem’s New ‘Foreign Trade Zone’, A ‘Fortress’ Holding Billions’ Worth Of Art
“[The facility] is called Arcis Art Storage. ‘Arcis’ is Latin for ‘fortress’ — a fitting name for what’s essentially a museum-quality bunker, currently insured to store up to $3 billion worth of goods. … Security is tight: Guests at Arcis must have their retinas scanned to go through the first door, then present their bare forearms for a vascular scan at a second door.” Atossa Araxia Abrahamian braves the security gauntlet.

“Westminster Abbey is opening a museum this week in its hidden “attic”, the triforium, which offers a stunning vista of the Gothic nave more than 50ft below. … Until 2015, the abbey had a smaller museum in the 11th-century undercroft off the cloisters, but the new venue has the space for four times as many objects — around 300 in total.”