Works depicting struggle, the US Civil War and the aftermath of slavery

Why Richard III remains such a fascinating figure

The head of Documenta, the famed recurring art show in Kassel, Germany, has left her post amid widespread scrutiny over how the exhibition has handled allegations of anti-Semitism.

On Saturday, Documenta announced that Sabine Schormann would depart as the show’s managing director. The board and Schormann had “mutually agreed” on her departure, Documenta said, adding that it would no longer be making public statements about how it was dealing with the various controversies surrounding this year’s edition.

The board said that the decision regarding Schormann’s departure came at “short notice” and that an interim replacement was being sought.

“A lot of trust has unfortunately been lost,” the board, which manages both Documenta and the Fridericianum museum, said in its statement. “The Supervisory Board considers it essential that everything is done to regain this trust.”

Two separate anti-Semitism controversies have roiled this year’s Documenta, which was curated by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa. One revolved around an artwork that contained anti-Semitic imagery, the other centered on the inclusion of a Palestinian collective.

Leslie H. Wexner, the Ohio billionaire who was once one of the world’s important art collectors, made his fortune at the mall by turning around faltering brands into massively successful behemoths like Abercrombie & Fitch and Victoria’s Secret and founding others like the Limited and Bath & Body Works. But since 2019, when Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who was charged with sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York and who had previously been Wexner’s money manager, the mall mogul’s reputation and fortune have been on the decline.

Wexner’s relationship to Epstein is now explored in a new three-episode documentary series on Hulu, called Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons, that became available to stream on Thursday. Directed by Matt Tyrnauer, who was previously explored fashion and sex scandals in series like Valentino: The Last Emperor (2008) and Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (2017), the tantalizing new documentary charts Wexner’s rise and fall, and is the latest documentary to do so, with Netflix having released White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch earlier this year.

According to Angels and Demons, Epstein was known to attach himself to older, wealthier men as a way to secure funds and power. Wexner ended up being one of those men, entangling himself deeply with Epstein and going so far as to make Epstein his financial manager and later giving him power of attorney.

That struck many in his circle, such as former Victoria’s Secret CEO Cindy Fedus-Fields, as out of character considering that Wexner was a known micro-manager and that Epstein was a college dropout who had mysteriously leveraged a job at Bear Stearns after a brief stint as a math teacher at Dalton, the prestigious New York private school. Serving as Wexner’s financial manager from the ’80s until 2007, Epstein use his connection to Wexner’s companies, most notably Victoria’s Secret, in order to proposition women.

The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, one of the leading art schools in the U.S., announced employee layoffs just a few weeks after its staff unionized.

The news comes roughly two months after employees working across various departments voted 86–17 on to join SEIU Local 500 on May 24. Staff learned of the cuts just two days after the representatives for the newly-formed union petitioned the school’s administration to enter into negotiations before issuing changes to employee working conditions, Artforum reported Thursday.

The restructuring move is poised to cut around 10 percent of the union’s bargaining unit, the group of workers who conduct labor negotiations, ahead of contract talks. 24 positions total will be affected by the layoffs. The announcement was disseminated in an email sent to employees and reviewed by Artforum. In the internal message, the administration said they expected “about half” of the 24 positions set to be cut would affect union employees.

SEIU Local represents staff spanning public schools universities and nonprofits in Maryland and Washington, DC. Employees including those at Goucher College, Howard University, and Planned Parenthood.

“We have agreed to bargain with Local 500 about how the restructuring process will affect those positions and about the details of the severance package that will be offered to the represented staff members in those positions,” the email said.

Over the course of my time posted on the sidewalk outside last night’s opening of “The Patriot,” a 200+ artist, 100 percent bonkers open-submission group show at the Lower East Side gallery O’Flaherty’s, I heard a couple variations on the same refrain: If the police showed up this fast, it must be a pretty good party.

It wasn’t just one or two cops either. At peak, there were multiple squad cars and at least five policemen lined up outside the space, which drew a line before opening and reached capacity almost instantly. Lower East Side gallery openings don’t typically come with a line snaking around the block and a band of cops. But O’Flaherty’s, which is less than a year old and helmed by the rising artist Jamian Juliano-Villani along with her friends, painter Billy Grant and musician Ruby Zarsky, is not typical.

It’s something else, something somewhat rare: It’s fun. And completely insane.

When I arrived at 8, the line was already in full force, with an almost comical number of people fighting to get through the doors. Outside the gallery, a contortionist, flanked by neon-pink alien sculptures, wrapped her leg behind her head as progressive house music blared over a nearby boombox. I spotted Grant close to the entrance, and he ushered me through the throng.

Upon entering the darkened gallery, lit like a haunted house by attendees’ flashlights, I was bombarded with the first of at least seven rooms of art, five of which were hung salon-style with a dizzying array of work ranging from what looked like known contemporary art entities to the kind of artist who might, say, submit a fairly straightforward-looking portrait of Tom Petty. I couldn’t get a hold of a checklist, so who really knows.

Chella Man wears many hats. At only 23, the Deaf trans phenom has enjoyed impressive careers as a YouTuber, artist, activist, actor (he’s best known for his role as Jericho, a mute superhero in the DC Universe series Titans), and now, curator.

This summer, 1969 Gallery in TriBeCa is hosting Man’s curatorial debut, a show titled “PURE JOY: 14 Disabled Visual and Performance Artists,” on view through August 13. It marks one of the first New York group shows bringing together work by a growing coalition of disabled artists.

The recent opening for Man’s show was packed. ARTnews sat down with the multi-hyphenate to catch up about the show and his own artwork.

ARTnews: Tell me why you chose to focus on disabled joy.

CHELLA MAN: The main reason is simply that disabled people are often not asked about joy. We are asked about how we deal with our trauma and how we deal with discrimination. But I find I’m rarely asked about joy, or about what makes me happy. Isn’t that sad?

Looking for a way to add a little extra luster to your acrylic paintings? Rather than purchasing a new set of paints, try spicing up your existing materials with an iridescent medium. Mix it with your acrylic base color, and your paint will not only have an iridescent shimmer but will also become slightly more transparent on the canvas. What’s more, the mix-in will slow the drying of your acrylics so you’ll have more working time, but it won’t compromise the stability of your pigments. Each product offers different levels of sparkle, drying time, and mixing ease. Ahead, find our favorite iridescent media for acrylic paints.

Heavy-body acrylics are vital for artists who love playing with texture. These paints feature a higher viscosity than liquid paint, which makes them act almost like buttery oils, with improved ability to retain brushwork and knife work once they dry. The very best heavy-body paints should contain no added extenders, opacifiers, fillers, or dyes. They should have outstanding lightfastness and show no cracking even when heavily built up. Achieve bold color and dramatic surface effects with our picks of the best, below.

The heartland of Turkey is home to an eclectic, if remote, variety of emerging arts initiatives and institutions. Known by its appellation, “Anatolia,” meaning “the east” in Greek, it is host to a growing group of curators, artists and cultural workers who have kept busy.

The video-centric art space Monitor in Izmir is staging conceptually rigorous shows, the Mardin Biennial is readying its latest edition, contemporary artists are flocking to the Dou PrintStudio in Ankara to create lithographs, Bursa’s İmalat-Hane is hosting some of Turkey’s most cutting-edge shows, and the FIRIN art space in Eskişehir is thinking through urgent issues related to the country’s water crisis.

Spanning from the Asian shorefront of the Bosphorus to the coastlines of three interconnected seas—Black, Aegean, Mediterranean—and sharing territorial borders with Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, the Anatolian region is an embattled ground. Its artists and their colleagues are on the frontlines of a struggle to preserve its pluralist heritage.

Once hailed as the subcontinent of Asia Minor, it is believed to be the birthplace of Homer and Herodotus, and its towns and cities are home to a dissonant harmony of peoples, histories, and ecologies. Here, Central Asian, Middle Eastern, Levantine, Grecian, Romany, and Afro-Turkish cultures blend, and multicultural identities intermingle.

With grant support from the Goethe Institute and others, independent arts organizations across the diverse regions of Anatolia are flourishing, often without the support of government agencies, which generally do not fund contemporary art that is out of step with powerful officials’ neo-Ottoman, Islamist politics. Young Anatolians are linking up, aligning themselves with local and international movements beyond the Istanbul-centric art scene in Turkey.

Q&A with Daniel Tobin, cofounder and creative director of UAP (Urban Art Projects).

What is UAP and how did it start?
When my brother and I started Urban Artists [now UAP] in the early 1990s, we were interested in connecting with artists and making work for public space. Originally, we encouraged developers to start investing in public works, which helped our business get a foothold in the public art sector in Australia. We set up a small workshop in our hometown of Brisbane on the east coast of Australia, with a team of four. There, we built our own furnaces, bought an old metal workshop, and built our foundry. We started casting in bronze only and we’ve grown from there. Currently, we do wax printing and metal casting of various sorts in ten locations worldwide. But ultimately, we’re makers at heart and we’re very proud of the part that we play in the art ecosystem. We see ourselves as custodians of the making process. Bronze has been cast for five millennia, since the Bronze Age, and we continue doing so today.

The foundry that we purchased about three years ago in New York has been making work for over fifty years. It’s humbling to work with such amazing craftspeople and makers from North America who have created pieces for such great American artists as Frank Stella, Claus Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein. Our most senior maker, who is 85 and the oldest in the country, is still on the floor today, training our younger team and helping to make work. Whether the furnace, the grinders, or welders are running, there’s always this energy of making in the workshops.

What is it like to work with contemporary artists?
Some artists are extremely involved in the process and visit the workshop all the time. Others are more hands off and use more contemporary techniques of digital sculpting. We let artists work in any way they like, but we always love hosting them in the workshop.

May 26 – July 17, 2022

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April 23 – November 27, 2022

April 23 – November 27, 2022

April 23 – November 27, 2022

April 23 – November 27, 2022