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(Spoiler alert: this article contains information and plot points from the first episode of The Exhibit.)

The Exhibit, a new six-episode docuseries created by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and MTV officially kicking off tonight, will see seven American artists compete for a presentation at the institution and a $100,000 cash prize. But on tonight’s episode, before they even made any art, the contestants got to spend a night at the Hirshhorn, à la E.L. Konigsburg’s 1967 YA novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, to gather inspiration for their upcoming challenge.

After operating hours, the group is shown wandering around the Hirshhorn’s galleries and immersed themselves in installations such as Mark Bradford’s Pickett’s Charge (2017), Laurie Anderson’s The Weather (2021), and Barbara Kruger’s Belief + Doubt (2012). You wouldn’t be blamed for thinking this was all a commercial for the Hirshhorn’s collection.

But this is technically a reality show, however, and pretty soon, a sense of rivalry begins to creep in. “What bothers me is some artists that are new on the scene, suddenly they’re in every art news magazine,” remarks artist Frank Buffalo Hyde, one of the contestants. “It’s super annoying.”

This remark is followed by another from Misha Kahn, who sets the scene for what’s to come. “Baseera [Khan] and Jillian [Mayer] are both troublemakers,” Kahn says, referring to two of the other contestants. “We’re the ones that do three-dimensional stuff. Immediately you sense a similar thing. And then the painters, who all seem so lovely, are maybe more proper reserved humans.”

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The longtime chief curator of the Orlando Museum of Art, Hansen Mulford, has quietly retired after 42 years without fanfare or even advanced notice to staff, according to local press.

Mulford’s retirement was first reported by the Orlando Sentinel, which noted that with it, the OMA’s top leaders during last year’s Basquiat scandal have all left the institution. 

The former museum director, Aaron De Groft, was fired in June 2022 by the OMA board of trustees only days after the FBI seized a suite of paintings on display that were attributed to Basquiat. A FBI affidavit revealed that the works had been at the center of a nine-year-long investigation into their authenticity, and that the museum had been served a subpoena prior to the opening of the exhibition “Heroes & Monsters” in February 2022. Several former trustees have claimed that De Groft and the former board chair, Cynthia Brumback, withheld knowledge of the subpoena.

De Groft, who had vocally defended the works to the media, was replaced by interim director Luder Whitlock. A swift museum shakeup followed: Whitlock resigned after less than two months on the job, and two days after his departure, the board replaced Brumback as chair. Brumback had faced criticism from the Orlando community for her presumed failure to avert the scandal. She said in a statement in August that she had stepped down from her position to “focus on my business and my family.”

An internal announcement was issued by OMA interim chief operating officer, Joann Walfish, on the day of Mulford’s departure. “Today we are announcing the retirement of Chief Curator Hansen Mulford,” she wrote in the message. “We thank Hansen for over 40 years of service to the Orlando Museum of Art. Mulford’s last day as our Chief Curator was February 17.”

Scottish environmental activists with the group This is Rigged smashed the glass case of the sword of William Wallace, a knight who fought for Scottish independence, in an act of protest Thursday morning.

In a video shared to Twitter, two young activists, who go by Kat and Xander, used chisels, hammers, and a rock to break the glass case that protects the sword, demanding that the Scottish government do more to support a just transition to a green economy and refrain from approving new gas and oil licenses.

A spokesperson that works with Sterling Council, which stewards the monument, called the act “shameful”.

“We are currently assessing whether there is any damage to the historic Wallace Sword and the cost of repairs,” the spokesperson shared in an email. The sword will likely not be on view for at least several weeks, the spokesperson added.

Though the action brings to mind the protests that groups like Just Stop Oil and Letzte Generation began enacting at museums last year, sometimes splashing covered paintings with paint or glueing themselves to the pedestals of statues, the protest is actually inspired by a different history, according to the activists.

This week in London, Phillips followed its competitors Sotheby’s and Christie’s, holding an evening sale dedicated to modern and contemporary art at its UK headquarters that brought in £20 million ($24 million) with buyer’s fees on Thursday.

The total was almost half the sum made during last year’s equivalent sale, held in March against the backdrop of an escalating war in Ukraine. That sale, which was larger than this year’s by 10 lots, brought in £29.9 million ($40 million), even with Phillips under heightened scrutiny for its Russian ownership.

This time around, there were just 23 lots offered, making it the smallest evening sale that Phillips has staged in the British capital since 2019. All of them were sold, making it a white-glove sale.

The total amount the sale brought in likely would have been higher, were it not for the evening’s cover lot, a 1983 work by Gerard Richter consigned by French collector Marcel Brient, having been pulled before the sale. That work had been expected to sell for £10 million ($12 million).

After all was said and done, the auction hammered at a price of £16.3 million ($19.5 million) ($19.2 million–$23.5 million), meeting its newly adjusted low estimate.

A Balkan gang is suspected of being behind the theft of diamonds at last year’s edition of The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF), the renowned Dutch art fair, the Limburg police department announced Friday.

An international consortium of researchers and detectives working on the case believe the theft to be the work of a well known gang based in the Balkans which have been implicated in several heists, police said.

The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reported that sources close to the investigation say that the gang is the notorious Pink Panthers, who have been responsible for multiple diamond and jewelry heists around the world, including in Dubai, Tokyo, and Greece since 2001.

The gang is known for tactics that seem ripped from a movie, including a trick with a jar of face cream that was used in one of the original Pink Panther movies. Little is known about the internal structure of the gang, which experts say could range from 30 to 800 members.

Arthur Brand, a Dutch national who often works with police working on art crime investigations, said that he suspected the Pink Panthers from the very beginning.

Queen Victoria’s sketchbook, which was expected to fetch between £5,000 to £10,000 ($5,989 to $11,978) at auction, is now slated to return to the Royal Collection Trust. The news was announced by Charterhouse Auctioneers in Sherborne, Dorset, which was selling the work.

A family who owned the sketches was auctioning the book. They struck a deal with the Royal Collection Trust, which houses more than 4,000 works by the late monarch at St. James’ Palace in London, for an undisclosed sum.

The book contains the monarch’s monograph on the cover. It is filled with pencil and watercolor drawings made by the queen between 1885 and 1886. The queen’s sketches capture many of the landscapes that she saw while traveling.

Earlier this year, two floral paintings by Queen Victoria were up for sale at Hansons Auctioneers in London.

Queen Victoria is not the only royal with a passion for art. It’s a hobby that King Charles III, the reigning monarch, also enjoys in his free time.

For nearly two decades, South African ceramicist and designer Zizipho Poswa has been carving ancient stories in ceramics. She’s frequently relied on clay, but she experiments with other unusual material too, like bronze. The objects she crafts are often large; they flow from a rich tapestry of her heritage.

Born in Mthatha, a small town in Eastern Cape, Poswa attributes her love of art to her mother, who saw her interest in it from a young age and gave her the liberty to explore it. “She nurtured my creativity,” she said on a recent Zoom call. “She would allow me to draw on the walls and curate when her friends came.”

While in college, she studied textile design, a course she saw as an opportunity to explore her curiosity about art. The class put her on track to working in the design and textile industry. After working in that sector for a year, she turned her work in a more conceptual direction, working with her business partner Andile Dyalvane and five others she knew from school. Slowly and imaginatively, they built a story that birthed other stories. 

Poswa’s work has a delicateness to it: with a very contemplative intuition, her works illustrate the glamor of ancestral stories. Her work draws on mysticism, rituals, religion, and her Xhosa ancestry. In her latest exhibition, “uBuhle boKhokho” (Beauty of Our Ancestors) at Cape Town’s Southern Guild gallery, Poswa showed clay and bronze sculptures that seemed to merge African hairstyles with traditional vessel forms. Twenty monumental ceramics were shown alongside a photographic series capturing the artist’s creation of 12 hairstyles, in an attempt, she said, to bring a sense of visual comfort to the ever-expanding field of Black art. 

Just before her Southern Guild show ended earlier this month, ARTnews spoke with Poswa about how she began making ceramics and how she keeps her culture alive.

Chloé’s 2023 Fall Ready to Wear collection, which debuted Thursday in Paris, used Artemisia Gentileschi, a Renaissance era painter, as the muse for the new collection, Gabriela Hearst, the brand’s creative director, said in a recent interview.

Heart has been designing with two issues in mind, climate change and “the urgent need to champion women as leaders,” as Chloé has put it in brand messaging. “This is already accounted for. So how do we do this in our design context?” Hearst told Vogue. “I have to find a muse, and that is Artemisia Gentileschi, the Renaissance painter.”

The brand’s Instagram is full of references to Gentileschi, introducing the new collection with quotations from the artist, like, “A woman’s name raises doubt until her work is seen” or “I will show your lordship what a woman can do” alongside videos featuring her paintings.

The influence of the muse appears subtly. Whereas Paco Rabanne’s recent Fall 2023 collection included textiles printed with Salvador Dalí’s paintings, Chloé refrained from recreating Gentileschi’s work. Rather, Hearst seems to have taken loose inspiration from Renaissance era modes of dressing, invoking Gentileschi as a symbol of womanhood that transcends eras.

Born in 1593 in Rome, Italy, Gentileschi managed to become an artist despite the obstacles facing her as a woman in a male-dominated craft. Her rape at 17 years old, and the subsequent trial, defined her life, as onlookers and critics defined her as a curiosity. Meanwhile, her work would be strongly influenced by that violation. Paintings like Judith Slaying Holofernes (1615) and Jael and Sisera (1620) both depict strong, capable women killing unsuspecting men.

Art Dubai opened its 16th edition on March 1 with a strong sense of geopolitical positioning. During the press preview artistic director Pablo del Val called the fair a “mirror of a city of micro-communities,” where “culture is considered in non-Western terms” and regional director Hala Khayat echoed (in Arabic) that the focus of this art fair is the so-called Global South, the 5 percent of the world lacking representation in the Western art market and institution. “It’s the geography of the dream,” she said. Nearby, an unsettling work in the digital section of the fair depicted a rapid project of greening the desert in which swaths of new forest gave way to Dubai’s glittering skyscrapers.

While del Val insisted that Art Dubai is not about “exotic representations or the exception,” as part of a region tempered by a mild political sensibility, it sometimes felt that way. The term Global South was tossed around a lot during the press conference, standing in for a transnational subjectivity that is far from monolithic. In countries that don’t share the same economic inequities or racism, what or where is the Global South is still a point of interrogation, since, as scholar Anne Garland Mahler has put it, “there are economic Souths in the geographic North and Norths in the geographic South … the epithet ‘global’ is used to unhinge the South from a one-to-one relation to geography.”

More than 130 galleries are spread across two halls in the fair’s longtime home at Madinat Jumeirah, the Modern section, tightly curated by Mouna Mekouar and Lorenzo Giusti, melding with the Contemporary. There was a more discursive, communal feel to Art Dubai this year with its most ambitious program of market-driven talks, which includes the first edition of Christie’s Art + Tech and Art Business conference as well as 10 performative culinary South Asia-inspired commissions at the Chaupal delicatessen. The mood among gallerists was generally buoyant and optimistic, with several veteran galleries reporting sales, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi announcing itself as an institutional player ahead of its 2025 opening.

Below are six stand-out booths at the 2023 Art Dubai.

Maryland’s Glenstone Museum has announced they will acquire more than 100 photographs from the collection of Andrew and Mary Pilara and the Pilara Foundation in San Francisco. The Pilara collection is among the greatest in North America, and will bolster the museum’s already significant collection of conceptual photographs with luminaries of documentary photography like Walker Evans and Diane Arbus.

The acquisition, which was made in part with guidance from Gagosian Art Advisory and Jeffrey Fraenkel of Fraenkel Gallery, comes just over a month after the Pilara’s announced that Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco, where the collection was kept, will shut its doors in 2025 after over a decade.

The decision to shutter Pier 24 was not an easy one. However, San Francisco Port Commission’s decision to triple the rent for Pier 24’s home under the San Francisco Bay Bridge led the Pilara Foundation to rethink how best to serve both their local community and the global photographic community and change its mission from an “operating foundation to a granting foundation.”

Apart from sharing philosophical values with Pier 24, free admission, education, and community engagement, for example, the Glenstone similarly views photography as a driving force in contemporary art. “The advent of photography is arguably the single most important technological innovation to have an impact on art since the late 19th century, so it’s impossible to tell the full story of modern art without it,” Glenstone director and co-founder Emily Rales told ARTnews.

Rales added that separating collections by medium is an archaic way of thinking about how to organize art.  “Painting, sculpture, photography, drawings, videos – they are all important and thinking about them in a cross-disciplinary way yields a deeper and more nuanced appreciation of artmaking,” she said. 

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