News from Around the Art World: March 12, 2018
Overlooked No More: A Foundation's Push to Elevate Chicago Art
New York has long been considered the center of American visual art, home to the Met, the MoMA, and the incredible, cylindrical viewing galleries of the Guggenheim. Abstract Expressionism developed in the city, as did the careers of its luminaries such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko. A new crop of art-world superstars blossoms in the city each year.
More recently, Los Angeles has entered the collective art consciousness. In the past five years, major gifts in the hundreds of millions have remade L.A.’s cultural landscape into a Monopoly board of arts institutions. The Broad and the Marciano Art Foundation opened, and new galleries and acquisitions are planned at the Hammer, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Art makers themselves, fleeing the high cost and low light of New York City, are basking in L.A.’s spectacular, Mediterranean-like sun.
By Wendy Paris, Inside Philanthropy
Opioid Protest at Met Museum Targets Donors Connected to OxyContin
Anti-opioid activists unfurled banners and scattered pill bottles on Saturday inside the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which is named for a family connected to the powerful painkilling drug OxyContin.
The protest, which was organized by a group started by the celebrated photographer Nan Goldin, started just after 4 p.m., when several dozen people converged at the Temple of Dendur inside the wing.
By Colin Moynihan, The New York Times
Chicago architects take the lead for U.S. pavilion at prestigious Venice Architecture Biennale
It’s no insult to Chicago’s fledgling architecture biennial to say that the event remains an upstart compared to the bigger, older and more prestigious Venice Architecture Biennale. So it’s a big deal that Chicago’s architecture community is poised to make a mark on the Italian city of lagoons, canals and exotic buildings washed by the Adriatic mist.
For the first time, a spokeswoman confirmed, Chicago institutions are organizing architecture biennale’s U.S. pavilion, traditionally a showcase for top American talent. In addition, Chicagoans are designing two of the pavilion’s seven installations, including one by the firm of architect Jeanne Gang that will transport hundreds of cobblestones from a Memphis riverfront to Venice.
By Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune
Kapoor condemns NRA’s use of his Chicago ‘Bean’ sculpture in promotional ad
The British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor is speaking out against the National Rifle Association (NRA), condemning the US gun lobby organisation’s use of an image of his Chicago sculpture Cloud Gate (2004) in a promotional videoreleased last year. “I am disgusted to see my work—in truth the sculpture of the people of Chicago—used by the NRA to promote their vile message,” Kapoor says in a written statement from today (12 March), issued in association with the anti–gun violence nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety. “Recent shootings in Florida, Las Vegas, Texas, and a number of other towns and cities, make it more urgent than ever that this organization is held to account for its ongoing campaign of fear and hate in American society.”
By Jillian Steinhauer, The Art Newspaper
Part of University of Chicago art museum collection is on loan … to undergrads
Andrew Langford lives in a typical college dorm room: He has a desk, a single bed, a mini-fridge stocked with cookies, brownies, some booze and, on an otherwise drab beige wall, he has a framed Miro. That’s right, the 18-year-old has a piece by the famed Spanish painter and sculptor, Joan Miro.
Noah Adams, 19, has a Pablo Picasso etching in his dorm entitled, “Dream and Lie of Franco 1.” To be sure, these are not the originals — they’re prints — but many of the several dozen pieces on loan this year to mostly undergraduates at the University of Chicago are each worth several thousand dollars.
By Stefano Esposito, Chicago Sun Times