To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday,signupfor ourBreakfast with ARTnewsnewsletter.
The Headlines
CONTROVERSY HITS CANADA.Late last Friday, news broke that theNational Gallery of Canadain Ottawa let gofour senior staff members, a move that “shocked Canada’s art community,”Karen K. Howrites inARTnews.Angela Cassie, the interim director and CEO of the museum, said in an internal memo that the cuts were meant to “better align the Gallery’s leadership team with the organization’s new strategic plan.” Some claimed otherwise.Gary A. Hill, the senior curator of Indigenous art and the first-ever Indigenous curator at the museum, wroteon his social media, “The truth is, I’m being fired because I don’t agree with and am deeply disturbed by the colonial and anti-Indigenous ways the Department of Indigenous Ways and Decolonization is being run.” Also laid off wereKitty Scott, chief curator and deputy director;Stephen Gritt, director of conservation and technical research; andDenise Siele, senior manager of communications.
Related Articles
As U.N. Climate Talks Continued in Egypt, Protesters Simultaneously Targeted Sculptures in Three European Cities
National Gallery of Canada Fires Four Senior Staff in Sudden Restructuring
THE CLIMATE PROTESTS CONTINUEDthis past week in Paris, Oslo, and Milan, where, asDevorah Lauterpoints out inARTnews, activists took on works that werenot protected by glass. The Milan protest, which involved flour poured over anAndy Warholart car forBMW, had alreadygrabbed headlineslast week, but the other two actions didn’t receive quite as much attention. The Paris one took place at collectorFrançois Pinault’sBourse de Commercemuseum, where activists doused an outdoorCharles Raysculpture in red paint. The French minister of culture,Rima Abdul Malak,was not pleased. And at Oslo’sVigeland Sculpture Park, protestors also threw orange paint on a 46-foot-tall sculpture, which was not harmed in the process.
The Digest
Just 10 days before its expected sale date,Christie’spulled a T. rex skeleton from an auction in Hong Kong. The skeleton was expected to fetch between $15 million and $25 million.[The New York Times]
Many works that are on view at art fairs cannot be purchased, and that is because they’ve been bought before these events even open.Brian Ngsurveyed the phenomenon and asked gallerists about it.[Artsy]
Trustees at Washington’sTacoma Art Museumsaid they would not voluntarily recognize a unionization effort by workers at the institution. Staff at the museum now must vote on whether to unionize.[The Seattle Times]
Jean-Marie Straub, one half of the famed French filmmaking duoStraub-Huillet, whose work has also been seen in art galleries, has died at 89.[Variety]
Maine’sPortland Museum of Artrevealed potential designs for the institution’s expansion that were thought about by four finalists for the project. One of those finalists isAdjaye Associates, which is currently at work on the newStudio Museum in Harlem.[The Portland Press Herald]
ArtistsEbecho Muslimova,Aria Dean, andAnna Weyant; dealerAlexander Shulan; and criticDean Kissickare among the figures whoAir Mailsaid are “remaking Lower Manhattan in their own image.”[Air Mail]
The Kicker
BROADCAST NEWS.The latest news venture is mainly the product of artists, not journalists, and it’s being run from New York’sBrooklyn Museum, not a traditional sound studio. It’s the product ofFor Freedoms, which was founded as an artist-run super PAC and continues to stage politically oriented events and shows. “There has to be space for play in order for us to be creative, to rethink some of these big things,” its cofounder,Eric Gottesman, told theNew Yorker. “If we really are going to profoundly shift the foundations of the structures of society through culture, it’s got to be playing with it, poking at it, experimenting with it, failing, and laughing.”[The New Yorker]