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Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle has left her post as senior director at Pace Gallery to return to Canada gallery, the New York space where she once held that same title. At Canada, Boyle will now be partner and co-owner.

The move is an unusual one, as it is rare for high-ranking figures at a mega-gallery like Pace to leave for a smaller operation. Moreover, in the past year, Pace has lost three other senior members of its staff, including its executive vice president of global sales and operations.

Three weeks ago, Boyle announced her departure on Instagram, calling her time at Pace “one of the most transformative periods of my career.” She added, “I was taught to always leave things better than found, and I can confidently say I did just that.”

At the time, she did not reveal where she was headed, but on Friday, Canada announced her return. She was formerly a senior director at that gallery, which is known for its roster of acclaimed painters, including Katherine Bernhardt, Katherine Bradford, Joan Snyder, and Rachel Eulena Williams.

Among her first projects upon her return will be shows at Canada for Denzil Hurley and Reginald Sylvester, both opening this January. Those exhibitions kick off the gallery’s 25th-anniversary slate of shows.

As part of her national campaign advertisements, Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris was lent imagery from artist Carrie Mae Weems’s landmark “Kitchen Table” series from 1990. The video, titled Kamala’s Table, began airing on October 30 on streaming and digital platforms in key battleground states.

Weems most recently made headlines last month for receiving a National Medal of Arts.

Her famed “Kitchen Table” series shows Black women posing around a kitchen table, with the artist herself appearing in these photographs. The Harris ad, which is aimed at working-class Black, Latino, Asian and women voters, shows photographs of the Democratic Presidential candidate during her childhood and on the campaign trail in an effort to support the Democratic candidate at the polls on November 5.

“The kitchen table. It’s where we gather with family. It’s where we eat together, pay our bills. It’s where Kamala Harris learned the importance of serving the people,” the voiceover explains.

The ad then continues to outline some of Harris’s key election promises, among them family tax credits and a proposal to provide first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 toward a downpayment.

Two politically charged statues have appeared in Washington, D.C., sparking public interest and discussion just days before the election, according to CNN. 

One statue, a bronze replica of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk topped with a large, emoji-style poop, was placed near the Capitol along the National Mall last week. The other, a bronze tiki torch statue titled The Donald J. Trump Enduring Flame, was set up at Freedom Plaza, close to the White House, on Monday. Both works appear to critique past actions of former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The plaque below the Pelosi desk sculpture reads, “This memorial honors the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021, to loot, urinate and defecate … in order to overturn an election,” a reference to the Capitol insurrection on that day. The work sarcastically calls these individuals “unbelievable patriots” and “warriors,” mirroring Trump’s past praise for the rioters. The sculpture, titled The Resolute Desk, has been described as symbolizing the resilience of democratic principles, though its nameplate has gone missing since the statue was unveiled.

The tiki torch statue, placed in Freedom Plaza, recalls Trump’s defense of individuals who participated in the violent 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Its plaque references Trump’s controversial comment about the marchers as “very fine people” and notes that, while white supremacists attended the protest, Trump had argued they were “treated absolutely unfairly.”

The artist or artists behind these works remain anonymous, though a permit request submitted by Civic Crafted LLC and Julia Jimenez-Pyzik was approved by the National Park Service. Jimenez-Pyzik, according to the Washington Post, worked as a producer on the 2020 film Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Jimenez-Pyzik told the Post that her work on the Borat film had “absolutely nothing to do with” the sculptures and that she “helped get the permit for the statue on the National Mall, but that’s really my only involvement.”

Paris-based art dealer Philippe Jousse remembers when he first participated in the Turin-based fair Artissima a few years ago. “I went home with my pockets stuffed with business cards from curators,” he said, speaking from his current Artissima booth, which features an array of intriguing young, and emerging artists.

Held in Turin’s skylit Oval Lingotto in the foothills of the Alps, Artissima is Italy’s largest international contemporary art fair. With this year’s edition featuring a roster of 189 galleries, it packs a mighty punch in a city that boasts a history of high-net-worth residents, whose grandeur is reflected in the embellished, stone-arched walkways and impressive towers seen around town.

But the fair, which held its preview for this year’s edition yesterday, is not known for the ultra-pricey artworks that typically appear at Art Basel’s various events. Instead, dealers told ARTnews that Artissima was well-reputed for attracting curators, mainly ones from Italian and European institutions. Plus, the relatively affordable cost of booths, about half the price of what it takes to exhibit at fairs like Art Basel or Frieze, allowed smaller galleries to experiment with lesser-known artists and provide them with greater exposure. 

Artissima director Luigi Fassi told ARTnews that about 50 curators from international institutions, many of them based in Italy, were involved with the fair in an “official capacity.” These curators participated in the fair’s programming, with some 35 of them serving on juries for the 11 total prizes and initiatives awarded at the fair. Additionally, Turin’s Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT is endowed with an acquisition budget for artworks purchased at the fair for its own collection, which it loans on long term to two local museums: the GAM – Galleria Civica di Arti Moderna di Torino and the Castello di Rivoli. Those two institutions purchased more than $400,000 worth of art within the fair’s first day.

Dealers, Fassi said, “are very vocal in saying that for them, having curators come is as key as having collectors come.”

Thieves with a taste for Pop Art literally blew the doors off of MPV Gallery in Oisterwijk, Netherlands Friday before stealing two screen prints from Andy Warhol’s “Reigning Queens” series, one of the UK’s Queen Elizabeth and the other depicting Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.

According to the German art publication Monopol, the two screenprints were broken out of their frames and may have been “severely damaged” during the heist. The gallery told Monopol that the group of pictures was rare “because they all had the same numbering” and that it’s a “terrible shame” that the series has been separated.

In a case of biting off more than one can chew, the thieves, it seems, had originally meant to steal all four of the “Reigning Queens” prints that were on view at MPV in the southern Netherlands but, according to the gallery’s surveillance footage, the looters’ car wasn’t big enough for all four pictures. The images of Dutch Queen Beatrix and Queen Ntfombi Twala of Swaziland were left on the street as the robbers made their getaway.

MPV’s owner, Mark Peet Visser, didn’t give Monopol an estimated worth for the stolen pictures, which, including the two left behind, were meant to be sold during the PAN Amsterdam art fair at the end of November.

However, four numbered and hand-signed prints of Queen Beatrix sold at auction in The Hague in 2021 for more than $235,000. In 2022, at Heffel Fine Art Auction House in Toronto, Warhol’s Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, from Reigning Queens, Royal Edition (F.S.II.337A) sold for just over $856,000.

New York authorities have obtained an arrest warrant for embattled dealer Edoardo Almagià, whom they said sold antiquities that were worth tens of millions of dollars.

According to the New York Times, which first reported the news, Almagià has been charged with conspiracy. The charge centered around Almagià’s dealings with centuries-old cultural property that Manhattan officials say belongs to Italy.

The investigation into Almagià is being led by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which has regularly made headlines in the past decade for its aggressive pursuit of dealers who have obtained and sold stolen artifacts.

Almagià is said to have trafficked in Roman sculptures and Etruscan pottery that were obtained by illegal means, according to the Times. Per the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, Almagià recorded the details of his business in the form of a document that he kept inside what the Times described as “a Renaissance-era chest beneath a marble statue of a deer.”

While the arrest warrant may be new, allegations that Almagià illegally sold the artifacts is not. He has been the subject of scrutiny since 1992, the year that authorities connected him to a tombarolo (tomb robber), according to an Art Newspaper report from earlier this year.

Beauty, contemplation, freedom and peace. Those aren’t usually the first words that come to mind when you think of an art fair, yet they are the reasons that Tim Neuger, co-founder of Berlin-based gallery neugerriemschneider, cited when asked why he returned to exhibit at the boutique fair Art Collaboration Kyoto (ACK), which opened Friday in the historic Japanese city.

“This fair is about content, contemplation and respect,” he told ARTnews. “It’s a deaccelerating time machine.” 

Neugerriemschneider is among 69 exhibitors from 18 countries participating in this year’s fair, which runs November 1 to 3 at the Kyoto International Conference Center (ICC Kyoto). This is the fourth edition of the government-backed event, which has a distinct model in which a Japanese gallery acts as a host, inviting one or two international galleries to share their booth. Going against the grain of most international art fairs, ACK doesn’t feel competitive. Instead, it appears deliberately intimate and slow-paced, prizing thoughtful connections over commercial activity.

Eschewing a cookie-cutter grid format of white-cube booths, ACK is an irregular warren of booths clad in a lattice of raw wood beams. The sustainably-designed fair also uses paper-coated walls, which are recyclable. Booth costs were lower—ranging from around $3,500 to $19,000—due to government funding and sponsorship from the private sector, relieving galleries from bringing more predictable names and allowing them more room to experiment.

For the fair sector “Kyoto Meetings,” which focuses on presentations with a strong link to the city, neugerriemschneider featured Kyoto-inspired abstract paintings by Swedish artist Andreas Eriksson. His work is also on view nearby at Murin-an, a 19th-century villa and garden. A handful of other artists, including as Bosco Sodi, Izamu Kato and He Xiangyu, were also showing works at temples across the city as part of an expanded roster of partner events surrounding the fair.

Everyone wants to be a creator. According to a report by YouTube, SmithGeiger, and the Fandom Institute, 65 percent of teenagers and young adults aged 14 to 24 now identify as creators. But the creator’s future is uncertain: the rise of AI-generated content is challenging their place in our limited and highly competitive attention landscape. What good is a content creator if we can generate unique content customized to each individual at will and at scale? Can the creator survive the advent of generative AI and the fourth Industrial Revolution?

I believe we can draw parallels between the impact of the first Industrial Revolution on folk art and the upcoming changes to the content landscape with the emergence of generative AI.

For centuries, the Artist has remained unchallenged as the central creative force in Western culture. The masterful subtlety of light brushstrokes and the troublingly realistic sfumato of the Renaissance painter in the service of god or a noblewoman elevated the work and, by extension, its maker to celebrity. We still revere artists, flock to their museum retrospectives, and read their biographies, but the paradigm is rapidly changing. Museum attendance is dwindling; movie sales have not reverted to pre-Covid levels; even television, once the heart of American entertainment, is seeing its viewership diminish in favor of internet-based entertainment. Creators currently hold most of the attention in the media space, especially with younger generations.

The term creator, particularly in the context of content creator, emerged in the early 2000s with the rise of Web 2.0, the version centered on user contribution and interactivity that spawned social media platforms. The development of platforms like YouTube, which launched in 2005, contributed significantly to the popularization of the term. Its slogan, “Broadcast Yourself,” was a call for self-expression, but also a call for its transformation into “creation.”

The content creator is crowd-facing, constantly addressing the audience through the screen, staring at the feedback integral to the very interface through which the content is distributed. For instance, when we encounter a YouTube video, we see the content, the comments, and the likes all in the same interface. They exist as a singular cybernetic system, reinforcing each other. Many debate the artistic value of content, and question whether creators are comparable to artists. However, it has become abundantly clear that the content creator is an artist, but, specifically, a folk artist, an individual creating art reflecting a particular culture, society, or community.

Ancient Roman ruins in Baalbek, a historic city in Lebanon, survived an initial wave of Israeli air strikes this week, Baalbek Mayor Mustafa al-Shell told the BBC. However, he warned that the safety of the site is not guaranteed and that Lebanese authorities are “pleading” for international organizations to help spare the UNESCO World Heritage site.

Nineteen people, reportedly including women, were killed by Israel’s bombardment of Baalbek, which Israel said was meant to target Hezbollah command centers. Some 50,000 people have fled the area under evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military. Those evacuation orders followed similar ones directed at residents around Beirut, which, along with large parts of southern Lebanon, has faced the threat of devastation.

Amid the escalation of violence in eastern Lebanon, local officials and cultural workers abroad have called for intervention on behalf of the triad of Roman temples which date back to the 1st century BCE. The monumental structures are among the best preserved ones of their kind worldwide.

The temples are dedicated to the Roman deities Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury, and were constructed over more than two centuries. They served as a sanctuary and a site of religious pilgrimage. 

In its citation for the site, UNESCO calls Baalbek “one of the finest examples of Imperial Roman architecture at its apogee.”

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The Headlines

TRUMPED UP AND ‘CHEAP.’ Artnet News reports about how a “cheap” Donald Trump, per Andy Warhol ’s description of the former president in 1981, failed to pay for paintings he commissioned from the artist to decorate Trump Tower. Warhol’s candidly entertaining diary entries describe how Trump visited The Factory and disapproved of Warhol’s color choice for a series of paintings depicting Trump’s new skyscraper, which he had asked the artist to make. Instead, Trump’s team reasoned they would have to show the artist swatches of pink and orange materials from the building entrance so Warhol could match them to the paintings. In the end, Trump gave Warhol the cold shoulder and never paid him, which is now the ex-president’s loss. Warhol never forgot. “I still hate the Trumps because they never bought the paintings I did of the Trump Tower,” he wrote in his diary in 1984. Now, estimated at $500,000 to $700,000, New York Skyscrapers will be offered for sale by Phillips on November 19. The article does not mention how much Trump had promised to pay Warhol, and only that “nothing was settled,” but we can satisfyingly conclude it was very likely a lot less than what they are worth today.

TOMB RAIDING ACCOMPLICE. The Manhattan district attorney’s antiquities trafficking unit, led by Matthew Bogdanos, has obtained the warrant for the arrest of Italy-based dealer Edoardo Almagià on charges of conspiracy in a scheme to defraud and possess stolen property rightfully owned by Italy, reports The New York Times . The high-profile, Princeton-educated antiquities dealer is implicated in trafficking thousands of artifacts valued at several millions of dollars, per the report. It is not clear whether Interpol has issued a “red notice” for Almagià’s arrest and eventual extradition since the story broke, but that’s apparently the next step in the legal proceedings. In the meantime, an 80-page warrant “describes a debonair figure who sold and donated prized artifacts to important museums and collectors, but who also operated under a cloud,” particularly when authorities began to suspect him of working with tomb raiders.

The Digest

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) said it wants to return more artworks to the indigenous Kogi people in Columbia. Germany’s culture minister Claudia Roth said in a statement that the aim is to “officially transfer ownership as soon as possible” three ritual objects of sacred significance, including a headpiece, a staff, and a basket, currently on loan to Colombia, and originally from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the northern part of the country. [ Monopol Magazine and dpa]

ART X Lagos has opened in Nigeria from October 31 to November 3, featuring Andrew Dosunmu’s first solo exhibition in Africa, and 10 “curated galleries,” including Afriart Gallery (Uganada), Galerie MAM (Cameroon) and Gallery 1957 (Ghana). The fair also includes discussion forums and immersive art experiences. [ART X Lagos website]

“Hideous” or an artwork locals have “warmed to”? Whatever the public thinks of the controversial sculpture titled Quasi (2016) by artist Ronnie van Hout, it will now be removed from the roof of New Zealand’s City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. The giant depiction of a hand, with the artist’s face embedded in it has divided opinion since its installation in 2019. [ArtAsiaPacific]

The GermannAuctionhouse in Zurich is preparing to sell three artworks authenticated by AI next month. The Swiss company Art Recognition has used AI to help certify the authenticity of the art in question, made by Louise Bourgeois, Marianne von Werefkin and Mimmo Paladino. [The Art Newspaper]

September 14 – October 27, 2024

August 31 – November 2, 2024