A rendering of William Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments (2016) along the Tiber River
To create Triumphs and Laments—an 1,800-foot mural on walls along the Tiber River in Rome—William Kentridge will power-wash stencils depicting Roman history, creating “reverse-graffiti” as grime and pollution are cleaned away. Some 90 figures from Roman mythology and history will line the river. “Everyone’s triumph is someone else’s disaster” says the South African artist. “If you’re returning in triumph from a war, it means that other people are returning as slaves.” The work will be inaugurated April 21, 2015.
- Dirty Corner, Anish Kapoor’s new sculpture in Versailles, has been vandalized a second time, but instead of having the work restored—like last time, after yellow paint was splashed on the work’s steel funnel—he’s leaving Sunday’s graffiti in place, as a reminder that intolerance lives on in France. “This is a violent attack against the human spirit and culture,” he said. “This time, I am convinced that nothing should be removed from these slurs, from these words which belong to anti-Semitism that we’d rather forget.”
- Nine artists and two organizations who “have broadened our horizons and enriched our lives” will receive National Medals of Arts from President Barack Obama at a September 10 ceremony—including artists John Baldessari, Ann Hamilton, Meredith Monk, and Ping Chong.
- Franklin Sirmans, curator of contemporary art at LACMA, has been named director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Formerly a curator at the Menil Collection, he curated the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s 2005 Basquiat show as an independent curator.
- In honor of the Fluxus legend’s just-closed Museum of Modern Art solo show, Lego “master sculptor” Veronica Watson has created a plastic homage to Yoko Ono, complete with replicas of her War is Over (1969–) poster and sculpture Apple (1966).
- “We are just at the very beginning of a new epoch,” says Wikileaks whistleblower Chlesea Manning in an interview with musicians Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, design firm Metahaven, and web activist Jacob Appelbaum. “As we begin to ascend into a new era—which sometimes includes ideas of ‘transhumanism’ and the information, economic and technological ‘singularity’—perhaps we are going to begin to slowly embrace, or fear, a post-human world?”
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