Art Industry News: Frieze’s London Art Fairs Will Be Smaller and Very Different This Fall (If Allowed to Proceed) + Other News

Art Industry News is a daily digest of the most
consequential developments coming out of the art world and art
market. Here’s what you need to know on this Monday, June
22.

NEED-TO-READ

Parliament’s Curator Re-examines the Collection’s Racist
Imagery – The curator of the UK
Parliament’s art collection, Melissa Hamnett, says that many of its
artworks were acquired with wealth accrued from slave-owning and
colonial-era projects and celebrate historical figures who held
racist views. In the wake of mass demonstrations, officials are
trying to grapple with that history, engaging in discussions about
how to better contextualize the legacy of the British Empire and
tell the stories of injustice embedded in the collection.
Parliament’s curators are also hoping to commission new artworks
that reflect the diversity of the governing body today.
(Guardian)

Russian Artist Faces Six Years in Prison for Posting Lewd
Drawings Online – A Russian
artist and body positivity advocate is facing jail time after
posting drawings online that include images of female genitals.
Yulia Tsvetkova, who is an LGBTQ activist, has been accused of
breaking Russia’s anti-pornography laws with her series “Vagina
Monologues,” through which she aimed to remove the stigma around
the vagina. She was placed under house arrest from November 22 to
March 19 while an investigation was carried out and now faces up to
six years in prison. (The Art Newspaper)

New York Cultural Workers Call on Museums to Address White
Supremacy – Cultural workers in
New York are penning open letters to their institutions urging them
to do more to confront systemic racism from within. Current and
former employees from MoMA, the Whitney, the Met, and elsewhere
signed an open letter on Thursday addressed to all of the city’s
museums, asking them to stop “performative allyship and virtue
signaling” and instead commit to taking concrete action, including
widening the recruitment nets to make it easier to hire BIPOC
staff, ending contracts with the NYPD, and investigating artworks
that should be restituted to Black and Indigenous communities. “We
will no longer be silenced, abused in the shadows nor take the
treatment white employees would never accept,” the letter states.
(ARTnews)

Annie Leibovitz Doesn’t Want to Be Known as a Celebrity
Photographer – The famous
photographer catches up with the Financial Times from
upstate New York, where she has been on lockdown with her three
teenage daughters. While she might be best known for her portraits
of celebrities, Leibovitz is showing a quieter, more
contemplative side with a new online exhibition presented by Hauser
& Wirth called “Still Life.” “Maybe the photography for right now
is still lifes,” she muses. The show may also help address one of
Leibovitz’s pet peeves: always being associated with celebrity. “I
think of myself as more of a conceptual artist using photography,”
she says, “so it’s great to explore all the different ways you can
take pictures.” (Financial Times)

ART MARKET

Frieze Fairs May Be Combined – The organizers of the Frieze and Frieze Masters
fairs in London have told exhibitors that if the events do ahead in
October, they could be combined into one space and will welcome
fewer visitors, prioritizing those invited by galleries.
Participating dealers must confirm by Friday, June 26 whether they
are still interested in exhibiting, but Frieze organizers have
promised to refund participants 100 percent of the stand rental fee
if they are forced to cancel. (The Art Newspaper)

Bill Traylor Is Vulnerable to Forgers, Experts Say –
Dozens of fake artworks purporting
to be by Bill Traylor, a man born into slavery in Alabama who
became homeless after he was freed, are circulating on the market.
Interest spiked after a drawing owned by author Alice Walker
sold at Christie’s New York
in January for a record $507,000. Experts—including Richard
Polsky, who has recently begun authenticating Traylor’s work—find
the trend “very disconcerting,” but add that the forgers are unable
to fully capture Traylor’s somber tone. (Guardian)

Black Dealers Face an Uphill Battle – The racial inequity in the art market is
highlighted by the fact that none of the 281 galleries
participating in Art Basel’s online viewing room is owned by an
African American dealer (although there are Black gallerists
participating who are not from the US). African American dealers
report that they have trouble accessing the upper echelons of the
market because discrimination elsewhere means that they have less
access to capital and are excluded from the art world’s wider
networks. Some suggest that fairs like Art Basel could reserve
spots for minority-owned galleries through an affirmative
action-style program and could further amplify Black dealers’
voices by adding them to selection committees and talks programs.
(New York Times)

COMINGS & GOINGS

MOCA Cleveland Director
Resigns – After 23 years, Jill Snyder is stepping
down from her post as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art
Cleveland following a scandal over the museum’s decision to
cancel a show of work
by Shaun Leonardo about police brutality. During her tenure,
Snyder oversaw the museum’s move to a 34,000-square-foot,
$27.2 million home designed by Farshid Moussavi.
(New York
Times)

Artists Named for Two
New Monuments to the Windrush Generation – Thomas J. Price
and Veronica Ryan will create two new individual public artworks to
honor Hackney’s Windrush Generation, a postwar generation that came
to the UK from Commonwealth countries to help boost a depleted
labor market. The works—which are the first permanent public
sculptures to celebrate this community—will be unveiled in 2021.
(Press release)

FOR ART’S SAKE

Malcolm Gladwell Takes
on Deaccessioning – On his podcast Revisionist
History, the best-selling author tackles the subject of museum
deaccessioning, using the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a case
study. His takeaways will not please museum traditionalists. First,
he contends, it’s shady that museums get to avoid valuing their art
collections in financial statements—and it’s even more concerning
that institutions would rather let go of staff than objects,
especially when most of the items are just squirreled away in
storage. (Art Law
Blog)

Guerrilla Girls Release
New Video About Black Lives Matter – The anonymous
collective released a video tribute to the Black Lives Matter
movement drawing on footage from the protests that have flooded
cities across the United States in recent weeks. The video, which
doubles as a call to action, is part of a new digital series launched
by Art Night, a free contemporary art festival in
London that has moved online this year. (The Art
Newspaper)

The post Art Industry News: Frieze’s London Art Fairs Will
Be Smaller and Very Different This Fall (If Allowed to Proceed) +
Other News appeared first on artnet News.