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      Ford Foundation Gives $10 Million to Studio Museum in Harlem

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      The grant will support the museum’s director and chief curator, a position held for the last 20 years by Thelma Golden.The Ford Foundation has awarded the Studio Museum in Harlem a grant of $10 million to endow its director and chief curator, a position held for the last 20 years by Thelma Golden.Ford’s president, Darren Walker, announced the grant on Monday at the museum’s annual gala, which honored Golden and promoted plans for the institution’s new home in fall 2025.“The Studio Museum is the only one of New York’s great museums that does not have an endowed director position, which in my view has to be rectified,” Walker said in an interview.“Thelma has elevated this position through her unwavering commitment to excellence and that her position is not endowed is a glaring problem in my view,” Walker added. “Black and brown cultural institutions have always been under-resourced and this is another such example.”Neil Rasmus/BFAThe Ford gift also helps shore up the institution’s future, so that it is not dependent on Golden herself, who is widely considered the front-runner in the search for the next director of the Museum of Modern Art, which is currently underway.“This position naming is a testament to and acknowledgment of the six directors who came before me,” Golden said in an interview, “and also holds a real sense of possibility for the leaders who will come after.”The position will now be titled the Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator, in keeping with other major institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Max Hollein is the Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer; MoMA, where Glenn D. Lowry is the David Rockefeller Director; and the Whitney Museum, where Scott Rothkopf is the Alice Pratt Brown Director.The gift has financial as well as symbolic importance, since it helps cover compensation for the position. Directors are typically well-paid to attract and retain top talent.While Walker and Golden have had a long friendship, Golden noted that Ford has supported the Studio Museum since its founding. Walker “has been an inspiration to me and my work from the beginning of my career,” she said.Walker pointed out that other museums and foundation directors have close personal ties and that his friendship with Golden should not disadvantage the Studio Museum.“At the Ford Foundation we invest in excellence, and by any objective standard the Studio Museum punches above its weight and is worthy of this kind of gift,” Walker said. “It has earned the right to have an endowed directorship.” More

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      The Met’s Next Costume Fashion Blockbuster Take On the Politics of Race

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      With support from LeBron James, ASAP Rocky, Pharrell Williams and more.The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is wading into the politics of race relations.On Wednesday, the museum announced that its spring 2025 blockbuster fashion show will be “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” focusing on the history of the Black dandy and the way peacocking goes beyond aesthetics to empowerment. ASAP Rocky, Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, Pharrell Williams and Anna Wintour will be co-chairs of the gala that opens the show; LeBron James will be the honorary chair.The Met’s first fashion exhibition to focus solely on the work of designers of color, as well as the first in more than two decades to focus explicitly on men’s wear, the show is another step in the Costume Institute’s efforts to rectify its own historic failures in diversity and inclusion, said Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge.“I wanted to stage a show on race that could use our collection to tell a story that had been absent from the conversation both within the museum and outside,” Mr. Bolton said. “This is a first of its kind.”LeBron James will be the honorary chair of the event. Mario Anzuoni/ReutersThe goal, he said, is to demonstrate what happens to the concept of the “dandy,” as defined by Beau Brummell in Regency England, when it is racialized. When, for example, an enslaved person is treated as a luxury object to be dressed up and displayed — and how those clothes in turn were appropriated by the enslaved and used to subvert existing systems and create new identities. Additionally, it will illustrate how contemporary Black men’s wear designers use their work to connect to this tradition.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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      Studio Museum in Harlem to Open New Building in Fall 2025

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      The 82,000-square-foot structure on 125th Street will open with a show featuring the artist Tom Lloyd.The Studio Museum in Harlem on Tuesday announced that it will open its new home on 125th Street in the fall of 2025. Its first show there will bring the museum full circle by focusing on the work of Tom Lloyd, the artist, educator and activist who was featured in the 1968 opening exhibition of the institution — which was then just a second-floor rented loft on upper Fifth Avenue.“This building represents the collective aspirations of all who have been involved in thinking about what it would mean to make a museum on 125th Street devoted to the work of Black artists,” said Thelma Golden, the museum’s director, in a recent walk through the new structure. “This space allows us to fully execute on all of the work that we have been known to do, but gives us so much more capacity and so much more possibility.”Featuring stacked volumes of differing sizes over five stories, the new building provides 82,000 square feet, increasing the exhibition space by more than 50 percent and the public areas by about 60 percent.The museum’s news release makes no mention of the building’s architect, David Adjaye, nor those currently credited for the design — Adjaye Associates in collaboration with Cooper Robertson. (The museum parted ways with Adjaye in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct. Adjaye has denied the accusations.)Golden declined to discuss Adjaye, but said, “We are thrilled with and proud of this design and look forward to working in it.” A rendering of the lobby, facing north. The museum said it has raised more than $285 million of a $300 million capital campaign for future sustainability. via Adjaye AssociatesWe 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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      Tacita Dean Draws Her Way Into the Menil

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      In the artist’s first major U.S. museum survey, she bonds with Cy Twombly through works on paper, films and photographs.During a residency at the Menil Collection in Houston last February, the British artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean spent the night in the Cy Twombly Gallery.She wanted to be surrounded by Twombly’s work, having long felt connected to the so-called Blackboard artist, who died in 2011, and in particular to his collage-drawings and preoccupation with the passage of time.“He connects to the classical world in a way that is deeply emotive,” Dean said. “I’m interested in where your mind goes when you look at one of his works. It can go to memory, it can go to envy — you think, ‘God, that’s so perfect.’”Now Dean is bringing her own monumental blackboard drawings and her rarely shown drawings on paper, found postcards, and albumen photographs to the Menil, in a show that opens on Oct. 11. The exhibition, “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly,” is her first major museum survey in the United States.“The presence of Cy Twombly in Houston really ignited the show and the conversation,” said Michelle White, senior curator at the Menil, who organized the exhibition. “It just became such a lovely point of connection.”In a recent interview at her Los Angeles studio, Dean, 58, said a focus on her drawings “is quite unusual for me,” given that shows typically focus on her films. And the artist said it is meaningful to be presenting her work in a place where Twombly’s presence is felt.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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      Brooklyn Museum at 200 Celebrates Beauty and Art’s Hidden History

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      At 200 years young, the Brooklyn Museum, the second largest art museum in New York City, has begun celebrating the bicentennial of its founding. And it’s doing so in characteristic fashion — meaning in ways that make traditionalists crazy. It is emphatically re-emphasizing what it has, basically, long been: an institution with the heart and soul of an alternative space enclosed in the body of a traditional museum.And it does so with two large-scale season-opening projects. One is a complete rehang and rethink of its American art galleries, filtering centuries of art from two hemispheres through a post-Black Lives Matter lens. The other, less radical, is a community-based roundup of new work by more than 200 contemporary artists living and working in the borough.Let me wedge in some history here. The museum was founded in 1823 as a circulating public library in what was then the Village of Brooklyn, across the river and independent from a rivalrous Manhattan. In the mid-19th century, the library, called the Brooklyn Institute, began collecting, along with books, natural history specimens and art. (Among the first pieces acquired was a painting, “The First Harvest in the Wilderness” (1855), by the Hudson River School artist Asher B. Durand. It’s in the American galleries rehang.)Asher B. Durand, “The First Harvest in the Wilderness,” 1855.George Etheredge for The New York TimesIn 1898, what is now the museum moved into a version of its present McKim, Mead & White home where, over time, it scored some cultural coups. It was among the first United States museum to present African art as art rather than as ethnology. It organized a nervy survey of avant-garde European modernist art in 1926, three years before MoMA existed. The museum was also one of the first in the country to have an art school, and to create a conservation lab.As time went on it also courted controversy by giving space to art unwelcome elsewhere. In 1980, while two other museums backed out of a traveling tour of Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” Brooklyn not only took it in but acquired the installation for its collection. (It’s on permanent view in the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, another Brooklyn first.)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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      When Monet and Turner Found Beauty in London’s Toxic Fog

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      Monet and Turner found something sublime in the polluted 19th-century city — and maybe something darker, too.If you’ve been to London recently (or ever) you’ll probably recognize Claude Monet’s description: “Today the weather was maddening, gusts of snow, then sunshine, fog and dark weather and clear, it was magnificent but all too changeable.”Yet the French painter found London’s moody climate an inspiration, and he purposely came in only the colder months. During three visits from 1899 to 1901, he produced dozens of canvases of the city’s surging River Thames, 36 of which were shown to acclaim in Paris in 1904 but never exhibited in London.One hundred and twenty years later, the Courtauld Gallery has brought a selection of the series home for the first time in “Monet and London: Views of the Thames” (through Jan. 19, 2025). The effect is as radiant and sublime as Monet might have hoped — though today we might see those unsettled skies in a different light.“Every day I find London more beautiful to paint,” he wrote to his wife Alice from the swish Savoy Hotel, where he stayed on those visits. From his riverside balcony, the artist could observe the working waterway, chugging with boat traffic and steaming with trains on bridges above, from sunrise to sunset. Here, he would fulfill his enduring wish to “try to paint some fog effects on the Thames.”Monet’s “Charing Cross Bridge, The Thames” (1903)Alain Basset/Lyon MbaAt the Courtauld (less than half a mile from the Savoy), 21 canvases show the river in an atmospheric suite of cornflower blue, cobalt, dove gray and mauve. The choppy Thames glimmers in shades of silver and blue flecked with violet and pink, or flaming yellow, orange and crimson from the sun — “the little red ball,” Monet called it — that’s high above in a sky thick with “delicious fog.” “The extraordinary fog so very yellow,” he wrote, characterized the industrialized late-19th-century London. Locals already called it “the Big Smoke.”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 Local’s Guide to Chiang Rai, Thailand

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      Four insiders on where to stay, eat “micro-seasonal” dishes and shop for handmade pottery and textiles.T’s monthly travel series, Flocking To, highlights places you might already have on your wish list, sharing tips from frequent visitors and locals alike. Sign up here to find us in your inbox once a month, along with our weekly roundup of cultural recommendations, monthly beauty guides and the latest stories from our print issues. Have a question? You can always reach us at tmagazine@nytimes.com.Travelers to the northern provinces of Thailand have long been drawn by two things — elephant camps and campy temples. The most famous examples of each are within or near the 13th-century city of Chiang Rai, where the Wat Rong Khun, or White Temple, stands as an artist’s parable of the world’s ills, as depicted in the form of pop culture villains and other icons of kitsch. (If crossing a sea of grasping arms at the entrance doesn’t terrify you, beware the Freddy Krueger-themed hanging planters.) Chiang Rai is also where the Emerald Buddha, a national treasure now housed in Bangkok’s Grand Palace, was reportedly discovered in 1434. According to legend, a bolt of lightning cracked the stupa in which it had been hidden years prior.Chiang Rai — the city shares its name with the surrounding province — has gained a reputation as something of a tourist trap, thanks to the tour buses that ferry visitors from the White Temple to the equally gaudy Blue Temple and then to the very bleak Black House (which the artist Thawan Duchanee, who died in 2014, decorated with elephant skulls and antlers and a table runner made of snakeskin). But the city, having played second fiddle to the luxe-boho paradise of Chiang Mai ever since King Mang Rai moved the capital of the Lanna Kingdom — which ruled over most of what is now northern Thailand — to the “new city” in 1296, has more recently emerged as an unhurried haven for serious artists and other creative professionals seeking to escape the heat and sprawl of Bangkok.The third edition of Thailand’s roaming Biennale, which brought dozens of international and Thai artists to Chiang Rai this past winter and spring, shed light on an often-overlooked aspect of the city — its long history as a cultural crossroads. Owing both to its proximity to Laos and Myanmar and, to some degree, the Golden Triangle’s uncomfortable past as a center of the global drug trade, Chiang Rai has been the site of intermingling cultures for centuries.“The constant migration of people of different races and religions make this an interesting place both geographically and culturally,” says the Chiang Rai-born artist and gallerist Angkrit Ajchariyasophon. In 2023, Chiang Rai was also recognized by UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network for its sustainable architecture design and landscapes. “My house is near the city’s oldest Christian church, close to an Islamic mosque and a Buddhist temple off the same road,” says Ajchariyasophon. “This is where I grew up and learned about cultural diversity, which I find wonderful.”Today, multigenerational family-run restaurants featuring traditional Thai, Chinese and Myanmarese specialties likewise share a slow-movement sensibility with hipster cafes that serve coffee from beans grown on local farms, and stylish home stays that incorporate teak wood scavenged from nearby forests. Here, Ajchariyasophon and other Chiang Rai enthusiasts offer their recommendations on where to stay, eat, shop and sightsee in and around the city.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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      Just Stop Oil Activists Sentenced for Attack on Van Gogh Painting

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      A judge sentenced two climate protesters to prison terms for throwing soup at the work in 2022, an act he called “criminally idiotic.”One morning in October 2022, Anna Holland and Phoebe Plummer, two young climate activists, walked into room 43 of the National Gallery in London, opened two tins of Heinz tomato soup and then threw the sloppy orange contents at Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.”The pair then glued themselves to the wall beneath the painting’s frame, before Plummer shouted, “What is worth more, art or life?”On Friday, a British judge sentenced the pair, both members of the Just Stop Oil protest group, to lengthy prison terms for the protest, which he said was “criminally idiotic” and could have caused “irreversible damage” to the masterpiece.Judge Christopher Hehir, sentenced Plummer, 23, to two years in prison for damaging the painting’s frame. Holland, 22, received 20 months in jail for the same offense. The court had found the pair guilty of the offenses in July.During the sentencing hearing, Judge Hehir said that acidic soup had a “corrosive effect” on the painting’s 17th-century wood frame and had lowered the frame’s value by an estimated 10,000 pounds, or about $13,000. The painting — one of a series that van Gogh made between 1888 and 1889 — is one of the National Gallery’s most treasured paintings and currently a centerpiece of the museum’s 200th anniversary exhibition, “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers.”The judge said the duo’s action came close to damaging the masterpiece — within “the thickness of a pane of glass.” He added that “stupidity like this” could lead museums to withdraw cultural treasures from public view, or force them to introduce onerous security measures that would deter visitors.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