Nine Charged in Art and Memorabilia Thefts, Artist Huang Yongyu Dies at 98, and More: Morning Links for June 16, 2023

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The Headlines

THE LONG ARM OF THE LAW. On Thursday, nine Pennsylvania residents were charged by federal officials with stealing art, sports collectibles, and more from various places over two decades, the Associated Press reports. Eight of the suspects have surrendered to law enforcement, and some have taken pleas agreements. The alleged crimes included breaking into the Everhart Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 2005 and stealing a 1949 Jackson Pollock painting said to be worth $11.6 million at the time and an Andy Warhol silkscreen (a deep cut) of a bottle of La Grande Passion liqueur. The alleged thieves also made off with items from the Roger Maris Museum in Fargo, North Dakota; Space Farms: Zoo & Museum in Wantage, New Jersey; and the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center, Little Falls, New Jersey. Truly catholic taste.

ON THE MOVE. The Kunstmuseum Basel has tapped Elena Filipovic to be its director, ArtReview reports. She has been director and chief curator of the Kunsthalle Basel since 2014, where she has overseen an influential exhibition program. ● The director of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Chad Coerver, is departing after two years on the job, Datebook reports. Coerver is a veteran of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and his tenure at the CJM included shows with Mika Rottenberg and Gillian Laub. He’s headed to Working Assumptions, a Bay Area nonprofit that supports art and media focused on care and families. On the other coast, the Brooklyn Museum said that it has hired Darienne Turner as its first first full-time curator for Indigenous art, WWD reports. ● Turner, an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe of California, is coming from the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she is assistant curator of Indigenous art of the Americas.

The Digest

The self-taught artist Huang Yongyu, whose inventive and charismatic ink paintings and woodblock prints made him a beloved figure in and beyond his native China, died on Tuesday at the age of 98. [South China Morning Post]

A Sotheby’s sale of digital art once held by the failed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital hauled in $11 million, with a Dmitri Cherniak piece going for $6.2 million. [ARTnews]

The oddly punctuated Design Miami/ fair will stage a Paris edition at the same time as Art Basel’s (also oddly punctuated) Paris+ fair in October at the L’hôtel de Maisons, with up to 25 exhibitors. Its planned debut in the French capital was canceled last year amid security issues. [Financial Times]

The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, Scotland, will open a Banksy show this weekend that is the first authorized solo museum outing by the shadowy street artist in 14 years. Titled “Cut & Run,” it will feature behind-the-scenes information on some of the artist’s most infamous creations. [The Guardian]

A new short film for Loewe’s upcoming menswear show in Paris was shot inside David Zwirner’s recent Franz West show in New York. The video was created by Loewe’s creative director, Jonathan Anderson, and filmmaker Luca Guadagnino. A warning: It starts calm and then gets pretty wild. [Wallpaper]

This summer, the Phoenix Art Museum will shutter its Yayoi Kusama “Infinity Mirror Room” (not so infinite after all!) in order to do conservation work on it and move it to a “more accessible” location. You have until July 5 to visit. It will return September 9. [Arizona Republic]

The Kicker

EVERYONE’S A CRITIC. The New York Times has a rollicking article by Dan Barry about the theft and return of a late Pablo Picasso painting in 1969—a tale that has never been completely told until now. It involves the “ice cream king of Waterville,” Maine; “a bowling-alley bartender”; and “an airport forklift operator” in Boston who stole the artwork but was not too pleased with it. It was “not a Wyeth, put it that way,” he once said. [NYT]