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      Can Adriano Pedrosa Save the Venice Biennale? No Pressure.

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      Only workaholics and delusional optimists should organize a Venice Biennale, as the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa discovered during the countless flights and midnight meetings that have crammed his calendar for the past two years.“This would probably have taken five years and a team of intense researchers,” Pedrosa said in a video interview, if he hadn’t spent more than a decade mulling the possibilities, most recently as the influential artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art.On April 16, when the press previews begin for the 60th international exposition, others will judge whether the 58-year-old curator has captured the zeitgeist of contemporary art with his two-pronged show, “Foreigners Everywhere,” in the sprawling spaces of the Giardini and the Arsenale.The title is a provocation, weighted by the anti-immigrant agendas of Italy, Hungary and other countries in the last few years. Pedrosa, however, speaks about celebrating the foreigner and the historic waves of migration across the planet, offering a catalog of synonyms — “Immigrant, émigré, expatriate” — even as he expands the concept. “I take this image of the foreigner and unfold it into the queer, the outsider, the Indigenous,” he said.Those themes are embodied by 331 artists, most of whom will be unfamiliar to even seasoned art snobs. They are divided here between two major sections, one focusing on contemporary art and another dedicated to work made in the 20th century. Most have arrived from the Global South without major gallery representation or a foothold in the museum circuit. For many visitors, it will be the first time experiencing the splintered abstractions of Zubeida Agha (1922-1997) from Pakistan, the expressive portraiture of Hatem El Mekki (1918-2003) from Tunisia and the colorful fantasies of Emiliano di Cavalcanti (1897-1976) from Brazil, among others.From the beginning, critics noticed that “Foreigners Everywhere” would serve as a somber — some say morose — tipping point: It’s the first Venice Biennale in recent years to showcase more dead artists than living ones.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Heartland Godmother of Installation Art, No Longer in the Shadows

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      She is a trailblazer of the architectural sculpture movement, and her diaries rival Frida Kahlo’s. Are we ready for the unsettling clarity of Donna Dennis?One of Donna Dennis’s architectural installations — a false tunnel entrance installed on the Mad River — so confounded local Ohioans that one morning in August 1981, someone pipe-bombed it. New York’s bomb squad confiscated part of another structure, a cabin occupying City Hall Park, in 1986. The works by Dennis are so faithful to existing vocabularies of infrastructure that they defy classification as art objects.In 1970s New York, as painting and sculpture gave way to a gold rush of conceptualism, environments, performance and politics, the Ohio-born Dennis, fresh from art school in Minnesota and Paris, tuned into consciousness-raising women’s groups and devoted her craft to unsettlingly frank resemblances of buildings.First came hotel and subway facades, then houses in the round — each a combination of construction and artist materials, and slightly too small to pretend functionality. (For lights she uses appliance bulbs, and her doors terminate at her eye level.) Since the ’80s she has gone industrial: room-size lift bridges, stairways, rail platforms, pump houses and roller coaster girdings that have increased in complexity as they lessen in number.Dennis in 1981 with half of “Mad River Tunnel: Entrance and Exit,” in Dayton, Ohio.Donna DennisThis month, the gates crack on this scarce and challenging oeuvre. The bellwether art gallery O’Flaherty’s has darkened its space on Avenue A to a dramatic degree, and filled it with five Dennis works from the 1970s and ’90s, for a show called “Houses and Hotels.” Whatever else they do, these shrines to vernacular architecture, humane, seductive and commanding, make clear that a godmother of installation art has been unwisely overlooked.“Two Stories with Porch (for Robert Cobuzio)” (1977-79) is a 10-foot-tall rowhouse in the style of suburban New Jersey. From a darkened first-story window, a VACANCY sign glows greenly. (A tribute to the late friend of the title.) A wallpapered room lit by ceiling bulb is just visible upstairs. As your eyes adjust in the dark, unlit details fade in: a coat of aluminum paint on the cornice, a staircase through the curtain, a tracing of mortar among stones in the foundation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Betye Saar Is Making Some of the Best Work of Her Life.

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      Being raised during the Depression, we all learned to be creative with what we had on hand. At Christmas or on my birthday, I always got art supplies, and I was jealous that my siblings got bikes and stuff. I realize now that my parents were fostering my creativity.An early influence on my becoming an artist was Simon Rodia. My grandmother lived in Watts, and we would walk by the Watts Towers when they were being built. I was fascinated by how he used bottle caps and corn cobs and broken plates — trash, essentially — to make art, to make something beautiful. Then, much later, in the 1960s, I saw the work of Joseph Cornell. He refined the use of found objects and materials and boxes, and I thought, “Wow, I’ve kind of been doing that, too.” I didn’t know it was called assemblage, but it made sense to me and set me in that direction as an artist.A young Betye Saar in 1965 at the entrance to Simon Rodia’s monumental towers in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.via Betye Saar and Roberts ProjectsThe main challenge, I guess, to being an artist is how to make a living. But being a creative person means you have to find ways to do this. I studied design at U.C.L.A., and after I graduated, I made greeting cards, I made jewelry, I got into printmaking and then sold my prints. I taught art classes in colleges all over the states. My creativity kept evolving with my needs as I got married and bought a house, had my daughters and put them through college. Through it all, I loved making art. It kept me going.I still want to make art. Sometimes in the morning when I wake up, it’s hard to get out of bed, hard to get back into my body and get it to move. But I do it. Not everyone has a reason to get out of bed, something they love to do and that gives their life meaning. I am so lucky that I have that as part of my life. I don’t really think about my age, unless someone mentions it, though I guess I feel middle-aged — which for me is, like, 50 to 70. It would be kind of neat to live to 100, to have 100 revolutions around the sun. I’m pretty close.Greeting Card #8Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonThe inside of Greeting Card #8Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonGreeting Card #1Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonThe inside of Greeting Card #1Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonMemories Lost at Sea, 2024Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonThe exterior of Memories Lost at Sea, 2024.Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonA Different Destiny, 2024Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonThe exterior A Different Destiny, 2024.Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonDark Passage 2024Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonThe exterior of Dark Passage 2024.Drifting Toward Twilight, 2023 (installation view)Betye Saar, via The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens; Photo by Joshua WhiteCurrent and upcoming projects: Completed “Drifting Toward Twilight,” an installation at the Huntington Library in the Bronx; “Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer” exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; “Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight” at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne, Switzerland; and completed a newly commissioned artwork for “Paraventi; Folding Screens from the 17th to the 21st Century” at the Fondazione Prada in Milan.This interview has been edited and condensed. More

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      Artist Files Lawsuit Against Des Moines Museum to Protect Her Work

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      Mary Miss’s lawsuit claims that the planned demolition of her work violates the Visual Artists Rights Act, which empowers artists to save their work from destruction.The artist Mary Miss filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the Des Moines Art Center to halt the planned destruction of a work of land art the museum commissioned her to create less than 40 years ago.The museum has said that the artwork, an environmental installation called “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” (1989-1996), has become a safety hazard and that repairing it is beyond the museum’s means. Demolition was slated to begin as early as Monday.The Art Center said Thursday that it had no immediate comment on the lawsuit.Miss’s legal action is the latest twist in an ongoing fight over the fate of “Greenwood Pond,” which has highlighted the difficulty of preserving ambitious public artworks — especially for smaller institutions operating in environments with changing weather conditions. In the weeks since the center’s plan became public, high-profile art-world figures including the collector Agnes Gund; the art critic Lucy Lippard; and the artists Laurie Anderson, Martin Puryear and Alice Aycock have written to the museum’s director, Kelly Baum, encouraging her to reconsider.Miss’s lawsuit claims that the planned demolition of “Greenwood Pond” violates the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, which empowers artists to protect their work from destruction if it is of “recognized stature.” The suit also contends that the museum violated its contract with the artist by failing to protect the work from the elements in the first place.Miss has asked an Iowa federal court to issue a temporary restraining order to keep the museum from draining the pond and dismantling the installation; a hearing on her request is slated for Monday morning. “The project is an original work of art and cannot be found anywhere else on planet Earth,” the lawsuit states. “Its destruction is its extinction.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Whitney Museum Names Chief Curator

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      Kim Conaty will steer exhibitions and the permanent collection, saying she will pay close attention to work by Latino and Indigenous artists.When Scott Rothkopf, the former deputy director and chief curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, stepped up as director of the New York institution last fall, he knew he would have to hire his replacement in the curatorial area. That role — one of the most influential in the contemporary art world — will be filled, effective next week, by Kim Conaty, the museum’s curator of drawings and prints since 2017. In her new position she will steer the institution’s permanent collection and acquisitions, as well as its exhibitions and conservation activities.Conaty has a reputation for creating shows that please critics and crowds alike. Her celebrated 2022-2023 exhibition “Edward Hopper’s New York” was among the best-attended in the museum’s history, while the 2023-2024 exhibition of drawings by Ruth Asawa that she organized with another curator was lauded as “revelatory” by The New York Times. As the chief curator, Conaty said she plans to focus on Latino and Indigenous artists, who remain underrepresented in the Whitney’s collection, and invest in emerging talent. But she also intends to slow down the pace of collecting. “Gifts are not free,” she said, referring to the cost of storing and preserving artworks. “We’re being extremely intentional about how we’re building the collection.”The Whitney has seen significant turnover in recent years. In addition to the departure of its longtime director, Adam D. Weinberg, two high-profile curators — David Breslin and Jane Panetta — decamped for roles at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while its chief advancement officer, Pamela Besnard, retired last year. Rothkopf has made several new appointments, including promoting the curator Adrienne Edwards to a newly created leadership role as senior curator and associate director of curatorial programs. The chief financial officer I.D. Aruede was promoted to deputy director.A few weeks ago, Rothkopf had his first taste of controversy as director when the museum was seemingly caught unaware that the artist Demian DinéYazhi’ had slipped a “Free Palestine” message into a flickering neon sign in the Whitney Biennial, which opened on March 20.Asked about how he and Conaty plan to navigate such bumps in the future, he said, “In appointing Kim, it was important to think about someone who had the sensitivity interpersonally and the intellectual sophistication to help navigate the times that we’re in — I’m not going to be coy about that. These are key attributes for someone at a museum like the Whitney, which is so committed to the art and the ideas of our moment.” More

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      Teacher Secretly Sold His Students’ Art on Mugs and Shirts, Lawsuit Says

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      Parents of a dozen students at a school near Montreal accused an art teacher in a lawsuit of reproducing portraits from a class assignment and putting them on items that he offered for sale online.In January, students at a junior high school outside Montreal received an assignment to draw a classmate or a self-portrait in the style of Jean-Michel Basquiat.“The challenge is to make an original artwork in Basquiat’s style; not to copy one of his images,” the teacher, Mario Perron, wrote to his students on the junior campus at Westwood High School in St.-Lazare, Quebec. “I am very familiar with Basquiat’s work and will return copied work, because it is considered plagiarism.”The assignment was titled “Creepy Portrait.”Basquiat was a worthy subject: He was the influential Brooklyn-born artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent who was known for a brief career in which he innovated with graffiti and other types of improvisational pieces. He died at 27 in 1988.But parents of some students who completed the assignment were shocked to find that Mr. Perron had copied the portraits and was offering mugs, cushions, bags, apparel and other items for sale online bearing reproductions of the artwork, according to a class-action lawsuit filed last week in Quebec Superior Court.Joel DeBellefeuille, who learned what was happening from his 13-year-old son, Jax, accused Mr. Perron in an interview of perpetrating a “premeditated” scheme. A portrait of Jax by one of his classmates was among the student artwork being offered for sale, he said. “I freaked out,” Mr. DeBellefeuille said. “I was full of emotions. Still now, it’s really unbelievable.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Rage and Grief

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      Käthe Kollwitz’s fierce belief in social justice and her indelible images made her one of Germany’s best printmakers. A dazzling MoMA show reminds us why.An artist friend texted me recently, asking how to contend with the anger and sadness she was feeling about the state of the world. I can think of no better balm than the Museum of Modern Art’s Käthe Kollwitz retrospective, the first ever at a New York museum that encompasses this German artist’s groundbreaking prints and drawings and her sculpture, posters and magazine illustrations.Once you’re there, go straight over to her series “Peasants’ War,” which she started in 1902, to find her own outlet for her burning desire for radical change. She was about 10 years into her already successful career when she made it, a remarkable feat given that she was a woman in a country that still didn’t allow women into art schools. In 1898, she had been nominated for a gold medal at the Greater Berlin Art Exhibition for her first major print cycle, “A Weavers’ Revolt” (1893-97), but did not receive it: The Prussian minister of culture thought her subject matter — a fictional uprising based on a contemporary play about an 1844 revolt, a watershed moment for many German socialists — too politically subversive, while Kaiser Wilhelm II himself objected to the idea of a woman garnering top prize.Born in 1867, Kollwitz was an avowed socialist whose career stretched from the 1890s to the 1940s, a period of tremendous social upheaval and two world wars. Though she was a member of the progressive Berlin Secession art movement, she kept a distance from the elite art world, living in a working-class Berlin neighborhood with her husband, a doctor who tended to the poor.Display of posters by Käthe Kollwitz at MoMA, left to right: “Vienna is dying! Save its Children,” 1920; “The Survivors,” 1923; “Help Russia,” 1921; “Never Again War!” from 1924; poster to legalize abortion, from 1923; “Release our Prisoners,” 1919. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWith “Peasants’ War,” Kollwitz again turned to the past to share her outrage at the injustices around her “which are never ending and as large as a mountain.” The seven-part series deals with the historical revolt that swept German-speaking countries of Central Europe in the 16th century, not as a transcription of historical events but as an imagined narrative showing the exploitation of farm workers (men treated no better than animals yoked to a plow, a woman in the aftermath of a rape by a landowner), their explosive response, and the chilling repression that followed. It is a story worthy of Charles Dickens or Émile Zola, told from a woman’s point of view.The largest print, “Charge,” focuses on the figure of “Black Anna,” reputed to be a catalyst of the violence, urging a mob of peasants to action. She is no “Liberty Leading the People.” Unlike Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 image of a beautiful and bare-breasted personification of French freedom, Kollwitz’s crone is shown from the back, her sinewy arms raised and hands clenched urgently, practically launching herself into the crowd.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lauren Haynes to Be New Head Curator on Governors Island

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      Lauren Haynes brings her curatorial expertise to the goal of growing Governors Island’s public art program.The Trust for Governors Island announced on Tuesday that it has appointed Lauren Haynes as the new head curator and vice president of arts and culture for the 172-acre island, situated in New York Harbor with ringside views of the Statue of Liberty, Lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn waterfront.“We have big ambitions for the arts program here, which is to be New York’s pre-eminent public art destination,” said Clare Newman, the president and chief executive of the Trust, a nonprofit organization created by the city to develop and operate the island as a recreational and cultural resource.“Lauren is very good at bringing emerging voices and underrepresented artists to the forefront and shares our ideas about growing the public art program significantly,” said Newman, who tapped Haynes, most recently the director of curatorial affairs and programs at the Queens Museum.Originally used by the Lenape for hunting and fishing, the island became an Army base in the early 19th century, then was used by the Coast Guard in the late 20th century and opened to the public in 2005. Now ferries run regularly from Lower Manhattan year-round and directly from Brooklyn in warmer months, with 931,000 trips to the island last year, according to the Trust.“We have fantastic examples of public art throughout the city, but what makes Governors Island unique is really our location and the fact that it’s an experience to get here,” Haynes said. The idea of disconnecting from the city, while still visible, and reconnecting to nature on the island, she continued, “feels like where the opportunity is.”Haynes, 42, will build on a half dozen permanent and long-term public artworks by Rachel Whiteread, Mark Handforth, Sam Van Aken, Mark Dion, Sheila Berger and Shantell Martin that are positioned around the island and previously stewarded by Meredith Johnson, the first head curator at the Trust. Early this summer, Jenny Kendler is creating “Other of Pearl,” an immersive installation evoking marine ecosystems in the subterranean spaces of Fort Jay, on the northern part of the island.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More