Art Movements: Frieze Partners With ... the Whitney?
Also, the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts director retires, the Speed Museum's newest residents, and "peep" this art!
Art Movements, published every Thursday afternoon, is a roundup of must-know news, appointments, awards, and other happenings in today’s chaotic art world.
A Museum and an Art Fair Walk Into a Bar
This week, Frieze announced it will partner with several NYC institutions to present performances and exhibitions timed with its May fair. The Whitney Museum of American Art will show artist Jonathan González’s Body Configurations (2023–25), a suite of works commissioned especially for the Whitney Biennial, while Dia Art Foundation will display David Lamelas's video piece “To Pour Milk into a Glass” (1972) and other works. Is this a sign that the cozy ties between the institutional and commercial art worlds, an open secret once treated with the whisper of a taboo, are being increasingly touted as legitimate collaborations? A press release from the fair seems to suggest as much, stating with not a hint of irony that the initiative “extends Frieze New York beyond the fair aisles into major cultural institutions.”
Patsy Phillips to Retire After Three Decades
Patsy Phillips (Cherokee Nation), director of the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts for the last 18 years, will retire this June. Through her three-decade career, she held roles at ATLATL, a national service organization for Native American arts in Phoenix, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. Critic Seph Rodney discussed Phillips's contributions to MoCNA in a profile of the museum for Hyperallergic last year.
What Else Happened?
Deana Lawson (left) and Brandon Ndife photographed by Ashley Mclean (right) (photos courtesy Speed Museum)
- Deana Lawson and Brandon Ndife are the Speed Art Museum's 2026 Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program Residents.
- The Estate of Pope.L is now represented by Gladstone Gallery, in collaboration with Modern Art in London and Vielmetter in Los Angeles.
- Jessica Silverman gallery now represents Koak.
- Mucki Botkay is now represented by Galatea in São Paulo and Salvador, Brazil.
- Filmmaker Steve McQueen is the recipient of the 2026 Erasmus Prize.
- Colectivo Los Ingrávidos won the 2026 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research.
Peep This Art! 👀
Pictured above: a fuzzy pink marshmallow bunny hooked to a tiny CPAP machine snoozes happily in a miniature bedroom demarcated by a mousepad. This piece by Milwaukee-based Korinthia Klein is included in the Racine Art Museum's annual PEEPS®-themed exhibition, which will have you gritting your teeth violently with cuteness aggression. All the works on view are inspired by or materially incorporate Easter's most controversial confection, with titles such as “The Peepeux Tapestry” and the delightfully revisionist “Mount Peepmore” (both 2026).
