Category: visual

New York Museums In All-Out Resistance To Trumpism

“The Whitney may have been the first New York museum to signal its resistance to the new Administration, but waves of actions have followed. No major institution closed in response to the #J20 movement’s call for an art strike during the Inauguration, but the Whitney invited Occupy Museums to program a series of talks in its theatre, and the Brooklyn Museum hosted a seven-hour reading of Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again.” Most significant, the week after Trump signed his now unravelling travel ban, the Museum of Modern Art replaced seven works in its sacrosanct fifth-floor galleries—the domain of van Gogh, Picasso, and Pollock—with pieces by artists from three of the seven targeted Muslim-majority nations.”

The Art Market: A Partner (Witting Or Un-) In Crime

The secrecy of the seller might have to go the way of an expectation of no selfies at museums, but for better reasons: “This sort of discretion — one founded in a simpler time, when only a few wealthy collectors took part in the art market — is not only quaint but also reckless when art is traded like a commodity and increasingly suspected in money laundering.”

Moving A 12,000-Pound Civil War Diorama Into A Rightful Place In History

The 19th-century painting has been feted by both North and South over the decades since it was painted. “”It’s one of our greatest Civil War artifacts in what it can teach us about what Americans have remembered and disremembered about the Civil War,’ Gordon Jones, senior military historian at the Atlanta History Center and co-leader of the cyclorama move and restoration team, told Hyperallergic.”

Canada Starts To Recognize Its Indigenous Women Artists, But There’s Much More To Be Done

One current show has an intentionally provocative name because “‘It’s really a colonial idea that our women didn’t carve. Our women have always carved,’ said Lou-ann Neel, the carver’s granddaughter and an advising curator for the exhibition. ‘I’ve already heard a few people say, ‘Well, you know, our grandmother was also a carver.’ Good, I want to hear about her. Let’s talk about her, too. Because all of our communities need these role models to come from the last couple of generations and encourage our young girls and women to pursue the arts, too.'”

When A High-End Gallery Turns Into A Convenience Store – As Art

The convenience store exhibit, which is also, sort of, a functional convenience store, is supposed to be a critique of art-world prices. But one anonymous artist says they stole an art – or convenience store? – bag of cat food. “‘Do not be confused,’ wrote the artist in Spanish, under the nickname ‘Peligro’ (Danger). ‘Oroxxo isn’t a criticism of capitalism, it is an act of capitalism.'”