Week in Review: MoMA Terminates All Educator Contracts; Funders Offer $5K Artist Grants

Week in Review is a weekly collection of news, developments, and stirrings in the art world. Subscribe to receive these posts as a weekly newsletter.

MoMA terminated contracts with all of its freelance museum educators. In an email sent this week, the museum told educators “it will be months, if not years, before we anticipate returning to budget and operations levels to require educator services.”

Projecting $7 million in losses in 2020, the Whitney Museum laid off 76 staffers. Director Adam Weinberg says many of those who were laid off “work in visitor-related roles and are no longer able to fulfill their duties now that the Museum is closed.”

UOVO art handlers filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board saying they were laid off for supporting unionization.

Elizabeth Jaeger, an artist, and Cady Chaplin, a nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, started a campaign for artists to submit illustrations, paintings, and digital edits thanking healthcare workers. They are using the posters to decorate hospital ICUs.

The largest Native arts market in the United States, the Santa Fe Indian Market, was postponed to 2021.

Organizations including the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Ford Foundation came together to match $5 million in seed funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and will distribute $5,000 unrestricted grants to individual artists.

As the COVID-19 pandemic roils the arts community, the Getty Trust, Warhol Foundation, and Frankenthaler Foundation launched emergency funding initiatives to support the cultural sector.

A London couple made a mini-museum for their gerbils to visit during quarantine.

Here’s a first look at the designs for new US postage stamps featuring Ruth Asawa artworks.

Transactions

The Getty Research Institute announced the acquisition of the Emmett Williams archive, also known as the Berlin archive. The American-born Williams relocated to Europe to 1949 and rose to acclaim through his contributions to the Fluxus movement. The archive, which spans the late 1950s to 2007 when Williams died, features artwork, performance instructions, prints, correspondence, and more. Notable items include a group of Fluxus scrolls used in poetry performances; 100 letters that Williams wrote to his first wife Laura, which document early developments in Fluxus and his own work; and artwork by Williams and his circle, which included Charlotte Moorman, Seiichi Niikuni, Dieter Roth, and Daniel Spoerri. The archive will be available to researchers once it is catalogued.

The Hepworth Wakefield announced the acquisition of nearly 100 works from local Yorkshire collectors and patrons Terence Bacon and John Oldham. Bacon and Oldham, who have been collecting art since the 1930s, gifted pieces by British ceramicists such as Dame Lucie Rie, Angus Suttie, and Alison Britton, as well as an impressive 43 pots by John Ward. The donation also features works on paper and paintings by British artists including Sir Terry Frost RA, Rose Hilton, and Craigie Aitchison, who was also a friend of the couple.

Phillips just kicked off a series of online-only auctions with an Editions and Works on Paper sale, which features 50 work by well-known modern and contemporary artists including Alexander Calder and Takashi Murakami. Of personal interest is Yoshitomo Mara’s “Pup Cup” (2003), a plastic puppy in a teacup that rotates (caveat emptor: it requires two AA batteries). The Editions and Works on Paper sale will be followed by Current Mood, a sale of contemporary art, and Desktop, a sale of contemporary art, editions, and design (details to be announced). The auction series will run through May.

This Week in the Art World

The Leslie-Lohman Museum named Laura Raicovich as its interim director. | New York Times

Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) has named Tim Rodgers as the museum’s Sybil Harrington Director and CEO. | Press release

The Centre Pompidou re-appointed Serge Lasvignes as the museum’s president. | Artforum

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University, St. Louis granted the 2020 Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Awards to Lyndon Barrois Jr. and Wyndi DeSouza. | Press release

The FHNW Academy of Art and Design appointed Claudia Perren as its director. | Artforum

Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum selected the new heads of painting, Martha Mysko and Willie Wayne Smith, and the new head of photography, Chris Fraser. | Art Newspaper

In Memoriam

Helène Aylon (1931­–2020), ecofeminist artist | ARTnews

Anne Bass (1941–2020), ballet philanthropist | Vogue

Honor Blackman (1925–2020), Pussy Galore actress | Guardian 

Jeffery Camp (1923–2020), British painter | Artforum

Renato Danese (1944–2020), Chelsea gallerist | ARTnews

Kate Johnson (1969–2020), video artist and filmmaker | 18th Street

Michael McKinnell (1935–2020), Brutalist architect | New York Times

Marlo Pascual (1972–2020), found image artist | ARTnews

John Prine (1946–2020), country-folk singer | Rolling Stone

Suellen Rocca (1943–2020), Hairy Who cofounder | New York Times

Chynna Rogers (1994–2020), model and rapper | Pitchfork

Sergio Rossi (1935–2020), Italian shoe designer | Harper’s Bazaar

Bill Withers (1938–2020), singer-songwriter | Associated Press

Christina Monet Zilkha (1959–2020), new wave singer and art critic | NPR