Arts news

• Why Are American Nonprofit Arts Organizations Failing? It’s Not as Complicated as You Think.

  04-11-2025 14:00 via artsjournal.com
  
  The easiest explanations tend to be the right ones.
  A lost Magritte. Or possibly an AI-generated image. Hard to tell. Maybe Tilly Norwood has the answer.I’m surprised that anyone in the nonprofit arts sector has any skin left on their hands with all the wringing that’s been happening in the industry about the loss of audience, money, and favor. Every article on the nonprofit arts seems to be the announcement of a death knell, a merger, slashed budgets, layoffs, resignations and retir
  
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• LACMA Workers Vote to Unionize With AFSCME

  18-12-2025 00:09 via artnews.com
  Workers at the the Los Angeles County Museum of Art voted to unionize with AFSCME District Council 36, the union announced on Wednesday.The new union, LACMA United, will represent around 300 workers across the museum, from curators to art handlers. Workers announced their plan to unionize in late October, citing high turnover, low wages compared to the city’s rising cost of living, and a lack of transparency from management. The group sent out an open letter, addressed to colleagues and ma
  
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• Libya’s National Museum Reopens After 14 Years

  18-12-2025 00:07 via artnews.com
  Libya’s National Museum, known as As-Saraya Al-Hamra or the Red Castle Museum, has reopened in Tripoli for the first time since the 2011 revolution that ended the four-decade rule of Muammar el-Qaddafi. The Red Castle is a symbol of Libya’s ancient, layered history, with a foundation dating to the Roman era, and significant expansions undertaken in the 1500s, 1930s, and 1980s—when the structure was first converted into a museum. The largest museum in the North African coun
  
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• M+ Sigg Prize Winner, Jessica Silverman Takes on Trevor Paglen, and More: Industry Moves for December 17, 2025

  17-12-2025 21:36 via artnews.com
  Happy Wednesday!Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.Happy Wednesday! Here’s a round-up of who’s moving and shaking in the art trade this week.Industry Moves
  Jessica Silverman Now Represents Trevor Paglen: The gallery will debut a solo show in January featuring prints from four major series, including works that explore dr
  
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• Bay Area Artist Mildred Howard to Receive Major Retrospective at Oakland Museum of California

  17-12-2025 21:00 via artnews.com
  The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) will stage a major retrospective for Bay Area artist Mildred Howard, opening next June.Titled “Poetics of Memory,” the exhibition will bring together work from across five decades of Howard’s career and will also debut new work by the octogenarian artist, who was awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. The retrospective will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, and the museum is working on a national tour for it.Howard’s his
  
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• Two Days Into Walkout, Louvre Staff Unions Vote to Continue Strike

  17-12-2025 19:41 via artnews.com
  The world’s most-visited museum, it seems, cannot catch a break lately. Unionized staff at Paris’s Louvre Museum voted unanimously on Wednesday to continue a strike that began Monday, when hundreds walked out in protest over “increasingly deteriorated working conditions,” the Associated Press reports. The action had closed the museum on Monday, and it was closed Tuesday as per its usual schedule. It opened late and only partially on Wednesday, offering a “maste
  
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• SFMOMA and Museum of the African Diaspora Name Cornelia Stokes as Inaugural Holder of Joint Curatorship Focused on African Diaspora

  17-12-2025 19:15 via artnews.com
  The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), two Bay Area institutions that are around the corner from each other, have appointed Cornelia Stokes as assistant curator of the art of the African diaspora. She will begin in the role on January 5.The newly created position, first announced in 2023, will be shared by both museums, with Stokes working across the two institutions. The position has been endowed for its first three years by the KHR McNeely Family
  
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• Using Flight Simulators, Peggy Ahwesh Crafts an Elegy to a Disused Palestinian Airport and the Freedom It Represented

  17-12-2025 19:03 via artnews.com
  ‟The stewardess has a recurring dream of her airplane soaring / through a milky veil of rotating clouds / Clouds of memory, clouds of erasure, / Clouds blurring the view of her homeland below,” says Peggy Ahwesh in the poetic yet pointed voiceover anchoring her solo exhibition ‟The Wayfinders,” recently on view at New York’s Microscope Gallery. Ahwesh (b. 1954) is an icon of experimental film and forerunner in avant-garde digital animation whose traveling
  
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• Short Film by Artist Alexandre Singh and Art Historian Natalie Musteata Shortlisted for an Oscar

  17-12-2025 18:50 via artnews.com
  Two People Exchanging Saliva, a black-and-white film written and directed by Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata, has been shortlisted for an Academy Award in the live action short film category. The 36-minute film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival earlier this year, and has been making the festival rounds this fall and winter, winning various prizes and honors, including also being shortlisted for a 2026 César Award, often referred to as a “French Oscar.”Singh is an a
  
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• Five Essential Books About the NYC Art World

  17-12-2025 17:12 via artnews.com
  That there’s more to a painting than meets the eye is a boon to writers looking to pry into the people, places, and ideas that bring art into the world. From the Met’s ticketed corridors to shared studios on the Lower East Side, these five books (including a survey, a memoir, and three novels) chart a course through the New York art world.
  
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• AIPAD Names Exhibitors for 2026 Photography Show, to Give Artist and Scholar Deborah Willis Its 2026 AIPAD Award

  17-12-2025 17:00 via artnews.com
  The Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) has named the 77 exhibitors that will participate in upcoming edition of the Photography Show. The annual fair will return to the Park Avenue Armory in New York, running April 22–26.This year’s fair will include a number of the world’s top photography-focused galleries, including Edwynn Houk Gallery, Yancey Richardson, Robert Mann Gallery, and Higher Pictures. First-time exhibitors, including Ruiz-Healy Art, Leica
  
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• The Most Impactful Archaeological Discoveries of 2025

  17-12-2025 16:31 via artnews.com
  This year had no shortage of archaeological discoveries, and ARTnews reported on the most notable and exciting of them.While there were some new finds like the oldest blue pigment discovered in Europe, a rare hieroglyphic decree identified in Egypt, and an elite Moche residence unearthed in Northern Peru, a number of archaeological studies took a deeper dive into previously known sites and artifacts like the excavations at England’s Palace of Westminster, a di
  
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• Louvre Still on Strike, Top Art Fabricators, and More: Morning Links for December 17, 2025

  17-12-2025 16:17 via artnews.com
  Good Morning!Christie’s and Sotheby’s have released their projected global sales totals.The Louvre remains closed due to an ongoing strike.Artadia and United States Arts announce multi-year partnership.The Headlines A YEAR TO REMEMBER. After a first half of the year to forget, Christie’s andSotheby’s ended 2025 with totals on par with 2023, according to results released by the auction houses on Wednesday. As ARTnews’s Daniel Cassady reported
  
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• At Her Centennial Year, the Market for Ab-Ex Master Joan Mitchell Has Come a Long Way—And May Climb Much Higher

  17-12-2025 16:00 via artnews.com
  Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.If you were asked to guess the artist behind the most expensive artwork on offer at Art Basel Miami Beach earlier this month, a few (male) artists’ names would likely come to mind: Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, and Andy Warhol would probably figure on the list.Guess again: A 1979 untitled abstract
  
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• Arts Nonprofits Artadia and United States Artists Announce Multi-Year Partnership

  17-12-2025 15:40 via artnews.com
  Two arts funding organizations—United States Artists (USA) and Artadia—have announced a multi-year partnership. The most immediate outcome will be the return of Assembly, USA’s short-lived annual gathering of artists and fellows that launched in 2015 and last took place before the COVID-19 pandemic. The newly reimagined Assembly events, focused on community building and interdisciplinary exchange, will now include Artadia award winners as well.Judilee Reed, president and CEO of
  
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• Sotheby’s Projects $7 B. for 2025 as Breuer Opening and Trophy Works Drive 17% Sales Jump

  17-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  Sotheby’s is projecting $7.0 billion in consolidated 2025 sales, a 17 percent increase over last year and the strongest result in the company’s history. Auction sales rose 26 percent to $5.7 billion, accelerating sharply in the second half. Private sales came in at $1.2 billion, down slightly, while the categories of global fine art and luxury posting double-digit gains.The company benefited from a surge of high-quality consignments: Fine art sales reach
  
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• Christie’s Ends 2025 With $6.2 B. in Sales as Confidence Creeps Back Into Art Market

  17-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  Christie’s closed 2025 with $6.2 billion in projected global sales, up nearly seven percent from last year’s $5.8 billion and in line with its 2023 total.After a sluggish first half, the house saw auction sales pick up considerable this fall, with deep bidding across the house’s core categories. Auction sales totaled $4.7 billion, up eight percent from last year, while private sales held flat at $1.5 billion. The house also reported an 88 percent sell-through rate and
  
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• 10 Under-Recognized Artists Who Got Their Due in 2025

  17-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  We are coming to understand that art history rarely moves in a straight line. Whereas the canon was once seen in the West as a series of successive movements, now it is recognized as a cascade of different artists working in far-flung locales, often in divergent ways.“We see now that the whole picture is so much broader and more complex and complicated,” Anke Kempkes, curator of a massive survey called “Queer Modernism” at the K20 museum in Düsseldorf, told Artsy ear
  
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• Pussy Riot Labeled ‘Extremist Organization’ by Russia’s Justice Ministry

  17-12-2025 00:35 via artnews.com
  Pussy Riot, the feminist punk rock band and art collective, has been officially branded an “extremist organization” by Russia’s justice ministry. The move comes after a December 15 hearing at Moscow’s Tverskoy Court, when prosecutor general Alexander Gutsan filed a lawsuit against the group, which was co-founded by Nadya Tolokonnikova.The judgement means that Pussy Riot’s activities are now banned in Russia. Any individual or organization found to be supporting the
  
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• Theaster Gates Tapped for Obama Presidential Center Installation Celebrating Ebony and Jet Image Archives

  16-12-2025 23:07 via artnews.com
  The Obama Foundation has tapped a local talent with its latest commission for its highly anticipated Obama Presidential Center (OPC), set to open on Chicago’s South Side in 2026. Artist Theaster Gates will create an expansive frieze drawing drawing from the Johnson Publishing Company image archive and the Howard Simmon and photographic collections. The new installation will occupy the Pendleton Atrium at the forthcoming OPC and celebrate the visual archives of the Chicago legacy magaz
  
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• Top Ukrainian Art Historian Believes Italian Museum Holds 14 Fake Russian and Ukrainian Modernist Works

  16-12-2025 21:51 via artnews.com
  Konstantin Akinsha, a top curator and art historian of Russian and Ukrainian art, said he believes 14 artworks attributed to Russian and Ukrainian modernists in the collection of the Palazzo de Nordis, a museum in the northern Italian town of Cividale del Friuli, are not authentic.In a Substack post published in late September, Akinsha analyzed the De Martiis Collection, a cache of 64 modern and contemporary works donated to the palazzo in 2015 by the late local collector Giancarlo De Martiis. T
  
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• Art Institute of Chicago’s 2025 Acquisitions Include a Painting by Kay WalkingStick and a 17th-Century South Asian Textile

  16-12-2025 18:56 via artnews.com
  The Art Institute of Chicago announced the top lots among its more than 1,000 acquisitions in 2025, with special notice going to key paintings and other holdings now in the collections of departments including prints and drawings, photography and media, textiles, and architecture and design.The paintings include Kay WalkingStick’s The Silence of Glacier (2013), a two-panel work that overlays a Northern Chayenne beadwork pattern over top a landscape scene from Glacier National Park in Monta
  
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• “Little Foot” Hominin Fossil May Be a Formerly Unknown Species of Human Ancestor

  16-12-2025 17:59 via artnews.com
  As reported by the Guardian on December 14, one of the world’s most famous hominin fossils may be a previously unidentified species of human ancestor. Nicknamed “Little Foot,” the skeleton was discovered between 1994 and 1998 in the Sterkfontein cave system in South Africa. It is the most complete specimen ever found of the genus Australopithecus, from which humans are descended.Little Foot was a bipedal like humans, but likely foraged and slept in trees like primates, while th
  
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• For the First Time, Hong Kong Selects Not One But Two Artists to Go to the Venice Biennale

  16-12-2025 17:57 via artnews.com
  Hong Kong has typically sent a single artist to represent the special administrative region at the Venice Biennale, but in 2026, artists Angel Hui and Kingsley Ng, both Hong Kong natives who live in the city, will jointly take up the mantle. The Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA) and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) are collaborating for the first time on the presentation in La Serenissima. The artists will explore “the poetic rhythms of daily life,” per an announcement, i
  
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• Malba Founder Eduardo Costantini Acquires Daros Latinamerica Collection in Major Expansion Ahead of Museum’s 25th Anniversary

  16-12-2025 17:52 via artnews.com
  The Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires is set to nearly double the size of its holdings following founder Eduardo F. Costantini’s acquisition of the Daros Latinamerica Collection, a trove of 1,233 works by 117 artists created primarily between the 1950s and 2010s. The deal brings the combined collection to roughly 3,000 works, positioning the institution as among the world’s most significant repositories of modern and contemporary Latin American art.According to the museum,
  
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• Tuan Andrew Nguyen Selected for Next High Line Plinth Commission

  16-12-2025 16:44 via artnews.com
  The High Line in New York has selected artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen to produce its next plinth commission, scheduled to open next spring.Titled The Light That Shines Through the Universe, the commission will see Nguyen present a re-created version of one of the two Bamiyan Buddhas that once stood on a cliff in central Afghanistan. Dating to the 6th century CE, the Bamiyan Buddhas are typically seen as symbols of the syncretism of cultures along the Silk Road.  The Buddha’s hands were los
  
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• ‘To be really successful, you have to be sexy in a straight way’: Ben Whishaw on libidinous New York and playing Peter Hujar

  16-12-2025 16:33
  Peter Hujar captured a queer Manhattan demi-monde that is now lost to Aids. Whishaw reveals what he learned playing the photographer in a minimalist film being hailed by some as a masterpieceOn 19 December 1974, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz went round to her friend Peter Hujar’s apartment in New York, and asked the photographer to describe exactly what he had done the day before. He talked in great detail about taking Allen Ginsberg’s portrait for the New York Times (it didn’t
  
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• Time for a Right-Size Art Market, National Museum of Libya Reopens, Somerset’s Cultural Awakening: Morning Links for December 16, 2025

  16-12-2025 16:12 via artnews.com
  The HeadlinesIF THE RIGHT SIZE FITS. One could be forgiven for thinking, at various points over the past year, that the global art industry was approaching an existential breaking point, Tim Schneider writes in the Art Newspaper. A steady drumbeat of gallery closures and a handful of underwhelming auction results has created an atmosphere of persistent unease. It’s natural to worry that the downturn might be permanent. After two decades in the business, however, Schneider is conf
  
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• A viral hit and loved by Tracey Emin: the woman who took up art at 88 – and became an Instagram sensation

  16-12-2025 15:47
  Christine Hazell has progressive memory loss yet now has four shows in the works, thanks to these raw, untutored drawings of her children, grandchildren, great grandchildren – and Kizzy the dogIn his four decades as a curator, publisher and gallerist, Matthew Higgs has supported many artists’ careers, including those of his contemporaries Jeremy Deller, Martin Creed and Peter Doig when they emerged in the early 1990s.Higgs also champions artists from alternative backgrounds – t
  
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• Sotheby’s Is Selling a Watch Gifted to Admiral Nelson Before His Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar

  16-12-2025 15:26 via artnews.com
  The clock is ticking on Sotheby’s final watch sale of the year, scheduled for Wednesday. A total of 51 timepieces are being sold in the online auction, titled “Fine Watches,” with the historical “Victory Watch” being one of the sale’s top lots. Legendary British naval officer Admiral Horatio Nelson was presented with the gilt metal, gold, and enamel watch by officers on the HMS Victory in 1805. Weeks later, Nelson etched his name into the history books by defe
  
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