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We’re honored to release the Contemporary Art Quarterly archive of Suse Weber. The archive includes the documentation of 23 solo shows going back to as early as 2003, as well as 11 selected group exhibitions. We're thrilled to present the shifting iterations of Weber’s work, an artist whose practice has transformation and reconfiguration at its heart. We're grateful to the artist for working with us and providing so much material!

Despite being the country’s fourth most-populated city, Houston is in many ways a very well-kept secret when it comes to its art scene. What outsiders often misunderstand as a lack of culture here is rather a lack of a centralized culture. With a kind of schizophrenic miasma, its seemingly endless snarl of concrete and shopping centers and no-zoning laws lend the metropolis a simultaneous feeling of culture-less sprawl while also brimming with a sincere, can-do spirit for limitless possibilities. The humility, sincerity, and enthusiasm of its people, one of the most diverse populaces in the US, is what makes it special.

It is this ethos that the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston carries in its veins. Established in 1948, the CAMH recently celebrated its 75th anniversary with the exhibition “Six Scenes From Our Future” (October 2023–March 2024). Senior curator Rebecca Matalon and curator Patricia Restrepo invited six artists to respond to CAMH’s first-ever exhibition “This is Contemporary Art,” which aimed how people could live with contemporary, boldly placing artworks alongside furniture, design, and architectural elements. Those artists—Jill Magid, Leslie Martinez, Mel Chin, Leslie Hewitt, Lisa Lapinski, and JooYoung Choi—all have a relationship to Houston or CAM Houston, and the work on view continued the inaugural presentation’s legacy of dissolving artistic categories. 

Founded as the Contemporary Arts Association by six local artists and architects as a sort of artist cooperative, the organization aimed to bring the contemporary arts to Houston and imbricate the city with a richer, more sophisticated art community. Because CAA didn’t have a space back then, “This is Contemporary Art”was actually staged at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

“Shortly after it was founded there were 200 plus members,” Matalon said of CAMH’s early days. “You paid [dues] and you exhibited your work through your membership and, of course, as the institution evolved, and the understanding that Houston really needed a space for contemporary art, its mission also shifted.”

The museum soon moved a semi-permanent location near downtown Houston and later to its current home, the iconic, stainless-steel parallelogram designed by Latvian architect Gunnar Birkerts, in the Museum District. And soon, it will likely grow once more as the museum eyes a potential expansion. Through it all, CAMH has long been served as a visionary agent in defining Houston’s cultural landscape.

If there’s one thing wealthy people have access to, it’s lawyers. As a result, a client of Christie’s recently filed an class-action lawsuit against the auction house after it experienced a cyberattack in May.

The incident, which Christie’s had previously referred to as a “technology security incident,” shut down its website for ten days before and during the house’s marquee New York sales.

The cyber-extortion group RansomHub claimed responsibility for the cyberattack on May 27. A dark-web message from the group also said it “attempted to come to a reasonable resolution,” but the auction house cut off communication halfway through negotiations. Christie’s emailed its clients on May 30 acknowledging the cyberattack, but said only identification data, not financial or transaction data, had been stolen.

The complaint filed in the Southern District of New York on June 3 alleges that Christie’s was unable to protect the “personally identifiable information”, or PII, of its clients, of which is estimated to be at least half a million current and former buyers in its databases. The complaint describes the breach as “a direct result of [Christie’s] failure to implement adequate and reasonable cyber-security procedures and protocols necessary to protect consumers’ PII from a foreseeable and preventable cyberattack”. The complaint filed also alleges that “data thieves have already engaged in identity theft and fraud and can in the future commit a variety of crimes” using the stolen information, which it said includes full names, passport numbers, as well as other sensitive details from passport scans, including dates of birth, birth places, genders, and barcode-like “machine-readable zones” or MRZs.

The complaint alleges the breach of data resulted in multiple “concrete injuries,” including invasion of privacy; lost time and opportunity costs from “attempting to mitigate the actual consequences of the Data Breach.”

MO.CO, a contemporary art museum in Montpellier, France, accused a French art publication of “exploitation” on Friday after it ran a report on the suicide of Vincent Honoré, who formerly served as the institution’s head of exhibitions.

Le Quotidien de l’Art reported last week that Honoré’s suicide had been determined a “work accident” by French social security and featured allegations from unnamed MO.CO workers who claimed Honoré had a tense relationship with museum management. The publication quoted a text from Honoré to a friend in which he said he felt “trapped.”

In an unusual move, MO.CO issued a lengthy statement Friday rebutting the Le Quotidien de l’Art article, saying that the museum considered the report “an unbearable exploitation of a tragic event which deserves dignified, measured and respectful treatment for all.”

The museum said it had set up a “psychological support unit” for staff there following Honoré’s suicide in November and wrote that his “memory was sensitively honored” in a number of ways, including via the staging of a Huma Bhabha exhibition that he had organized, which the museum has offered to the public free of charge.

Responding to Honore’s text about feeling “trapped,” the museum said that he had never taken sick leave “in recent years,” and that it had never denied a request by him for time off.