Hyperallergic

News — 3 min read Kate Gottgens, “Audible Doom” (2021) (photo courtesy the artist) A prominent international gallery in Cape Town is facing allegations of withholding artworks from and delaying payments to artists. The claims stem from a now-deleted Instagram post by South African artist Kate Gottgens.

WOODSTOCK, New York — When I arrived at Keltie Ferris’s studio last month, he invited me first to see the home he shares with his wife and their child. “It’s important to situate yourself,” he says, allowing me a glimpse into the domestic side of his life, before we focus on the work. Then we walk back across the field toward the studio, and a loud scratching noise catches his attention. Ferris points toward a massive black bear clambering up the fence and out of his robust vegetable garden.

In Memoriam is published every Wednesday afternoon and honors those we recently lost in the art world. Bruno Lucchesi (1926–2026) Figurative sculptor Across a seven-decade career, he sculpted the human form in bronze, terracotta, marble, and more. His works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and many more.

The Longaberger Company was once a billion-dollar basket-weaving empire, employing over 8,000 people at its peak. Its headquarters in Newark, Ohio, was built in 1997 in the shape of a giant basket, complete with two enormous handles arching over a glass atrium ceiling. But after declining sales, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018. The iconic Basket Building, which has sat empty for years, is now for sale.

News — 2 min read The UK activism campaign Everyone Hates Elon returns with a lenticular advertisement skewering Kylie Jenner’s ad campaign for Meta glasses. (all media courtesy Everyone Hates Elon) The social media giant Meta partnered with controversial TV personality and cosmetics mogul Kylie Jenner for the design and marketing of an “entry-level” line of its widely criticized camera glasses late last month.

Book Review — 3 min read Frederic Edwin Church, “The River of Light” (1877), oil on canvas (image courtesy the National Gallery of Art) Great writers, Susan Sontag once said, are either husbands or lovers: either “reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency,” she yawns, or lovers — ah, lovers! Then there are artists like Frederic Edwin Church, the 19th-century American painter whose solid, husbandly virtues have none of the tedium Sontag implies — an artist who paid the bills and picked...

What happens when you collate MoMA’s deaccessioned paintings into one convenient catalog, or shift the wall of a house by about a foot, all in the name of conceptual art? Michael Asher might have some answers for you. The artist’s work is cerebral — sometimes verging on inscrutable — but also politically charged, socially aware, and continually relevant, even more than a decade after his death.

LOS ANGELES — Walking through the exhibition Michael Asher at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, one may mistake the artist for a donor. The small solo show takes over two galleries, and Asher’s name is most prominently mounted above the opening that separates the rooms, like a deep-pocketed patron who bought their legacy. Asher, who passed away in 2012, was not wealthy like the Annenbergs or the Sacklers, famous benefactors who coaxed museums into naming wings after them.

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. — The rainy season is over, and the verdant hills up the west central coast dazzle our eyes; the blue ocean sparkles in the high sun. It’s a straight shot up the 101 Freeway from my house in Echo Park, with only one turn: Madonna Road, the exit for the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo. The famous kitschy motel with themed rooms, in all its pink glory, is where we’re staying to meet up with filmmaker/artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens; they booked the Swiss Chalet Room.

News — 2 min read Michael Rosato’s mural “Take My Hand” (2019) graces one of the exterior walls of the Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center in downtown Cambridge, Maryland. (photo Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images) The Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center in Cambridge, Maryland, reported a break-in that resulted in damage to a mural over the weekend.