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National Gallery of Art recruits the first woman and person of color to serve as its chief curator

The National Gallery of Art (NGA) says it has recruited the first woman and person of colour to serve as chief curatorial and conservation officer: E. Carmen Ramos, who has been the acting chief curator and curator of Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Ramos will assume the post in August. The appointment…

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‘Very aggressive and violent from the start’: Palestinian artist films police crackdown in Israeli city of Haifa

The Turner Prize-nominated artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan turned over his Instagram account to fellow artist Inas Halabi on Tuesday night as she reported live from Haifa on the continued police crackdowns on protestors in the Jewish-Arab city. Nightly demonstrations have been taking place all week after hundreds of Palestinians were injured when Israeli forces stormed…

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The Met installs a plaque on its façade honoring the Lenape people, driven out of their New York City land

Amid a general acknowledgment of its links to a fraught local history of exploiting Indigenous peoples, the Metropolitan Museum announced today that it had installed a bronze plaque on its Fifth Avenue façade recognising the Lenape. The museum says that the move follows years of research and consultation on ways to honour the Lenape, who…

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James Turrell will unveil another Skyspace this year in the Colorado mountains

The American artist James Turrell will unveil a new Skyspace this summer in the foothills of Pikes Peak in Colorado. The work will be installed on a hillside in Green Mountain Falls, a bucolic town near Colorado Springs. The work—one of more than 100 of the artist’s signature light chambers with ceiling apertures open to the sky—will…

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Looted Libyan sculpture seized at Heathrow Airport heads back home with help from the British Museum

A statue looted from Libya in 2011 has been handed over to the Libyan Embassy in London after experts from the British Museum (BM) helped identify the piece. The funerary sculpture, taken from Cyrene in north eastern Libya, was seized by Border officials at Heathrow airport in London after being brought into the UK from…

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As a Sotheby’s auction looms, scholars protest Newark Museum of Art’s plan to sell a Thomas Cole painting and other works

An open letter signed by more than 50 art historians, curators and researchers was submitted today to the Newark Museum of Art protesting its plan to sell works from its collection, most prominently Thomas Cole’s 1846 painting The Arch of Nero, organisers say. The letter, addressed to Linda Harrison, director and chief executive of the museum, denounces…

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Unable to run in its usual format, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair moves into Christie’s for bijou showcase

With Frieze now well underway, New York has a taste again for art fairs—those not on a screen. And the next opportunity is around the corner: a potted edition of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair New York will run from 15 to 26 May in the lobby gallery at Christie’s, with a larger selection…

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Contract Killers: artist Nancy Baker Cahill challenges the efficacy of the ‘smart contracts’ behind NFTs with an augmented reality project

When in 1985, a Texas jury awarded Pennzoil $10.53bn in damages for getting the short end of the contractual stick, the world learned just how powerful a handshake could be. One year prior in New York, the oil giant had reached an informal, but binding agreement to purchase a large stake in Getty Oil for…

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Met’s next Costume Institute show is an exploration of the emotional hues of American fashion

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York offered additional details today about the next major show presented by its Costume Institute, a two-part exhibition exploring American fashion that will run from 18 September through 5 September 2022. An online video preview underscored how the museum is invoking both the angst generated by the Covid-19…

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‘Some Like It Not’: protesters rally against plan to install Marilyn Monroe sculpture near Palm Springs Art Museum

It’s hard to find a single person in the Palm Springs art and design community who supports the city’s decision to install an enormous, voluptuous sculpture of Marilyn Monroe, showing her skirt flying up and underwear exposed, on a public site right next to the Palm Springs Art Museum. And several dozens of those dismayed…

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