1.
The First Edition of Creative China Festival
The Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation has announced that this autum it will launch the inaugural edition of the Creative China Festival, a curated program of events in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles that aims to bring Chinese contemporary art to American audiences. The festival’s program will include six sections: public forums, a film series, public art exhibitions and an arts residency, design exhibitions, live music performances and a guest city program with more than ten collaborating institutions.
2.
A Poster Museum
New York City’s first art museum solely dedicated to posters, called Poster House, is set to open in late 2018. The upcoming arts space aims to present the impact, culture, and design of posters, both as historical documents and methods of contemporary visual communication. The institution will temporarily stage pop-up exhibitions until its official opening.
3.
Chiara Fumai (1978–2017)
Italian artist Chiara Fumai, best known for her performative and multimedia works that engage radical feminism, media culture, language, and repression, committed suicide. She was found dead in the Doppelgaenger gallery in Bari, Italy. She participated in Documenta 13, where she presented The Moral Exhibition House, 2012, a one-hundred-day performance based on Italian radical feminist literature, in which she channeled Annie Jones, the famous “Bearded Lady” of the Victorian era, and freak show performer Zalumma Agra, and for which she created a fictional campaign for feminist Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto.
4.
Partition Museum opens in India
The world’s first partition museum officially opened to the public, seventy years after the division of Pakistan and India at the close of the British Empire. Located in the Indian border city of Amritsar, the Town Hall acquired its collection, comprising personal items from the approximately fourteen million people that were displaced, from the families of those affected by the largest mass migration in history. Within it are fourteen galleries, which present stories from the period.
5.
Yayoi Kusama Museum
Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, is opening her own museum in the Shinjuku neighborhood of Tokyo in October. David Zwirner gallery, which represents Kusama, confirmed the news. Her new series of paintings, “My Eternal Soul,” will be featured in the museum’s inaugural exhibition, “Creation Is a Solitary Pursuit, Love Is What Brings You Closer to Art”. While the five-story building was completed in 2014, Kusama has remained quiet about its purpose. It will also house the artist’s popular “infinity rooms” and other installations, a reading room, and archival materials.
6.
David Roberts opens a sculpture park in Somerset
The David Roberts Art Foundation in London, founded in 2007, will be closing in October. David Roberts, the gallery’s founder, will then open a twenty-acre sculpture park in Somerset, West England, scheduled to open in 2019, once it is approved by the local council. This new project will be free to the public and will showcase works from various artists in his collection, including Ai Weiwei, Mark Wallinger, and Anthony Caro.
7.
The London project of the Swedish Photography Center
The Swedish center for contemporary photography Fotografiska, Stockholm, is spearheading a new museum in the UK devoted to the medium. The new London Museum of Photography will occupy the White Chapel building, located near the Whitechapel Gallery. Tommy Rönngren, chairman of the Fotografiska board, said that Fotografiska has for a long time been searching for suitable facilities in London, one of the world’s most dynamic cities when it comes to photography.
8.
MoMA is selling photographs
The Museum of Modern Art in New York will sell more than four hundred photographs in a series of auctions over the course of this year beginning with four works that will be on the block at Christie’s New York’s photographs day sale on October 10. The monies raised will support the acquisition fund of the institution’s photography department. The works offered include iconic photographs by many of the most well-known names from the early twentieth century to the postwar period, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Man Ray, Edward Weston, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Walker Evans.
9.
Parisian mosaics stolen
Two men wearing yellow safety vests and posing as city workers have been driving around Paris in a Mercedes and taking down works by street artist Invader. About fifteen of the artist’s mosaics—which resemble the 8-bit graphics of the old Atari video game Space Invaders—have been removed. The municipal government is filing a formal complaint against the men for both stealing Invader’s work and pretending to be city workers. The artist said thieves often target his pieces during the summer, when many Parisians leave the city for vacation.
10.
Martin Roth (1955 – 2017)
Martin Roth, the former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, died in Berlin. He resigned from the V&A last September and was diagnosed with cancer after he left. In the beginning of July, he took over as president of Germany’s Institute for Foreign Relations in order to become more politically engaged. From 2001 to 2011, Roth served as director general of the Dresden State Art Collections, overseeing twelve museums, before moving to London to become the first foreign director of the V&A since its founding in 1852.
Silvia Meloni
Featured image: Yayoi Kusama’s I Who Have Arrived In Heaven Exhibition Press Preview at David Zwirner Art Gallery on November 7, 2013 in New York City. Photo by Andrew Toth: Getty Images
CuratingtheContemporary (CtC) 