Lawsuit Aims to Halt University’s Art Selloff, Yuz Museum Readies New Location, and More: Morning Links for April 26, 2023

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The Headlines

A LEGAL BATTLE. Valparaiso University in Indiana has been hit with a lawsuit that aims to prevent it from deaccessioning and selling works from its Brauer Museum of Art by three greats—Georgia O’Keeffe, Frederic E. Church, and Childe Hassam—to raise around $20 million to improve its first-year dormitories, the Art Newspaper reports. Museum groups have criticized that plan, ARTnews reported earlier this year, since industry guidelines require that such sales be used to acquire new work or care for collections. An interesting wrinkle noted by TAN: The two people bringing the suit are not connecting to the original donor of the pieces, so there is some question about whether a court will rule that they have standing to make their case. One plaintiff is Richard Brauer, the founding director of the museum that has his name. He says that his reputation is at stake, and that if the sales go through, he will have his name removed.

COLLECTION HISTORY. ProPublic has published an investigation on Native American objects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, focusing on 139 items loaned or donated by collectors Charles and Valerie Diker. Only 15 percent of those items have “have solid or complete ownership histories” on the museum’s online database, the nonprofit outfit reports, and experts said that the lack of provenance information can be a sign that material has been forged or looted. The Met termed it misleading to view “complete ownership histories as a standard for judging a collection,” and said, “Although some progress has been made in updating the online catalog information and providing more complete provenance information, we recognize there is still much work to do.” In a statement, the Dikers said in part, “Our collecting practice for over 50 years has always centered on proceeding carefully, assessing all available information relating to provenance before acquiring a work.”

The Digest

Women have finally been hired to direct many major art museum in recent years, Ted Loos reports. However, Tate’s director, Maria Balshaw, emphasized that the vast majority of directors continue to be male. “I was on a Zoom the other day with international museum directors, and it was still 75 percent men,” she said. [The New York Times]

The Shanghai-based Yuz Museum, which was started by the late collector Budi Tek, is readying a new location at the Panlong Tiandi real estate development in the city, and tomorrow will open a pop-up near there with 14 artists. The new museum, designed by HBA Architecture, is set to be unveiled next month. [Ocula]

Art collector and philanthropist Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo—whose holdings are currently the focus of a show at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy—got the profile treatment. “Today’s patrons have a duty to society to engage the public with art,” she said. “Art isn’t just for decorating our houses.” [The New York Times]

Artist Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, who makes alluring artworks from durags, currently has a show up at Night Gallery in Los Angeles. “I think the idea of bringing the durag into high art, you’re repositioning who is in control of the power,” he told writer André-Naquian Wheeler. [Vogue]

Stalwart New York artist David Diao has joined the Greene Naftali gallery, which said in a statement that his “paintings have dismantled the tenets of modernism from within, exploring the shadow side of its reductive geometries as a source of untapped potential.” [@greenenaftali/Instagram]

A little dose of archaeology to conclude: Amid efforts to extend the Osaka Monorail in Japan, archaeologists found a (fairly haunting!) cedar mask dating back some 1,800 years that may have in ceremonies at agricultural festivals. It will soon go on view at the Museum of Yayoi Culture in Izumi. [Heritage Daily]

The Kicker

A LONG STRANGE TRIP. In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Carolina A. Miranda has a remarkable story about the journey of a giant cube that artists Julio César Morales and Eamon Ore-Girón created for a 2008 show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. After Ore-Girón gave it away (storage was pricy), it got offered for free on Craigslist and eventually made its way to a backyard in Pasadena, California, where it is now a sound recording studio for Enrique Tena Padilla, aka DJ Escuby. Morales recently visited and told Miranda, “It was breathtaking. To see it outside and not in the context of a pristine museum, but seeing it age. It’s like a beautiful old guitar. Like, there’s a new version you could get. But this one, as it ages, it still plays really amazing.” [LAT]