Week in Review: NYU Will Remove Sackler Name; Deana Lawson Awarded Hugo Boss Prize

Protest against Arctic drilling held at the opening of a British Museum exhibition (photo by Kristian Buus)

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.

A group of former board and committee members is demanding a formal investigation into what it calls the “hasty and opaque deaccession” of three paintings from the Baltimore Museum of Art’s collection, and an honorary, non-voting trustee announced their resignation from the board during the deliberations. In addition, a new letter was sent directly addressing the BMA Board of Trustees and urging them to revoke the decision.

Following years of pressure by students and the artist-led drug advocacy group P.A.I.N., New York University’s Langone Medical Center will remove the Sackler name from its Graduate Biomedical Institute.

The climate activist group BP or not BP? staged an anti-oil demonstration at the British Museum as part of a day of action convened by the Alaskan Indigenous organizations Defend the Sacred AK and Native Movement.

An artist-decorated boulder in Brooklyn might disappear due to fracking in the borough. While Sculpture Center and MOMA PS1 have shown interest in exhibiting “THE ROCK,” sculptors Pam Lins and Halsey Rodman say the ongoing installation “could disappear at any moment.”

Banksy’s “Show Me The Monet” (2005), a riff on Monet’s paintings of his Japanese bridge in Giverny, sold for £7.6 million (~$9.8 million), the second-highest price ever paid for a work by the street artist.

Just weeks ahead of the US election, a portrait of Donald Trump by Dana Schutz sold for £550,000 (~$711,774).

The Pérez Art Museum Miami drew ire after it hosted Donald Trump’s town hall. In response, the museum said it has a responsibility to remain nonpartisan, per official guidelines on election advocacy released by the American Alliance of Museums.

Approximately 70 Trump supporters held a rally on the steps of the Museum of the American Indian in Lower Manhattan. A dozen activists were detained after they protested the rally.

On Indigenous People’s Day, activists in Santa Fe, New Mexico toppled an obelisk celebrating Native genocide.

Hundreds of treaties between the United States and Native American tribes are now available online for the first time.

A Jacob Lawrence painting, thought missing for over six decades, was actually hanging in a New York City apartment. The painting will now join a collection of Lawrence artworks on display in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.

Awards & Accolades

Deana Lawson, “Mama Goma, Gemena, DR Congo” (2014), pigment print (© Deana Lawson, courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles)

Deana Lawson was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize by the Guggenheim Museum, becoming the first photographer to win the prestigious award.

The Joan Mitchell Foundation announced the 25 recipients of its annual Painters & Sculptors Grants. | Press release

The second OBEL AWARD was awarded to Anna Heringer for her project Anandaloy.

Artists Sondra Perry, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Martine Syms, and Zhou Tao were shortlisted for the Dream Commission from Muse, the Rolls-Royce Art Programme.

Transitions

Richard Tuttle is now represented on the West Coast by David Kordansky Gallery.

SculptureCenter has appointed a trio of artists to its board of trustees. Carol Bove will serve as chair, Sanford Biggers as president, and Leslie Hewitt will also join the board.

Terry Skoda was appointed interim director of the Museum of Arts and Design, and Lorin Gu and Alexander Mason Hankin were appointed to the board of trustees.