The Manhattan property where Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat lived and worked will be taken over by actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie.

The deal for the property, located at 57 Great Jones Street, was confirmed today by John Roesch and Garrett Kelly, both directors at the real estate agency Meridian Capital Group. Jolie will rent the space for her latest creative venture, Atelier Jolie, under long-term commercial use for eight years.

The interior space features 6,600 square feet of space across three floors. The exterior of the building is adorned in street art, and Jolie will keep it that way as a public tribute to Basquiat, who started his career as one half of the graffiti art duo SAMO.

“[Jolie] wanted to preserve the older art on [the building] and keep that Basquiat feel to the space,” said Roesch.

“She loved the facade of the building and it being tagged up with the street art as a memorial for Basquiat,” Kelly added.

The Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Latvia (RIBOCA), set to open next month after a year-long postponement, has canceled its third edition due to its organizers’ ties to Russia.  

“It appears that the heritage of our executive members, which includes Russian among Lithuanian and Latvian nationalities, is something too significant to overcome as the Russian attack on Ukraine rekindles tensions of an occupied past,” an exhibition spokesperson told Artnet News in a statement.

RIBOCA’s founder, Agniya Mirgorodskaya, is of Russian and Lithuanian descent, and has, until recently, accepted philanthropy from her father, Russian fishing tycoon Gennady Mirgorodsky. RIBOCA’s Russian backing, already a sore subject for Latvia’s artistic community, given the country’s contentious history with the Soviet regime, became a debate flashpoint following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Last April, exhibition organizers announced that its third edition would be postponed a year given the mounting devastation in Ukraine. “In times like these, to envision working towards an exhibition that was supposed to be a vast celebration of art, respect and togetherness feels inconceivable whilst heinous crimes are still being committed in Ukraine,” RIBOCA said in a statement. “We strongly condemn the Russian attack on Ukraine and are united with everyone who calls for an immediate end of the war.”

More than 60 artists were planned to participate in its main exhibition, retitled “There is an Elephant in the Room,” which was due to appear in Andrejsala, a neighborhood of Riga. The artist list included Alicja Kwade, Ayşe Erkmen, Richard Wentworth, and Tamar Harpaz. More than half the works are new commissions created in response to Riga’s social and political landscape.

Nancy Yao has stepped down from her role as founding director of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum following allegations that she had mishandled several scandals during her tenure as head of New York’s Museum of Chinese in America, commonly known as MOCA.

Melanie Adams, the director of the Anacostia Community Museum, will serve as interim director, the Smithsonian said in a statement. The current interim director, Lisa Sasaki, will be transferred to an undisclosed Smithsonian leadership position. The search for a new permanent director has restarted.

In a statement sent to The Washington Post on Wednesday, the Smithsonian said that Yao stepped down “due to family issues that require her attention.” Her tenure at the Smithsonian was set to begin in June, however the decision was re-evaluted after a Post investigation in April detailed a toxic workplace environment she helmed—and by some accounts, directly facilitated—in her near-decade as president of MOCA. According to the report, the museum settled three wrongful-termination lawsuits filed by former employees who claimed to have been fired in retaliation for reporting the alleged sexual harassment of younger female colleagues.

Two men named in the lawsuits kept their jobs, while one was subsequently promoted by Yao, who vehemently denied the allegations of retaliation. The cases were reportedly settled on terms that did not imply wrongdoing on MOCA’s part. 

In a press release issued at the time of her appointment, the Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III lauded Yao’s leadership. “Nancy’s proven experience, skill and leadership will be crucial in bringing to life the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum and enabling it to creatively tell a more robust and complete story about who we are as a nation,” he said.

The Young V&A, a branch of the English Victoria and Albert Museum meant for children, has recently come under criticism by its staff after its director Tristram Hunt decided to remove two trans-affirming books from its store. Hunt also removed a poster from an exhibition that read “Some people are trans, get over it!”

The works were taken away just before the Young V&A’s reopening on July 1.

According to reporting by Arts Professional, Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union members at the V&A and the V&A Staff LGBTQ Working Group had a meeting with Hunt, requesting that the materials be reinstated, which they said he refused to do.

In a letter by V&A staff shared with Arts Professional, staff wrote, “The unified message from all attendees was that we do not support the decision to remove the object, that this decision undermines the V&A’s ability to expand our audiences, that the decision is not in line with the V&A’s values, it is not in the public interest, the decision undermines the editorial independence of curators, which may very well lead to self-censorship, is of a disservice to the visitors we serve, and a direct affront to trans visitors and staff.”

The two books removed were Seeing Gender: An Illustrated Guide to Identity and Expression by Kacen Callendar and Here and Queer: A Queer Girl’s Guide to Life by Rowan Ellis. In a comment to the Art Newspaper, the Young V&A explained that the works were removed because they were not considered age-appropriate by senior staff.

On Thursday, New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem became the latest institution to distance itself from David Adjaye, the acclaimed architect who was the subject of a Financial Times report earlier this week that focused on allegations that he sexually assaulted and harassed three former employees.

The Studio Museum had brought on his firm, Adjaye Associates, to design a hotly anticipated new building that would significantly grow the institution in scale. But Adjaye will no longer work on that project, the New York Times reported Thursday.

“The actions being alleged are counter to the founding principles and values of the Studio Museum,” board chair Raymond J. McGuire told the Times in a statement.

Adjaye himself said in a statement to the Times that “the prospect of the accusations against me tarnishing the museum and creating a distraction is too much to bear,” echoing the language he had used to describe his resignation from certain projects in London earlier this week.

The Financial Times report featured allegations from three women who accused Adjaye of various forms of sexual misconduct, as well as of having created a “toxic work culture.” He denied the allegations, calling them “untrue,” and said, “I am ashamed to say that I entered into relationships which though entirely consensual, blurred the boundaries between my professional and personal lives. I am deeply sorry.”

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The Headlines

TOKYO DRIFT. The inaugural edition of the Tokyo Gendai art fair opened to VIPs yesterday, and Maximilíano Durón has a rundown of the best displays in ARTnews. They include Jonathan Lyndon Chase at London stalwart Sadie Coles HQ, Tatsuki Masaru at Tokyo’s Gallery Side 2, and Keita Miyazaki at Maho Kubota Gallery, which is also based in the Japanese capital. The fair, which has 73 exhibitors, runs at the Pacifico Yokohama convention center through Sunday. Its cofounder, Magnus Renfrew, said at a press conference that the event is “the first step on a longer journey,” and that his team’s “aspiration is that over the coming years we can really build this into a fair of global importance. It’s really time now for the Japanese art scene to step into the spotlight.”

HSIAO CHIN, the pioneering modernist painter who was born in Shanghai, educated in Taiwan, and exhibited around the world, died last Friday at the age of 88, ArtAsiaPacific reports. Hsiao traveled widely, and long lived and worked in Milan. His best-known works are punchy, invigorating expressionistic and Hard Edge paintings that are informed by his understanding of Asian philosophies. His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, M+ in Hong Kong, the Long Museum in Shanghai, and other notable international collections. Earlier this year, 3812 Gallery presented a survey of his work at its Hong Kong location that was on view during Art Basel’s run in the city.

The Digest

The inaugural edition of Tokyo Gendai, the art world’s latest fair, opened to VIPs on Thursday afternoon, with a long line forming ahead of the 2 p.m. opening time and crowded aisles throughout the day. Dealers reported a number of first-day sales, and the buzzing energy throughout the exhibition hall at the Pacifico Yokohama on the first day was palpable.

In a press conference just before the VIP opening of the fair, Magnus Renfrew described this moment as “the beginning of a new chapter for the art scene in Japan,” and he reiterated previous talking points that the inaugural edition of the fair is “the first step on a longer journey,” adding that the group’s “aspiration is that over the coming years we can really build this into a fair of global importance. It’s really time now for the Japanese art scene to step into the spotlight.”

Similarly, Katsunori Takahashi, the head of the private banking division for SMBC, the fair’s lead sponsor, said that though modern and contemporary art has, in recent years, become popular in Japan like elsewhere around the world, Japanese financial institutions “have only been making limited contributions” to the art scene when compared to their counterparts in North America and Europe. With SMBC as principal sponsor, “I think it is a very small step that I would like to make into a very big opportunity … to make further contributions” to Japan’s art market.

Below, a look at the best booths at the 2023 edition of Tokyo Gendai, which runs until Sunday, July 9.  

March 17 – July 1, 2023

May 12 – July 1, 2023

May 13 – July 1, 2023

June 3 – July 2, 2023

May 5 – July 2, 2023

April 14 – July 1, 2023

May 11 – June 17, 2023

May 25 – July 1, 2023

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