The Studio Museum in Harlem revealed its new building to the press ahead of its public reopening on November 15, showcasing a major new acquisition: Jean-Michel Basquiat's 1984 painting *Bayou*, the first Basquiat painting to enter the museum's collection. The work was gifted in 2023 by financier Joseph Perella and his wife Amy, with Joseph having mentored Raymond J. McGuire, an ARTnews Top 200 Collector and the museum's board chair.
Raquelín Mendieta, the longtime administrator of the estate of her sister, artist Ana Mendieta, died on October 24 in Miami at age 79 due to a long illness. Raquelín took charge of Ana's legacy after the artist's death in 1985, organizing a retrospective at the New Museum in 1987 and partnering with Galerie Lelong in 1991 to establish a market for Ana's work. Under her stewardship, Ana's art was acquired by major museums like the Whitney Museum and included in over 600 group shows and 55 solo exhibitions, including 16 museum retrospectives.
Alison Knowles, a pioneering artist of the Fluxus movement, died at age 92 in New York on October 29. Her gallery, James Fuentes, announced her passing but did not specify a cause. Knowles was best known for works like *Make a Salad* (1962) and *The Identical Lunch*, which used everyday materials and simple text-based instructions to create participatory art. Her most famous piece, *Make a Salad*, consists only of its title as a directive, allowing performers to interpret it freely; it has been staged at venues from Art Basel to Tate Modern. Knowles was a key figure in Fluxus, a movement formalized in 1963 by George Maciunas that rejected traditional art in favor of performance and accessible materials.
The second edition of Taipei Art Week has drawn a large crowd, anchored by Art Taipei—Asia's longest-running art fair—and the 14th Taipei Biennale. Galleries have raised their ambitions, with pop-up shows, talks, and collectors' parties filling the city. However, Taiwan's art market faces significant headwinds: art imports fell 15.2% in 2024, Ravenel's spring auction sales plummeted from $14.6 million in 2020 to $3.6 million in 2025, and Taipei Dangdai announced it would cease operations after its sixth edition. Geopolitical tensions with China have reduced Chinese collector participation and visitor numbers at the National Palace Museum.
Gladstone Gallery now represents British painter Celia Paul, known for her moody figurative works drawn from her life. Paintings by Paul are on view at Art Basel Paris this week, and the gallery plans a solo New York exhibition in 2026. Paul has long been represented by Victoria Miro in London but lacked a New York gallery presence since a 2015 show at Gallery Met. Her market has grown following a 2018 exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art and a recent profile in The New Yorker by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Her auction record was set in 2023 when Self-Portrait (2017) sold for $122,700 at Christie’s London.
ARTnews has announced the nominees for the 2025 ARTnews Awards, which honor excellence in art at US institutions and galleries. The awards, now in their second year, feature six categories: Emerging Artist, Established Artist, Lifetime Achievement, Best Thematic Museum Exhibition, Best Gallery Group Show, and a newly introduced Best Historical Artist category. The jury includes five top US curators and two ARTnews editors, with winners to be celebrated in November.
During New York Fashion Week, Canadian designer Jason Wu unveiled his latest collection in a Brooklyn Navy Yard warehouse, but the runway show was preceded by a ten-piece installation of screen prints by American artist Robert Rauschenberg, on loan from the Rauschenberg Foundation. Wu spent months researching the artist's archive, focusing on the little-studied Hoarfrost series, and incorporated image transfers from 1970s newspapers and magazines into his garments. The show also featured other designer-art crossovers, including Proenza Schouler's debut under Rachel Scott at Olney Gleason gallery and Ashlynn Park's presentation at the International Center of Photography alongside works by Iranian artist Sheida Soleimani.
Independent 20th Century, a New York art fair held September 4–7 at Casa Cipriani, reported that 74% of buyers were new clients of participating dealers, with 100 works sold—up from 87 in 2024. The highest sale was Ilya Kabakov's *Colourful Noise #2* for $650,000 at Galerie Brigitte Schenk, a 65% increase over last year's top sale. Nine of 30 exhibitors sold out their booths, and institutions acquired 18 works, compared to three in 2024. The fair also announced its 2026 edition will move to Sotheby's new headquarters in the Breuer building, marking a first-of-its-kind collaboration between a contemporary art fair and an auction house.
Donald Moffett's latest exhibition, "Snowflake," opened at Alexander Gray Associates in New York, marking his first solo show in the city since 2019. The exhibition features extruded oil paintings created with cake-decorating tools, including works like "Lot 052525 (nature cult, melt 1)" and "Lot 061625 (nature cult, melt A)," which depict melting snow as a metaphor for the climate crisis. Moffett draws a parallel between this show and his 1989 exhibition "I Love It When You Call Me Names" at Wessel O’Connor Gallery, both titles reclaiming derogatory terms—"homo art" then, "snowflake" now—as acts of defiance. The palette is predominantly black and white, reflecting what Moffett describes as "dark times" and the stark choices of the current political climate.
A major survey of Donald Locke's work, titled "Resistant Forms," has opened at Spike Island in Bristol, England, in collaboration with Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and Camden Art Centre in London. Featuring over 80 works spanning five decades, the exhibition includes early biomorphic ceramics, monochromatic black paintings from the 1970s, collage paintings, mixed-media sculptures, and personal writings and photographs. Highlights include the black paintings series addressing colonial subjugation, such as "The Cage" (1976–79), and later whimsical works like "Reconstructed Bottle with Pearls #11 (Pearls for Mahalia)" (2008). The show traces Locke's journey from his birth in Guyana, his time in the UK as part of the Windrush Generation, and his eventual move to the US, where he lived until his death in 2010.
Gladstone Gallery has secured U.S. representation of Peter Saul, the 91-year-old painter known for his garish satirical canvases, and appointed Anna Christina Furney, formerly a partner at Venus Over Manhattan, as director. Saul will continue to be represented in the U.S. and UK by Michael Werner Gallery. Furney had represented Saul for 14 years at Venus Over Manhattan, which recently closed after founder Adam Lindemann announced he would shutter the gallery and return to being a collector.
Artnet Auctions' Premier Prints and Multiples: Summer Edition sale, open for bidding through April 3, 2025, features iconic works on paper by artists such as Jonas Wood and Lynda Benglis. The article highlights the collaborative process between artists and printers, with firsthand accounts from Emmett Walsh of Ollin Editions and a publisher who worked with Lynda Benglis on a tapestry based on her painting *Rajesh in Rajasthan* (2012–2016). Walsh describes producing Wood's 112-color silkscreen *Kitchen Interior* (2022) over 20 months, while the other publisher recounts a three-year search for weavers to create Benglis's detailed rug.
Brazilian sculptor Solange Pessoa is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, featuring her evolving installation *Bags – Aspen version* (1994–2025). The work, originally created in 1994, consists of burlap sacks filled with organic materials such as coffee beans, seeds, feathers, dried peppers, and records by Brazilian musicians, arranged in towers on a dirt-covered floor. Pessoa, who has long been based in Belo Horizonte, has recreated the piece in various locations over three decades, and this iteration marks one of her few solo museum shows outside Brazil.
A major survey of Portuguese French artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–92) is on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice through September 15, before traveling to the Guggenheim Bilbao. The exhibition highlights her maze-like abstractions, which feature vibrant tile-like squares and interwoven lines, and includes works from her World War II–era figurative period, such as *The Disaster* (1942). The show follows a traveling exhibition in Marseille and Dijon (2022–2023) and her inclusion in the Centre Pompidou’s 2021 “Women in Abstraction” exhibition, signaling a resurgence of interest in her work.
Artnet News' Wet Paint column reports a wave of gallery closures and rumors in New York's art scene. Blum and Venus Over Manhattan have recently shut down, while Clearing's Bowery space temporarily became a Tank Air clothing pop-up, not a permanent closure. Micki Meng sent a cryptic 'I'm quitting' email but clarified it was a reference to Marcel Duchamp, not a business closure. Jack Barrett Gallery is relocating, not closing, and Tramps has closed its Washington Square Park location while planning a new Paris outpost. Jack Hanley, who closed his gallery in January, is now painting in the Hamptons.
The Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, is hosting a retrospective of Vija Celmins featuring roughly 90 works. The exhibition traces Celmins's career from her early still lifes of studio objects, through her grayscale depictions of war imagery like bombers and nuclear tests, to her later graphite drawings of clouds, ocean waves, and desert surfaces. The show also includes her bronze casts of stones painted to resemble the originals, presented in the installation *To Fix the Image in Memory*.
Amid a sluggish broader art market, the design category is surging. Major auction houses—Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips—held design sales in early June 2025 that far exceeded expectations. Sotheby’s New York design sales totaled $37.5 million, Christie’s $23.6 million, and Phillips $4 million, representing a 62.3 percent year-on-year increase across all three houses. Notable highlights include the Goddard Memorial Window by Tiffany Studios, which sold for $4.29 million, the second-highest price for a Tiffany window at auction. The sales attracted many new buyers, with Sotheby’s and Phillips reporting over 20 percent of buyers were new to the houses.
Kenny Schachter recounts his fraught journey from Newark to London for his curated Paul Thek exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery and the 56th edition of Art Basel in Switzerland, describing a near-crash landing and widespread anxiety among U.S. attendees about returning home amid FAA cutbacks and immigration fears. He highlights Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s presence at Jenkins Johnson as his Basel highlight, dismisses panic over a single unsold Giacometti as overblown, and critiques art journalists for lacking real market experience, while sharing conversations with collectors Mera Rubell and Dakis Joannou.
The Frick Collection in New York, which recently reopened after a major expansion, does not own a single painting by John Singer Sargent, despite founder Henry Clay Frick's admiration for the artist. Sargent declined Frick's request for a portrait commission late in his career, and after Frick's death, his daughter Helen Clay Frick turned down an opportunity to purchase Sargent's iconic portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw in 1922 because the museum's trustees were undecided about the institution's future. The painting now resides at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. However, the Frick will receive a study for Sargent's famous 'Madame X' as part of a promised gift from collectors Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard.
This week's art industry roundup covers a range of developments: a new wave of younger, deliberate collectors is reshaping the art market, as reported from Art Basel; the Independent art fair will relocate to Pier 36 in New York in 2026; Riga Contemporary, a new fair, launches in Latvia; and the inaugural Arrival art fair took place in North Adams, Massachusetts. In auctions, seven never-before-seen Picasso ceramic plates sold in Geneva for nearly double their estimate, while a Giacometti sculpture made the top 10 sales list. Galleries news includes Nara Roesler now representing Asuka Anastasia Ogawa, a new gallery called Open Studio opening in New York, and Andrew Edlin Gallery relocating. In museums, a government watchdog found the Trump Administration broke the law by withholding funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and UC Irvine and the Orange County Museum of Art plan to merge. A legal battle over an El Greco painting withdrawn from Christie's auction is advancing, with the owner revealed as Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev.
Audemars Piguet Contemporary (APC) and the Aspen Art Museum have co-commissioned a new sculpture by Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas, titled (Untitled) The Language of the Enemy. The work will debut in November in the Jura Mountains, near APC's hometown in the Vallée de Joux, before traveling to the Aspen Art Museum for a multi-floor exhibition in 2026. The sculpture draws a parallel between paleontology and speculative memory, imagining that an encounter with fossilized dinosaur remains might have sparked the earliest act of art-making. APC curator Audrey Teichmann emphasized the organization's role in supporting the artist through inception, research, fabrication, and project management, as well as providing continuous support for a second exhibition and storage of the work between shows.
This week's art industry roundup covers major developments across art fairs, auction houses, and galleries. Ahead of Art Basel in Basel, Artnet's Editor-in-Chief Naomi Rea investigates how the trade lost control of the pricing narrative amid a market breakdown. The Armory Show announces its 2025 edition with over 230 galleries and new curated sections, while Frieze will open a gallery space in Seoul. Sotheby's London will auction Pauline Karpidas's collection estimated at over $81 million, and a rare Rodin marble sold for $1.2 million. Caroline Lang steps down as chair of Sotheby's in Switzerland after four decades. Gallerist Kamel Mennour donates 180 works to Paris's Musée d'Art Moderne, and Marian Goodman Gallery now represents the estate of Ana Mendieta.
Husband-and-wife artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham, who met in 1977 and married in 1983, are holding their first-ever concurrent solo shows in New York City. Dunham is exhibiting new paintings of naked men wrestling at Gladstone Gallery, while Simmons presents photographic portraits of women in body paint at Salon 94 and a revisitation of her ventriloquism dummy photographs from the 1990s at Mary Boone Gallery. In an interview with artnet News, the couple discusses their contrasting work habits—Dunham works steadily over long periods, while Simmons works in intense, episodic bursts—and how they have balanced their careers and family life, including raising daughters Lena Dunham and Grace Dunham.
Daniel Lelong, the influential French gallerist who cultivated deep relationships with 20th-century modern artists, died at age 92. Lelong began his career drafting statutes for the Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation before working at Galerie Maeght, where he organized exhibitions for icons like Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, and Alberto Giacometti. After Maeght's death in 1981, Lelong became director of Galerie Maeght-Lelong alongside Jean Frémon and Jacques Dupin, and the gallery was renamed Galerie Lelong & Co. in 1987, with locations in New York and Zurich. He showed at the first Art Basel in 1970 and maintained close ties with artists such as Jaume Plensa, Jannis Kounellis, and Sean Scully.
Artist Do Ho Suh presents his first solo exhibition at London's Tate Modern in two decades, titled "The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House." The show features his signature translucent fabric architectural sculptures, including the newly created installation "Nest/s" (2024), a collection of 1:1 scale replicas of spaces where Suh has lived and worked across Seoul, New York, London, and Berlin. The exhibition explores themes of home, memory, and migration, drawing from Suh's own experiences moving from Seoul to New York and later London.
Actor Robert De Niro announced that artist R.H. Quaytman has won the 2016 Robert De Niro Sr. Prize, awarded to a mid-career painter for excellence and innovation. Quaytman, represented by Gladstone Gallery and Miguel Abreu Gallery, is known for mixed-media works on wood panels that blend photography, printmaking, and technology, often organized into series called "chapters." She will receive a $25,000 prize at a ceremony in New York on December 14. The selection committee included curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum.
The article reviews the Independent art fair, highlighting its curated approach that results in a visually cohesive and easeful experience compared to other fairs. It notes the prevalence of neo-bucolic landscapes and animal paintings by artists like Sameen Agha, Tim Braden, and Lisa Sanditz, as well as delicate abstractions and small ceramic works. Standout pieces include Pope.L's provocative paint-scribbled underwear at Mitchell-Innes and Nash, Rosa Barba's kinetic painting at Vistamare, Ibrahim El-Salahi's silkscreen painting at Vigo Gallery, and works by emerging artists such as Constanza Camila Kramer Garfias and Ada Friedman at Kendra Jayne Patrick Gallery.
This week's art industry roundup covers major personnel changes at Phillips, with Cheyenne Westphal stepping down as global chairwoman and Jean-Paul Engelen departing for Acquavella Galleries, alongside promotions of Robert Manley and Miety Heiden. Auction results show mixed performance: Christie's Riggio collection brought $488.8 million, but Sotheby's and Phillips saw declines, while Marlene Dumas set a record for a living woman artist at Christie's. Other highlights include the launch of Derrick Adams' Scout Art Fair in Baltimore, Art Basel's inaugural awards, and the opening of Destinee Ross-Sutton's gallery in Stockholm.
Photo London's 10th edition opened with a buoyant mood despite co-founder Michael Benson acknowledging a difficult economic climate. The fair features classics by pioneers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï, alongside emerging artists through its Discovery section and Positions platform. Standouts include Palestinian-American artist Adam Rouhana's poignant images of joy and resistance, the special exhibition "London Lives" curated by Francis Hodgson featuring 30 photographers, and a notable booth by Guerin Projects showcasing Robin Hunter Blake's chronophotographic works paired with Rodin's The Kiss.
Gallery Weekend Berlin took place during the city's spring bloom, featuring exhibitions like Alvaro Urbano's melancholic installation "September and Lions" at ChertLüdde and Pamela Rosenkranz's flesh-toned water bottles at KaDeWe. The event kicked off on May Day and included expanded public tours, artist talks at the Neue Nationalgalerie, and a 24-hour window project. Notable attendees included collector Frédéric de Goldschmidt and celebrity Usher, who collected art. The weekend was marked by a mood of resilience despite political turmoil.