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.
Industry Moves
Artists Hellen Ascoli and José Morbán Selected for Delfina Foundation Residencies: The two artists will head to London for 12 weeks via support from the Jorge M. Perez Collection and El Espacio 23, the top collector’s Miami exhibition space.
Storm King Art Center Names 2026 Artist Residencies: Liz Ferrer and Bow Ty, Jennifer Harley, Mimi Ọnụọha, Sasha Wortzel, and Chunghee Yun make up this year’s cohort, which gives artists “a process-focused experience on the museum’s 500-acre grounds in New York’s Hudson Valley” and is done in collaboration with Shandaken Projects.
Serpentine Galleries Names Lead R&D Fellows, Ecology: The London-based museum has announced a multiyear collaboration with Formafantasma, a research-based design studio founded by Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin that “explores the environmental, historical, political, and social forces shaping contemporary design,” per a release.
South Arts Announces Open Call for Summer 2026 Grant Cycle: Applicants have until September 30 to submit three categories—Arts in Community, Emerging Traditional Arts, and In These Mountains Infrastructure Grants—to the Atlanta-based organization that supports artists working in the Southeast US.
New Bedford Whaling Museum Promotes Ymelda Rivera Laxton: The Massachusetts museum has elevated Rivera Laxton to the role of curator of contemporary art and community projects, with her first major project being the institution’s new Welcome & Exhibition Center, opening in 2027.
Big Number: $8.9 billion
That’s the combined sales total that Sotheby’s and Christie’s reported for the first half of 2026. For its part, Sotheby’s notched $4.4 billion, up 58 percent from the previous year, while Christie’s raked in $4.5 billion, marking its strongest first half since 2021. While Sotheby’s and Christie’s might best be known for their auctions (both live and online), a growing portion of their businesses now comes from private sales: $826 million for Sotheby’s and more than $1 billion for Christie’s. As ARTnews’s Daniel Cassady noted, Sotheby’s business portfolio now includes lending, securitizations, luxury real estate, restaurants, and cultural programming. “The result,” he writes, “is a company that resembles an investment bank or private wealth adviser as much as it does an auction house.”
Read This.
“Is it ever possible to separate an appreciation of an artist’s work from the facts of his or her life?” That’s a question that writer Rebecca Mead poses in a New Yorker piece about Ana Mendieta, who is the subject of a Tate Modern retrospective that opens to the public today. One of the year’s most-anticipated exhibitions, the survey brings together many of her iconic works, including her long-running “Silueta Series,” alongside newly remastered films. The curators have foregone a more traditional telling of Mendieta’s theme, organizing works around themes like the River and the Sacred Ground, which Mead reports “resists the dark pull exerted by Mendieta’s biography.”
The biographic detail that most haunts Mendieta’s legacy is her death in 1985, for which her husband, artist Carl Andre, was tried and acquitted. That tragic moment was sensationalized in the press and for years was among the first things mentioned when discussing her work and legacy. To seemingly head that off, the Mendieta estate, which recently joined Marian Goodman Gallery, created a “Fact Sheet” ahead of the Tate show that stated “Ana Mendieta’s death does not define her, or her art.” Speaking to Mead, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, the artist’s niece who now heads the estate, pointedly added, “That’s a second of her life, right? It’s a blip. She shouldn’t be defined by something that happened to her. She should be defined by what she did.”
