Art Movements: Meet The Met's New Photography Curator
Oluremi C. Onabanjo’s new role, grants for Queens artists and orgs, the “pinkest pink” turns 10, and more art industry news.
Art Movements, published every Thursday afternoon, is a roundup of must-know news, appointments, awards, and other happenings in today’s chaotic art world.
Oluremi C. Onabanjo Heads to The Met
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a new curator of photographs: Oluremi C. Onabanjo, a scholar with a deep commitment to African and Black diasporic histories of the medium. Born in London and raised in Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and the United States, she heads to The Met from the Museum of Modern Art, where she's held curatorial roles in the photography department since 2021, working on exhibitions of Ernest Cole, Ming Smith, and others. Among her celebrated publications is Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos (2022), centered on the Brooklyn photographer's chronicles of a historic 1977 Pan-African art festival. Onabanjo was the inaugural recipient of the Vilcek Foundation Prize for curatorial work, awarded in 2025.
A Boost for Queens Artists
A whopping 129 Queens-based artists, collectives, and nonprofit organizations will get $493,350 in grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. Among this year's Queens Arts Fund recipients is artist Adelle Yingxi Lin, pictured above. “This funding makes possible a connection between ecological observation and cultural practice — translating water quality data from Newtown Creek, a recovering Superfund site, into multilingual calligraphic textiles created with the communities who live alongside it, making environmental conditions visible and personal,” Lin told Hyperallergic. See the full list of awardees here.
What Else Happened?
- Melissa Chiu will step down from her role helming the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, to join the Guggenheim Museum in New York City as its new director. Read more at Hyperallergic.
- United States Artists announced the awardees of its $50,000 Knight Arts + Tech fellowship: LIZN'BOW (Liz Ferrer and Bow Ty), Miguel Novelo, Rhonda Holberton, Taeyoon Choi, and Wes Taylor.
- 47 Canal, the 15-year-old gallery known for bolstering the careers of artists including Anicka Yi, Josh Kline, and Janiva Ellis, is moving to Chelsea, where it will share a space with Marlborough Gallery heir Max Levai's new venture. Will 47 Canal become 529 West 20th? Unlikely. (The gallery has relocated before, but it's always kept its name.)
- The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art has selected Bryan Collier as its artist honoree for this year's Carle Honors, which recognizes important contributions to the beloved and formative art form.
Wildcard
British artist, paint mixer, and provocateur Stuart Semple is celebrating 10 years of his “pinkest pink” pigment by giving away signed editions for free to anyone except Anish Kapoor. That's right: If you add the paint to your cart on Semple's website, you must confirm that you are not Kapoor, who controversially holds exclusive artistic rights to the world's blackest black since 2016. The ultra-bright, fluorescent-pink powder can be used to create watercolors, acrylics, oils, and more. Most importantly, Semple says, it shows Kapoor “how nice it feels when you share your colours.”
