The 59th Venice International Art Biennale recently officially announced the list of theme exhibitions and national pavilions. As the fifth female chief curator in the exhibition's history, and the first Italian woman to hold the position, Cecilia Alemani "online access" to 400 art studios during the pandemic and will present a women-focused exhibition in April.
In the United States, the 93-year-old artist Wesley, who died on February 10, excelled at black humor in pop, minimalism and surreality. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has unveiled a new director, and Christopher Bedford will take office in June. In addition, Chinese art historian Wu Hong was recently awarded the Art Writing Award.
The Paper, Art Review, "Art Figures of the Week", reports and analyzes art topic figures and hot events at home and abroad.
Italy | Female curator Cecilia Alemani
The Venice Biennale "Her Time" is about to open, and 90% of the artists are women
Cecilia Alemani
Recently, the 59th Venice International Art Biennale officially announced the list of theme exhibitions and national pavilions, which will be based on the theme of "Milk of Dreams", with 213 artists from 58 countries participating, as well as 80 national pavilions.
The 59th Venice International Art Biennale will take place from April 23 to November 27, with Cecilia Alemani as curator. As the fifth female chief curator in the history of the Venice International Art Biennale, and the first Italian woman to hold the position, under the leadership of Cecilia Alemani, this biennale will focus on female artists and present "a deliberate rethinking of the centrality of men in art history and contemporary cultural history". Of the 213 artists exhibiting, only 21 were men (just under 10 percent, including living and deceased artists), a groundbreaking and encouraging statistic.
Women artists at the show include Barbara Kruger, South Golding, Louise Nepherson, Ruth Azer, and Simon Leigh, the first black female artist to represent the United States at its national pavilion.
Alemani served as Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art in New York and curator of the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale in 2017. Alemani is the fifth female chief curator in the history of the Venice Biennale, and as the first Italian female curator of the Venice Biennale, she said: "I understand and appreciate this responsibility and opportunity entrusted to me, and I will give the artists a voice to create unique art projects that reflect their vision and our society." ”
The pandemic forced the exhibition to be postponed for a year, and Alemani conducted online visits and visits to 400 art studios through Zoom. Artists focus on the purpose of life, the unknown future, communication with nature, unequal relationships and issues such as earth health, identity politics and ecological activism, sometimes imagining the future in terms of dystopian doom and sometimes reshaping the future with hope. These questions provided the basis for Alemani to plan the Biennale.
The theme of the exhibition of the China Pavilion in Weishuang is "Yuanjing", and Zhang Zikang, director of the CAFA Art Museum, is the curator, and 4 (group) artists are invited to participate in the exhibition. (Finishing / Hatamachi)
New York, USA | Artist John Wesley
He died at the age of 93 and showed black humor with pop, minimalism and surreality
John Wesley
American artist John Wesley died at his Home in New York on Feb. 10 at the age of 93. Over a career spanning fifty years, Wesley is known for his paintings that place clean-cut comic book characters in eerie scenes, creating styles involving pop, minimalism, and surrealism. These works of black humor often have sexual and desperate overtones, evoking the horror and the mundane in everyday life.
Born in Los Angeles in 1928, Wesley lost his father at the age of 5 and was sent to an orphanage. Wesley worked as an illustrator for Northrop Aircraft and became a postman after moving to New York. Both industries profoundly influenced his artistic creation. Because of his rise to prominence in the New York art world in the 1960s, his flat, cartoonish paintings were often associated with the pop art movement, but what influenced Wesley's work was not so much an interest in consumerism as a "preference for erotic narratives." New York minimalists Dan Flavin and Donald Judd were his lifelong friends and staunch supporters. In 1983, Judd established an exhibition hall at his Chinati Foundation in Malfa, Texas, dedicated to Wesley's paintings. Some of these works are still exhibited there today.
Works by John Wesley
Wesley has had solo exhibitions at the Prada Foundation in Venice, the P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art in New York (now MoMA PS1), Portikus in Frankfurt, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His work was exhibited at the 5th Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in 1972 and is in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. (Finishing/Qian Xueer)
San Francisco, USA | Christopher Bedford
He will serve as the new director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Christopher Bedford
Recently, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced Christopher Bedford as its new director. Bedford has been director of the Baltimore Museum of Art since 2016. He will take up his new role in June, replacing the curator, Neal Benezra, who stepped down last fall after 19 years at the agency. Before Benezra left office, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art experienced a period of turmoil, with the agency forced to close and lay off employees due to the impact of the epidemic and accused of institutional racism.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Photo: Jon McNeal, Sn hetta
As director of the Baltimore Art Gallery, Bedford implemented a series of initiatives aimed at increasing the diversity of the museum's collections and staff, insisting on hiring and promoting female and people of color staff, and committing to collecting only works by women artists in 2020. Through practical actions, he shifted the focus of the art world from male white artists to more diverse, more cosmopolitan, and more inclusive narratives. He's also committed to bringing museums into the community, launching a city-wide survey in 2019 to try to understand how museums can better serve Baltimore residents, and launching a series of programs to provide immediate financial relief to the city's art scene during the 2020 pandemic. Late last year, Bedford received criticism for planning to sell works by some prominent white male artists in the collection in order to buy works by postwar unrecognized artists of color.
In 2018, the Baltimore Museum of Art raised $16.1 million for the sale of works by Andy Warhol, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, and Franz Kline. Last spring, the museum held an exhibition showcasing the work of a range of overlooked artists who were purchased with the funds. Bedford has since said, "We are taking a closer look at art history across geographies and cultures, allowing artists who have not been duly recognized over the centuries to emerge and shifting the conversation from modern to the history on which it is based." "Now, with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bedford continues to explore diversity. (Text/Qian Xue'er)
American | Art historian Wu Hong
Received the "Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Artistic Writing" from the American University Art Society
Wu Hong
The American University Art Society recently announced the winners of the 2022 Merit Award, and art historian Wu Hong won the "Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Art Writing", which recognizes a large number of his outstanding works that bring Chinese visual culture to the perspective of admission and general readers from different perspectives.
Wu Hong is an art historian, critic, curator, and professor at the University of Chicago. In 1963, he was admitted to the Art History Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. From 1972 to 1978, he worked in the Calligraphy and Painting Group and the Jinshi Group of the Palace Museum. In 1978, he returned to the Department of Art History of the Central Academy of Fine Arts to pursue a master's degree. From 1980 to 1987, he studied at Harvard University and received a double doctorate in art history and anthropology. He then taught in the Department of Art History at Harvard University, where he was awarded a tenured professorship in 1994 and was appointed to chair the "Professor of Special Contributions to Stebbon" at the University of Chicago in the same year. In 2002, he established and served as the director of the East Asian Art Research Center, and also served as the advisory curator of the Smart Art Museum of the university.
"Training in Both China and the United States has enabled Wu Hung's work to bring cultural perspectives from both countries to the fields of aesthetics, art history and archaeology," the award speech said. From the earliest ancient relics to the intervention of the current era in the contradictory psychological structures of the Progressive Narrative of the West, his arguments laid the foundation of Chinese culture. From the Dunhuang Grottoes to Chongping to Zhu Jinshi's installation 'Phalanx: A Cube of Rice Paper', he has received numerous awards for transforming the study of East Asian art and focusing on the relationship between images and the space being observed. All in all, his work explores many complex transformations across time and space. He has always been very interested in the shape of time, and has written a large number of monographs, papers and exhibition catalogues on world time, bringing Chinese visual culture into different focal points. The scope of his work is as large as an epic, in which debates can span centuries and focus on the humanity of both the artist and the audience. He was a practitioner of art history, a poet and scholar who knew from the bottom of his heart how to pick up a pen and create clear and delicate prose, opening up new areas for experts and new readers. (Text/Hatamachi)