As the world mourns the loss of the Brazil National Museum to a monumental fire, we look back on some of the greatest losses to humanity’s art and cultural heritage.
Art News
The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs announced today that artist Martin Puryear to represent the US at the 2019 Venice Biennale. In its 58th year, the Biennale will run May 11 through Nov. 24, 2019. The Madison Square Park Conservancy will serve as this year’s curator of the United States Pavilion and will commision site-specific work from Puryear. Puryear follows 2017’s representative for the US, painter Mark Bradford.
A new set of tariffs proposed by President Trump could hit the art world this month. As part of continued efforts to reduce the US’s trade deficit with China, the list of items subject to import tariffs continues to grow. Set to go into effect as soon as late August, that list now includes categories covering paintings, sculpture, collage, ceramics, and antiques from China. The 25 percent import tariff would present a heavy burden to galleries, individual collectors, and museums in the US.
This week the Uffizi Gallery made a significant portion of its remarkable collection much more accessible. Through a partnership with Indiana University, scholars from both institutions have been working for two years to create 3D scans of the museum’s classical sculptures. Launching this week, the Uffizi Digitization Project website hosts over 300 digitized sculptures and fragments from the collection. The digital models offer views of the sculptures and fragments heretofore only available through in-person inspection.
Andy Warhol would have been 90 years old on August, 6. Museums and art lovers the world over are celebrating. The pioneer of Pop Art died in 1987 at the age of 58, but 30 years later, his fifteen minutes of fame aren’t up and his art is still ubiquitous.
Brooklyn polymath, Erik Zajaceskowski, has been making his imprint on the borough’s art and nightlife scenes for nearly two decades. Zajaceskowski and friends launched Mighty Robot, an illegal art and party loft, during Williamsburg’s cultural heydey in the late 1990s. During that time, he forged many connections that remain essential to his art making and curating. Mighty Robot eventually became Secret Project Robot, Zajaceskowski and Rachel Nelson’s acclaimed Bushwick performance space, music venue, and gallery.
This summer in Chicago, public art is being used as a call to action. Fifty-one 6 foot lighthouse sculptures that have been decorated by national and local Chicago artists, many with disabilities, are now on display on North Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s Magnificent Mile.
This weekend marks the inaugural opening of FRONT International, Cleveland’s new Triennial for Contemporary Art. Centered around the theme “An American City,” FRONT seeks to push the boundaries of the traditional art fair by emphasizing “process, research, collaboration and long-term engagement with Cleveland and Northeast Ohio." While the theme gives the triennial a local focus, it all aims to engage larger social, political, cultural, ecological and economic issues, using Cleveland to serve as an example of how these issues function on a larger scale.
Today the art world mourns the death of Robert Indiana. The pop artist died on Saturday at the age of 89. His ubiquitous “LOVE” sculptures, notably seen in Philadelphia, New York, and Indianapolis, are iconic works of art. The four letters stacked in a square with an off-kilter “O” were made famous in 1964 as a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card. Indiana went on to create steel sculptures based on this design, as well as prints. Since then the image has gone on the grace postage stamps, clothing, and every kind of souvenir imaginable.
In the spirit of the English poet Alexander Pope, art, like hope, springs eternal. And this year the vernal equinox, signaling the onset of spring, our most hopeful season, occurred on March 19th, the earliest in recent memory. While March 2020 also saw the proliferation of that other “v” word necessitating a period of enforced isolation, artists are possibly the best equipped to weather this period given the solitary nature of most creative activity. Many artists have recognized the uplifting power of spring, particularly in times of societal upheaval.
