All posts tagged: Contemporary

Cate Blanchett Set as Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theater

Cate Blanchett Set as Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theater

Published by Daniella Wilson

Professor Blanchett reporting for duty. Oscar winner Cate Blanchett is confirmed for a surprising new career move as the next Cameron Mackintosh visiting professor of contemporary theater at St. Catherine’s College at the prestigious University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. She will assume the post for this fall’s academic year of 2026-27. The professorship — established in 1990 thanks to a gift from the renowned British theater producer responsible for such legendary productions as Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera and Cats — has a history of bringing “internationally significant figures from theater, film and performance into direct dialogue with students” and the university community. Blanchett follows in a line of previous visiting professors including Stephen Sondheim, Ian McKellen, Arthur Miller, Meera Syal, Tom Stoppard, Adjoa Andoh, Stephen Fry, Diana Rigg, Trevor Nunn and Deborah Warner, among others. Blanchett will be charged with contributing to a program of conversations, lectures and engagement with students and the university community. She follows closely in the footsteps of artist and stage designer Es Devlin, who helped …

Valentine Willie, Advocate of SE Asian Contemporary Art, Dies at 71

Valentine Willie, Advocate of SE Asian Contemporary Art, Dies at 71

Published by Jenni Sidey

Valentine Willie, a lawyer by training who spent his career promoting contemporary Southeast Asian art as a curator and galleriest, died on June 9 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He was 71. The news was reported by the Malaysian website The Star. Willie was born in Sabah, a state on the norther part of the island of Borneo, in 1954. He studied law at University College London in the ‘70s. In a profile published in Nikkei Asia days before his death, Willie reminisced about finding refuge from the cold London winters in the city’s free art museums. “The National Gallery was empty, pretty much; nobody taking selfies for sure. I found a comfortable chair, and I would sit and do my homework. . . . Michaelangelo, Botticelli, Raphael all there. Imagine, for somebody like me.” Related Articles Willie moved back to his home country in 1978, where he practiced law for 20 years, focusing on the corporate and banking sectors. He collected art (eventually amassing a collection of some 4,000 paintings, sculptures, textiles, and ceramics) and …

Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art is Balm

Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art is Balm

Published by Jenni Sidey

A new group exhibition in Zurich surveys the state of global photographic heritage through the work of twenty renowned artists. “There is something predatory in the act of taking a picture,” writes Susan Sontag in her pivotal 1977 volume, On Photography. “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves… it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” Colonialism operates in a similar manner. It’s an act of mythmaking — objectification of a land or its people, not merely through infiltration but the assertion of a single story, a flattened image. Dinh Q. Lê, Crossing the Farther Shore, 2014, © Dinh Q. Lê By this token, it’s unsurprising that for European colonizers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one of the most potent instruments of mythmaking was the camera. A new group exhibition entitled A Kind of Paradise: Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art, currently on view at Museum Rietberg in Zurich, seeks to pierce this veil of myth. The exhibition challenges audiences to excavate layers of meaning …

Tiwani Contemporary to Close After 15 Years Due to ‘Shifting’ Market

Tiwani Contemporary to Close After 15 Years Due to ‘Shifting’ Market

Published by Jenni Sidey

Tiwani Contemporary, one of the few highly visible European galleries with a stated focus on the African diaspora, will close after 15 years, bringing to an end an ambitious run that helped elevate artists such as Joy Labinjo and Emma Prempeh to star status. It is merely the latest gallery in a succession of commercial art spaces to shutter in the past few years, a trend that has aroused anxiety about the state of the market from some observers. Yet most of those shuttered spaces have been based in New York; Tiwani Contemporary, by contrast, is based in London. Related Articles The gallery was founded by Maria Varnava in 2011, and has operated a space in Lagos alongside its London base since 2022. Tiwani Contemporary relocated its current London headquarters to Mayfair, the city’s central district for blue-chip galleries, in 2023. In a statement posted to Instagram, Varnava attributed the gallery’s closure to the conditions of the market. “Sadly, the current economic climate and the shifting landscape of the London art market no longer support …

Phillips Modern & Contemporary Sale Nets  5.2 M., With Strong Results for Women Artists

Phillips Modern & Contemporary Sale Nets  $115.2 M., With Strong Results for Women Artists

Published by José Betancourt

The Phillips team appeared joyous with the results of its modern and contemporary art evening sale, which got underway at the respectable time of 5pm on Tuesday. The auction house achieved $115.2 million against an estimate of $84.2 million—its highest presale estimate since the frothy days of 2022. All 40 lots found buyers, with 2 works, by Richard Prince and Albert Oehlen, withdrawn before the sale. This sale total was almost double November’s $61.2 million for 31 lots (not including the dinosaur fossils it offered), and more than double the $52 million for 36 lots in May 2025. Looking at it another way, the sale’s average lot value, $2.9 million, is more than double the $1.4 million average lot value from last May. Related Articles Only about 19 of the 40 lots had third-party guarantees. Given that several works hammered below their low estimates, it seems that many consignors were willing to accept lower reserves. About 50 percent of the lots recieved priority bids through Phillips’s proprietary system, which gives bidders a 4 percent discount …

Sotheby’s 9.3 M. Contemporary Art Sale Led by .8 M. Rothko

Sotheby’s $389.3 M. Contemporary Art Sale Led by $85.8 M. Rothko

Published by José Betancourt

At its Madison Avenue headquarters, Sotheby’s kicked off the May auction season early, smack in the middle of the opening of art fairs all around Manhattan, with a solid if unexciting $433.1 million sale of modern and contemporary art, led by an $85.8 million canvas by Mark Rothko. Major auctions at Christie’s and Phillips will follow next week. The equivalent sale last year tallied just $186.1 million. “The sale was robust, and it felt authentic,” said New York adviser Laura Paulson as she exited the sale room partway through the evening.  Related Articles “It was a good sale,” said adviser Jacob King after unsuccessfully bidding on a Warhol. “Not particularly exciting, but good.” The sale opened with 11 works from the estate of legendary New York dealer Robert Mnuchin, who died last year at 92, and his wife Adriana. The group was estimated to sell for in excess of $130 million. The house guaranteed the seller an undisclosed price for the group of works, which included pieces by Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Pablo …

The Best Booths at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair

The Best Booths at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair

Published by Jenni Sidey

The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair is back at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea—just a few blocks from Frieze New York and in the same building at NADA—with more than 20 galleries from the continent and other ports of call for the “ever-expanding narratives of the African diaspora,” as fair director Touria El Glaoui described it. Spirits were high during the opening preview on Wednesday, when an international roster of galleries—including first-time fair participants from Lagos, São Paulo, Nassau, and New York—placed a stated special focus on Brazil and Afro-Brazilian perspectives. Below is a look at the five best booths at the fair, which runs through Sunday. Sulette van der Merwe at Blond Contemporary Image Credit: Courtesy Blond Contemporary The London-based gallery Blond Contemporary is showing phantasmagorical paintings by the South African artist Sulette van der Merwe, who conjures the legacy of Surrealism in works that play with “the notion of consciousness and how consciousness is formed,” according to gallery director Philip Blond. There’s also a playful element of trompe-l’oeil trickery, as what appear to be …

Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art Gets 0 M. Grant

Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art Gets $490 M. Grant

Published by Jenni Sidey

The forthcoming Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art has received a $490 million construction grant from Diriyah Company, a real estate juggernaut that has previously thrown its support behind an array of resorts, a digital art institution, and a shopping district in the country. Designed by Godwin Austen Johnson, a Dubai-based architecture firm that previously conceived the Sharjah Art Foundation, the museum will span 883,000 square feet, poising it to cover more ground than the Louvre in Paris. The museum’s main base will be located in Diriyah, though it will also stage exhibitions in nearby Riyadh. Related Articles Diriyah Company is chaired by Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Time magazine recently placed the enterprise on a list of 100 influential companies, praising it for “showing that the kingdom’s tourism dreams aren’t just blueprints.” Jerry Inzerillo, CEO of Diriyah Comapny, said in a statement, “The Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art will provide Saudi and international artists with a truly world-class platform—one that invites global voices to engage with …

A Must-Read Book By One of Our Sharpest Contemporary Voices

A Must-Read Book By One of Our Sharpest Contemporary Voices

Published by Jenni Sidey

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino If you read The New Yorker with any kind of frequency, you’ve probably read a Jia Tolentino piece. I recommend “Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies” as an amuse-bouche of her style and tone (it’s also just plain juicy). Beyond The New Yorker, Tolentino is often called-upon to deliver her thoughts on the zeitgeist because she so deftly articulates the collective vibes into punchy nuggets of truth. This is why I snatched up her debut collection when it first published in 2019, and why it became a bestseller and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of that year. Thanks(?) to this book, I will always look at Lululemon leggings and indoor group workout classes with a faint, possibly unfair, hint of revulsion. Beyond this one squeamish scenario, Tolentino writes about big, meaty topics like identity in the age of the internet, reality television with which she has an intimate and personal connection that took me by surprise, and more of-the-moment topics still relevant today in nine exquisitely open and …

The Film From 1969 That Explains Contemporary America

The Film From 1969 That Explains Contemporary America

Published by Sam Flores

The best thing I watched in the past year was an epically long movie about retired militants, but it wasn’t One Battle After Another, the Oscar winner for Best Picture. It was The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-hour documentary from 1969 about life in Nazi-occupied France. Reviewing the film in The Atlantic in 1972, David Denby called it “one of the greatest documentaries ever made,” and that remains true. What makes the film so effective is not how it looks at the Germans, a spectral presence, but how it chronicles the way that many ordinary citizens simply lived their lives as if nothing had changed. The director Marcel Ophuls, who died last year at 97, explores collaboration and resistance through the lens of a small city, Clermont-Ferrand. It’s about an hour from Vichy, where the Nazis established a puppet government headed by the World War I hero Philippe Pétain. Pétain’s former protégé Charles de Gaulle fled to Britain, coordinated resistance to the Nazis, and returned to lead a free France. The idea that the …