All posts tagged: Alma

Hampshire College, Alma Mater to Many Artists, to Close After 51 Years

Hampshire College, Alma Mater to Many Artists, to Close After 51 Years

Published by José Betancourt

Hampshire College, a liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts, will close after 51 years in operation, becoming the latest school of its kind to shutter amid financial difficulties. Though small in scale, the college has had an outsize effect on the art world, with its art department graduating a number of painters, sculptors, and photographers who went on to achieve fame in the years after their undergraduate education there. The alumni list includes Christina Quarles, a painter who is now represented by Hauser & Wirth and has shown at the Venice Biennale; Math Bass, a painter who has had shows at the Hammer Museum and MoMA PS1; and Every Ocean Hughes, an artist who has staged exhibitions and performances at institutions ranging from the Whitney Museum to the MIT List Center for Visual Arts. Related Articles Non-artist alumni of the college include filmmaker Ken Burns, actress Lupita Nyong’o, and the writer Eula Biss. The college, which will officially shutter after the fall 2026 semester, will allow students to complete their education at a range of …

Alma Allen, Artist Representing US at Venice Biennale, Joins Perrotin

Alma Allen, Artist Representing US at Venice Biennale, Joins Perrotin

Published by Jenni Sidey

Alma Allen, the sculptor chosen to represent the United States at this year’s edition of the Venice Biennale, has joined Galerie Perrotin, a blue-chip French gallery with locations in Paris, London, Hong Kong, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Los Angeles. As ARTnews’s Maximilíano Durón and Sarah Douglas reported upon Allen’s selection in November, the artist was born in 1970, but has been based since 2017 in Tepoztlán, a town just outside of Cuernavaca and south of Mexico City. Prior to moving to Mexico, he was based in Joshua Tree, California. Allen is known for large-scale sculptures that are often made in stone, wood, and bronze, but he has also begun working a self-built robotic device to make his sculptures. Related Articles Prior to being taken on by Perrotin, Allen was represented by Olney Gleason and Mendes Wood DM, both of whom dropped the artist after Allen accepted the Biennale commission, according to the New York Times. In years past, Allen was represented by Blum & Poe and Kasmin, but both of those galleries closed last …

Largest image of its kind reveals the Milky Way’s core looks like a web of cold gas

Largest image of its kind reveals the Milky Way’s core looks like a web of cold gas

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Milky Way’s centre looks nothing like the calm band of starlight you see from a dark hillside. In a new, ultra-wide radio mosaic, the region turns into a tangle of cold, threadlike gas structures. Chemical fingerprints are scattered through the scene like dye in water. That mosaic, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile’s Atacama Desert, is the largest image ever assembled from ALMA observations. It covers the Milky Way’s Central Molecular Zone, or CMZ, which is the dense, dusty heart of the galaxy. Here, a supermassive black hole sits nearby. Star-forming gas gets pushed around by extreme conditions. “It’s a place of extremes, invisible to our eyes, but now revealed in extraordinary detail,” says Ashley Barnes, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Germany and part of the team behind the work. This image shows the location of the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ), a region at the core of our galaxy rich in dense and intricate gas clouds. (CREDIT: ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Longmore et al. Stars in inset: ESO/D. Minniti …

The Writer from the Dance | Alma Guillermoprieto, Nawal Arjini

The Writer from the Dance | Alma Guillermoprieto, Nawal Arjini

Published by Jenni Sidey

Alma Guillermoprieto has spent her nearly fifty-year career writing about America—North and South, from New York to Argentina. From her earliest essay in the Review, in 1994, about Mario Vargas Llosa’s election campaign memoir, to her most recent, in our February 12 issue, about the Trump administration’s coup in Venezuela, she has focused in particular on the political upheavals that have convulsed the Americas since World War II. She was one of two reporters to break the story of the 1981 El Mozote massacre by the US-backed Salvadoran army; she has covered the collapse of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, the Shining Path in Peru, and the Mexican security state in the case of the Ayotzinapa Forty-Three; she has profiled charismatic, shadowy figures from the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos to Pablo Escobar. And yet reporting was not Guillermoprieto’s first career; for more than a decade she was a dancer in New York City, where she trained with Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, before moving to Havana to teach, an experience she wrote about in Dancing …

A More Pliant Chavista | Alma Guillermoprieto

A More Pliant Chavista | Alma Guillermoprieto

Published by José Betancourt

History sometimes repeats itself out of sheer malice. For example, in 1898 the United States stepped in to help Cuba in its long struggle for independence from Spain, and won. Cubans were grateful but not yet free. American troops were in control of the island, and the US refused to remove them until Cuba accepted eight conditions presented to Congress in 1901 by Senator Orville Platt. The most important provisions of what became known as the Platt Amendment were that Cuba was required to lease land indefinitely to the US for naval stations (thus Guantánamo), that it could not make treaties with other nations, and that to preserve Cuban independence or maintain a stable government, the US retained the right to intervene on the island militarily, which it did four times before the humiliating provisions (but not the lease on Guantánamo) were repealed in 1934. Secretary of State Marco Rubio—the child of Cuban émigrés—must know the Platt Amendment well: the text was burned into every Cuban’s heart, fomented Cubans’ fervent nationalist sentiment, and for decades …

Who is Alma Allen, Trump’s Pick for the Venice Biennale?

Who is Alma Allen, Trump’s Pick for the Venice Biennale?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Following a fraught selection cycle, the US Department of State on Monday confirmed that Utah-born, Mexico-based sculptor Alma Allen will represent the United States at the 2026 Venice Biennale.  The prestigious exhibition opens next May, when scores of curators, collectors, and journalists descend on the lagoon city to judge not only the quality of art on display, but the politics communicated by each national pavilion at the world’s top international art event. In the context of the ideological re-weaving of arts and culture under President Trump, the choice of the US representative offers a prism through which to read his priorities, especially when this year’s guidelines were updated to include that proposals should “advance international understanding of American values by exposing foreign audiences to innovative and compelling works of art that reflect and promote American values.” Related Articles Who is Alma Allen? Born and raised in Herber City, Utah, in 1970, Allen lived for several years in Joshua Tree, California; and Tepoztlán, roughly 50 miles from Mexico City, where he has a studio complete with …