Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.
Happy Friday! Here’s a round-up of who’s moving and shaking in the art trade this week.
Industry Moves
Frank Trujillo Named Director of the Morgan’s Thaw Conservation Center: Trujillo joined the institution as associate book conservator in 2006, and succeeds Maria L. Fredericks, who retired earlier this year.
MIT Museum to Receive Gift of I.M. Pei Archive: Pei Cobb Freed & Partners will transfer the Pritzker Prize–winning architect’s complete project archive to his alma mater, making MIT the world’s largest repository of his work. The collection spans 60 projects and 1,500 rolls of drawings.
Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum Opens New Flight and the Arts Center: The dedicated gallery space debuts July 1 with a Rauschenberg exhibition as its inaugural show. The presentation includes 30 works, many never before displayed, exploring the artist’s engagement with aviation and space exploration.
Sebastian Smee Joins The Atlantic as Staff Writer for Visual Art: The Pulitzer Prize–winning critic joins from the Washington Post and will write broadly about visual art and its influence on modern life and culture. He had worked for the Post since 2018 but was laid off in February.
Mennour Takes on Ruoxi Jin: In collaboration with Cibrián, the Paris-based gallery now represents Jin, whose “practice blend[s] installation, sculpture, and performance, devised as narrative devices. She works with found and repurposed objects, combined with semi-autobiographical narratives and personal mythologies,” per Mennour, which mounted a solo show for her last October.
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Names New Senior Curator-at-Large, American Art: Carrie Rebora Barratt will assume the newly created role at the Kansas City, Missouri museum. A specialist in American art, she held multiple roles at the Metropolitan Museum of Art between 1990 and 2018. Most recently, she served as interim director of the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, New York.
The Big Number: $50 M.
That is the total discretionary budget of the Manhattan Borough President’s office for the city’s next fiscal year. On Tuesday, Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal said that he will allocate that entire amount toward the arts, in response to President Donald Trump’s attempts to remake the US’s cultural institutions. The funding, while still needs to be adopted by the city council, will be disbursed in grants for arts education, renovations at museums, and other programs to 55 cultural organizations and 28 schools. The grant winners named Tuesday include the American Museum of Natural History, El Museo del Barrio, and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among others.
Read This
What was really going on during Christophe de Menil’s final years, when she somewhat suddenly went from a ubiquitous presence at galas and openings to a recluse, hidden away in her Upper East Side apartment and kept from friends like experimental theater director Robert Wilson, whose work she had supported for half a century? A deep dive in New York magazine has decades’ worth of juicy details about the glamorous oil heiress, philanthropist, arts patron, and collector and her wealthy family. They include an accounting of her troubled relationship with and long-time estrangement from her only child, daughter Taya; her seemingly limitless devotion to her grandson, controversial artist Dash Snow, whom she supported financially and emotionally (against his mother’s wishes) and who died of a heroin overdose in 2009 when he was 27; and her final five years spent mostly at home during which time, her friends alleged, she was not taken care of well. It’s a sad end to a colorful life that, as recently as 2017, had been full of glamour and great art. —Leigh Anne Miller, Managing Editor
