The New York-based Andy Warhol Foundation, which distributes grants in the creative sector, has announced the 2022 recipients of its lauded Arts Writers prize.

The non-profit organization will distribute a total of $695,000 that will go to support twenty writers producing project across three literary categories: articles, books, and short-form writing. Each recipient will receive funding between $15,000 and $50,000. The annual grant is focused on supporting arts criticism.

In a statement announcing the awardees, Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant director, Pradeep Dalal described this year’s honored writers as “immensely rich.” Topics represented in the projects address issues related to race, eco-activism, and labor.

Dalal went on to describe the need to fund art criticism as “urgent,” amid “publication venues folding, national newspapers reducing their arts coverage and staff, and university presses relying on authors to find additional support for the publication of their books.”

The full list of grantees follows below.

RM, the leader of the pop group BTS, was recognized by a South Korean agency for his overseas efforts to help preserve and restore Korean cultural artifacts.

The 28-year-old singer, who released his solo album Indigo on Friday, received a plaque of appreciation from the Cultural Heritage Administration (CHA). RM, whose real name is Nam-joon, shared the news on Instagram with a short “Thank You” note.

According to the Korea Times, the plaque’s engraving says, “You have contributed to preserving and promoting Korean cultural artifacts outside the country with great affection for our cultural heritage and history. You are being honored with much appreciation and gratitude.”

The pop superstar has established a reputation for his interest in art and other artists through visits to museums, galleries, and major art fairs. In between publicity events and tours, he has shared news of all of this on his influential social media channels. RM also made large financial donations of 100 million won (about $77,000 USD today) to the Overseas Korean Cultural Heritage Foundation and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.

In addition to collecting art from domestic and foreign artists, RM loaned a terra cotta sculpture of a horse by the Korean artist Kwon Jin-kyu to a Seoul Museum of Art for a retrospective that ran until May of this year.

A self-portrait by the German Expressionist painter Max Beckmann may now be the most expensive artwork ever to sell at auction in Germany, according to a report by the Associated Press.

The painting hammered for $20.7 million on Thursday at Berlin’s Grisebach auction house. The previous record was for a 15th-century bronze sculpture of a Buddhist deity from China, which sold last year for about $10 million.

The painting, titled Selbstbildnis gelb-rosa (Self-Portrait Yellow-Pink), was made in 1943 during the artist’s exile in Amsterdam, where he fled after his work was classified as “degenerate art” by the Nazi regime. Hundreds of his works were confiscated from German museums.

Beckmann gave the painting his wife, Mathilde Kaulbach, who kept it until her death in 1986. The painting’s buyer remains unidentified. With the buyer’s premium, the total price for the work came to about $24.4 million, according to the auction house.

Artnet News reported that the painting sold to an unidentified Swiss buyer over the phone. The sale marks only the second time the painting has changed hands since it was executed.

Pioneering cartoon artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, whose self-deprecating drawings about frustrations and sexual longing made her a feminist hero, died from pancreatic cancer at 74 years old at her home in France on Tuesday. News of her death began spreading on social media and was later confirmed by David Zwirner, which represents her husband, R. Crumb.

Kominsky-Crumb came up in the underground comics scene that grew out of the 1960s counterculture. While the scene was not particularly supportive of women, Kominsky-Crumb broke through with her frank and unapologetic autobiographical comics, which often depicted women with hairy armpits, large noses, and big butts in black-and-white.

In 2016, she became one of twelve female cartoonists listed by the Comics Alliance as deserving of a lifetime achievement recognition.

Born Aline Goldsmith in 1948, Kominsky-Crumb grew up in Long Island, New York. It wasn’t until she attended the University of Arizona in Tucson in the late 1960s that she first got into underground comics. In 1972, she moved to San Francisco to pursue her artistic career. There, she met artist Robert Crumb, who is now better known by the name R. Crumb, after mutual friends noticed a resemblance between their work. They married in 1978 and had a daughter named Sophie in 1981.

While living in San Francisco, Kominsky-Crumb served as a founding member of the all-female collective that produced the long-running anthology Wimmin’s Comix (1972–85), which addressed such topics as queer life, abortion, and rape. In 1975, she cofounded with Diane Noomin the women’s comic Twisted Sisters, which tackled political issues around female empowerment, criticized of the patriarchy, took up sexual politics and lesbianism, and more.

London’s National Gallery canceled a plan with Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, to jointly organize an exhibition around modern art. The collaboration was nixed by the British institution in early March following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, The Art Newspaper reports.

National Gallery director Gabriele Finaldi is now working with its curators to replace 15 loans originally set to be supplied by the Pushkin museum for the show, titled “After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art”. The Pushkin’s director, Marina Loshak, was overseeing the loan. (Loshak could not be reached for comment.)

The exhibition, which is set to go on view in London in March 2023, will focus on the defining modern art movements, from Post-Impressionism to Fauvism, Cubism, and abstraction. Artists in the show include Gauguin, Van Gogh, Rodin, Degas, Munch, Klimt, Derain, Maillol and Mondrian. The show planned to explore the nascent avant-garde scene in Moscow before relations with Russia soured.

The Russian city was dropped from the exhibition’s plan amid the fallout from Ukraine invasion. The moves comes amid a period of isolation for the Russian arts sector from the rest of the museum world, which began in early March: Kremlin-affiliated trustees at international museums were asked to step down, while major exhibitions involving Russian art and preparations for Russia’s participation in the Venice Biennale pavilions were halted. Meanwhile, Russian art loans from Italy to South Korea were frozen in transit.

Since taking up the director position in 2013, Loshak has focused on developing the Moscow museum’s ties with institutions abroad in an effort to bolster its international reputation. (Her colleague, Vladimir Opredelenov, the former deputy director of the Pushkin Museum, resigned in March following the Russian invasion.)

A vast funerary building dating to Ptolemaic Egypt and decorated with portraits of the long deceased was uncovered in the Garza archeological site.

Heritage Daily reports that the structure was discovered at the Garza archeological site which has been under examination since 2016. Located about 50 miles south of Cairo, it was established in the third century BCE as part of an agricultural reclamation project launched by Ptolemy II Philadelphus (309–246 BCE).

The funerary building was constructed from stone blocks and descends several floors into the ground. A ring of arched doorways lead to burial chambers, some of which contained intricately decorated wooden coffins carved with ancient Egyptian and Greek glyphs.

The most notable find, however, is a collection of well-preserved Fayum portraits. Also called mummy portraits, these detailed portrayals of the dead were painted directly on the wooden coffins beginning in Egypt’s Roman period (100 BCE). The striking images ranged in style from realistic to highly stylized and have become icons of the period, with many housed in museums across the world.

This is the first significant discovery of Fayum portraits in over a century, since excavations by British archaeologist Flinders Petrie in Hawara in 1887, and German archaeologist, Von Kaufmann in 1910.

If you just so happened to look up at the Miami night sky over the last three evenings at the right moment—say, between 7 p.m. and 7:08 p.m.—you likely caught a glimpse of a swirling swarm of light. You weren’t dreaming, and it wasn’t a new UFO design. Instead, it was the work of Amsterdam-based artist duo Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn.  

Studio DRIFT, as the artists have long been known, staged a performance of Franchise Freedom, their famed drone performance, in honor of Art Basel Miami Beach’s 20th anniversary. The work premiered at the fair in 2017 and has since been staged only a few times, most recently in 2020 above Rotterdam in honor of frontline workers during the early days of the pandemic.

After opening remarks by Nauta and Gordijn in a small park across from the Miami Beach Convention Center, a mass of fairgoers grew silent as 300 Intel Shooting Star drones rose from behind the building and flew back and forth in concert with an emotive, minimalist piano score by Dutch composer Joep Beving. At times, the swarm briefly formed a double helix before flowing into more amorphous shapes and even a swirling vortex.

As the piece concluded, the drones formed the words “20 Years Art Basel Miami Beach” and then “DRIFT Supports Steam+,” referring to a program that places artists-in-residence at all Miami Beach public schools.

Franchise Freedom is strangely meditative, and the real magic of the performance is that, as the drones twist, turn, disperse, and reform in unison, they no longer appear as machines, but rather as an organic mass. This is by design, Gordijn told ARTnews after the performance. 

LA3C, an upcoming two-day culture and creativity festival launching later this month, will feature installations by a group of celebrated artists, including Jacolby Satterwhite, For Freedoms, and Patrick Martinez.

PMC—the parent company of ARTnews and Art in America, as well as Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, and SheKnows, among other publications—launched LA3C Culture & Creativity Festival last July, but had to postpone the event due to the pandemic. The festival is a celebration of culture in Los Angeles.

The festival will run from December 10 to 11, and will also feature performances by touted musicians such as Megan Thee Stallion, Maluma, and more.

The full lineup of artists includes Jacolby Satterwhite, Amanda Ross-Ho, Patrick Martinez, Edgar Ramirez, Tiffany Alfonseca, Abi Polinsky, Abi Polinsky, Rogan Gregory, and the collective For Freedoms. Their works at LA3C are being curated by Penske Projects. Information about each individual work is available on LA3C’s website.

In a statement, Alfonseca said, “I would say that I wanted to be a part of the LA3C project because I wanted to be a representation for people with Latinx roots. I want to be able to showcase work that’s relatable to the culture and make it accessible to people who can’t afford or are afraid to be a part of the art experience.”

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