The Headline
ANATOMY OF A PAVILION. The New York Times dug into the making of the forthcoming US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and found that its 37-year-old commissioner, Jenni Parido, has no professional experience in the arts. She recently ran a luxury pet food store in Florida, setting her on an “unlikely path from selling venison nuggets and dried sardines to organizing a federally sponsored pavilion on a global stage,” according to the Times. Parido later picked Jeffrey Uslip, who made headlines a decade ago for a racially insensitive in St. Louis, to curate the pavilion. Artist Alma Allen ended up being named as the American representative, but not before others, including photographer William Eggleston and sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud, reportedly bailed out first. “I don’t think my work is political in respect to party politics,” Allen told the Times, later adding: “I think that people will have to make a judgment for themselves.”
PENDANT POPS UP. A memento mori pendant that appears in a celebrated 1635 English family portrait has been discovered, reports the Guardian. The John Souch painting, Sir Thomas Aston at the Deathbed of His Wife and held by the Manchester Art Gallery , depicts the tragic story of Aston’s wife, Magdalen, who died in childbirth, as well as their surviving three-year-old, Thomas. Close observers of the artwork will notice Aston is shown wearing the pendant, which was made in remembrance of the couple’s other child, Robert, who died at age six; it contains some of his blond hair. The owners of the jewel were clued into its significance when they happened to spot it in Souch’s painting during a visit to the gallery. Now, historian and dealer Martyn Downer says that “the jewel unlocks some of the questions about the painting.” The rare pendant is valued at £650,000 ($879,000).
The Digest
Finland’s political leadership will not attend the Venice Biennale this year if the Russian Pavilion goes on view as planned. [ARTnews]
Hamburg gallery owner Jenny Falckenberg died unexpectedly on Sunday, at the age of 45. [dpa]
Researchers in Mexico have discovered 16 petroglyphs and cave paintings from prehistory and the Mesoamerican Postclassic period (900–1521 CE) on two cliffs in the state of Hidalgo. [The Art Newspaper]
Meet six Arab women who are part of “a powerful wave” of street artists speaking out in traditionally male-dominated regions. [Vogue Arabia]
Chainsaw-wielding, 91-year-old South Korean sculptor Kim Yun Shin is getting her due with the retrospective, “Two Be One,” at the Ho-Am Museum of Art, Yongin, a first for a woman artist at the institution. [AFP and Taipei Times]
Swiss art historian and curator Maria Schnyder was named the new director of the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art in Tilburg, the Netherlands. [ArtDependence]
The Kicker
FREE AT LAST? Under former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Hungarian artists were subject to punishing censorship. What’s next, now that Péter Magyar’s Tisza party has ousted him ? Ocula investigates, speaking to artists “who had spent more than a decade watching their institutions captured, their grants redirected and their work suppressed.” After Magyar’s election, “we went into the streets, it was euphoric,” said architect and designer Marton Pintér, who represented Hungary at the Venice Architecture Biennale. “For a very long time, we had to give up our professional beliefs and take the right choice according to the state. It was all about Neo-Classicism, fake vernacularism, pastiche. These were the only commissions we could get.” (That may sound familiar to artists living in the US, where the President is currently seeking to build a triumphal arch.) Some remained cautiously optimistic, including the Budapest-based painter József Csató, who said: “It feels like this is the first time we will be asked what we want as artists, instead of having the narrative imposed from above.”
