This Week in Art: 3.21-3.27

Sedki Alimam. Kingdom of Hyenas. Courtesy of Syria Deeply.

Sedki Alimam. Kingdom of Hyenas. Courtesy of Syria Deeply.

This week it was international art that grabbed headlines, with Art Dubai wrapping up on Saturday and Art Basel Hong Kong opening this Thursday. Art Dubai’s tenth edition beat out the majority of competing international art fairs in its representation of women, which at 45% of the 500 artists shown, has been touted as “almost half.”

  • Syria Deeply surveyed the history of revolutionary art in Syria, created during and in response to the past five years of war.
  • A new interview with the graphic designer who created the viral image of the Eiffel Tower as a peace sign after the Paris attacks was published ahead of the release of his new children’s book, This is Not A Book.
  • The Carabinieri Art Squad, a kind of Italian heritage police, arrested 13 suspects allegedly responsible for the 17 painting/$16 million art heist at Verona’s Castelvecchio Museum last November.
  • A suspicious item wrapped with cables was cleared by the TSA on Thursday after it was found not to be dangerous. The owner said “It’s art.”
  • The Duomo in Florence is testing out a new anti-graffiti initiative, installing three computer tablets around Giotto’s bell tower where visitors can scrawl their messages digitally. So far 3,000 visitors have left 304 digital messages, and no new graffiti has been found.
  • Google’s homepage today features original artwork by high schooler Akilah Johnson, the winner of the 2015 Doodle 4 Google contest.
  • And finally, Kanye West declared his tweets as “a form of contemporary art.”

ART21 artists


Events & exhibitions

NYC

For more exhibitions and screenings in New York, check out our Staff Picks!

USA

International

  • Two exhibitions are opening at the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris on Friday: a monographic exhibition of the French Fauvist painter Albert Marquet, and an exhibition of Jan Dibbets’ conceptual photography titled Pandora’s Box.

It’s impossible to include all the fantastic exhibitions and art events happening this week in a single post. If there’s something you feel should have been included in today’s roundup, leave a comment below!