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The Headlines
IN MEMORIAM. Liliana Angulo Cortés, who led Bogotá’s Museo Nacional de Colombia, died on February 21, aged 51, reports the Art Newspaper. She was the first Afro-Colombian artist to direct the museum, which she diversified by including more Black and Indigenous artists. Angulo Cortés also accelerated an institutional shift that prioritized colonial remembrance and the reparation of marginalized communities at the 1823-founded museum, one of the oldest on the continent. Among a myriad of responses to news of her death, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín said she “represented a shift in how Colombian contemporary art is understood.”
BEIRUT ART SCENE SUSPENDED. Cultural centers in Beirut have suspended operations amid the escalating regional conflict, reports ArtAsiaPacific. They include the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation, the Sursock Museum, Dar El-Nimer for Arts & Culture, and Beirut Art Center. Lebanon’s ministry of public health reported that at least 72 deaths and 437 injuries following Israeli airstrikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs and southern Lebanon in response to Hezbollah-launched rockets toward Israel.
The Digest
On Wednesday, during a VIP celebration of the Guggenheim Museum’s Carol Bove show, unionized staff rallied outside the institution for more secure contracts following 20 job cuts at the museum last year. [ARTnews]
Emmi Whitehorse of the Navajo Nation has joined White Cube. [ARTnews]
Could this “Cristo Dalvator” bust in a Roman church be by Renaissance master Michelangelo? Art historian Valentina Salerno thinks so and apparently has documents to prove it. [dpa]
Kostas Stasinopoulos, the director of live programs at the Serpentine in London, has been appointed director of Kyklos, the Renzo Piano-designed center for art and culture set to open in 2028 in Piraeus, Greece. [Artforum]
The Louvre isn’t the only major museum suffering from neglect. Berlin’s museums are also victims of of poor visitor guidance and water damage, as in the case of the Kunstgewerbemuseum. [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung]
The Kicker
THE OLD WITH THE NEW. Ahead of a Mark Rothko exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, the museum’s director Arturo Galansino talked to the Financial Times about his approach to connecting contemporary and modern art with “the modernity of the Renaissance.” It certainly jibes with Rothko, who “had a life-long passion and engagement with the Italian Renaissance,” per his son, Christopher Rothko, who is curating the show with Elena Guena. In fact, Rothko was influenced by a 1950 visit to Florence, just as he was developing his signature style. The Italian connection is evident in the chronological show’s finale, which concludes with the artist’s large works on paper painted in “colors of the early Renaissance,” like “delicate” hues in sienna, blue, pink, says Galansino.
