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.

A federal court earlier this month dismissed a lawsuit against the Japanese company Sompo Holdings surrounding Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888), which the heirs of a German Jewish banker said had been looted by the Nazis.

The company bought the work from Christie’s London in 1987 for $39.9 million, a record at the time. The heirs of its previous owner, Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy had sought to get it back, claiming that it had been stolen during World War II.

According to the Art Newspaper, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s heirs claimed that Sompo Holdings ignored the work’s potential provenance issues. A judge in Illinois, however, dismissed the case due to lack of jurisdiction over the Tokyo-based holdings company. 

The lawsuit was filed in Illinois in part because Sompo has business dealings in the state and because the picture had been part of the 2001 exhibition “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South” at the Art Institute of Chicago. During negotiations with Sompo’s museum in Tokyo, a museum official allegedly told the Art Institute that there was concern over the work’s provenance, and that that while they believed Sunflowers nothing to do with Nazi-looted art, they were “not 100% sure.”  

According to the complaint, filed in December 2022, the heirs claim that Mendelssohn-Bartholdy “never intended to transfer any of his paintings and that he was forced to transfer them only because of threats and economic pressures by the Nazi government.”

Just days after announcing its sudden closure, Philadelphia’s University of the Arts was hit with a class action lawsuit by nine of its employees, including several professors and department directors. The news was first reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday in the city’s federal court and accuses the school, commonly called UArts, of violating the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act), a 1988 law that requires most employers with at least 100 employees to provide a 60-day notice of mass closings or layoffs. The plaintiffs also accuse the college leadership of withholding wages for hours worked and unused vacation time, a violation of the Pennsylvania Wage Payment Collection Law.

The United Academics of Philadelphia, the union representing UArts professors, called the decision of the UArts board and management “cruel,” and has demanded the board pay staff for all hours worked and provide a severance package.

“This situation reflects a complete failure of leadership,” Eric Lechtzin, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, told Philadelphia Magazine. “It is incomprehensible how they could announce the closing of the university within seven days, with no prior warning to anyone. In fact, I’ve heard from people who recently left tenured positions at other schools to join the faculty and staff of UArts, only to learn mere weeks or months into their new position that UArts is closing.”

On June 7, the school’s last day of operation, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office and state lawmakers announced that they were investigating the circumstances of the closures, as well as “any transfer or loss of assets,” according to the New York Times. 

Tif Sigfrids, a dealer who has run a gallery in Athens, Georgia, for more than a decade, has closed up her art space and joined Canada, a blue-chip New York gallery that is well-regarded for its painting shows, as a partner.

Between 2021 and 2023, Sigfrids ran a gallery in New York as well. She is the second dealer in the city to announce a closure this week, after Simone Subal, who will shutter her 12-year-old Lower East Side gallery this month. News of the closure of Sigfrids’s gallery and her hiring by Canada was first reported by Annie Armstrong in Artnet News’s “Wet Paint” column.

First opened in 2013 in Los Angeles, Tif Sigfrids showed artists such as Thomas Dozol, Mimi Lauter, and Becky Kolsrud. The gallery relocated to Athens, Georgia, in 2018. The gallery’s last show, a group exhibition called “Bedroom Furniture,” closed in May.

“I’ve been doing this thing by myself for 11 years now, and while some people would love to have all that autonomy, I miss being part of a bigger world, or something that feels bigger than myself,” she told Artnet.

Although artists that Sigfrids has shown will be integrated into Canada’s programming, her roster will not be entirely ported over to that gallery.

When photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986 at 40, his immediate reaction was to destroy the work he would leave behind. After overcoming the initial shock, however, he settled on the idea of planning his estate, which led to the establishment of Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in 1988, the year before his passing.

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“Robert was smart with his board because he knew that appointing family members or life partners who can make emotional decisions is not always great to manage an artist’s legacy,”lawyer and Mapplethorpe Foundation president Michael Stout told ARTnews. Mapplethorpe instead assembled a board with professional specialties in both law (Stout is a copyright expert) and photography to shape the future and legacy of his impressive oeuvre.

Stout estimates that Mapplethorpe left behind approximately 14,000 prints, made from around 2,000 negatives, as well as a smaller number of sculptural objects and Polaroids. And in recent years, the management of the artist’s legacy has become an intricate feat: 15 galleries around the world manage the sales from the estate based on their respective geography. Gladstone Gallery, Morán Morán and Olga Korper Gallery are among the five in charge in North America; in Europe, Xavier Hufkins Gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, Alison Jacques Gallery, and Galerie Thomas Schulte are half of the eight galleries holding representation deals; Brazil’s Galeria Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel manages the South American demand; and the Asian market is handled by Seoul’s Kukje Gallery.

At Art Basel next week, Gladstone Gallery, Ropac, and Alison Jacques will each have a Mapplethorpe work on offer. There’s also various institutional shows each year and brand partnerships, like those with Uniqlo, Chrome Hearts, and Honey Fucking Dijon, who license Mapplethorpe’s images. In its earliest days, the foundation only licensed paper-based products, such as postcards, calendars, and posters. “There was no way we could know if Robert would like a Chrome Hearts leather jacket, but we did it, as many artists started making licensing deals,” Stout added.

“We have to make careful decisions about licensing and act meticulously about publishing because books do survive,” Stout said. “They are not as popular in terms of sales anymore with everything being online, but Robert knew it was important to have them and he did an awful lot of books with different publishers.” He also added that the foundation’s trustees have reached a consensus of being “conservative about licensing” and that they aim “to make decisions that we thought he would have made.”

Toward the end of a particularly turbulent May, China made global headlines for its military drills around Taiwan, done in response to the island’s newly elected leader. This past weekend, China’s defense chief affirmed the “threats of force” at Asia’s biggest defence summit, the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. This did little to mitigate growing concerns about the economic and security implications of rising tensions between China, the US, and Taiwan.

But back in the country’s capital city, at the historic 798 Art District, it was business as usual with the launch of the eighth edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing. Running from May 28 to June 2, 2024, with a VIP preview in the days before the event’s opening, Gallery Weekend Beijing this year included 27 participating galleries and nonprofit institutions in the main sector, and 8 galleries from locales beyond the city in the visiting sector, plus “The inner side of the wind,” a show curated by Yuan Jiawei.

This year, Gallery Weekend Beijing, as well as the city’s two major art fairs, Beijing Dangdai and Jingart, all held their openings at the same time, drawing a larger crowd to the city in the hopes of reigniting flagging excitement surrounding Beijing’s art scene, according to industry insiders.

The main theme for this year’s Gallery Weekend Beijing, or GWBJ as it’s known for short, was “Drift to Re-Turn.” It encapsulated the international artistic connections that participating galleries, institutions, and curated projects aimed to create through the annual showcase.  

Speaking to ARTnews, GWBJ program director Yang Jialin said, “On a deeper level, GWBJ, as a platform for contemporary art exchange, hopes to help the outstanding artists and their work ‘drift’ out to the world, allowing the voices from Beijing to reach the international stage; and to let excellent international art content ‘return’ to the local art scene, presenting it to the Chinese audience.”

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.

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