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On a muggy and overcast late June evening, art dealer Jeffrey Loria sat at a window table overlooking home plate in Yankee Stadium’s exclusive Legends Suite Club. Loria was in a jovial mood. The Bronx Bombers were up 2-0 on the upstart Seattle Mariners. The dining room was busy and Loria, a regular at the stadium, chatted with the server, by name, and joked with the chefs at the lobster station, which he visited twice. While fine art and baseball rarely mix, they intersect in Loria, who made his name as a modern and contemporary art dealer—hobnobbing with Edward Hopper, Henry Moore, and Salvador Dalí, among others—before purchasing the Miami Marlins in 2002 and leading them to a World Series victory over the heavily favored Yankees the following year.

Despite his high-profile baseball ownership, however, Loria seems to prefer the more behind-the-scenes nature of his earlier profession. “Art is a private business,” the 82-year-old entrepreneur told ARTnews at the game, a maxim he uses often. Dressed in a blue gingham shirt, black chinos, and a dark blue hooded rain jacket, it’s unlikely that anyone at Yankee Stadium recognized him. Loria may like it that way, but he did publish an autobiography, From the Front Row: Reflections of a Major League Baseball Owner and Modern Art Dealer, this past spring.

“Great ball players have much in common with great artists,” Loria writes in the introduction. “Both put their talents on the line, and neither is easily stifled by criticism.”

From the Front Row roughly follows Loria’s career from his acceptance to Yale University, where he studied art history under the renowned Vincent Scully, through his entrée into the shadowy, furtive art trade. How did he get his start? In 1960, the family of a Yale classmate turned a considerable profit selling their Texas dairy farm, and the fellow Ivy Leaguer looked to Loria, then only 20 years old, for advice on purchasing art with the proceeds. The two went on a buying trip to New York. It was enough to convince Loria that, with a little business know-how from the Columbia Business School, he could turn his art history knowledge into profit.

The Manhattan property where Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat lived and worked will be taken over by actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie.

The deal for the property, located at 57 Great Jones Street, was confirmed today by John Roesch and Garrett Kelly, both directors at the real estate agency Meridian Capital Group. Jolie will rent the space for her latest creative venture, Atelier Jolie, under long-term commercial use for eight years.

The interior space features 6,600 square feet of space across three floors. The exterior of the building is adorned in street art, and Jolie will keep it that way as a public tribute to Basquiat, who started his career as one half of the graffiti art duo SAMO.

“[Jolie] wanted to preserve the older art on [the building] and keep that Basquiat feel to the space,” said Roesch.

“She loved the facade of the building and it being tagged up with the street art as a memorial for Basquiat,” Kelly added.

The Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Latvia (RIBOCA), set to open next month after a year-long postponement, has canceled its third edition due to its organizers’ ties to Russia.  

“It appears that the heritage of our executive members, which includes Russian among Lithuanian and Latvian nationalities, is something too significant to overcome as the Russian attack on Ukraine rekindles tensions of an occupied past,” an exhibition spokesperson told Artnet News in a statement.

RIBOCA’s founder, Agniya Mirgorodskaya, is of Russian and Lithuanian descent, and has, until recently, accepted philanthropy from her father, Russian fishing tycoon Gennady Mirgorodsky. RIBOCA’s Russian backing, already a sore subject for Latvia’s artistic community, given the country’s contentious history with the Soviet regime, became a debate flashpoint following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Last April, exhibition organizers announced that its third edition would be postponed a year given the mounting devastation in Ukraine. “In times like these, to envision working towards an exhibition that was supposed to be a vast celebration of art, respect and togetherness feels inconceivable whilst heinous crimes are still being committed in Ukraine,” RIBOCA said in a statement. “We strongly condemn the Russian attack on Ukraine and are united with everyone who calls for an immediate end of the war.”

More than 60 artists were planned to participate in its main exhibition, retitled “There is an Elephant in the Room,” which was due to appear in Andrejsala, a neighborhood of Riga. The artist list included Alicja Kwade, Ayşe Erkmen, Richard Wentworth, and Tamar Harpaz. More than half the works are new commissions created in response to Riga’s social and political landscape.

Nancy Yao has stepped down from her role as founding director of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum following allegations that she had mishandled several scandals during her tenure as head of New York’s Museum of Chinese in America, commonly known as MOCA.

Melanie Adams, the director of the Anacostia Community Museum, will serve as interim director, the Smithsonian said in a statement. The current interim director, Lisa Sasaki, will be transferred to an undisclosed Smithsonian leadership position. The search for a new permanent director has restarted.

In a statement sent to The Washington Post on Wednesday, the Smithsonian said that Yao stepped down “due to family issues that require her attention.” Her tenure at the Smithsonian was set to begin in June, however the decision was re-evaluted after a Post investigation in April detailed a toxic workplace environment she helmed—and by some accounts, directly facilitated—in her near-decade as president of MOCA. According to the report, the museum settled three wrongful-termination lawsuits filed by former employees who claimed to have been fired in retaliation for reporting the alleged sexual harassment of younger female colleagues.

Two men named in the lawsuits kept their jobs, while one was subsequently promoted by Yao, who vehemently denied the allegations of retaliation. The cases were reportedly settled on terms that did not imply wrongdoing on MOCA’s part. 

In a press release issued at the time of her appointment, the Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III lauded Yao’s leadership. “Nancy’s proven experience, skill and leadership will be crucial in bringing to life the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum and enabling it to creatively tell a more robust and complete story about who we are as a nation,” he said.

The Young V&A, a branch of the English Victoria and Albert Museum meant for children, has recently come under criticism by its staff after its director Tristram Hunt decided to remove two trans-affirming books from its store. Hunt also removed a poster from an exhibition that read “Some people are trans, get over it!”

The works were taken away just before the Young V&A’s reopening on July 1.

According to reporting by Arts Professional, Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union members at the V&A and the V&A Staff LGBTQ Working Group had a meeting with Hunt, requesting that the materials be reinstated, which they said he refused to do.

In a letter by V&A staff shared with Arts Professional, staff wrote, “The unified message from all attendees was that we do not support the decision to remove the object, that this decision undermines the V&A’s ability to expand our audiences, that the decision is not in line with the V&A’s values, it is not in the public interest, the decision undermines the editorial independence of curators, which may very well lead to self-censorship, is of a disservice to the visitors we serve, and a direct affront to trans visitors and staff.”

The two books removed were Seeing Gender: An Illustrated Guide to Identity and Expression by Kacen Callendar and Here and Queer: A Queer Girl’s Guide to Life by Rowan Ellis. In a comment to the Art Newspaper, the Young V&A explained that the works were removed because they were not considered age-appropriate by senior staff.

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On Thursday, New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem became the latest institution to distance itself from David Adjaye, the acclaimed architect who was the subject of a Financial Times report earlier this week that focused on allegations that he sexually assaulted and harassed three former employees.

The Studio Museum had brought on his firm, Adjaye Associates, to design a hotly anticipated new building that would significantly grow the institution in scale. But Adjaye will no longer work on that project, the New York Times reported Thursday.

“The actions being alleged are counter to the founding principles and values of the Studio Museum,” board chair Raymond J. McGuire told the Times in a statement.

Adjaye himself said in a statement to the Times that “the prospect of the accusations against me tarnishing the museum and creating a distraction is too much to bear,” echoing the language he had used to describe his resignation from certain projects in London earlier this week.

The Financial Times report featured allegations from three women who accused Adjaye of various forms of sexual misconduct, as well as of having created a “toxic work culture.” He denied the allegations, calling them “untrue,” and said, “I am ashamed to say that I entered into relationships which though entirely consensual, blurred the boundaries between my professional and personal lives. I am deeply sorry.”

One of the most provocative sequences of Kenneth Anger’s career appears in an early short film (and my favorite), Fireworks (1947): a sailor opens his fly to reveal a Roman candle spitting sparks at the camera until it explodes, drenching the frame with spurts of white light. This image would later establish Anger as a seminal figure in the history of queer film, but it also resulted in an obscenity trial—gay sexuality was criminalized, and the Hays Code had a vice grip on Hollywood. A countercultural icon and lifelong Angeleno, Anger died in May at age ninety-six. The body of work he left behind stands beside that of American avant-garde filmmakers like Maya Deren, Sara Kathryn Arledge, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas: experimental shorts, made predominantly between the forties and seventies, that combine surrealism and scenes of stylized violence with a heavy dose of occult symbolism.

Fireworks, which Anger made at twenty in his parents’ Beverly Hills house while they were out of town, is a gorgeous fourteen-minute film with no dialogue, set to orchestral music. The nameless protagonist, played by Anger himself, leaves his bed, wanders through a homoerotic dreamworld in search of a light, and meets a group of beautiful sailors. They flex their cartoonishly massive biceps for him and light his cigarette with a flaming palm frond but then turn hostile, chasing the dreamer down to deliver a beating. There’s a flurry of white-clothed limbs as they tear his clothes off, whip him with chains, pour milk over his lips and eyes, and gouge open his chest with a shattered beer bottle to expose the face of a compass buried among his internal organs. The dreamer’s expression passes from ecstasy to agony and back again. A few hallucinatory moments later, the fireworks go off.

At the heart of Anger’s work is a question about the erotics of masculinity. The biker film Scorpio Rising (1963), for example, is an ambiguous exploration of fascist aesthetics: high-gloss rider jackets, Nazi iconography, an obsession with the perfected physical form—and the attendant unspoken racial implications. Like the sadomasochistic brutalization of the dreamer in Fireworks, the scenes in which the biker gang lovingly assemble their looks for the night—peaked caps, imperial eagle insignia, and leather—are suffused with desire. It’s one of the hardest watches of his oeuvre for me, but is emblematic of Anger’s work: shorts that span a vast imaginative territory, a sort of psychosexual underworld, where repressed fantasies of the American unconscious can take shape and move around unfettered. He takes dreams seriously as a subject worthy of art and utilizes them to develop scenes that operate on multiple registers. Though it might have been part of a strategy to avoid censorship, the Roman candle in Fireworks reads to me like an homage to the props enjoyed by a certain kind of transmasculinity. Like a strap-on or a souped-up packer, the prosthetic phallus allows the wearer to bathe in the pageantry of a particular type of queer masculinity, whose aggressive quality in this scene is undercut by a sense of comedy, magic, and mischief. Here, and elsewhere, Anger is able to observe the inner workings of desire—its pursuit, suspension, satisfaction, and fluctuation.

—Jay Graham, reader

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The Headlines

TOKYO DRIFT. The inaugural edition of the Tokyo Gendai art fair opened to VIPs yesterday, and Maximilíano Durón has a rundown of the best displays in ARTnews. They include Jonathan Lyndon Chase at London stalwart Sadie Coles HQ, Tatsuki Masaru at Tokyo’s Gallery Side 2, and Keita Miyazaki at Maho Kubota Gallery, which is also based in the Japanese capital. The fair, which has 73 exhibitors, runs at the Pacifico Yokohama convention center through Sunday. Its cofounder, Magnus Renfrew, said at a press conference that the event is “the first step on a longer journey,” and that his team’s “aspiration is that over the coming years we can really build this into a fair of global importance. It’s really time now for the Japanese art scene to step into the spotlight.”

HSIAO CHIN, the pioneering modernist painter who was born in Shanghai, educated in Taiwan, and exhibited around the world, died last Friday at the age of 88, ArtAsiaPacific reports. Hsiao traveled widely, and long lived and worked in Milan. His best-known works are punchy, invigorating expressionistic and Hard Edge paintings that are informed by his understanding of Asian philosophies. His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, M+ in Hong Kong, the Long Museum in Shanghai, and other notable international collections. Earlier this year, 3812 Gallery presented a survey of his work at its Hong Kong location that was on view during Art Basel’s run in the city.

The Digest

The rules have changed for the first time in the tournament's 146-year history