CHANGE IS COMING at the Studio Museum in Harlem. A new website design was unveiled yesterday and the museum announced it will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year by breaking ground on a new building designed by architect David Adjaye. The Studio Museum revealed the new developments in a New York Times article lauding...
Embed from Getty Images AFTER CAUSING A STIR when she announced the lengthy, provocative title of her latest exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins, Kara Walker is being honored with a W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Walker is among eight recipients of the 2017 award, including...
ENVISIONING NEW YORK IN THE FALL, Kadir Nelson‘s latest cover illustration for The New Yorker magazine depicts a father and daughter sitting on the stoop of a Brooklyn brownstone. “Sitting on the stoop is such a New York thing,” Nelson told Françoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker. “Brownstones, stoops, leaves turning: that’s...
FOUR YEARS AFTER ACQUIRING “Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man)” by Charles White (1918-1979), the Museum of Modern Art in New York will display the signature work for the first time in a special exhibition conceived by artist David Hammons. “Charles White—Leonardo da Vinci. Curated by David Hammons” opens Oct. 7 and pairs “Black Pope”...
FOR MORE THAN TWO DECADES, curators at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) have been commissioning artists to create works for a pair of walls in its voluminous atrium. In 1997, Sol LeWitt was the first artist selected. Kerry James Marshall painted murals for the space in 2008. In anticipation of the...
ONE YEAR AFTER ITS LONG-AWAITED DEBUT, overwhelming interest in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) hasn’t waned. The museum dedicated to the contributions and experiences of black Americans opened Sept. 24, 2016, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Often referred to as the “Blacksonian,” the museum turns one...
BEFORE: His largest work to day, Kerry James Marshall’s mural is being installed at the Chicago Cultural Center in Garland Court. | Courtesy City of Chicago, Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) GENERATIONS OF WOMEN have made groundbreaking contributions to Chicago’s arts and culture scene. A new mural by painter Kerry James...
Robert E. Lee Monument in Emancipation Park, Charlottesville, Va. | via UVA THE CITY OF CHARLOTTESVILLE’S plan to remove a monument memorializing Confederate General Robert E. Lee drew protests from tiki torch-bearing white supremacists and white nationalists. On Aug. 12, counter-demonstrators clashed with participants in the “Unite the Right” rally and one woman, among...
A NUMBER OF GEMS OPENED this month. Summer tends to be a relatively quiet season art-wise, but this year major international events—Venice Biennale, Documenta 14, and Art Basel—are coinciding with compelling gallery and museum exhibitions featuring works by black artists. From San Francisco and Detroit, to Greece, London and Cape Town, exhibitions by artists including...
Artist Kerry James Marshall delivers remarks at Columbia College Chicago commencement on May 14. | Video by Columbia College Chicago MORE THAN 30 YEARS AGO, when Kerry James Marshall left Los Angeles to move to New York, his friend and fellow artist Carrie Mae Weems called Dawoud Bey, who was living in the city....
FLAGS HAVE PROVEN to be a powerful medium in contemporary art, from David Hammons’s “African American Flag” (1990), which sold at Phillips auction for more than $2 million, to Dread Scott’s “A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday” (2015) displayed last summer at Jack Shainman Gallery, and Nu Barreto’s “Desunited States of Africa” (2010)...
FAITH RINGGOLD, “American Collection #4: Jo Baker’s Bananas,” 1997 (acrylic on canvas with pieced fabric border). | Purchased with funds donated by the Estate of Barbara Bingham Moore, Olga V. Hargis Family Trusts and the Members’ Acquisition Fund FOUNDED IN 1987, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) is celebrating its 30th...
AFTER DEVOTING A SUMMER in Gloucester, Mass., to landscape painting, Jordan Casteel decided to start making portraits of black men. The man who killed Trayvon Martin was acquitted in those months between her first and second year at Yale University where she earned her MFA. The experiences of her twin brother were unsettling, too....
IN ADVANCE OF “A Portrait Show” (June 11-July 22, 2017), Henry Taylor‘s solo exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich, Switzerland, Cultured magazine visited the artist in his studio. The publication paired Hamza Walker, executive director of LAXART, with Taylor. Both live and work in Los Angeles. The artist was still working on canvases...
Embed from Getty Images Troy Carter, Founder and CEO of Atom Factory THREE NEW MEMBERS were elected to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Board of Trustees, including entrepreneur and venture capitalist Troy Carter. A relatively young addition to the museum’s board, Carter, 44, is the influential founder and CEO of Atom...
Embed from Getty Images THE U.S. JAIL AND PRISON POPULATION increased more than ten-fold over the past 40 years, despite crime rates dropping by about 50 percent during the same period. To address the issue, Agnes Gund (above) provided $100 million to establish the Art for Justice Fund. A New York City philanthropist and...
ROBERT COLESCOTT, “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware” (1975). THE SEATTLE ART MUSEUM (SAM) is organizing a major exhibition of three critically recognized African American artists—Robert Colescott (1925-2009), Kerry James Marshall, and Mickalene Thomas. The exhibition will explore how their distinct approaches to figuration and history painting have recast the Western canon and challenged...
THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART announced the appointment of Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi as curator of African Art. The museum has a significant collection of more than 300 works of traditional art from sub-Saharan Africa, including a broad selection of masks and figurative sculpture from West and Central Africa. An artist, art historian and curator,...
FOR HIS FIRST EXHIBITION in Milan, Theaster Gates presented “True Value” (July 7-Sept. 25, 2016) which centered around the inventory of a shuttered Chicago hardware store. Installed in an art context, he reimagined the abandoned tools and supplies as a monumental visual display. An artist who trained as a potter, Gates has become more...
THE ARMORY SHOW NAMED CURATORS for its Focus and Platform sections today and also announced a new curatorial leadership summit for its 2018 fair. Bringing together an international roster of prominent curators, the daylong summit is designed to foster “new ideas and developments within the curatorial landscape.” Naomi Beckwith, curator at the Museum of...
On View: ‘Michael Armitage: Crucible,’ Paintings by Kenyan British Artist Explore Migration at David Zwirner in New York
Jun 27, 2025
Fresh Out of Graduate School, Christine Sun Kim Helped to Greatly Improve Experiences of Deaf Audiences at the Whitney Museum
Jun 24, 2025
American Sign Language Videos Explore Whitney Museum’s Collection, Including Works by Simone Leigh, Archibald Motley, Diedrick Brackens, Jacob Lawrence & More
Jun 24, 2025
Picturing Freedom: Exhibition and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Book Shed Light on Harriet Tubman’s Greatest Feat, Liberating More than 700 in Combahee River Raid
Jun 19, 2025
On View: ‘Jack Whitten: The Messenger’ at Museum of Modern Art in New York is First Full Retrospective of Pioneering Artist
Jun 17, 2025
