Putin Announces Mariupol “Liberation” Museum, William Kentridge Drops Marian Goodman Gallery for Hauser & Wirth, New Basquiat Movie in the Works, and More: Morning Links for March 7, 2024

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THE HEADLINES

KENTRIDGE JOINS HAUSER & WIRTH. The celebrated South African artist William Kentridge has signed with mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth, leaving Marian Goodman Gallery after over two decades, reports Sarah Douglas for ARTnews. Kentridge’s not entirely unexpected departure follows that of photographer Nan Goldin and painter Gerhard Richter, and it comes as Marian Goodman Gallery’s eponymous founder has withdrawn in recent years from daily operations. Kentridge is set to have his first show with Hauser & Wirth next year in New York, and he will continue to work with Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, where he is based, and Galleria Lia Rumma in Naples.

A MARIUPOL “MUSEUM”. Russian authorities have announced plans to create a “museum of the liberation of Mariupol,” set to open this summer, reports The Art Newspaper. Kremlin forces sieged the strategic port city of Mariupol during its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, and with the city’s so-called “liberation museum,” Vladimir Putin’s regime is implementing a campaign to use museums as venues for pro-Russian war propaganda across occupied parts of Ukraine and Russia itself. To ensure museum curators stick to the official Kremlin script, a 28-page document provides ample marching orders, titled “Methodological Recommendations for Creating Exhibitions Dedicated to the History of the Special Military Operation in Museums of the Russian Federation.”

THE DIGEST

Workers have gone on strike at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) over unmet demands to raise wages. The strike began March 6, after five months of failed bargaining to raise hourly wages. [Artnet News]

A rare, 1877 stained-glass window portraying a Black Jesus will go on permanent display at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in 2026. Scholars believe Jesus’s dark brown skin color was intentionally chosen by the Henry E. Sharpe workshop, which made the window for the St. Mark’s Church in Warren, Rhode Island. [Hyperallergic]

A new report shows women are progressing as leaders in France’s cultural sector, though they still lag in some areas. 65 percent of national French museums are led by women, including Laurence des Cars at the Louvre, yet in “national centers of musical creation,” there are no top women leaders, and equal government funding is another point of contention. [Le Monde]

French-Resistance fighter and artist Josette Molland, who painted her experience in a Nazi concentration camp, has died at age 100. [The New York Times]

California art dealer Stefan Simchowitz scored 0.24 percent of votes in his race for U.S. Senate as a Republican candidate, ranking 21^st out of 27 candidates, per data available at the time of publication last night. “No, this is not a joke, this is not some stupid art performance. This is a real thing,” he told reporters. [Artnet News]

THE KICKER

Curator Denise Murrell recently spoke to NPR’s It’s Been A Minute about her new, acclaimed exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Harlem Renaissance was “the deliberate attempt to remake the image of African Americans as contributing to the unfolding of modern life,” and it emanated internationally, she told her hosts. A notion as relevant today as it was then, Murrell explained the show was not developed as a “correction” to the heavily criticized 1969 Met exhibition about the movement, which was picketed for not featuring Black artists. The current exhibit “was more about my very firm belief that this period has been marginalized in art history, and it needs to regain the central place it actually had,” she said.