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    Philip Johnson’s Brick House Reopens After 15 Years

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    The architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House, a rectangular glass-and-steel residence set on a grassy shelf above a wooded bluff in New Canaan, Conn., has epitomized a certain East Coast ideal of midcentury elegance since its completion in 1949. Before becoming an architect at age 37, Johnson ran the architecture department at MoMA, and the spare, luminous building, which he inhabited for over half a century, embodies the Modernist International Style that he helped define in a landmark exhibition at the museum in 1932. The home also established Johnson himself as the paragon of a specific type of New York architect: erudite, absolutist in his refinement and formidable in his influence wielding, shaping careers, institutions and public opinion like few others in his field.But since the National Trust of Historic Preservation opened the Glass House to the public as a museum in 2007, visitors have discovered there’s more to the place than its namesake centerpiece. By the time Johnson died in 2005, the five acres he’d bought in 1946 had grown tenfold to encompass 14 structures, including experimental follies, a subterranean painting gallery and three wooden homes from earlier periods, including a shingled 18th-century dwelling that Johnson and his partner, the curator David Whitney, would use as a refuge in hot weather. For the past 15 years, however, a pivotal part of the estate has remained semi-concealed: Johnson’s guesthouse, known as the Brick House and situated just 80 feet from the site’s main attraction, has been closed to the public because of water damage. Now, after an extensive restoration and in time for the Glass House’s 75th anniversary, the building has finally been unveiled.The hallway has a granite floor and doubles as a gallery, displaying Brice Marden’s “Etchings to Rexroth” (1986), from the collection of Johnson and his partner, the curator David Whitney.Dean KaufmanJohnson considered the 1,728-square-foot Glass House and its 860-square-foot brick companion, which was built at the same time, two parts of a single home — one alluringly crystalline, the other introverted and opaque. He wrapped the smaller building entirely in iron-spotted red brick and positioned it facing the main house at a slight angle, with a gravel pathway crossing the courtyard between them. The structures are also linked below ground: Along with a bedroom, study, storage room and bathroom, the Brick House contains the unsightly mechanical equipment that supplies the Glass House with electricity and heat, enabling the larger building to maintain its aesthetic purity. Tellingly, Johnson placed the Brick House’s only windows — three big mahogany-framed portholes — on the building’s back side, facing away from his glass retreat. “I didn’t see why the guests should have a window looking out toward my house,” he said in an unpublished 1991 interview for the National Trust. “They can look their own way out to the hill.” But he and Whitney also often slept in the building when they didn’t have visitors.Ibram Lassaw’s welded bronze-and-steel work “Clouds of Magellan,” commissioned for the bedroom in 1953, hangs above the bed.Dean KaufmanThe Brick House is stern, squat and solid, its front interrupted only by a tall, centered black pinewood door. Even Johnson admitted it wasn’t much to look at, calling it “perfectly plain.” But if the exterior is unassuming, Johnson created an unexpected landscape of color, texture and fantastical detail inside. At one end of the bright entrance hall, which runs parallel to the front of the house, a door gives way to the building’s showpiece: a dim, sand-hued bedroom that is at once monastic, womblike and glamorous. Johnson — who never shied away from, as he put it in the 1991 interview, “deliberately copying whatever I felt like” — modeled it after a domed parlor in the early 19th-century London home of the English architect John Soane. Soane described the layered design of that room as “a succession of fanciful effects,’’ and Johnson deployed his own series of clever tricks. First, he built an off-white plaster pavilion inside the 10-by-26-foot room. A row of vaults seem to be supported by 14 superslim columns but are, in fact, suspended from the ceiling and give the room the sheltered quality of a cloister.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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      Petrit Halilaj Takes Flight

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      When the Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj received an invitation for his biggest project ever in the United States, he knew just where to go: back to school.For “Abetare,” his spare, smart, absolutely delightful sculptural installation on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Halilaj, who is 38, traveled to elementary schools across southeastern Europe, documenting the doodles that generations of schoolchildren left on their desks and walls. (The project’s title refers to the Albanian-language ABC book from which Halilaj learned the alphabet.) Those children’s drawings from the Balkans formed the templates for the sprightly, sometimes bawdy metal sculptures that now garland the skyline of New York — large ones, but also flowers, birds and graffiti that nestle in the topiaries, and hide behind the cocktail bar.Halilaj was born in 1986 in Kosterrc, a small village outside the town of Runik. (At Art Basel one year he answered that perpetual question, Where are you from?, by dumping 60 tons of Kosterrc soil in the white cube of the art fair.) His own school days took place amid the most horrific fighting in Europe between World War II and the present war in Ukraine. Serbian forces burned down the Halilaj family home in 1999, at the height of the Kosovo war, one of the most brutal chapters of a decade-long nightmare of ethnic and religious conflicts in the Balkans. The family fled to Albania, where psychologists in a refugee camp encouraged the boy to draw. War reporters at the time chronicled an ambidextrous child prodigy, drawing chickens and peacocks with both hands.Petrit Halilaj’s “Abetare (Spider)” seems to be smiling mischievously at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesHalilaj now lives in Berlin, but in both art and life he remains deeply engaged with Kosovo, which became independent in 2008 and where Halilaj is advising the culture ministry on the creation of a museum of contemporary art. (He figures among an exciting generation of artists from Europe’s youngest country, including Flaka Haliti, Alban Muja, and Doruntina Kastrati, the last of whom just won a prize at the Venice Biennale.) And for a decade now I’ve been captivated by Halilaj’s art, which pirouettes around questions of nationality, family and sexuality through a dense register of symbols — especially birds, whose wings and claws appear everywhere from the surface of Balkan antiquities to the fuselage of a Boeing 737.In two conversations, which have been condensed and edited, he and I spoke about the trauma of displacement, the magic of flight, and the universal language of schoolchildren’s scribbling. While we were on the Met roof one morning he pointed out his little sculpture of a dove, high up in the sky. A pigeon — an echt New Yorker — had touched down next to Halilaj’s bronze bird, and was making friends with its Balkan counterpart.At left, “Abetare (Wall of Symbols),” and at right, “Abetare (Flower, Toshe, Messi).”Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesThe project you’ve done for the Met roof continues one that began more than a decade ago, when you went back to your elementary school in Kosovo. What was it like, returning to the village you had to flee as a child?In 2010 I went back to Runik for a holiday. My old school — which had actually survived the war — was being torn down to build a new one. [The Serbian army] had burned 99 percent of the town, this was one of the few buildings that remained, and still it was going to be replaced by new, cheap construction! And while I was at the school all these kids showed up. Some were teenagers, but others were very little, maybe 8, 9: little devils. A classic small-town crowd of naughty kids. I loved them.Some of them knew me, that I’m an artist, and they were like, “You have to go in. ”We entered, and I started filming. They started doing everything you are not supposed to do in a school — just out-of-control fun.These kids would have been born after 2000, after the war.Exactly. They started painting on top of pictures of national heroes and poets, which, honestly, I would have never had the courage to do when I was a kid.Then one of the kids took me into a classroom. And then I see the pile of these green school desks there since before the war. The desks were older than me. And this kid says to me, ‘‘Come see the drawings,’’ because there is everything there. These desks contain 40 years of unconscious, crazy secrets. There’s this encyclopedic aspect, these layers of generations. But you also see how local and global these things are, and also how funny.I was just so touched by the language of drawing, and in a moment I saw another loss — this time not from the war, but from the postwar craziness, wanting everything new. I asked the principal if I could save at least one classroom of desks. He said, “Yes, if you finance new desks.” We made a deal. I hope he used the money to really buy them …“Abetare (Big Flower),” one of the bronze sculptures that ring the walls of the Met roof.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesFrom left, a tiny bird perched on the giant spider; the letters “KFOR,” a reference to the NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo; and a star atop the artist’s “Abetare (House).”You exhibited the desks from your hometown in a show in Cologne in 2015. Why did you go further, all around the Balkans, for the Met project?It was a personal journey. I started three years ago, going to Kukes, in Albania, where I was a refugee. Then to Rozaje, in Montenegro, where we used to go on holidays before the war. Very, very, very small towns. I actually went to all the countries of ex-Yugoslavia, except Serbia, where I had friends send me images.What I was amazed by, as I was going to the schools, was to feel so connected everywhere. For me, these drawings are a language that I just get. I had experts in education, or from museums, or even local artists, who accompanied me everywhere. Because otherwise it’s hard to convince a school superintendent that you aren’t a maniac. “Can I enter your classrooms to see the drawings of kids?” [Laughs] You have to really take time and build trust.Some sculptures on the Met roof clearly refer to the Balkans. There’s one with the letters “KFOR,” a reference to the NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo. But there are also birds and stars, and Lionel Messi, and the Chanel logo, and then the same naughty drawings of body parts you could find on a school desk in America.It’s a really funny way of seeing history, through all these politically incorrect drawings. But I love the queerness in them, these secrets. They are codes. You can see the euro symbol screwing Yugoslavia …One little queer joke I caught up here on the roof is the sculpture that spells out “IDGAF” — which stands for “I don’t give a [expletive],” but is also a song by the unofficial president of Kosovo, Dua Lipa.[Laughs] It’s kind of a tribute to her, but it’s also a little celebration of new possibilities. Both locally in Kosovo, or regionally, there is a chance for new generations to really question all these static historical, nationalist narratives that are so hard to move.Petrit Halilaj in the 2020 exhibition “To a raven and hurricanes that from unknown places bring back smells of humans in love,” at the Crystal Palace in Madrid.Oscar Gonzalez/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesInstallation view of “Petrit Halilaj: Runik” at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, in 2023.via Petrit Halilaj and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Photo by GLR EstudioTell me about why birds have such a notable place in your work. For your 2017-18 New Museum show, you translated antiquities from your hometown, many of which are now in museums in Serbia, into birdlike figures with spindly claws. There were giant brass bird claws in your show in Madrid, and a performer dressed as a white raven.The birds and the chickens always bring me back to the Albanian ABC book, the Abetare. In the lesson for the letter P, there is a boy named Petrit. “Pulat e Petritit.” Petrit and the chickens. So imagine, when you are little, and people ask you, “What’s your name?” I would say “Petrit,” and they would say, “Ah, Petrit with the chickens!” I didn’t get it for years. Why am I Petrit with the chickens?! I just knew we had chickens in our garden …Later on, I understood that all these adults went through this Abetare and learned this lesson.Language politics were such a flashpoint in the wars of the 1990s.Students were allowed to learn in Albanian until 1989, with the ending of autonomy. After that it’s this story of hidden classrooms, hidden universities. The school became a place of discussion, where we could see what was going to happen. My Abetare was burned when they burned the house in ’99.In shows before this one you’ve incorporated your own childhood drawings of birds, and also flowers. Is there something that links those redeployments of your drawings as a refugee with the doodles you found for the Met project?Questioning adulthood, or questioning established canons by going back to a part of childhood is the way to understand the world around me that scares me the least. Going through the schools and the desks, there was a way to build a counternarrative: a network of symbols and alphabets and drawings that come to the Metropolitan Museum and form a kind of joint landscape.A view of “Petrit Halilaj: RU,” 2018, at the New Museum, featuring an imagined landscape populated by whimsical creatures fashioned from pottery fragments, found objects and other detritus.via Petrit Halilaj and The New Museum, New York; Photo by Dario LasagniTwo years ago you did a wonderful project on the roof of the Grand Hotel in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. Once it was a five-star hotel; and as it declined through the war years, the stars on its roof sign were taken down one by one. You restored the stars, added dozens of new ones, and replaced the sign “Grand Hotel” with a phrase from a Kosovar child: “When the sun goes away we paint the sky.”This is a work that I ended up donating to the city, to the people of Pristina. We’re talking about, literally, the hotel where Tito was coming to sleep. You can still sense this glamour that was once there. I mean, you had this fantastic article in The New York Times about it …The then-president of Kosovo told our reporter, “I don’t think it is the worst hotel in the world, but that is because the world is very big.”And I had this idea of coming back to Kosovo and lighting it back up. Making something that is rotten into a 28-star hotel. Poetically, you can dream of something bigger than the hotels in Dubai, you know?But to me the stars against the blue Pristina sky were also the stars of the flag of the European Union. The installation is just as much about Kosovo’s still incomplete recognition as an independent European state.It was about bringing in a different language that we hardly see in public spaces. And also about seeing sculpturally a fallen ideology in these fallen stars. In Yugoslavian times, there was a whole generation of people who were so proud of this hotel, and they had no money to enter.An artistic project by Petrit Halilaj at Grand Hotel Pristina, 2022. Halilaj restored the stars, added dozens of new ones, and replaced the sign “Grand Hotel” with a phrase from a Kosovar child: “When the sun goes away we paint the sky.”Armend Nimani For The New York TimesYou have these two rooftop projects, in Pristina and in New York, both rooted in the voices of children. And what interests me most is how these children’s voices, even as they cement a claim to Kosovo’s independence, also escape the nationalist traps of so much artistic advocacy.At the Met there is an equilibrium. Maybe there are some nationalist symbols. But then you have a big heart. You have “Michael Jackson” written on the walls in Albania. You have group agendas, but also personal things. I felt like an archaeologist, discovering how people are so much more interconnected, more global, more human, than the national politics that dominate this area of Europe. And to me, that is really good news. More

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      Museums to Visit in California This Year

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      A special section of The New York Times on museums highlights art across the state.A Yuri Suzuki installation at SFMOMA’s “Art of Noise” exhibition. The work, titled “Arborhythm,” collects, remixes and broadcasts sounds from the streets of San Francisco from the balcony of the museum.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesHappy Monday.The New York Times published a special section on museums over the weekend, with more than two dozen articles about how institutions across the country are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.I highly recommend browsing the full series. One of the articles covers the ways that museums are making better use of their outdoor spaces; another highlights a museum dedicated to the history and science of nuclear weapons; and there is a profile of a joint show mounted by two museums, one on each side of the U.S.-Mexico border.There’s also a long list of American museums to visit this year, including several on the West Coast, as well as a guide to new and exciting museum programs for children.And, of course, there is a lot going on in the art world in California. Here are some of the highlights:The Broad in Los Angeles will open a sweeping exhibition on May 25 covering 20 years of work by Mickalene Thomas, an artist who was exploring the Black female figure well before it became so popular.“It’s difficult to understand, from where we are now, how radical her work was when I first showed it,” Susanne Vielmetter, a Los Angeles gallerist who gave Thomas one of her first solo shows in 2007, told my colleague Robin Pogrebin. “I cannot think of a single artist who at that time was making portraiture of female Black figures from a perspective of female desire.”The artist Mickalene Thomas in front of her work “Portrait of Maya No. 10” (2017).Mickalene Thomas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Amy Harrity for The New York TimesAn unusual collaboration among 10 large public universities, including U.C.L.A., will bring shows focused on democracy to campus museums across the country. It’s part of an effort to reduce political polarization and increase student voter turnout.From May 4 through Aug. 18, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will be showcasing visual and technological artifacts from the world of music, including early listening devices and iconic album covers, in its “Art of Noise” exhibition. But, as Chris Colin explains, what the show really explores is humans’ relationship to music.At the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in Los Angeles County, a new installation by the artist Betye Saar manipulates light to simulate the stages of nightfall. It’s one of many shows across the country in which artists are playing with darkness.Museums dedicated to the natural sciences have long been associated with dark spaces and nature dioramas, but that may be changing. At the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, a new area will soon be opened that features a theater, a cafe and new seating and exhibition spaces. “There is nature in L.A., and we believe that if you have a better understanding of what’s in your backyard and your neighborhood, you’ll have a much better appreciation of life on our planet,” Lori Bettison-Varga, the museum’s president and director, told The Times.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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      On the Met Roof, Skywriting His Way to Freedom

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      Petrit Halilaj of Kosovo began drawing as a refugee child in the Balkans during a violent decade and invented a calligraphic world of memory.When this old world starts getting me downAnd people are just too much for me to faceI climb way up to the top of the stairsAnd all my cares just drift right into space …I’ve found a paradise that’s trouble-proof …Up on the roofSo crooned the Drifters in 1962, making the inner-city rooftop — “tar beach” — a very cool spring-and-summertime place to be. And while the roof of the august Metropolitan Museum of Art may not have figured in anyone’s getaway plan back then, it does now, thanks to the Roof Garden sculptural commissions the museum has been installing, seasonally, over the past dozen years.The latest of them, “Petrit Halilaj, Abetare,” which opens on Tuesday, is one of the airiest looking so far. Indeed, drawing — or skywriting — rather than sculpture is what I’d call this openwork tangle of dark bronze-and-steel calligraphic lines tracing silhouetted images — of birds, flowers, stars, a giant spider and a fairy tale house — against the panorama of Manhattan beyond and Central Park below.It’s a funky, sky-reaching fantasia. But Paradise? Uh-uh. The spider looks mean. The house tilts as if melting. And what’s with a scattering of spiky phalluses, and a Soviet hammer-and-sickle emblem, and mysterious words and anagrams — Runik, Kukes, KFOR — with explicitly down-to-earth connections?And what to make of the fact that all of these images and words were lifted from a single prosaic source. They were found, scratched and doodled on the surfaces of classroom desktops by generations of elementary school kids in the Balkan territories of Europe during a time of brutalizing regional war.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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      Indigenous Artists Are the Heart of the Venice Biennale

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      Here are highlights of the range of work produced by Native artists in the pavilions and a central exhibition that proudly calls itself “Foreigners Everywhere.”Before visitors step into any gallery at the 2024 Venice Biennale, which opens April 20, Indigenous artists will have made their presence known.A collective of painters from the Brazilian Amazon, MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin), will cover the facade of the central exhibition hall with an intricate mural. Inuuteq Storch, the first Greenlandic and Inuk artist to represent Denmark at the international art festival, will erect a sign reading “Kalaallit Nunaat,” or “Greenland” above the pavilion’s entrance. (Greenland has been a self-governing country within the Danish Realm since 1979. )The Brazil Pavilion nearby has been renamed the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion — one of many terms that Indigenous people use to describe the territory that, after colonization, became Brazil. “There is a very political aspect to the Indigenous presence in an artistic space like the Venice Biennale,” said Denilson Baniwa, the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion’s co-curator. “Our aim is to rewrite history and add a new chapter to art history.”Beyond the United States Pavilion, which features the art of Jeffrey Gibson, the Venice Biennale offers a taste of the wide range of work produced by Indigenous, First Nations and Native artists around the globe. Here are some highlights.The Central ExhibitionMataaho Collective’s “Takapau” (2022), made of polyester tie-downs and stainless steel buckles. The first gallery at the Arsenale will host the monumental installation by a group of four Maori women known for making large fiber sculptures. Maarten Holl, via Te PapaIndigenous artists are at the heart of “Foreigners Everywhere,” the Venice Biennale’s central exhibition. As the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of this year’s Biennale, sees it, the Indigenous artist is “frequently treated as a foreigner in his or her own land.” The first gallery at the Arsenale, Venice’s former shipyard complex, will host a monumental installation by the Mataaho Collective, a group of four Maori women known for making large-scale fiber sculptures. The 331-artist lineup also includes the Native American artists Kay WalkingStick and Emmi Whitehorse; the Brazilian Yanomani artists Joseca Mokahesi and André Taniki; Indigenous Australian artists Marlene Gilson and Naminapu Maymuru-White; and Maori artists Sandy Adsett and Selwyn Wilson, considered one of the founders of Maori Modernism, who died in 2002.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 Steadying Force for The Africa Center is Stepping Down

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      Uzodinma Iweala, chief executive of the Harlem institution, will leave at the end of 2024 after guiding it through pandemic years and securing funds.After guiding The Africa Center through rocky pandemic years and securing a huge chunk of funding for a major construction project, the leader of the Harlem institution is stepping down.Uzodinma Iweala, who is in his seventh year as chief executive of the Africa Center, will depart at the end of 2024.Iweala’s leadership helped to settle an institution with a tumultuous past of various mandates, locations and even names. It was formerly known as the Museum for African Art, which The New York Times’s co-chief art critic, Holland Cotter, called the “source of some of the most conceptually daring exhibitions of its era,” and before that, the Center for African Art. Faced with a delayed opening date during the pandemic, Iweala expanded its programming to include lectures and visits from heads of state, outdoor dance parties, films and author talks. All of it was aimed at connecting with the African diaspora and changing the way Americans interact with the African continent.Iweala, who as a writer and medical doctor has a nontraditional background for an arts institution leader, said he planned to focus on new creative projects including finishing a book. His multifaceted background and personal history — he is Nigerian-American and has lived in Nigeria — were regarded by many in the arts community as a good fit for an institution trying to transform itself into more than a museum or gallery. In an interview last year, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Thelma Golden called him “visionary.”“I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to build over the past few years, especially in a challenging environment,” Iweala said. “It’s the right time to leave for me and for the institution.”Under Iweala, the Center has partnered with the Museum of Food and Drink on an exhibition as well as independent curators to offer “States of Becoming,” a 2022-23 exhibition that featured 17 African artists from the continent and diaspora. He partnered with the University of Cape Town to help organize a media index to track how Africa is covered in the media and created the Future Africa Forum that offered discussions with presidents, philanthropists and other leaders during the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York.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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      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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      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