Monday, January 19

Victoria Miro Now Represents Flora Yukhnovich 
Victoria Miro, which maintains spaces in London and Venice, has added London-based painter Flora Yukhnovich to its roster. Yukhnovich is known for her reinterpretations of  18th-century imagery through a contemporary cultural lens. Her work first appeared at Victoria Miro in a group exhibition in 2019, and she later had two solo exhibitions with the gallery. A third Victoria Miro solo exhibition will follow in London in 2022.

Rele Gallery Will Open Los Angeles Space
Rele Gallery in Lagos, Nigeria, will open its first international outpost in Los Angeles on February 1. The inaugural exhibition at the L.A. space is titled “Orita Meta –Crossroads,” and it will feature works by Nigerian artists Marcellina Akpojotor, Tonia Nneji, and Chidinma Nnoli. “Los Angeles has become a central destination for the arts at all levels, especially for emerging voices, and I … Read the rest

The Headlines

WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP SET TO LEAVE OFFICE IN ABOUT 48 HOURS, reporter Graham Bowley revisited the president’s repeated proposals to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. “The agency survived, its budget even grew a bit, not because President Trump ever wavered in his view of it as a waste of federal dollars,” Bowley writes in the New York Times, “but because Congress . . . voted to keep it alive.” Of course, the N.E.A.’s annual budget of $167.5 million (for 2021) is still modest compared to other sources of arts funding, he writes. For instance, New York City alone spends more each year on its cultural affairs. Meanwhile, in the San Francisco Chronicle, Denise Sullivan takes a look at the history of president’s supporting arts in an article that stops with President Obama.

SPEAKING OF THE WHITE HOUSE, Joseph Robinette Biden … Read the rest

These days, Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and a host of other familiar names dominate at auction. But it wasn’t always so. Before the last couple decades, the Old Masters category—featuring artists who were active between the 14th and 18th centuries—was all anyone could talk about. Although its prominence has waned, the category has still set a number of auction records. Both public auctions and high-profile private museum acquisitions of works by art historical giants like Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Rembrandt, and Peter Paul Rubens, among others, have grabbed headlines, with works sometimes selling for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Major private deals of masterpieces in recent years have also moved the category to new heights. In 2019, billionaire J. Tomilson Hill, former chairman of private equity firm Blackstone, was revealed as the buyer of Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (ca. 1607) in a last-minute behind-the-scenes purchase made … Read the rest

Art Is Everything, a new novel by art critic and law professor Yxta Maya Murray, follows the life of Amanda Ruiz, a queer Chicana performance artist who writes essays about her life and art, over the course of about a decade. When the novel opens, Amanda is on the cusp of fame, at work on a mobile opera named Texit and an NEA-funded autocritical documentary she plans to film in Mexico, after having stretched a $10,000 Franklin Furnace grant over two years. All the while, Amanda writes her essays, which form the core of the novel’s prose and appear as essayistic captions on Instagram, Yelp reviews of exhibitions, Vimeo comments, and more, as well as descriptions for artworks posted to museum websites that are quickly removed.

Though Art Is Everything is imbued with humor, Murray also takes to task the racism, misogyny, and homophobia that run rampant in … Read the rest