The news of Butler’s appointment was first reported by the New York Times.

Butler is among the country’s most respected curators, having held top positions at several important institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, where she was chief curator of drawings from 2006 to 2014.

“Connie Butler is widely known and admired as a trailblazing curator and scholar, as well as a dedicated mentor to rising museum professionals,” MoMA director Glenn Lowry said in a statement. “With her close working relationships with artists, both established and emerging, and her long-standing connections to MoMA and New York, we know she will advance MoMA PS1 in all aspects of its ambitious program. I look forward to working with her again.”

During her tenure at the Hammer Museum, which began in 2013, she was key in significantly raising that institution’s profile, establishing it as one of the city’s most important museums and a place known internationally for mounting cutting-edge exhibitions.

Among her first exhibitions at the Hammer was the 2014 edition of the Made in L.A. biennial, which included a range of artists who are now well-established, including Wu Tsang, Samara Golden, Tala Madani, Clarissa Tossin, and A.L. Steiner. A major survey for Mark Bradford, his first institutional solo show in his hometown, followed. Other curatorial credits at the museum include solo outings for Marisa Merz, Lari Pittman, and Andrea Fraser, as well as a landmark retrospective for Adrian Piper, which was co-organized MoMA.

At MoMA, her two most important exhibitions were the first major US surveys for Lygia Clark (2014) and Marlene Dumas (2009–09), as well as “On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century” (2010). She served on the curatorial team of the 2010 edition of Greater New York at PS1.

Prior to joining MoMA, Butler was a longtime curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Her most well-known exhibition during her tenure there was 2007’s groundbreaking “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” which traveled to PS1 in 2008. That exhibition is widely credited with rewriting art history through a feminist lens, examining how activism helped shape the art-making of numerous women artists between 1965 and 1980. The exhibition’s catalogue, which includes short biographies for each of the 140 artists included, is now considered an essential text.

“MoMA PS1 has a remarkable and important history, a rich and exciting present-day community of staff, artists, and audiences, and a potential that seems unlimited,” Butler said in a statement. “I am honored to have been chosen to lead this institution, and I look forward to working with the Board and staff as we continue its mission serving the New York and Queens communities, as well as the broader international network of artists who represent MoMA PS1’s incredible past and future.”

In a statement, MoMA PS1 board chair Sarah Arison said, “Thanks to our in-depth search process, we welcome a new Director who deeply understands MoMA PS1 and our artist-centric DNA, and will ensure that we remain at the forefront of innovative programming that serves our communities locally and internationally.”

Butler fills a gap at PS1 that has been left open for nearly a year. Fowle, who recently joined Hauser & With as senior curatorial director, had been at the helm for fewer than three years when she left the museum. The details of her departure were not disclosed at the time.

As part of the initiative, Hauser & Wirth will give The House of AWT Project a $10,000 grant that will aid in the organization’s goal of achieving nonprofit status and its mission of supporting and empowering at-risk Black and Brown LGBTQIA+ youth and young adults. Once it receives nonprofit status, The House of AWT Project will be able to fundraise for other initiatives, including digitizing the 14-year archive of its Ovahness Ball, which is the longest running House/Ballroom Ball on the West Coast to date.

Around a year ago, Hauser & Wirth began conversations with Sean/Milan™, the house’s founder, about staging the first Ovahness Ball since the pandemic at the gallery as part of a new initiative it was developing called the Performance Project, which aims to bring various kinds of performance to the gallery. That led to the staging of “It’s All About the AAWWWTTTT!!!,” a five-category ball at Hauser & Wirth in February during Frieze Los Angeles. The memorable evening led the gallery to consider how it could further support the organization.

Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles has a history of linking up with local organizations, including the California State University, Los Angeles, with whom the gallery has partnered since its opening in 2016. These partnerships are a way “to create programming that is in direct dialogue with the communities we call home in cities around the world,” Stacen Berg, a partner at the gallery and executive director of the LA location, said. “Community support and engagement are core values since our founding and are, in our mind, essential to being good citizens.”

Russell Salmon, the gallery’s director of public programs & events, had first met Sean/Milan™ via a casual Zoom call in 2020 during lockdown. The goal during that meeting was to strategize how the house could achieve nonprofit status and “get the word out to LA and beyond about the amazing work they were doing,” Salmon told ARTnews by email.

He continued, “One of the most poignant things about meeting The Iconic Sean/Milan™ Garcon in that pandemic zoom call was the generosity he exuded when talking about the black and brown LGBTQIA+ youth he is so influential for and committed to. He wasn’t asking for much—a space in which something could happen and supporters of the project. I knew during that call that I would try my hardest to return the generosity he so selflessly exuded.”

Sean/Milan™ grew up in Los Angeles, off Crenshaw and West Adams Boulevards, in the late 1970s and early ’80s—“art was something your teacher gave you to do when she had to grade papers,” he said in an interview. He first began voguing in 1992, and in 2006 he launched the Ovahness Ball after his friend Tyrone Carter, who was working for the nonprofit REACH LA; the organization wanted to create an outreach event that would spread awareness of the rise in HIV among men of color at the time.

“I was an up-and-coming Legend at the time and my name was a neutral draw for the entire West Coast House/ Ballroom community,” Sean/Milan™ said. “I agreed to host, theme, and promote the event, as well as officially introduce REACH LA to the House/ Ballroom community. The rest is History.”

Since its founding in 2006, Gina Lamb, now a media studies professor at Pitzer College, has been “the official Ovahness Ball video archivist,” Sean/Milan™ said. “She has collected years of footage from my run as the creator and curator/producer of the Ovahness Ball. She has always stressed the importance of creating a central hub for such a historical series of events. She also felt it important to credit me for my often-overlooked contributions to my communities as a whole.”   

In reflecting on the future of The House of AWT Project, now with this grant from Hauser & Wirth, Sean/Milan™ said, “If anyone would have told me that I would eventually figure out a way to inspire and teach other kids like me to use their artistic talents to sustain a healthy and sustainable life, it would’ve been far beyond anything I could have ever dreamed.”

Added Salmon, “As Sean/Milan™ would say, ‘It’s all about the AWT darling,’ and I can’t wait to see exactly that: Artists Working Together.”

Watch an excerpt of the “It’s All About the AAWWWTTTT!!!” ball below.

Among the blue-chip enterprises slated to participate are Victoria Miro, Jessica Silverman, Kavi Gupta, James Cohan, Templon, Roberts Projects, Nara Roesler, Kasmin, Sean Kelly, Almine Rech, Timothy Taylor, and Instituto de Visión. More than 30 galleries are returning to the fair after a hiatus, including Jenkins Johson Gallery, Galerie Lelong & Co., Pilar Corrias, Lehmann Maupin, and Clearing.

Last year, the fair had only one mega-gallery, David Zwirner, take part; this year, no mega-galleries have signed up. (Pace Prints, a graphics-focused affiliate of Pace Gallery, is, however, one of the exhibitors this time.) But the world’s four largest galleries—Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace Gallery, David Zwirner—are among the 69 galleries taking part in Frieze New York later this month.

In addition to its main galleries section, the fair also mounts several focused sections, including its two curated sections: Focus (organized by Candice Hopkins) and Platform (Eva Respini).

Hopkins’s section this year will highlight “emerging and established voices that uncover hidden histories and little-known narratives” in single- or two-artist presentations. Bringing together a large swath of various artists, the section has a strong emphasis on Indigenous artists, who have rarely ever been given such a large showcase at a commercial art fair. Among those who will take part are Jeffrey Gibson, Beau Dick, Nicholas Galanin, Sara Flores, Matthew Kirk, G. Peter Jemison, Eric-Paul Riege, Abel Rodríguez, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, and others.

Additionally, the Armory Show also announced the winner of its Gramercy International Prize, which gives a New York–based gallery that has never shown at the fair a complimentary booth. This year’s winner is No Gallery, which will mount a solo presentation of Valentina Vaccarella.

In a statement, the fair’s executive director Nicole Berry said, “The 2023 edition of The Armory Show welcomes to New York an impressive array of exhibitors from around the United States and the world. The scope of international participation among both gallerists and artists reflects the rich diversity of the city itself, a place where art professionals of all backgrounds have historically come to push boundaries and join in a global conversation.”

The full exhibitor follows below.

Galleries

Solo

Focus

Presents

Platform

The creation of this position is one of the first major changes to the company’s leadership since Noah Horowitz returned to Art Basel as CEO last year. Shortly after he started, the fair announced that it would appoint Angelle Siyang-Le as director of the Hong Kong edition, with the fair’s longtime leader, Adeline Ooi, focusing more on its overall strategy in Asia. Horowitz’s former position, running Art Basel Miami Beach, still remains vacant, though Art Basel said that “a search is underway” to fill the role.

In a statement, Horowitz said, “Maike knows the art world intimately and has deep relationships with our global community of galleries, collectors, and institutional audiences, having been at the helm of art fairs and Gallery Weekend Berlin for many years.”

Tasked with overseeing the company’s Basel-based team and leading the realization of the fair, Cruse is returning to Art Basel, having previously worked as a communications manager for the fair in the mid-2000s. She will report directly to Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s director for fairs and exhibition platforms and work closely with Andreas Bicker, head of business and management for Europe, as well as the fair directors for Hong Kong, Paris+, and Miami Beach.

“I have attended every edition of Art Basel in the last nearly 20 years and I have consistently been in active exchange with the fair as Director of Gallery Weekend Berlin,” Cruse said in a statement. “I am truly honored to lead this pre-eminent show in the art and culture city of Basel, to steer its next chapter and contribute to Art Basel remaining the most important platform for galleries worldwide.”

For over a decade, Cruse has been a major figure in Berlin’s art market, having run two iterations of the city’s fair: Art Berlin Contemporary (2012–16) and Art Berlin (2016–19); in 2013, she was also hired to run Gallery Weekend Berlin. She has also had positions at KW Institute of Contemporary Art and the Berlin Biennale.

“Maike is a proven leader in the field and an enthusiastic partner to galleries, artists, and collectors,” de Bellis said in a statement. “In Berlin she has created an annual showcase that is deeply embedded in the city and unites its diverse cultural actors. Her collaborative spirit means she is uniquely positioned to foster close ties to our many partners and stakeholders in Basel.”

With a commitment of $11 million over the next five years, the Leadership in Art Museums (LAM) initiative will aim to increase racial equity in leadership positions across museum departments, ranging from curatorial and conservation to education and community engagement.

For nearly a decade, the Mellon Foundation has been tracking the diversity of staff at major art museums through its Art Museum Staff Demographic Surveys, published in 2015, 2018, and 2022. The most recent report found that though the percentage of people of color among all staff at the over 300 museums that were surveyed had grown from 27 percent in 2015 to 36 percent in 2022, the diversity among leadership positions had risen to only 27 percent in 2022 from 18 percent in 2015.

“If we want the arts in this country to stay vibrant, moving, and transformational, it’s imperative that these institutions bring in more diverse perspectives and lived experiences,” For Foundation president Darren Walker said in a statement. “Leadership in Arts Museum’s vision is to grow and invest in diverse leadership at U.S. art museums to ensure their excellence and relevance in the future.” 

Ultimately, LAM has selected 19 museums to be part of the initiative, which will create or sustain diverse leadership positions at their institutions with the promise to make these permanent after the five-year funding cycle. As part of the hiring process, the instituions have also “pledge[d] to develop a diverse pool of applicants in a manner that is inclusive of communities of color, including Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Arab, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities,” according to a release.

The institutions range from major ones like the Museum of Contemporary in Los Angeles, MASS MoCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston to smaller ones likes the Riverside Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, the Newark Museum of Art, and the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida.

“Our new Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole curator position, named in honor of the Jacksonville native and internationally regarded educator, scholar, and cultural leader, will help us realize Ninah Cummer’s vision that the museum be a center of beauty for all,” Cummer Museum director Andrea Barnwell Brownlee said in a statement. “With the LAM support, we are on course to expand our audiences and invite more visitors to explore and engage with our collections, gardens, and programs.”

Special attention has also been paid to geographical diversity with museums like the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in Michigan, the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio,  and the State University Art Museum in Phoenix.

“Ultimately, the future of museums depends on their ability to stay relevant and serve their communities,” philanthropist and collector Alice Walton said in a statement.“The LAM museums represent a variety of regions across the U.S., and help ensure that we’re increasing access to museum roles in a way that’s inclusive of communities of color, no matter where the art institution is based.”

The full list of LAM-funded museums follows below.

State University Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona

Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, Florida

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts

Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, Michigan

MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts

McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, Mississippi

Museum of the City of New York, New York, New York

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

The Newark Museum of Art, Newark, New Jersey

Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California

Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts

Perez Art Museum Miami, Florida

Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon

Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, California

Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri

Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, Seattle, Washington

For more than a decade, Sasamoto has been combining her installation work, which often involves everyday objects, with performances that have an absurdist sense of humor. Most recently, she was featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale, where she exhibited Sink or Float, in which commercial stainless-steel sinks were transformed into airflow tables with objects floating atop.

Delicate Cycle, which debuted at her 2016 exhibition at SculptureCenter in Queens, saw her memorably perform inside a commercial laundry machine and move a giant pile of clothing like a dung beetle.

“Aki Sasamoto uses everyday objects, movement, set design, and food in her performances to evoke the absurdity of the human experience,” Calder Foundation president Alexander S. C. Rower said in an email to ARTnews. “She improvises environmental elements such as equations or sounds in ways that are impossible to anticipate. This intangibility keeps us on our toes and somehow coalesces into magical coherence. The resulting energetics resonate with my grandfather’s own experiential art.”

Her work has also been featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, the 2010 edition of Greater New York, the 2012 Gwangju Biennial, the 2016 Shanghai Biennale, the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and the 2022 Busan Biennale. Though closely watched in the US, her work is currently only included in the permanent collections of museums in Japan, where she was born.

Sasamoto has a long history with the Calder Foundation, having first participated in a 12-hour program organized by the foundation called Oh, you mean cellophane and all that crap in 2012. In 2021, she was an artist-in-residence at the Atelier Calder in France, where she developed Squirrel Ways, which was included in the 2021 exhibition “Calder Now” at the Kunsthal Rotterdam in the Netherlands and which is currently being performed at American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.

For that work, Sasamoto performs around a series of mobile walls. To them she adds everyday objects in her now well-known improvisational style, drawing out connections between Calder, the materials with which he worked, and the domestic setting of the atelier.

“When volumes exert their ownness,” she said of the piece, “and behave like living characters in our psyche, those sculptures truly occupy the same space as us. I like how sculptures can blur the line between art and life like that.”  

In a statement, ICA Boston director Jill Medvedow said, “As an art historian and a humanist, Ruth will lead with a keen eye, open heart, and clear vision for justice and the ways in which art, artists, and museums can make meaning, build community, and inspire hope and change.”

Respini, who added deputy director for curatorial affairs to her title last June, did not immediately announce any future plans, though a museum spokesperson said she would announce “her next chapter in the coming weeks.” Additionally, Respini will return as a guest curator to complete the ICA’s forthcoming survey on Firelei Báez, set to open next March.

Among the most closely watched curators in the country, Respini most notably was curator and co-commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, for which Simone Leigh was selected. That presentation was tied to the ICA’s current survey for Leigh, also organized by Respini, which after a series of major career achievements for Leigh, ARTnews said, “lives up to the hype.”

Other curatorial credits by Respini at the ICA Boston include solo presentations for Deana Lawson, John Akomfrah, Huma Bhabha, Liz Deschenes, and Nalini Malani, as well as major thematic exhibitions like “Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today” in 2018 and “When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art” in 2019. Prior to joining the ICA Boston in 2015, Respini was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for a decade.

“I extend great thanks to Eva for her partnership over eight extraordinary years at the ICA,” Medvedow said in an email to ARTnews. “Through exhibitions, publications, and our permanent collection, she has advanced our knowledge of contemporary art and artists, and expanded the visibility of the ICA on a national and global stage.”

Erickson first started working at the ICA Boston over a decade ago, first as a research fellow before becoming an assistant curator in 2014. She was promoted to senior curator last July. She is currently organizing a commissioned artwork by Guadalupe Maravilla that will open at the ICA Boston’s Watershed location at the end of the month, and she curated the museum’s current solo show for María Berrío.

Among her other curatorial credits are solo presentations for Barbara Kruger, Vivian Suter, Wangechi Mutu, and Kevin Beasley, as well as two thematic exhibitions in 2022, “To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood” and “A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now.”

“I am thrilled to expand my work at the ICA, a place I know well and love deeply,” Erickson said in a statement. “I look forward to building upon a decade of collaboration with artists and colleagues across the museum to deepen and expand our engagement with audiences, amplify the impact and visibility of our permanent collection, and advance new art and ideas through commissions and significant exhibitions.”

“The new format of the award takes up the idea of ​​the exhibition as a collective exchange and aims to expand the collection through the purchase of the four new productions,” the museum said in a statement.

The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Sobey Art Foundation have announced the long list for the annual Sobey Art Award, which comes with $100,000. The long list is divided into five regional categories—Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario, Prairies & North, and West Coast & Yukon—with five artists in each. Among the 25 selected artists are Alan Syliboy, Barry Ace, Michèle Pearson Clarke, Wally Dion, Marigold Santos, Justine A. Chambers, and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill. The short list will be announced in June, with a winner chosen in November. The full list can be accessed on the NGC’s website.

The inaugural K21 Global Art Award, which was established by the Friends of K20K21 in cooperation with Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, has gone to South African interdisciplinary artist Senzeni Mthwakazi Marasela. Friends of K20K21 has acquired work by the artist totaling 70,000 euros, which will go on permanent loan to the Kunstsammlung.

In a statement, K20K21 director Susanne Gaensheimer said, “Marasela is an artist and a feminist who has achieved so much to give a voice and a visibility to the life and struggles of women living in post-apartheid South Africa. Her work is not only about women and not only about specitic context of South Africa—it captures the emotions and the experiences of something far greater and far more universal.”

The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York has named the three winners of its 10th annual Isamu Noguchi Award. They are artist Theaster Gates, artist and writer Edmund de Waal, and novelist and T: The New York Times Style Magazine editor-in-chief Hanya Yanagihara.

In a statement, Noguchi Museum director Brett Littman said, “The goal of our museum and this Award is to continue to expand the legacy, philosophy, aesthetics, and values of our founder Isamu Noguchi, and these creative artists do just that. All are deeply influenced by Noguchi and exemplify the integration of art, life, and the world around us to create works in a multitude of mediums that make our understanding of our past, present, and future more nuanced and enhanced.”

The arts nonprofit Artadia recently announced the three winners of its 2023 awards for Chicago-based artists, which this year are underwritten by several foundations. The winners are SaraNoa Mark (as the LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation Artadia Award recipient), Nyeema Morgan (The Joyce Foundation Artadia Award recipient), and Julia Phillips (The Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation Artadia Award recipient). Additional support for this cycle was provided by the Walder Foundation.

Next month at Frieze New York, artist Jessica Vaughn will present a commissioned artwork as the inaugural winner of the Frieze Artadia Prize. Titled The Internet of Things, the work “draws on the US postal system to spotlight the organizational structures that underlie late-stage capitalism. In a process that began during the pandemic and lasted until earlier this year, Vaughn mailed letters via the US Postal Service to a series of locations, each marking a site of leisure, commerce, or an act of public violence,” according to a release.  

The Orlando Museum of Art has announced the 10 artists who will participate in the annual Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, which comes with $20,000. The selected artists, who will present their work in a group exhibition, are Cara Despain, Miami; Elliot and Erick Jiménez, Miami; Akiko Kotani, Gulfport; Peggy Levison Nolan, Hollywood; Yosnier Miranda, Tampa; Reginald O’Neal, Miami; Amy Schissel, Miami; Magnus Sodamin, Miami; MJ Torrecampo, Orlando; and Denise Treizman, Miami.

The 2023 Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award, which is presented by Scotiabank and the National Gallery of Canada, has gone to three lens-based artists: Hannah Doucet, Wynne Neilly, and Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez. They will each receive $10,000. In a statement, NGC senior curator for photography Andrea Kunard said the winners “explore the many challenges in contemporary representations of the body, identity, culture, and history. … As much as their images operate as critical statements on contemporary life, they also function to open dialogue and create community.”

Fellowships

Right of Return USA, which was founded in 2017 by artists Jesse Krimes and Russell Craig, has named its 2023 fellows, who will each receive a grant of $20,000 “to support artistic projects focused on transforming our criminal legal and immigration systems and combatting mass incarceration.” The six winners are Adamu Chan, Jaiquan Fayson, Michael Fischer, Gary Harrell, Jeremy Lee MacKenzie, and Beverly Price.

The New York–based arts nonprofit Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) has named the winners of its inaugural fellowships, which are “designed to support and sustain mid-to-late career artists and honor artists’ legacies,” according to a release. The two winners are New York–based E’wao “Rocky” Kagoshima and San Juan–based Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. Funded by the Karsh Family Foundation, with support from United States Artists, the two winners will each receive an unrestricted grant of $75,000.

“CARA is dedicated to amplifying the many perspectives that make up the arts, and through this fellowship, we hope to further our commitment to accommodating artists’ voiced needs,” CARA’s founder Jane Hait and executive director Manuela Moscoso said in a joint statement. “Since our founding, we have endeavored to create an organization driven by cultural workers, artists, curators, and thinkers.”

The Oakland-based Kenneth Rainin Foundation has awarded its 2023 fellowships to three artists and one collective based in the Bay Area. The winners are Mohammad Gorjestani for film, Joanna Haigood for dance, Related Tactics for public space, and Sean San José for theater. Each fellow will receive an unrestricted grant of $100,000. In a statement, Ted Russell, the foundation’s director of arts strategy & ventures, said the fellows’ “boundary-pushing creative practices, performances, plays, films, and writings illuminate and further enrich the longstanding history of cultural experimentation and innovation in the Bay Area.”

The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans has named its 25th class of graduate student fellows, who were selected from a pool of nearly 2,000 applicants. The merit-based program is awarded annually to students who are immigrants or children of immigrants as they pursue graduate degrees; each fellow can receive up to $90,000 for their studies. Among the 30 selected is Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez, who will pursue an MFA in print media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Cambrón Álvarez was born in Michoacán, Mexico, and when she was seven years old, her family immigrated to Atlanta, where she is still based and has painted several murals. She is the first openly undocumented artist to exhibit at the city’s High Museum of Art.

“Being an undocumented immigrant with DACA, especially in the South, means growing up cultivating unwavering resilience,” Cambrón Alavarez said in a statement. “My parents’ sacrifices and dreams for my future carried me here, and their example of service to others inspires how I want to show up as a leader in my work. Being an Undocumented American also means navigating the bittersweet reality of recreating a home for yourself within a system that refuses to recognize you on paper. … Through my work, I share my lived experience with the hope of helping shape a more nuanced and humanizing narrative about immigrants in America.”

Open Calls and Jury Announcements

The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships have also announced that applications for 2024–25 academic year are now open, with an October 2023 deadline. Eligible applicants must be under 30 at the time of applying and are open to “green card holders, naturalized citizens, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) recipients, individuals born abroad who graduated from both high school and college in the United States, and the US-born children of two immigrants,” according to a release.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco has announced that it will once again stage the de Young Open, after its initial debut in 2020, which exhibited 800 works from nearly 12,000 submissions. The exhibition, which has been turned into a triennial, is “the only exhibition of its kind at a major American museum, inviting submissions from local artists via open call for review by a jury composed of both Bay Area artists and Fine Arts Museums’ curators,” according to a release. The four artists serving on the jury are Clare Rojas, Stephanie Syjuco, Sunny A. Smith, and Xiaoze Xie, and the curatorial jury will consist of eight of the museum’s curators, led by senior curator Timothy Anglin Burgard, who originated the 2020 exhibition.

The Uruguay-based Fundación Ama Amoedo has announced an open call for 10 grants of $10,000 each in the following categories: artists (four grants), art and social engagement (two grants), organizations (two grants), and publications (two grants). Applicants should have “a significant connection with Latin America, either by nationality, cultural heritage and/or the site where the project will be carried out,” according to a release. This year’s jury consists of curators Sonia Becce, Marina Reyes Franco, and Yudi Rafael, along with the foundation’s director, Verónica Flom. Interested parties have until May 15 to apply and can do so on the foundation’s website.

In 2012, McGowan joined Visual AIDS, the contemporary art nonprofit dedicated to supporting the work of artists living with HIV/AIDS and those lost to AIDS-related causes, as its deputy director. In 2017, she was promoted to executive director.

During her tenure there, McGowan helped to significantly raise the organization’s profile, expanding its staff and moving the organization to a larger space that houses archives related to artists and institutions that Visual AIDS maintains.

“When I first joined Visual AIDS in 2012, I was thrilled to become a part of an incredible community and to work for an organization with such an important legacy in AIDS activism and visual art,” McGowan wrote in an email to ARTnews. “When I was promoted to Executive Director in 2017, my goal was to grow the organization in ways that were sustainable but that also provided a platform for the high level of programming that takes place year after year.”

A major focus of McGowan’s leadership at Visual AIDS has been to deepen the organization’s connections with HIV+ women, who have historically been marginalized in conversations about HIV/AIDS. The nonprofit’s monthly Women’s Empowerment Art Therapy Workshops, founded by artist and activist Shirlene Cooper, have been staged via partnerships with major museums, including MoMA PS1, the Queens Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum.  

McGowan also helped launched a new research fellowship to support scholarship drawing on Visual AIDS’s archives and a series of oral histories centered on artists. She also expanded the organization’s publishing endeavors, most notably with the publication in 2021 of the first monograph dedicated to artist Darrel Ellis, who died in 1992 at 33 of AIDS-related causes. Additionally, the organization’s longstanding annual Day With(out) Art program, which takes place every year on December 1, now partners with numerous institutions worldwide.

“I am devoted to Visual AIDS and its mission, and it has been an honor to help grow an organization with such an important legacy,” McGowan wrote in a letter to the organization’s supporters. “The generous and inspiring Visual AIDS community of artists and activists has made this a place like no other, and for that I am extremely grateful. It has been a pleasure to go to work each day. I’ve built incredible friendships and helped to shape fascinating and impactful programs and projects. I’m very proud of what we have accomplished, and there are many great things to come.”

McGowan will stay on board through the organization’s VAVA VOOM benefit on May 15, which celebrates Visual AIDS’s 35th anniversary. Visual AIDS’s board will now begin a search for a new director.

“We are excited to continue the challenging work that Esther has initiated, and at the same time want to express how much she will be missed by the Board, Staff, and Visual AIDS community,” the board wrote in a statement. “Throughout she has demonstrated a deep commitment to the organization’s core mission and to its vibrant community of artists and activists.”

At Aperture, McGowan will spearhead a capital campaign as the photography-focused nonprofit prepares to move to a new, permanent home in the Upper West Side in 2024.

In an email to ARTnews, Aperture executive director Sarah Meister said, “With an accomplished history of building engagement and support for artists and mission-driven arts organizations, Esther joins Aperture at a pivotal moment in our institution’s history. She will play a key role in activating our capital campaign and advancing fundraising for Aperture as we prepare to move to our permanent home next year and continue to nurture our growing community around photography.”

The exhibition’s four curators—Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes, and Manuel Borja-Villel—have so far selected 43 participants, including 37 individual artists, four duos, and two collectives. This iteration will likely be its most diverse, with 92 percent of the artists announced so far identifying as Black, Indigenous, and/or non-white and 76 percent coming from the Global South or “locations outside the hegemonic circuit,” according to a press release.

A number of closely watched artists will feature in the exhibition, including Igshaan Adams, Julien Creuzet, Torkwase Dyson, Ellen Gallagher, Duane Linklater, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Dayanita Singh, and Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz.

The exhibition, which carries the title “choreographies of the impossible,” will also include several deceased artists, such as stanley brouwn, Elizabeth Catlett, Wifredo Lam, and Santu Mofokeng.

This edition of the Bienal, the curators said in a statement, “wants to build spaces and times of perception that challenge the rigidity of western time linearity. What we see in this choreographic horizon are the strategies and policies of the movement that these practices have been creating in order to imagine worlds that confront the ideas of freedom, justice and equality as impossible achievements.”

The initial 43-person artist list follows below.

Luiz de Abreu
Igshaan Adams
Deborah Anzinger
Sammy Baloji
Denilson Baniwa
Anna Boghiguian
Marilyn Boror Bor
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz
Nadir Bouhmouch and Soumeya Ait Ahmed
stanley brouwn
Rolando Castellón
Elizabeth Catlett
Elda Cerrato
Manuel Chavajay
Julien Creuzet
Torkwase Dyson
Inaicyra Falcão
Frente 3 de Fevereiro
Ellen Gallagher
Ayrson Heráclito and Tiganá Santana
Geraldine Javier
Wifredo Lam
Daniel Lie
Duane Linklater
The Living and the Dead Ensemble
Sarah Maldoror
Trinh T. Minh-ha
Santu Mofokeng
Aline Motta
Nontsikelelo Mutiti
Niño de Elche
Bouchra Ouizguen
Rosana Paulino
Ana Pi and Taata Kwa Nkisi Mutá Imê
Philip Rizk
Tejal Shah
Dayanita Singh
Mounira Al Solh
Tadáskía
Gabriel Gentil Tukano
Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro
Nadal Walcott
Leilah Weinraub