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The Headlines

THE LEGENDARY ARTIST AND DRUMMER MILFORD GRAVES HAS DIED at the age of 79, the Guardian reports, terming him “a student—and eventually teacher—of many disciplines, from linguistics and human biology to martial arts.” Graves was a pioneer of free jazz, and spent years studying the relationship between the human heartbeat and music. In 2018, he was diagnosed with amyloid cardiomyopathy, or stiff heart syndrome, as the New York Times wrote in a 2020 profile; he was given six months to live. “It turns out, I was studying the heart to prepare for treating myself,” Graves told the paper. He collaborated with everyone from Albert Ayler to John Zorn, and created ingenious assemblages that were included in a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the … Read the rest

Teresa Burga, an artist whose indefinable output made her one of the most important conceptual artists in Latin America, has died at 85. The Peruvian Ministry of Culture announced her death on Twitter on Thursday.

Today, Burga is considered a major figure for her boundary-pushing works focused on authorship, forms of labor, and the status of women in Peru, her home country. Her work has taken the form of sculptures, installations, drawings, paintings, and conceptual projects, in the process expanding what art could be.

Burga’s best-known work is one that during its day generated confusion. Perfil de la mujer Peruana (Profile of Peruvian Woman), from 1980–81, marked a collaboration with the psychotherapist Marie-France Cathelat, with whom Burga founded the Investigaciones Sociales y Artísticas, an institution through which they facilitated social research. For Burga’s project, she and Cathelat interviewed 290 middle-class women between the ages of 25 and 29 in … Read the rest

As part of its annual conference, which runs through February 13, the College Art Association, a U.S.-based professional organization that promotes art history scholarship, announced the winners of its awards for 2021.

The association’s biggest prize, the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, has been awarded to Samella Lewis, an artist and scholar. Lewis was mentored by Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White, whom she met while studying at Dillard University in New Orleans, and she is best known for creating a vast number of figurative works on paper that depict various aspects of the Black experience in the United States. Her art was included in the Hammer Museum’s acclaimed exhibition “Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980.”

Lewis, the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in art history from Ohio State University, has also been influential as an art historian, carving out space for Black … Read the rest

A drawing by Vincent Van Gogh made during the artist’s final years will sell at Christie’s as part of the drawing collection sale titled “A Family Collection: Works on Paper, Van Gogh to Freud” on March 1 in New York. Estimated at $7 million–$10 million, the work is titled La Mousmé (1888).

The rare drawing comes from the family collection of London dealer Thomas Gibson and depicts an anonymous young female sitter. It is the last work of a group of 12 originally gifted by the artist to Australian painter John Russell that still remains in private hands. Other works from that gift, which include 9 landscapes and 2 portraits are held by the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

“The work is incredibly rare,” said … Read the rest

Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of the most expensive contemporary artists, is set to continue his reign next month at Christie’s in Hong Kong. His 1982 painting Warrior will be auctioned on March 23 during a single-lot sale titled “We Are All Warriors.” The work, which carries a third-party guarantee, is expected to achieve a price between $31 million and $41 million (HKD 240 million–HKD 320 million). If the present lot meets its low estimate it will be among the top 10 Basquiats to ever sell at auction, surpassing the price of $30.7 million paid for Flesh and Spirit (1982), from the collection of Herbert Neumann, at Sotheby’s in 2018.

“It is simply a masterpiece,” Cristian Albu, Christie’s international director of postwar and contemporary art, said of Warrior.

The large-scale painting, made with acrylic, oilstick and spray paint on wood panel, features a sword-wielding figure with Basquiat’s signature skull-like head. … Read the rest

During the pandemic, our kitchens have become even more the centers of our lives. Most meals are cooked at home; pasta makers, bread makers, and rice cookers have all seen jumps in sales as quarantine created both the need and opportunity for more appliances. KitchenAid, maker of iconic appliances like their stand mixer, chose the dark orange-yellow hue of honey for their 2021 color of the year — a fitting choice for quiet homeyness, though it was decided on in 2018.

The KitchenAid team already had in mind telling a story about connection and empathy for this year, “reaching across differences to make the world a better place, to build a brighter future,” according to Jessica McConnell, a director at KitchenAid, and Katie Remaly, a color, finish, and material designer. The color “is a reminder of the sweetness of coming together in the kitchen and experiencing the irresistible positivity, … Read the rest

Five hundred years after the conquest of Mexico, Sandy Rodriguez is weaving together old and new stories of the United States borderlands. “There is a kind of communion, a uniting, with the tlacuilos, who were the painters, scholars, scribes of the colonial period… it’s about affirming an indigenous artistic practice and reclaiming an art history that is very much of this region and of our culture,” Rodriguez said of making her series, “Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón.” This ongoing multimedia project includes the “Mapa de los Child Detention Centers, Family Separations and Other Atrocities,” pictured above. 

Rodriguez’s maps and portraits layer images of separated migrant families with Mayan and Nahua iconography and ancient botanical recipes. As part of her artistic process, she camps along the border, studying and gathering traditional materials to make pigments for her paintings. She is institutionally trained and comes from a family of Mexican artists.

Rodriguez is inspired … Read the rest