Bethany Collins and Brendan Fernandes named 2019 Chicago Artadia recipients
CHICAGO—This week, artists Bethany Collins and Brendan Fernandes were named the 2019 Chicago Artadia awardees. Bethany Collins, an Alabama-born artist and Georgia State University MFA alum whose often text-based artwork focuses on race and language, first won the Artadia award in Atlanta 2014. Brendan Fernandes—whose performance-based installation The Master and Form is currently on view in the 2019 Whitney Biennial—addresses complex issues of queer culture, migration, and protest through his choreographic works. Over the past two decades, the national nonprofit Artadia has provided unrestricted grants to over 300 artists in seven cities.
MIAMI—Last week, the Pérez Art Museum Miami announced a one-million-dollar grant Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s supporting the development of the museum’s new Caribbean Cultural Institute. The new institute focuses on promotion of artistic production across the Caribbean, scholarship and research, and collection acquisition. PAMM director Franklin Sirmans said in a statement, “Miami exists as a northern border of the Caribbean and contains elements of the Caribbean in its peoples and culture that make it a nexus point for the study of the region. It is integral to our mission to further cultural dialogue within that space, and to amplify it outwards to the international community.”
A survey of contemporary Caribbean art, The Other Side of Now, opened this past week at PAMM. BA editor Logan Lockner spoke with one of the exhibition’s curators, María Elena Ortiz, last week.
Institute of Contemporary Art in Richmond announces twenty-percent cut to full-time staff
RICHMOND—Despite being open for little over a year, the Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond has faced a number of staffing changes and financial difficulties, including when Lisa Freiman, the museum’s original director, stepped down abruptly before the museum opened. The announcement of the staffing cuts was a strategic one, says Dominic Willsdon, the current executive director. “After a successful first year, where we presented more than 100 artists and welcomed more than 100,000 visitors, we found that it was necessary to adapt the ICA’s inaugural staffing plan, which was based on models of existing institutions, to apply what we’ve learned from our own audiences. Through a rigorous research process, involving the input of all staff, our advisory board, VCU leadership and community stakeholders, we discovered that the way our staff was structured did not serve us.”
Solange announces museum tour of extended video When I Get Home
HOUSTON—Kicking off in the Knowleses’ hometown, Solange’s thirty-three-minute extended-cut video for her 2019 album When I Get Home began its fourteen-city museum tour at the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, Texas. The extended video, created in collaboration between Solange and artists including Jacolby Satterwhite and filmmaker Terence Nance, pays homage to Houston and the singer’s Southern roots. The video will be shown at the New Orleans Museum of Art in New Orleans, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, along with stops in Marfa, Paris, London, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and New York.
Storm Janse van Rensberg joins Zeitz MOCAA as senior curator following five years at SCAD
SAVANNAH—After five years as head curator of exhibitions at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, Storm Janse van Rensberg will return to his native South Africa to join Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, where he will develop programming with executive director Koyo Kouoh in his new role as senior curator. SCAD has not announced an immediate replacement. During his time at SCAD Museum of Art, van Rensburg curated solo exhibitions by artists including Lorraine O’Grady and Toyin Ojih Odutola, as well as the recently closed exhibition by South African artist Nicholas Hlobo and Azikiwe Mohammed‘s first solo museum exhibtion, Blackest Night, on view through September 1.
Pérez Art Museum Miami chief curator resigns
MIAMI—Tobias Ostrander, chief curator at the Pérez Museum of Art since 2011, resigned this week. His curatorial projects at PAMM include the current Beatriz González retrospective, and Ebony Patterson’s …while the view is on the roses…. Ostrander told the Miami Herald, “I’m proud of all I did at PAMM… I’m leaving with a great sense of accomplishment.” Ostrander has not announced his future plans, and PAMM has not announced an immediate successor.
Warhol Foundation announces 2019 grantees, including institutions in Alabama and Louisiana
NEW YORK—Among its awards to forty-one organizations totaling $3.81 million, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts announced operating grants for two institutions in Alabama and one in Louisiana last Wednesday. The New Orleans Film Society, the Alabama Contemporary Art Center in Mobile, and the Coleman Center of the Arts in York, Alabama, will each receive grants of between $80,000 and $100,000 over the course of two years.
Rabkin Foundation announces winners of 2019 grants for art journalists
PORTLAND, ME—The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, which recognizes visual arts journalists who are “essential” to the arts in their region of the country, announced the third-annual recipients of its grants to eight writers across the country, including Kristina Kay Robinson of New Orleans and Mariela Fullana Acosta of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Each of the eight winners receive an unrestricted grant of $50,000. The judges for this year’s grants were Dennis Scholl, president and CEO of Miami’s Oolite Arts; Rainey Knudson, cofounder of Texas contemporary art magazine Glasstire; and David Frankel, a contributing editor at Artforum and former editorial director of the MoMA’s publications department.
MOCA GA director Annette Cone-Skelton and artist Kevin Cole named 2019 Nexus Award recipients
ATLANTA—According to a release from Atlanta Contemporary earlier this week, Atlanta-based artist Kevin Cole and Annette Cone-Skelton, founder and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia (MOCA GA), have been named the 2019 recipients of the Nexus Award, given annually in recognition of leadership and contributions to Atlanta’s contemporary art communities. The recipients will be recognized as honorary chairs of the museum’s annual fundraiser, Art Party, set for Saturday, August 24, and at a public reception on Thursday, October 3.
