The Headlines
MOMA HAS A NEW DIRECTOR. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has a new director Christophe Cherix, ARTnews reported on Friday. Cherix will succeed Glenn Lowry, the director of MoMA since 1995, and he will start his new job this September. He has served as chief curator of MoMA’s prints and drawing department since 2013. “As the Museum approaches its centennial, my highest priority is to support its exceptional staff and ensure that their unique ability to navigate the ever-evolving present continues to thrive,” Cherix said in a statement. He has received widespread praise for exhibitions, including retrospectives for Adrian Piper and Ed Ruscha. At that latter show, Cherix personally facilitated the revival of Ruscha’s rarely seen 1970 Chocolate Room installation, which first debuted at that year’s Venice Biennale and which features walls covered sheets of paper printed with chocolate.
SHRINE SENT HOME. After 120 years, the American Museum of Natural History in New York is returning an Indigenous shrine known as the Whalers’ Shrine to the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation community in Canada, reports the New York Times. The wooden shrine features 88 carved wooden human figures, 4 carved whale figures, and 16 human skulls, and began its journey from the New York institution back to Vancouver Island last week. Locals there have been waiting for its return ever since it was sold secretly by two chiefs for $500 in the early 1900s and taken to the museum. Mowachaht epresentatives have repeatedly demanded that the shrine be repatriated, with no success until now, even as the shrine remained off view, in museum storage. “We’re ready for it to come home,” said Marsha Maquinna, an eighth-generation heir to a Mowachaht chief. “We, as a community, have lots to heal.”
The Digest
The Calgary-based EA Studios gallery is suing the estate of the late artist Norval Morrisseau for breach of contract and defamation, seeking $1.45 million CAD ($1 million) in damages. In a lawsuit filed in Alberta’s Superior Trial Court on March 11, the gallery alleges that the estate and its director, Cory Dingle, implied that the gallery “is, generally, an unethical organization” and alleged “exploitation of a vulnerable Indigenous artist.” [CBC]
Tate Britain in London will return a Nazi-looted painting by Henry Gibbs to the family of a Jewish Belgian art collector, Britain’s Ministry of Culture said on Saturday. The UK government’s Spoliation Advisory Panel recommended the restitution of the 1654 painting Aeneas and His Family Fleeing Burning Troy, which was stolen from Samuel Hartveld, who was forced to flee his home in Antwerp in 1940. [The Brussels Times]
The public is reacting with confusion and dismay over Trump’s recent order against the Smithsonian Institution’s so-called “anti-American ideology.” Visitors to the National Museum of African American History and Culture instead said that the institution, one of several targeted by Trump, was exposing “a long neglected part of history.” [The Washington Post and The Washington Post]
Long hidden away in private, a Caravaggio ceiling mural in a Rome mansion may eventually become viewable to the public following the settlement of a lawsuit between a princess and her stepsons. The work is the only one of its kind ever made by Caravaggio. [The Times of London]
The tomb of a high-ranking Egyptian military commander who served during the reign of Ramesses III was recently discovered. The ancient mudbrick burial structure was found at the site of Tell Roud Iskander in Ismailia. [Archaeology Magazine]
The Kicker
FAMILY MATTERS. Ahead of a survey show at Tate Britain in London, artist Ed Atkinsspoke candidly with the Guardian about how he processes thoughts on his body (which he doesn’t like) and his children (whom he loves and has used as inspiration for some of his finest works). The Tate show is in some ways a tribute to his loved ones. It features some 700 Post-it notes he drew for his daughter, as well as a new film that addresses his father’s death. In it, actor Toby Jones reads the cancer diary written by Aktins’s father. “One of the last lines in the diary is, ‘When and how does one begin to think about dying?’ That’s literally days before he dies,” Atkins said. “You can never come to terms with it.”
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