Art
Former Vancouver Art Gallery head Kathleen Bartels joins Toronto's Museum of Contemporary Art as executive director and CEO – Straight.com
The Vancouver Art Gallery’s former director of 18 years has moved eastward.
Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art has announced the appointment of Kathleen Bartels as its new executive director and CEO, starting April 14.
Bartels had been leading the VAG in its move to a 300,000-square-foot purpose-built landmark, raising about $85 million in its capital campaign, before suddenly stepping down and not renewing her contract last May to “pursue other professional and personal interests”. The new facility is scheduled to open in 2023.
Bartels was the longest serving director in the gallery’s history.
Formerly located on hip Queen West, MOCA moved into a 55,000-square-foot home in a heritage industrial space in T.O.’s new Lower Junction ‘hood in 2018. It used to be known as the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (or MOCCA). Like all other museums and galleries in the country, it’s temporarily shut down due to COVID-19 measures.
“Kathleen’s experience taking successful regional organizations and putting them on the world stage to enjoy both the profile and subsequent funding benefits, uniquely positions her to identify key strategic opportunities for MOCA and guide us into our next phase of development,” Brad Keast, chair of MOCA’s board of directors, said in a press statement today. “We are especially thankful that she is joining us now, as arts organizations across the world face the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Kathleen has led an organization through 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and other tumultuous times, and we are grateful to have her guidance and wealth of experience available to us as we navigate this new reality.”
The institution had been led by former MOCA CEO Heidi Reitmaier, who left after only one year at MOCA, moving into a role as deputy director and chief of public programming and learning at the Art Gallery of Ontario early in 2019. Since then November Paynter and Rachel Hilton had shared the leadership role.
Bartels, who had established the VAG’s Institute of Asian Art in 2014 and had worked to grow the VAG’s collection by more than 60 percent, had stayed on as a special advisor to the facility’s interim director, former chief curator and associate director Daina Augaitis.
Prior to taking the helm of the VAG, Bartels was assistant director at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles for more than a decade.
In today’s press statement, Bartels said: “I’m honoured and excited to be joining such a strong staff and Board whose exemplary commitment to contemporary art, community engagement, and institutional collaborations is to be applauded. MOCA is poised to be recognized as a world-renowned contemporary art museum, as well as a cornerstone in Toronto and Canada. While I recognize that these are challenging times, I am committed to leading the institution’s growth and long-term impact in the years to come, with my first and foremost priority being the well-being of MOCA staff and patrons.”
Art
Art and Ephemera Once Owned by Pioneering Artist Mary Beth Edelson Discarded on the Street in SoHo – artnet News
This afternoon in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, people walking along Mercer Street were surprised to find a trove of materials that once belonged to the late feminist artist Mary Beth Edelson, all free for the taking.
Outside of Edelson’s old studio at 110 Mercer Street, drawings, prints, and cut-out figures were sitting in cardboard boxes alongside posters from her exhibitions, monographs, and other ephemera. One box included cards that the artist’s children had given her for birthdays and mother’s days. Passersby competed with trash collectors who were loading the items into bags and throwing them into a U-Haul.
“It’s her last show,” joked her son, Nick Edelson, who had arranged for the junk guys to come and pick up what was on the street. He has been living in her former studio since the artist died in 2021 at the age of 88.
Naturally, neighbors speculated that he was clearing out his mother’s belongings in order to sell her old loft. “As you can see, we’re just clearing the basement” is all he would say.
Some in the crowd criticized the disposal of the material. Alessandra Pohlmann, an artist who works next door at the Judd Foundation, pulled out a drawing from the scraps that she plans to frame. “It’s deeply disrespectful,” she said. “This should not be happening.” A colleague from the foundation who was rifling through a nearby pile said, “We have to save them. If I had more space, I’d take more.”
Edelson’s estate, which is controlled by her son and represented by New York’s David Lewis Gallery, holds a significant portion of her artwork. “I’m shocked and surprised by the sudden discovery,” Lewis said over the phone. “The gallery has, of course, taken great care to preserve and champion Mary Beth’s legacy for nearly a decade now. We immediately sent a team up there to try to locate the work, but it was gone.”
Sources close to the family said that other artwork remains in storage. Museums such as the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Whitney currently hold her work in their private collections. New York University’s Fales Library has her papers.
Edelson rose to prominence in the 1970s as one of the early voices in the feminist art movement. She is most known for her collaged works, which reimagine famed tableaux to narrate women’s history. For instance, her piece Some Living American Women Artists (1972) appropriates Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1494–98) to include the faces of Faith Ringgold, Agnes Martin, Yoko Ono, and Alice Neel, and others as the apostles; Georgia O’Keeffe’s face covers that of Jesus.
In all, it took about 45 minutes for the pioneering artist’s material to be removed by the trash collectors and those lucky enough to hear about what was happening.
Dealer Jordan Barse, who runs Theta Gallery, biked by and took a poster from Edelson’s 1977 show at A.I.R. gallery, “Memorials to the 9,000,000 Women Burned as Witches in the Christian Era.” Artist Keely Angel picked up handwritten notes, and said, “They smell like mouse poop. I’m glad someone got these before they did,” gesturing to the men pushing papers into trash bags.
A neighbor told one person who picked up some cut-out pieces, “Those could be worth a fortune. Don’t put it on eBay! Look into her work, and you’ll be into it.”
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Art
Biggest Indigenous art collection – CTV News Barrie
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Biggest Indigenous art collection CTV News Barrie
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Art
Why Are Art Resale Prices Plummeting? – artnet News
Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that delves into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join us every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market, and much more, with input from our own writers and editors, as well as artists, curators, and other top experts in the field.
The art press is filled with headlines about trophy works trading for huge sums: $195 million for an Andy Warhol, $110 million for a Jean-Michel Basquiat, $91 million for a Jeff Koons. In the popular imagination, pricy art just keeps climbing in value—up, up, and up. The truth is more complicated, as those in the industry know. Tastes change, and demand shifts. The reputations of artists rise and fall, as do their prices. Reselling art for profit is often quite difficult—it’s the exception rather than the norm. This is “the art market’s dirty secret,” Artnet senior reporter Katya Kazakina wrote last month in her weekly Art Detective column.
In her recent columns, Katya has been reporting on that very thorny topic, which has grown even thornier amid what appears to be a severe market correction. As one collector told her: “There’s a bit of a carnage in the market at the moment. Many things are not selling at all or selling for a fraction of what they used to.”
For instance, a painting by Dan Colen that was purchased fresh from a gallery a decade ago for probably around $450,000 went for only about $15,000 at auction. And Colen is not the only once-hot figure floundering. As Katya wrote: “Right now, you can often find a painting, a drawing, or a sculpture at auction for a fraction of what it would cost at a gallery. Still, art dealers keep asking—and buyers keep paying—steep prices for new works.” In the parlance of the art world, primary prices are outstripping secondary ones.
Why is this happening? And why do seemingly sophisticated collectors continue to pay immense sums for art from galleries, knowing full well that they may never recoup their investment? This week, Katya joins Artnet Pro editor Andrew Russeth on the podcast to make sense of these questions—and to cover a whole lot more.
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