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The Headlines
MUSEUMS. South Korea’s oldest art museum, the Kansong Art Museum, has reopened for the first time since 2014, before closing again in June for a restoration that is expected to last three years. The beleaguered institution, however, made a major promise not to put any of its cultural artifacts up for auction, after offering up pieces at two separate auctions in 2020 and 2021. NBC’s Buffalo affiliate, WGRZ, got a hard-hat tour of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, which is due to reopen next spring as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, after a $65 million construction project that will put it on par with some of the country’s largest art museums.
AS THE ART WORLD makes its way to Venice this week for the Biennale previews, The Guardian visits with Sonia Boyce in her London studio, ahead of the artist representing Great Britain at the Biennale. (Make sure to follow ARTnews’s coverage of the 2022 Venice Biennale this week.) Artist Larry Achiampong talks about the influence of gaming on his artistic practice with Nintendo Life. At the Serpentine Gallery in London, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster offers “a strange vision of elsewhere.” Marta Pérez García is the subject of a solo show at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.
The Digest
The Cleveland Museum of Art recently acquired a plaster version of Why Born Enslaved! by 19th-century French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. Last month, a major new exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened featuring two later versions of the bust as its centerpiece. It provocatively looks at how the bust has had “damaging effects” over centuries. [Cleveland.com]
The California College of the Arts in the Bay Area has reached two contracts with unions representing its staff and its adjunct faculty. [The Art Newspaper]
Devon Henry’s contracting company has been responsible for taking down 23 Confederate monuments across the South. [The New York Times]
A Warhol silkscreen of Elizabeth Taylor, Silver Liz (Ferus Type), sold for ￥2.3 billion ($18.9 million) at Shinwa Auction in Tokyo. The house said it is the highest bid ever seen at an auction in Japan. [Japan Forward]
Here’s a review of a “breakthrough retrospective” of Carlos Villa, which is currently on view at the Newark Museum of Art. [Hyperallergic]
The Kicker
TAKE THAT. A confidant of the artist Francis Bacon has decided to donate a major trove of Bacon’s archive of drawings, photographs, paintings, and audio recordings to the French National Archives at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, instead of Tate. The friend, Barry Joule , said he made the decision after being frustrated with an earlier Bacon–related gift in 2004 that was estimated to be worth £200 million at the time. That donation was to undergo study over three years before going on view and be available for loans. Tate has yet to put any of those works on view. Joule said, “The Tate and Britain will be missing out on part of the nation’s art history of one of their most important painters. I turn my back on the Tate for ever.” [The Guardian]
