Rhizome, the New York–based nonprofit which ‘champions born-digital art and culture’ has appointed the artist Aria Dean as its editor and curator. Dean has worked at the organisation, which is now affiliated to the New Museum, since 2016. She will be charged with overseeing Rhizome’s publishing ventures, public events, online exhibitions and commissions, as well as maintaining the Net Art Anthology database. Staying in New York, the curatorial team for Greater New York, MoMA PS1’s annual survey of artists living and working in the New York City area, has been announced. Led by Ruba Katrib, curator, MoMA PS1 with writer and curator Serubiri Moses, in collaboration with Kate Fowle, director, MoMA PS1 and Inés Katzenstein, curator of Latin American Art and director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America, the large-scale show will open in the autumn of 2020.
A charity is offering a Picasso for €100. Well, that is the price of the raffle tickets being sold by French non-profit Aider les Autres to raise money for CARE, a project providing clean water and sanitation facilities to schools and villages in Cameroon, Madagascar and Morocco. This is the second time the fundraiser has happened. In 2013 Jeffrey Gonano, a 25-year-old fire safety official from Pennsylvania, USA, got his hands on a Picasso gouache drawing from 1914 as €4.8 million was raised to help restore Tyre, an ancient city in southern Lebanon. Nature Morte, the work up for grabs this time, is from 1921 and, previously owned by collector David Nahmad, is currently on show at the Picasso Museum in Paris. It’s new owner will be announced 6 January.
In what seems an increasingly volatile climate for the art fair business, German events company Koelnmesse has cancelled the next Art Berlin art fair. The fate of the fair, which never brought in the desired revenues for the company, was sealed after its regular venue, the old Tempelhof airport, was unavailable in 2020. The fair receives no state money – a fact that gallerist Johann König bemoaned recently in Monopol – and a Koelnmesse spokesperson said that they intend to funnel their energy into Art Cologne, another of the its ventures.
The shortlist of the Margaret Tait Award, which recognises a Scottish or Sctoland-based artist working in moving image has been announced. Emilia Beatriz, Sulaïman Majali, Kimberley O’Neill and Hardeep Pandhal are in the running for a £15,000 commission, to be shown at the Glasgow Film Festival in 2021 and subsequently tour with LUX Scotland. The news came as Ashley by Jamie Crewe, recipient of the 2019/20 award, premiered. Margaret Tait was an Orcadian filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait who died in 1999.
Museu de Arte de São Paulo has appointed Sandra Benites adjunct curator for Brazilian art. As a Guarani Nhandewa woman her the move marks the first time an indigenous curator has being hired by an art museum in Brazil. Benites was a teacher at an indigenous school in the city of Aracruz, Espírito Santo, in the Guarani community, before becoming a coordinator at the Municipal Secretariat of Education in Maricá, Rio de Janeiro, advising the indigenous schools in the region. She was the curator of the exhibition DjaGuata Porã: Rio de Janeiro Indígena at the Museu de Arte do Rio in 2017–18. In 2021 MASP will organise all its shows under the title Histórias indígenas (Indigenous Histories). Benites said in a statement ‘The project of the exhibition Histórias indígenas at MASP is very important to awake indigenous memories, since most of them have been asleep. When we speak about histories, we speak about ancestral knowledge, and the objective here is to tell these histories from an indigenous perspective about ‘ywy rupa’, which is the Guarani notion territoriality.’
