New Albertina Museum Director Named, Spain Makes 2024 Venice Biennale Pick, and More: Morning Links for July 6, 2023

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The Headlines

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE. The founding director of the American Women’s History Museum will not be Nancy Yao, the Washington Post report. Yao had been slated to start last month, but that plan was paused after the paper reported in April that, while she was running New York’s Museum of Chinese in America, it had settled lawsuits by former staffers who alleged that they had faced retaliation for filing sexual-harassment claims. In those settlements, MOCA did not admit any wrongdoing. In April, the Smithsonian said that it was tapping an outside firm to investigate what had occurred. A spox for the Smithsonian said that Yao had withdrawn from the position because of “family issues that require her attention,” according to the New York Times, which said that the institution declined to comment on any findings from the investigation.

A FIRST. Spain announced that it will be represented at the 2024 Venice Biennale by Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, ArtReview reports. The exhibition will be curated by Agustin Pérez Rubio, who co-curated the 2020 Berlin Biennale, which featured the artist. Gamarra Heshiki, who is perhaps best known for incisive figurative paintings, lives in Madrid, and is of Peruvian-Japanese. Born in Lima, she will be the first artist born abroad to represent Spain in its more-than-100-year history at the biennale.

The Digest

The leader of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Ralph Gleis, has been hired to be director of the Albertina museum in Vienna. He takes the place of Klaus Albrecht Schröder, who is set to depart at the conclusion of 2024, after a quarter-century at the helm. [Berliner Zeitung and The Art Newspaper]

Amid the fighting in Sudan, at least 28 cultural and archaeological sites have been damaged or targeted by military forces, according to a report by the nonprofit Heritage for Peace. In June, the Rapid Support Forces took control of the National Museum in Khartoum, preventing its staff from checking on its collection. [Reuters]

The Illinois State Museum in Springfield returned about three dozen sacred artifacts to Kenya. The objects were removed from various sites in the country in the 1980s and acquired by private collector before entering the museum’s collection. [The Associated Press]

Marlborough Galleries veteran Frankie Rossi has hung up his own shingle in London—Frankie Rossi Art Projects—along with Geoffrey Parton and John Erle-Drax, who spent more than half a century each at the legacy firm. [Financial Times]

South Korea’s LG Group conglomerate has been active in the art industry of late, sponsoring projects with the Guggenheim Museum and Frieze. “LG will actively leverage art as a tool to enhance its brand value,” a company official said. [The Investor]

What is being billed as the “the largest wooden building in Asia” has been completed in Singapore. That structure is the new business school at Nanyang Technological University, designed by architect Toyo Ito. [Dezeen]

The Kicker

SAFETY FIRST. Painter Christina Quarles has a show up at Hauser & Wirth in Minorca, Spain, right now, and answered a number of juicy questions about her life and practice from T: The New York Times Style Magazine. The worst studio she ever had? That would be the place she shared with a number of fellow artists in downtown Los Angeles. “We all called it the baked potato because it had this big silver dome and would get so hot,” Quarles said. “My wife would make me call her every few hours when I would work in there because she wanted to check I hadn’t passed out.” [T]