The Headlines
VENEZUELA FALLOUT. The painter Onai Quiñonez is one of thousands still missing since Venezuela’s devastating double earthquake on Wednesday, June 24, reports Hyperallergic. His family has issued a call for help in rescuing the artist, whom they believe remains trapped under rubble from his collapsed residential building in the coastal town of Caraballeda in La Guaira. “We need to give visibility to Onai’s situation,” his sister-in-law, Mariela Roa, said via WhatsApp message. “He is alive, he is fighting, he’s been under the rubble for 41 hours,” she added, noting at the time that official rescue services had not yet made it to the site. Quiñonez’s wife, the artist Laura Silva, had gone outside the apartment to walk their dog when the first earthquake struck, and reportedly saw their home collapse while her husband was inside.
ART BEHIND THE WALL. Artist Gabriele Stötzer is having a major solo exhibition at the Gropius Bau museum in Berlin, marking the largest show ever dedicated to an East German woman in a German state museum, according to the Guardian. Titled “Dabei Sein und nicht schweigen” (Show up and don’t be quiet), the show features 150 of Stötzer’s artworks. On view until December 6, it covers her life and career as a dissident. She began making art while incarcerated for her political views in the Hoheneck German prison in the 1970s. “Living in a land already cordoned off from the rest of the world by the Berlin Wall, I found myself behind yet another set of walls,” she said. “Art was bound up in my dream of another life,” she added. As the exhibition shows, she worked underground while she was under constant Stasi surveillance, and despite the risks, she cofounded a women’s artist collective. “We made use of everything we experienced—our dreams, traumas, the exaltation, the humiliation,” she said of the group.
The Digest
Today, workers will begin dismantling La Caverne du Pont-Neuf, a public artwork by JR, that was installed on a Paris bridge in homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, which fell victim to a damaging storm and heat wave that sent its interior temperature soaring. [Le Figaro]
The Box, an art institution in Plymouth, England, won this year’s UK Art Fund Museum of the Year Award, worth about $158,000. [Artforum]
AI-generated content is “the opposite of making art,” Madonna said. [Deadline]
The first dinosaur bone found in Antarctica was mistakenly stuffed in a drawer by researchers who didn’t know what it was. It remained there for some 40 years. [BBC]
Remember the controversy over that 50-foot-tall, Burning Man Festival sculpture, R-Evolution, featuring a nude woman standing in a yoga pose? Installed in San Francisco’s Embarcadero neighborhood since April 2025, the Marco Cochrane work is now up for sale, the city said, though no price has been made public. Any takers? [Petaluma Argus-Courier]
The Kicker
IT’S ALL ART TO ME. For New York Magazine, writer Adrian Madlener takes us into the “total-work-of-art environment” that is the Watermill Center, an artist residency assembled by the late theater director Robert Wilson in Southampton, and the site of the US debut of the art and design fair NOMAD, held June 25 to 28. In this universe of experimental dance, theater, and art of all kinds, the writer, who first visited the residency at the age of 10, could sense even as a child, “that every aspect of what went on reflected Wilson’s philosophy that life and art are one and the same … [he] was uninterested in the high-low hierarchies that traditionally divided the arts.” To NOMAD founder Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte, the magical location was a perfect fit for his smaller, alternative fair that has traveled to glitzier locations like Monaco, Saint Moritz, Capri, and Abu Dhabi. Bringing NOMAD to Watermill “centered on a shared belief that art, design, architecture, performance, and daily life should never be considered separate worlds,” Bellavance-Lecompte concurred. In the end, the fair also became an homage to Wilson, who passed last July.
