What We're Reading: 7/7/23
Acclaimed architect David Adjaye is no longer working with a developer to overhaul several Old Town buildings as the designer faces accusations of sexual misconduct within his firm.
Adjaye, whose work includes the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., was selected by development firm Fern Hill to design a development entailing a few properties around 1600 N. LaSalle Drive.
But a spokesperson from Fern Hill confirmed Thursday the architect will step away from the project.
Via Block Club
Sculptor Ruth A. Migdal still celebrating the female form at 90
On a street of stark brick warehouses, where the air is grubby with Canadian wildfire smoke — made worse by the billowing dust from a nearby saw cutting into concrete — a woman with a cane emerges from a doorway framed with ivy.
She beckons for her guest to follow her inside.
“I don’t have any depth perception,” she says, explaining the need for the cane.
She leads the way along a dimly lit corridor, turns sharply and then into a high-ceilinged space that instantly overwhelms.
The walls, the shelves, tables are all covered with sculptures of the female body. Mostly, what you notice, though, are the breasts: hundreds of them — small, large, in wax, clay, bronze, glossy red, gold-leafed. In the center of a lunch table, there’s a pair made of solid lead and too heavy to lift.
They aren’t trophies. For Ruth Aizuss Migdal, their 90-year-old creator, they are symbols of feminine beauty, defiance, rage.
Via Chicago Sun Times
The Art Angle Podcast: The Stunning Fall of Lisa Schiff, Art Advisor to the Stars
Just about everyone who works in the New York art world knows Lisa Schiff, an art advisor to the rich and famous who worked with celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio for many years. She was a highly visible presence at art fairs, on museum boards, and generally around town, running her glamorous boutique firm from a first floor gallery space in Tribeca whose entry wall was covered with a memorable floor to ceiling plant installation.
So media savvy that she had a PR firm on retainer, Schiff was frequently quoted as an expert in the art press, and she had longstanding relationships with journalists in town, including here at Artnet News, where she even wrote an op-ed last summer on the scourge of “meme art.” That’s why it came as such a shock to a lot of us this past May when a lawsuit dropped accusing her of essentially using her advisory firm to run a pretty extravagant Ponzi scheme.
Via Artnet