Marian Zazeela, an artist whose abstract drawings and light installations envisioned dream states, died at her home in New York at 83 on Thursday. The MELA Foundation, an organization she cofounded with her partner, the artist La Monte Young, announced her passing on Friday, saying she died of natural causes while sleeping.

Zazeela produced work that did not fit neatly within the confines of any movement, even as it flirted with the aesthetics of Minimalism. By her own admission, she produced “borderline art,” a term she favorited for work that “‘borders’ and challenges the conventional distinction between decorative and fine art by using decorative elements in the fine art tradition,” as she once put it.

She is best-known for Dream House, a sound and light installation conceived in collaboration with Young. First mounted in 1969 and since staged in a variety of forms, the installation features drone music by Young and Light, an installation by Zazeela whose illumination, typically in a single shade of magenta, colors the entire space.

The version of Dream House that is now open for visitation on Church Street in Lower Manhattan is beloved by the general public, with visitors regularly venturing there to recline in the installation for extended periods of time. “It’s a simple concept,” M. H. Miller remarked in a 2020 T: The New York Times Style Magazine profile of Young, “and yet this harmony between sound and light was one of the earliest cohabitations of contemporary music and art.”

Working solo, Zazeela produced drawings composed of intricate calligraphic forms that are by turns hypnotic and dizzying. They are currently the subject of an exhibition at Artists Space in New York that has earned acclaim from critics. In Art in America, Andy Battaglia wrote of the show, “drawings of the kind in ‘Dream Lines’ tell the story of an artist who awakens different states of dreaming on her own.”

A federal judge on Friday granted a preliminary injunction that will force New Jersey to redo its controversial ballot design, known as the county-line ballot, a move that could fundamentally alter elections in a state long rife with allegations of political corruption. 

The ruling is a victory for Rep. Andy Kim, who last month sued the state’s counties to end the use of the design. But Friday’s decision, which at one point had been seen as a critical step in Kim’s campaign to replace the now twice-indited Sen. Bob Menendez, may carry less importance for those efforts. That’s because Tammy Murphy, wife to Gov. Phil Murphy and Kim’s opponent ahead of the June Democratic primary, announced last week that she was suddenly dropping out. Despite never having held office and being a registered Republican until 2014, Murphy had been backed by the state’s political machine and therefore widely perceived as unbeatable.

Still, the ruling’s potential effect on future elections, especially if it survives a likely appeal by county clerks, could be massive. My colleague Nina Wang explains:

Strong party endorsements offer an outsized electoral advantage in New Jersey’s primaries. Nineteen of the state’s 21 counties design their ballots in an extraordinarily confusing way that tips the scales toward local bigwigs’ favorite candidates. On ballot sheets, party bosses can put their top picks on the county line—a list of candidates endorsed for all seats currently up for election, from county clerk all the way to the presidency. Challengers who lack the bosses’ favor are often kicked to “ballot Siberia,” where they are likely to be ignored by voters.

“Today’s decision is a victory for a fairer, more democratic politics in New Jersey,” Kim said in a statement. “It’s a victory built from the incredible grassroots work of activists across our state who saw an undemocratic system marginalizing the voices of voters, and worked tirelessly to fix it.”

Earlier this week, Bravo announced that all six cast members of the rebooted Real Housewives of New York City would return for their second season (the franchise’s 15th), as reported by Variety, bringing rumors about whether the network would add two new members, including one with ties to the art world.

It’s now rumored that that cast member might be Racquel Chevremont, a collector and curator who is also the ex-partner of artist Mickalene Thomas. Chevremont is also a friend of current cast member Jenna Lyons, the former creative director of J. Crew. (Bravo blog Bravo and Cocktails first posted a blind item about the news on March 19; Artnet News’s Wet Paint column picked up the story on Friday.)

Chevremont has amassed a modest collection of around 70 to 80 works by artists such as Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Deborah Roberts, and Toyin Ojih Odutola. She also previously served as a trustee of the Studio Museum in Harlem.

She recently consulted on the art-filled set decoration for the Netflix film Leave the World Behind. Beyond the art world, she has modeled, most recently walking in Batsheva Hay’s New York Fashion Week show in February.

Prior to their spilt, Thomas and Chevremont founded Deux Femmes Noires, which was aimed to raise the profile of artists of color. Together, they mounted exhibitions, including one in 2022, titled “Set It Off,” at the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill, New York. The two also co-produced a performance by artist Kia LaBeija as part of the 2019 Performa Biennial in New York.

California legislators have introduced a bill intended to give Holocaust survivors and their heirs a greater chance of recovering artworks stolen, or sold under duress, during periods of political oppression.

Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino), co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, who has led the legislative effort, told the Los Angeles Times that it was inspired by a ruling this January that determined that Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum could keep a Camille Pissarro painting taken from its Jewish owner by the Nazi party. 

“It immediately made sense to me that this was a unique opportunity to correct a historical injustice and make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again,” Gabriel said. “Respectfully, we think that the 9th Circuit got it wrong, and this law is going to make that crystal clear.” He added that the bill has bipartisan support.

The keenly followed case of the Pissarro, titled Rue Saint Honore, apres midi, effet de pluie (Rue Saint Honore, Afternoon, Rain Effect) and depicting a rainy Paris street, has bounced between California courts for nearly two decades, as the heirs of Lilly Cassirer Neubauer have argued for its recovery. 

Cassirer Neubauer was forced by the Nazi party to sell the painting in 1939 for 900 Reichsmarks (roughly $360 today) in exchange for a visa to escape Germany. According to court documents, she never received payment. The painting was acquired in 1993 by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum from the collector Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. Cassirer Neubauer’s heirs allege in the initial complaint filed in 2005 that the museum knew upon acquiring the work that it had been sold under duress. 

It’s easy to see the glaring hypocrisy of Brian Pritchard, the Republican official in Georgia and outspoken election denier, who was found guilty this week of voting illegally nine times. A judge apparently did not buy Pritchard’s claims that he had been unaware that his probation from felony forgery charges had not ended when he illegally cast his vote. All this is ironic considering voter fraud is an enduring conservative boogeyman despite scant evidence that such rampant fraud exists. 

Yet any schadenfreude that might be derived from Pritchard’s voting violations, which resulted in an order on Wednesday to pay a $5,000 fine and receive a public reprimand, is short-lived. It seems stunted by another piece of headline-making voter fraud news this week: A Texas court of appeals reversed a five-year prison sentence for Crystal Mason, a Black woman who voted illegally in 2016 after unintentionally casting her ballot while technically still a felon under Texas law. (The state bars convicted felons from voting until a supervised release has been completed.) 

In the simplest terms, the reversal is good news; it’s hard not to feel emotional reading Mason’s statement celebrating that she will remain a “free Black woman.” But the wildly disparate punishments handed to Mason and Pritchard—a white man—over incredibly similar offenses once again underscores the deep flaws of a system borne out of a push to fix a virtually nonexistent problem. That Mason’s ordeal happened under the watch of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who led the war on voter fraud while under indictment for securities fraud, adds to the dissonance. But for conservatives who have long relied on voter fraud fears to block ballot access, that whiplashing dissonance is precisely the point. As my colleague Pema Levy wrote in 2019:

Raising fears of fraud in order to make it harder for people—particularly people fitting certain demographic profiles—to vote didn’t start with [the Trump] administration, or even in the past 100 years. As Harvard University historian Alexander Keyssar lays out in his 2000 book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, the tactic dates back to the early decades of the 19th century. Throughout US history, politicians and activists ginned up stories about fraud in order to keep their opponents from the polls. “Legislative debates were sprinkled heavily with tales of ballot box stuffing, miscounts, hordes of immigrants lined up to vote as the machine instructed, men trooping from precinct to precinct to vote early and often,” he writes. 

Put another way, these laws were never meant to hurt Brian Pritchard. This week, we were reminded of that once again. 

Two men have been sentenced to jail in London for selling more than £2.6 million (around $3.2 million) in fake fine art attributed to Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso.

A six-year money laundering investigation by Sussex Police found Behrad Kazemi and Raj Nasta had sold works by Dalí for £2,000 to £3,000 and works by Picasso for £5,000 to £20,000 each to more than 125 victims between October 2016 and June 2018.

The scheme involved cold calls from a company called Asset Consulting Services and Treasury Asset Group and encouragement to buy artwork instead of traditional investments.

A press statement from Sussex Police noted many of the victims were vulnerable and elderly, with some of them not knowing they had been conned until contacted by police. Some had paid over £150,000 to the scheme and lost their life savings as a result.

Suspicions arose after the victims and their families could not longer contact Asset Consulting Services and Treasury Asset Group. Artist signatures on the artworks were discovered to be false and the actual value of the works sold was between £200 and £300.

Today marks one year since Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia on what American officials say are false charges of espionage. He has been held in jail ever since.

Members of Russia’s Federal Security Service—the country’s intelligence agency, also known as the FSB—detained Gershkovich while he was on a reporting assignment in the city of Yekaterinburg, according to the Journal. Gershkovich had deep familiarity the country: his parents fled the Soviet Union in the 1970s. He had full press credentials from Russia’s foreign ministry and had reported from Moscow for Agence France Press and the Moscow Times before joining the Journal in January 2022. Russia has not publicly presented evidence of its espionage claims against Gershkovich, the Journal reports. 

Since his arrest—which marks the first time an American journalist has been held on such charges in Russia since the end of the Cold War—Gershkovich has been in Russia’s notorious Lefortovo prison, where he spends 90 percent of his day in a small cell, according to the paper. Earlier this week, a Russian court extended Gershkovich’s pre-trial detention by three months, until June 30. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the extension, calling it “another cynical affront to press freedom by the Russian authorities.” 

In a letter published today, Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker called Gershkovich’s detention “a blatant attack on the rights of the free press,” adding that “given the lessons of history and the arbitrary power of the Russian state, if there is a trial, we would expect a guilty verdict—something we would view as a travesty of justice.” A conviction could carry a sentence of 10 to 20 years, the Journal reports.

Roger Carstens, the Biden administration’s special envoy for hostage affairs, told the New York Times that the US government is involved in “intensive efforts” to secure the releases of Gershkovich and ex-Marine Paul Whelan, who has been in Russian custody since 2018 and was sentenced to 16 years in prison on espionage charges, which American officials also deny.

Breezing through the 35,000-square-foot home of Materials for the Arts is about as close as you might get to touring Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Earlier this year, the vast warehouse in Queens was chock-full of Christmas fixings, like ornaments, pink artificial evergreens, and Lush soap cartons, alongside perennial aisles of paper and books, envelopes, archival photos, all manner of fabric, buttons, beads, and trim. There are also lab coats from hospitals, furniture from the Javits Center, and vintage typewriters and PC towers, CDs and file folders. Full of castoffs of contemporary New York City life just waiting to be plucked from obscurity, the list goes on. The majority of these wares are in pristine condition, and they are all meticulously organized and labeled.

It’s also accessible, for free, to public school students and teachers, as well as art nonprofits.

As New York’s largest creative-reuse center and a program of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Materials for the Arts collects a boundless array of reusable materials from businesses and individuals that are then made available to nonprofits, schools, and other city agencies, thus diverting some 1.7 million pounds of materials from landfills in 2023.

That 1.7 million pounds is almost quadruple the amount of donated material just three years ago, and today the nearly-50-year-old organization is poised to keep expanding as it continues to evolve to meet the needs of the ever-changing, ever-resourceful but ever-resource-strapped city.

“It’s not just about our organization—it’s about our city,” MFTA executive director Tara Sansone told ARTnews. “As New York grows, so too must our program because our mission remains pivotal to the very essence of New York itself.”

Xue Tan, the curator in charge of a closely watched Hong Kong art center’s acclaimed programming, is set to join the staff of one of Germany’s top museums.

Currently senior curator of the Tai Kwun Contemporary center, Tan is now slated to become chief curator of the Haus der Kunst in Munich starting this June. The post is a highly coveted one, and was previously held by Emma Enderby, whose departure to become artistic director of the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin was announced in October.

Tan has overseen the exhibition program of Tai Kwun Contemporary since it opened in 2018. It is among the few Hong Kong art spaces with an international following, and has under Tan staged shows by Cao Fei, Maria Hassabi, Tino Sehgal, and more, as well as group exhibitions such as a current one about women, Indigenous knowledge, and the natural world.

Director Andrea Lissoni praised Tan for her “deep knowledge and experience on the Asian Region” in a statement.

“After dedicating almost a decade on establishing Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, I am thrilled to join Andrea Lissoni and the team in furthering the vision of art as a complex evolution through inventive and transformative engagements, and impactful programming,” Tan said in a statement. “I look forward to contributing to the transformation of the institution, my network of artists and communities across the globe will be a solid support for our work.”

During the development of a fine arts museum in Vannes, Brittany, in northwestern France, excavations revealed the remains of a medieval castle, according to Heritage Daily. The dig began in the courtyard of an 18th century mansion, the Château Lagorce, which currently operates as a hotel. 

Researchers from France’s national institute for archeological research learned that the castle was built around 1380 by Jean IV, the Duke of Brittany and Count of Montfort from 1345, and the 7th Earl of Richmond from 1372. The structure was known as the Château de l’Hermine and was built to assert the Duke’s authority in the area. 

The archaeologists found a moat and two stories of the fortress-like castle’s outer defensive wall in the courtyard as deep as 13 feet below street level. The stonework suggests that the castle as many as four levels, multiple staircases, latrines, and drainage pipes. The latrine area was filled with everyday objects that date back to the 15th century including jewelry, coins, padlock and several pieces of clothing. 

The team also found the remains of a bridge that stretched over the moat, connecting the castle to the town, and a mill that was built into the castle’s residential area “in a very original way.” The mill’s wheel was powered by a canal that flowed underneath the castle and released into the moat through a grate in the mill room.