Dallas Museum of Art Selects Finalists for Expansion, Preis der Nationalgalerie Winners Named, and More: Morning Links for April 28, 2023

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.

The Headlines

GROW OR GO. The Dallas Museum of Art has selected six finalists for an expansion project that comes with a budget of $150 million to $175 million, the Dallas Morning News reports. The lucky firms are David Chipperfield, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Johnston Marklee, Michael Maltzan Architecture, Weiss/Manfredi, and Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos. The paper’s architecture critic, Mark Lamster, writes that the selection committee “has leaned in to the tried and true—with one notable exception.” That would be the Madrid-based Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, which has worked largely in Europe, but has still handled a number of cultural projects, like the National Sculpture Museum in Valladolid, Spain. The winner will be named in August.

A DOUBLEHEADER. In Hong Kong, the artist JR has made a sprawling installation to mark the end of the city’s mask mandate, pasting black-and-white photos of some 450 volunteers to the floor and a wall at the Harbour City shopping center, the South China Morning Post reports. Not everyone is a fan of his efforts: Some online commenters have compared it to a memorial for a mass tragedy and noted that black signifies death in China. Meanwhile, out in Water Mill, New York, the indefatigable artist is getting ready to install an enormous photographic work on the facade of the Parrish Art Museum, the New York Times reports. It will show almost 40 running children, and JR told the paper that he was “really trying to capture that moment of lightness and innocence of all children before the weight of the world falls on them.”

The Digest

Jane Davis Doggett, a pioneer in environmental graphic design (aka wayfinding), has died at 93. Doggett worked on airports, malls, and other public spaces, helping people get to where they wanted to go. She saw her job “as communicating to people the choices offered for their individual selections,” she once said. [The New York Times]

The 2024 Preis der Nationalgalerie, a prestigious award in Germany for artists 40 and under, has for the first time gone to four artists: Pan Daijing, Daniel Lie, Hanne Lippard, and James Richards. Next year, they will each present a new work at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof. [ArtReview]

Good news, pet lovers. Greece’s Culture Ministry said it will now allow people to bring their pets to more than 120 archaeological sites. Some rules apply: Owners are required to pick up pet droppings, for one, and very crowded places will still be off-limits, like the Acropolis in Athens. [The Associated Press]

Artist Erwin Wurm kindly offered travel picks for Vienna, where he resides. They range from a toothsome-sounding Japanese-European resto to a “fancy Italian place,” where he loves the parmigiana and the scaloppine al limone. Wurm will have a retrospective at the Albertina Modern in the city next year. [Financial Times]

A retrospective of the legendary artist Tom of Finland (aka Touko Laaksonen) goes on view today at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, and it includes his homoerotic drawings, as well as clothing, letters, and more. “Tom is one of our national heroes,” the museum’s director, Leevi Haapala, said. [The Associated Press]

RM Sotheby’s is planning a new show and auction of classic cars in Miami that will debut next March. RM Group’s CEO, Rob Myers, said they his team wants to give the event “a different lifestyle twist, you know, not just walking around the show field, standing in line and paying $10 for a hot dog.” [Bloomberg]

The Kicker

MARK YOUR CALENDARS. In June, painter Christopher Wool is scheduled to reveal a gargantuan mosaic—almost 40 feet across!—in the lobby of Two Manhattan West, an office building about a block from New York’s Madison Square Garden. It’s a commission from the site’s developer, Brookfield Properies, which is also having Charles Ray make a sculpture for out front. Wool toldBloomberg’s James Tarmy that he informed reps from the firm that “if we take the scaffolding down but the piece doesn’t look good, you’re going to put the scaffold back up.” (Music to a patron’s ears!) From a rendering, at least, the artwork looks very handsome. [Bloomberg]