News

Berkeley’s Artwork Loss Is a Museum’s Gain

BERKELEY, CA—Everybody misplaces something sometime. But it is not easy for the University of California, Berkeley, to explain how it lost a 22-foot-long carved panel by a celebrated African-American sculptor, or how, three years ago, it mistakenly sold this work, valued at more than a million dollars, for $150 plus tax. The university’s embarrassing loss eventually enabled the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, a large museum and research center in San Marino, Calif., to acquire its first major work by an African-American artist.

For the full story, reported by The New York Times, please click here.

February 22, 2012

Azerbaijan Hosts First National Art Fair

AZERBAIJAN—Julia Michalska of the Art Newspaper reports that Azerbaijan is set to host its first national art fair. The exhibition, which opens February 24, includes twenty local artists who have collaborated with historians and archaeologists to create site-specific installations within the ancient city of Baku. The projects will be unveiled every Friday until September of 2012.

“Particularly at this time of development and transformation in Azerbaijan, it is important to embrace Baku’s heritage,” says Aida Mahmudova, the founder and director of Yarat, a nonprofit art foundation that organized the fair. “The city’s history is being used to make contemporary art.”

February 22, 2012

Damien Hirst to Develop 500 “Eco-Homes”

UK—Damien Hirst is branching out into environmentally sustainable real estate, according to the Los Angeles Times’ Jamie Wetherbe. Hirst is investing in the development of five hundred new ecologically sustainable houses near North Devon, UK, where he resides. Wetherbe notes that the buildings will feature “hidden rooftop wind turbines, photovoltaic solar panels, and state-of-the-art insulation” among other features meant to set the standard for green design. Mike Rundell, Hirst’s architect, stated: “[Hirst] has a horror of building anonymous, lifeless buildings. He wants these houses to be the kind of homes he would want to live in.”

February 21, 2012

Dealer Marc Jancou Files Suit Against Cady Noland and Sotheby’s

NYC—Dealer Marc Jancou has filed a lawsuit against Cady Noland and Sotheby’s, claiming that the artist disrupted his sale of her work Cowboys Milking, 1990, causing the auction house to reject the consignment the day before it was to be sold. R. Corbett of Artnet reports that the previous day a Noland piece fetched $6.6 million, well past its high estimate of $3 million, setting a new record for a work at auction by a living female artist. Jancou is seeking $26 million in damages for the painting, which was estimated to be worth between $250,000 and $350,000.

In his complaint, Jancou states: “Noland tortiously interfered with the consignment agreement by persuading Sotheby’s to breach the agreement by refusing to put the work up for auction, despite there being no basis under the agreement to do so.” Sotheby’s has responded by pointing to a clause within the firm’s consignment contract, which stipulates that the auction house “reserves the right to withdraw any property before the sale and shall have no liability whatsoever for such withdrawal.”

February 21, 2012

Thieves Loot Greek Museums as Economy Worsens

ATHENS—While the unemployment rate of Greece rises past 21 percent, the crime rate is increasing as well, putting the museums of antiquity in many historic cities at great risk. On Friday morning, two masked gunmen stormed a small museum in Olympia in southern Greece and made off with dozens of objects up to 3,200 years old. The robbers stole sixty-five artifacts and tied up a forty-eight-year-old female security guard. The Washington Times reports that culture minister Pavlos Geroulanos submitted his resignation after the robbery, but it was unclear whether it had been accepted by prime minister Lucas Papademos. Yiannis Mavrikopoulos, head of the culture ministry museum and site guards’ union told the Washington Times “There are no funds for new guard hirings. There are 2,000 of us, and there should be 4,000, while many have been forced to take early retirement ahead of the new program of layoffs. We face terrible staff shortages. As a result, our monuments and sites don’t have optimum protection––even though guards are doing their very best to protect our heritage.”

February 20, 2012

Bloomberg’s plan to close 33 schools

NYC—More than 2,000 teachers, parents, students and community members faced off against New York Mayor Bloomberg’s Panel for Education Policy (PEP) February 9 in a heated protest against Bloomberg’s plan to close 33 schools for supposed poor performance.

The protest, held at Brooklyn Technical High School, was led by Occupy the DOE, a coalition of Occupy activists and teachers, parents and students, along with a variety parent and student groups organized by the Coalition of Educational Justice. Under pressure from its membership, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) later joined the protest as well, after union leaders abandoned their plan to hold a separate demonstration nearby.

Activists didn’t achieve their goal of holding their own “People’s PEP” by using the people’s mic. But the militant demonstration that united students, teachers and parents was a major step forward in building a movement to challenge Bloomberg’s school closings and his entire policy of corporate education “deform.”

February 20, 2012

Marina Abramovic Turns to Rem Koolhaas to Design New Performance Art Center

NEW YORK—The artist Marina Abramovic has selected the architect Rem Koolhaas’s firm, OMA, to design her new performance art center in upstate New York.

February 17, 2012

Exhibition at National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Shut Down

February 16, 2012

Le Corbusier’s Radiant City damaged by fire

MARSEILLE—One of France’s most important landmarks of modernist architecture, La Cité Radieuse housing estate in Marseille, built by the architect Le Corbusier, has been damaged by fire. Fire services fought for over 12 hours to put out a blaze that began on Thursday afternoon in a first floor flat in the nine-storey concrete complex which is protected by special heritage status in France.

Three apartments had been gutted and many others seriously damaged. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, the Swiss-born architect better known as Le Corbusier, built what was hailed as the vertical village between 1947 and 1951.

February 16, 2012

WikiLeaks banned from UNESCO conference on WikiLeaks

PARIS—WikiLeaks denounced UNESCO for banning WikiLeaks from tomorrow’s international conference about WikiLeaks. The large two-day conference, which has 37 speakers listed, is to be held UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. US organizers have stacked the conference with WikiLeaks opponents and blocked all speakers from WikiLeaks, stating that the decision to censor WikiLeaks representation was an exercise in ’freedom of expression… our right to give voice to speakers of our choice’.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange denounced the conference: ’UNESCO has made itself an international human rights joke. To use “freedom of expression” to censor WikiLeaks from a conference about WikiLeaks is an Orwellian absurdity beyond words. This is an intolerable abuse of UNESCO’s Constitution. It’s time to occupy UNESCO.’

WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson expressed consternation in a letter to UNESCO about the exclusion: ’UNESCO has a duty to assure that fairness and balance is secured in important discussions carried out under the banner of the organization. It is obvious that this will hardly be the case, given the selection of speakers. This is both a disgrace to UNESCO and potentially harmful to WikiLeaks.’

Julian Assange calls for an immediate investigation “UNESCO must conduct a full, frank and open investigation as to how its constitution, which tasks it to promote freedom of expression, freedom of information and freedom of communication, has become a blunt instrument of censorship. UNESCO must demonstrate that cold-war style power-plays, by the United States, or indeed any other country, are no longer acceptable.”

February 15, 2012

McNay Art Museum Receives $5 Million Bequest

SAN ANTONIO, TX—The McNay Art Museum has received a bequest of five million dollars from museum trustee Nancy Blackburn Hamon, who passed away last year, reports Steve Bennett of the San Antonio Express News. Museum director William J. Chiego states that the endowment is intended for the Jane & Arthur Stieren Center for Exhibitions.

Said Chiego of Hamon: “She knew how expensive it was to operate a museum. Her gift allows us to use the income from the endowment to support the larger costs of operation that came when we built the Stieren Center. It’s the hardest kind of money to raise.”

In related news, Bennett writes that the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Witte Museum have each received eight hundred thousand dollars from the estate of Frances and Louis Wagner for endowments intended to provide annual support for their respective lecture series.

Katie Luber, director of the San Antonio Museum of Art, said that the bequest is “huge for us because it will allow us to bring internationally renowned scholars to San Antonio to address all kinds of really wonderful issues and opportunities in the art world.”

February 15, 2012

Lillian Bassman, Fashion and Fine-Art Photographer, Dies at 94

NEW YORK—Lillian Bassman, a magazine art director and fashion photographer who achieved renown in the 1940s and ’50s with high-contrast, dreamy portraits of sylphlike models, then re-emerged in the ’90s as a fine-art photographer after a cache of lost negatives resurfaced, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94. Her son, Eric Himmel, confirmed the death.

Ms. Bassman entered the world of magazine editing and fashion photography as a protégé of Alexey Brodovitch, the renowned art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Her nonadvertising work appeared frequently in Harper’s Bazaar, and she developed close relationships with a long list of the era’s top models, including Barbara Mullen (her muse), Dovima and Suzy Parker.

In 1969, disappointed with the photographic profession and her prospects, she destroyed most of her commercial negatives. She put more than 100 editorial negatives in trash bags, putting them aside in her converted carriage house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

It was not until the early 1990s that Martin Harrison, a fashion curator and historian who was staying at her house, found the long-forgotten negatives. A full-fledged revival of her career ensued, with gallery shows and international exhibitions, including a series of monographs devoted to her photography.

A new book, “Lillian Bassman: Lingerie,” is to be published by Abrams on April 1.

February 15, 2012

Gerhard Richter Mobbed by Paparazzi as Retrospective Opens in Berlin

BERLIN—One day after his 80th birthday, the German painter Gerhard Richter on Friday unveiled a major retrospective at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. A planned walk by the artist through the exhibition space had to be canceled after he was mobbed by dozens of photographers more typically associated with the movie stars up the block at the Berlinale film festival, which opened the day before. Interest in Mr. Richter, already a superstar by art world standards, has surged in his native land around his birthday, and a series of exhibitions and lectures in Berlin and Dresden, the city of his birth, are taking place this year.

This exhibition, “Gerhard Richter: Panorama,” includes roughly 130 paintings and five sculptures, featuring both his abstract and figurative works and will be open to the public from Sunday, Feb. 12, to May 13. The retrospective wason display at the Tate Modern in London through January and will be exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris after it closes in Berlin.

February 14, 2012

Dance Awards Announced for Mikhail Baryshnikov, Michel Kouakou, and William Forsythe

NEW YORK—Mikhail Baryshnikov has been named winner of the Vilcek Prize for the Arts, which honors the contributions of foreign-born artists and scientists in the United States and includes a cash prize of one hundred thousand dollars, reports Julie Bloom of the New York Times. The Vilcek Foundation notes in a statement that Baryshnikov is being recognized for his “body of distinguished work and his legacy of advancing the field of dance.” The Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, worth twenty-five thousand dollars, was awarded to Michel Kouakou, a choreographer from the Ivory Coast.

Bloom also reports that William Forsythe has won the 2012 Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement, which includes a fifty-thousand-dollar prize and honors choreographers who have dedicated their lives to the creation of modern dance. Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Hanya Holm, Alwin Nikolais, Katherine Dunham, Alvin Ailey, and Twyla Tharp are among past recipients.

February 14, 2012

Finnish Museum Employees March to Parliament

FINLAND—Employees of the National Board of Antiquities in Finland, a organization which oversees the country’s museums, have staged a demonstration in Helsinki to protest proposed job cuts as well as the closure of the museums, reports YLE. The staff marched from the Finnish National Museum to parliament with a petition to request more resources as opposed to layoffs. They claim that the job cuts endanger Finland’s national heritage. Earlier this year, the government proposed that eight museums be closed and it has threatened to terminate forty jobs. This decision comes as a result of the four-million-euro budget slash imposed by the new government on Finland’s culture sector.

February 14, 2012

UC Berkeley cop cleared in federal jury civil rights ruling

CALIFORNIA—A federal jury has ruled in favor of a UC Berkeley police officer who was accused of violating a student’s rights during a 2009 protest.The San Francisco jury decided late Friday afternoon after deliberating less than five hours that Officer Brendan Tinney did not violate Zhivka Valiavicharska’s civil rights during the November 2009 demonstration near Sproul Hall.

Valiavicharska had claimed Tinney broke her fingers with a baton.The 2009 protest over University of California tuition hikes was among the first in a series of demonstrations at Berkeley and other campuses that has continued this year.  A UC Berkeley panel later concluded the university’s bad decisions had turned the mostly peaceful protest into “a raw power struggle” between police and demonstrators.

February 13, 2012

Hungary’s government tightens grip on arts

HUNGARY—The national conservative government, led by Viktor Orban, stands accused of systematically replacing key figures in cultural institutions, staging pro-government exhibitions, rethinking permanent museum displays and replacing historic statues to fit its political agenda.

There have been other government-instigated changes in personnel at leading institutions. Laszlo Simon, a Fidesz party MP and chairman of the parliamentary cultural and press committee, has become the head of the National Cultural Fund of Hungary—which up until now was a body independent of government, monitored by the culture committee. It is one of the most important organisations that funds Hungarian cultural institutions, including museums, libraries, theatres and archives.

Meanwhile, Gyorgy Szabo, the respected director of Trafo, a leading contemporary art centre, was ousted from his position in January and replaced by the choreographer Yvette Bozsik. The director of Budapest’s Uj Szinhaz theatre, Istvan Marta, was due to be replaced by the extreme right-wing actor Gyorgy Dorner as we went to press. “The government wants to disrupt the fabric of Hungarian culture, by having leading cultural figures disappear and replacing them with their own,” says the art historian Eva Forgacs.

February 13, 2012

Egyptian University students maintain place at vanguard of revolution

EGYPT—Cairo University students weren’t the only ones to bring the ongoing revolution into their campus. By late March, students across the country found themselves in direct confrontation with authorities. Students at Nile University, the only university in Egypt dedicated to research, joined the student movement when the state commandeered the university’s premises and forbade faculty and students from entering.

Large numbers of students also participated in November’s clashes on Cairo’s Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which left 41 dead and over one thousand injured.  Thousands of students from Cairo, Ain Shams and Helwan universities also marched to Tahrir Square to register their opposition to Egypt’s ruling military council. Nile University students, for their part, suspended all university activities for one day to show their solidarity with the protesters.

Not long afterwards, a security crackdown on a sit-in protest outside the Cabinet building in December left 19 dead and 750 injured. Alaa Abd El-Hady, a fifth-year medical student at Ain Shams University, was among those killed during the crackdown. Some 2,000 students planned to march from Ain Shams University to the defense ministry to protest the death of their fellow student, but were ultimately intercepted by military forces.

“Students have nothing to lose. We have nothing to do but bring down the military,” said Nile University’s Ibrahim. “There are millions of us. If we move, we’re going to have an impact.”Students across the country, meanwhile, are now calling for a nationwide general strike on Saturday.

February 10, 2012

Robert E. Hecht Jr. (1920–2012)

FRANCE—American art dealer Robert E. Hecht Jr. passed away died as his home in Paris on Wednesday. He was ninety-two.

Hecht has been involved with classical antiquity trading for several decades and was most recently the subject of a criminal trial in Rome on the charges of trafficking looted artifacts. The case against him focuses on an international network of smugglers, dealers, and collectors trading objects originating from Italian tombs. Along with former J. Paul Getty antiquities curator Marion True and Italian dealer Giacomo Medici, Hecht was accused of being a key figure in the trade scandal. Discussing the sources of his inventory of artifacts, Hecht told the Los Angeles Times recently, “I have no idea of where an object was excavated. It could have been excavated one hundred years ago; it could have been excavated an hour ago.”

February 9, 2012

Sarkozy Asks Louvre to Turn France’s Naval Headquarters Into a New National Museum

FRANCE—The Hôtel de la Marine was built by Louis XV on Paris’s Place de la Concorde in the 18th century and later became the headquarters of the French navy. Now that France’s naval offices plan to move to the still-under-construction “French Pentagon” in 2014, the building needs a new purpose. President Nicolas Sarkozy has decided that the historic structure will succeed its military career with a cultural one: the Louvre is turning the Hôtel de la Marine into a rotating exhibition space.

The new plan comes as a relief for those who opposed the for-profit privatization of such an important cultural landmark. There was a public outcry in late 2010 when news leaked that the government was considering turning the structure over to technology and real estate entrepreneur Alexandra Allard. Allard had proposed creating a cultural center called “La Royale,” but critics denounced this as a “money-making circus.” Historians and members of the military signed a petition against the plan, reported Agence France-Presse. In response to the new Louvre arrangement, Allard has said that Sarkozy’s decision shows that France is “rotten with conservatism,” according to Le Figaro.

The Hôtel de la Marine is expected to open to the public in 2015.

February 8, 2012

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012)

SPAIN—Painter, sculptor, and art theorist Antoni Tàpies passed away on February 6th, according to AFP. His works ranged from abstract compositions on canvas to a ten-foot-high model of a sock with a hole in its heel. In 1948, Tàpies helped found the Spanish movement Dau al Set, closely affiliated with Surrealist and Dadaist movements. Over a decade later, he was active in resistance efforts against dictator Francisco Franco’s regime. In 2010, he was given the title of Marquess by Spain’s King Juan Carlos.

Tàpies’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions and retrospectives at institutions including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Guggenheim in New York, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and in the Spanish Pavilion during the 1993 edition of Venice Biennale. He was represented by Pace Gallery.

February 8, 2012

MoMA Acquires Works by Feminist Artists

NEW YORK—This week the Museum of Modern Art said it had acquired important groups of work from the 1960s and ‘70s in a variety of mediums by Martha Rosler and Valie Export. Included are all Ms. Rosler’s original photo montages as well as a complete set of 20 color prints of her landmark series “Bringing the War Home,” which she created in the Vietnam era between 1967 and 1972.

“Bringing the War Home” deals with issues of how war enters lives. “We see these beautiful advertisements in magazines and next to them these horrifying war images,” Ms. Breitwieser said. “This is what she has connected. Until now most of these images were only shown in underground magazines, but they really belong in a museum.”

The works by Valie Export include videos, photographs and two early films. “It’s what she calls expanded cinema,” Ms. Breitwieser said. “It does not consist of the usual things like a screen and a projection; rather she has deconstructed elements about how a film is generated.”

February 8, 2012

Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei to Create 2012 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion

UK—Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei are set to create the 2012 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion. In a press release issued today, Serpentine notes that the pavilion will lead visitors to the space beneath the gallery’s lawn, allowing them to “explore the hidden history of its previous pavilions.” The work will include eleven columns characterizing each past pavilion and a twelfth to support a platform roof suspended approximately five feet above ground. The pavilion will be presented as part of the London 2012 Festival, the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad.

Said Serpentine director Julia Peyton-Jones and codirector Hans Ulrich Obrist of the gallery’s selection: “It is a great honor to be working with Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei. We are delighted that our annual commission will bring this unique architectural collaboration to Europe to mark the continuity between the Beijing 2008 and the London 2012 Games.”

February 7, 2012

Guggenheim to Close Berlin Outpost

GERMANY—Carol Vogel reports for the New York Times that the Deutsche Guggenheim will be closing at the end of 2012. Though neither Deutsche Bank nor the Guggenheim enumerated any concrete reasons behind the decision, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation, Richard Armstrong, stated: “Berlin today is a very different city from what it was when we began. We feel the time is right now to step back and reexamine our collaboration to see how it might evolve.’’ Over the course of its fifteen years, the institution has brought in 1.8 million visitors to a total of fifty-seven exhibitions. It has also commissioned seventeen artists to create works that made their debut in the space.

February 7, 2012

Design Selected for AIDS Memorial Park in Manhattan

NEW YORK—“Infinite Forest,” a design proposed by a team of architects at Studio a+i, has won a competition for an AIDS memorial park in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, reports the Associated Press in an article published on the Washington Post. The park was previously part of the former St. Vincent’s Hospital; after the institution’s bankruptcy, Rudin Management Company acquired the triangular piece of land and hosted the design competition. CEO and chairman Bill Rudin notes the memorial has received partial approval by the city. He adds that the design, which includes groves of trees and mirrored glass surfaces, will allow for “a commemoration of those impacted by AIDS.”

February 7, 2012

Students continue to speak out against budget issue

CALIFORNIA—It’s been two months since student protesters rallied in the quad at Cal State Fullerton to protest a soon-to-be-enacted nine percent tuition increase for the California State University system. The protesters then followed that up by “occupying” an area behind the Pollak Library for three days and nights.

The nine percent tuition increase passed and it is expected to be enacted in the Fall 2012 semester. The campus closed for fall recess and the short-lived makeshift “occupy” encampment was broken up just three days after it began. The fall semester ended shortly thereafter.“We’re going to try to open up the lines of dialogue with the new president and the administration on our campus, but for the most part if it comes down to nothing, which is what we’re expecting, then we’re probably going to see some sort of action in March,” said Inga.

Inga was present Wednesday at the CSU Board of Trustees meeting in Long Beach despite the absence of student protesters.

“If anything positive came from the meeting it was basically (California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s) response to the board of trustees and the fact that they’re not holding the interest of the university and the public,” Inga said.

With a state budget that seems doomed in the short-run, future additional fee hikes for public education are likely and more student-held protests and demonstrations on California campuses can be expected.

February 2, 2012

Artist and poet Dorothea Tanning dies at age 101

NYC— Artist and poet Dorothea Tanning, died peacefully in her home in New York City on January 31.  She was 101 years old.  For 34 years, she shared a loving partnership with her husband, Max Ernst, first in the United States and later in France.  After his death in 1976, she returned to New York and demonstrated that it is never to late to begin a new chapter in life.  In her mid-seventies, she became more productive than ever in her studio, and in her mid-eighties launched a new and successful career as a writer and poet.  She worked until her last days, publishing her second book of poems, Coming to That, in the fall of 2011.

February 1, 2012

Guards at London’s National Gallery on Strike to Protest Staff Cuts

UK—The Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery in London faces disruption by strikes action from this week. Security guards say cuts leave works vulnerable to damage or theft. They are planning two-hour stoppages on 19 and 28 January and 2 and 4 February, with other possible dates to follow.

The strike follows the gallery’s instruction to the guards — referred to in London as “warders,” now called “gallery assistants” – to each watch over two rooms rather than one. Warders claim this allowed a man to attack two Poussin paintings in July while the warder was in the adjoining room.

A gallery spokeswoman said: “The majority of galleries…throughout the UK, across Europe and far beyond, all employ similar systems. The National Gallery will endeavour to keep the exhibition open and fulfil its obligation to people who already have tickets for that day.”

February 1, 2012

Artist Mike Kelly reportedly dies at age 58

NYC—Mike Kelley, one of the most critically acclaimed artists of his generation, has reportedly died at the age of 58.  The Observer has reported that according to several sources close to the artist died, a cause of death has not been confirmed.

The artist had recently been selected for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, an exhibition that he has participated in seven times in the past. He had major one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Louvre.

Mr. Kelley was born in 1954 in Detroit, and his childhood there provided material for many of his work. Beginning in the early 1970s, he played in the band Destroy All Monsters with Cary Loren, Niagara and Jim Shaw, producing noisy, metal- and punk-inflected music that has been an influence on generations of sound artists and noise musicians. Destroy All Monsters was recently the subject of two retrospectives, at the Prism Gallery in Los Angeles and at the Boston University Art Gallery.

February 1, 2012

US State Department and RISD Work Together on ART in Embassies

PROVIDENCE, RI—ART in Embassies (AIE), the US State Department, has began its inaugural art program in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design. ART in Embassies: Morocco, which will be a winter-session studio art course, is being taught by artist Jim Drain as well as other RISD students and will culminate in a student-made large outdoor sculpture outside of the US Embassy building in Rabat, Morocco. The program will also involve classes taught by textile artist Soukaina Aziz El Idrissi of Morocco, dean of fine arts from RISD Anais Missakian, and interim associate provost Patricia Phillips. Chief curator of ART in Embassies Virginia Shore told the Wall Street Journal, “The mission of the ART in Embassies is to advance our nation’s cultural diplomacy through the international exchange of visual arts, culture, and ideas. While AIE has worked with more than 10,000 artists, museums, collectors, universities, and dealers over the past fifty years, this project with RISD is one of the most involved collaborations to date. Led by artist Jim Drain, along with ten RISD students, this project is engaging talented artists from both the US and Morocco. As part of our fiftieth anniversary, this project is representative of the culmination of our collective efforts, and one worth celebrating.”

February 1, 2012

Hauser & Wirth Announces Opening of Second New York Gallery

NEW YORK—Hauser & Wirth has announced the opening of a second location in New York City, a twenty-three-thousand-square-foot exhibition and project space located at 511 West Eighteenth Street. Set to open to in fall of 2012, the new location will serve “as a counterpoint to the intimacy of the gallery’s Upper East Side townhouse,” stated Hauser & Wirth in a press release issued today. Previously, the space was home to the Roxy roller skating rink and discotheque.

“New York is the world’s art capital and its cultural ecology is unlike that of any other city,” founder Iwan Wirth said. “We are excited to expand our capabilities as a social and cultural shop in such a rich, dynamic, creative environment. Hauser & Wirth’s entire global team is delighted and honored to be able to increase our participation in the life of New York City, and to create another special destination where the public can engage the work and ideas of the artists we represent.”

February 1, 2012