One of the most significant museums of modern and contemporary British art outside London, the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, is set to lose its collection over a dispute with its sponsor. The Jerwood Foundation has given notice that the museum in East Sussex will stop receiving funds as of November 2019, must change its name and return over 300 works by artists including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Walter Sickert and Stanley Spencer. The Jerwood Foundation has provided £2.6m in grants to the Jerwood Gallery since it opened in a purpose-built, multi-million pound building in March 2012. The repossession order was issued after relations between the gallery’s director, Liz Gilmore, and Chair of the Jerwood Foundation, Alan Grieve, were reported to have broken down; the gallery has pledged to continue in its existing building under a different name, with a programme of temporary exhibitions.
It was announced over the weekend that Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung will be artistic director of sonsbeek 2020. The 12th edition of the triennale, which began in 1949 as the city started the process of recovering from the devastation of the Second World War, takes place in and around the Belgian city of Arnhem in summer next year. Ndikung, the founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin and curator-at-large of documenta 14, was appointed by an international selection committee which cited the focus on ‘space, rhythm, movement and words’ in his exhibitions.
On Monday Artes Mundi director Karen MacKinnon was announced as the new curator of Swansea’s Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. MacKinnon oversaw the arts prize, which with a £40,000 fund is the largest in the UK, for three editions. Last month Apichatpong Weerasethakul was announced winner of its eighth edition. The shortlist exhibition continues at National Museum Cardiff through 24 February. MacKinnon replaces Jenni Spencer-Davies who retired from the post having overseen a multimillion pound refurbishment in 2016.
Danica Dakić was announced as representing Bosnia and Herzegovina at this year’s Venice Biennale. ‘In her approach to the Bosnia and Herzegovina Pavilion project, Danica Dakić investigates the heritage of modernity, from Bauhaus to the utopian paradigms of international and Yugoslav socialist modernism,” Anja Bogojević, Amila Puzić and Claudia Zini, the curators of the pavilion, stated. ‘It exemplifies her search to reactivate utopian potentials by establishing a poetic relationship to the Bosnian post-war reality.’
On Wednesday Tate announced Catherine Carver Dunn as executive director of Tate Americas Foundation. Arriving from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, where she was deputy director, advancement, Dunn will join Pamela Joyner in heading up Tate’s US fundraising. Meanwhile First Site, the Colchester-based public institution announced former arts journalist and current chair of BBC Children in Need as its chair of trustees. On Thursday former director of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Philipp Kaiser, has been named as chief executive director of artists and programs at Marian Goodman. More recently, as an independent curator based in Los Angeles, Kaiser organised a Cindy Sherman exhibition at The Broad and the Jim Shaw show at the Marciano Art Foundation. At the Getty Research Institute, he cocurated Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions, which is currently on tour in Germany and Italy.
N.B. this news item was corrected on 9 February: the breakdown in relations at Jerwood Gallery is between Liz Gilmore and Chair of the Jerwood Foundation, Alan Grieve not, as originally reported, Chair of the Gallery David Pennock.
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