Spain to Decolonize Museums, Ex-Mormon Artist Cancels Her Show, Churchill Never-Before-Seen Paintings Go on View, and More: Morning Links for July 12, 2024

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THE HEADLINES

NO-SHOW ALERT. Arizona’s Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum (MCA Museum) has revised its seasonal exhibition program after Angela Ellsworth cancelled a show scheduled to run at the same time as a survey of artists affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), commonly known as the Mormon church. The Phoenix-based artist, a former Mormon who frequently critiques the religion in her work, said she withdrew her exhibition due to a lack of communication with MCA Museum. The museum is currently hosting Materializing Mormonism: Trajectories in Contemporary Latter-day Saint Art (until August 4), an exhibition of Mormon artists organised by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, a privately funded non-profit that promotes contemporary Mormon art. Ellsworth hoped MCA Museum would have been more proactive in co-ordinating a symposium or panel to contextualize the two exhibitions. “I thought it was brave and smart that I was invited, but there wasn’t much planning for a dialogue between the shows,” she told The Art Newspaper.

AN INVENTORY STORY.Despite previous criticism, the Spanish Ministry of Culture has announced its intention to promote a process that would “enable [the country] to move past a colonial framework rooted in the inertia and ethnocentrism that have hindered the perception of heritage, history and artistic legacy”, reports Le Quotidien de l’Art. This policy had been stopped by Miquel Iceta, the predecessor of its current advocate, minister Ernest Urtasun (Green Left) within the government of Pedro Sánchez (Socialist Workers’ Party). Today, it begins with the Museo Nacional de Antropología and the Museo de América in Madrid. Two groups of experts, including technical staff and external advisors, have been entrusted with the reshuffle of their permanent collections, which should be completed by 2025. In a press release issued on July 8, the Spanish Ministry stated that decolonization involves “modernizing and enriching knowledge of the collections,” in accordance with international commitments and the new guidelines of the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) on “cultural diversity and community participation in the renewal of museographic discourses.”

THE DIGEST

The Heather James Fine Art gallery in Palm Desert, California, is presenting (until December 31) ten never-before-exhibited paintings by former prime minister Winston Churchill. The selection of works (a still life, an interior vignette, landscapes) all originate from a single-family owner, which maintains the largest private collection of his works outside of the United Kingdom. [Artnet]

Wayne McGregor has been appointed the new artistic director of the dance department of La Biennale di Venezia for the two-year term 2025/2026. “Wayne McGregor was successful in building a far-reaching project for Biennale Danza, wielding a remarkable sensibility that looks with attention to the younger generations on the world stage”, said president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. [La Biennale]

Nicholas Cullinan, the new director of the British Museum, offered trustee Tracey Emin a T-shirt emblazoned with “Margate is my Marfa”, that he had commissioned as a birthday gift (matey merchandise perhaps). [The Art Newspaper]

This week’s installment of A View From the Easel—a series where artists reflect on their workspace—is devoted to Maricel Ruiz, who has been working for the past four months in a new studio in Fort Pierce, Florida. As she created the artist, who often paints several canvases simultaneously, enjoy listening to reggae and music by Rick Ross, Bad Bunny, and others. [Hyperallergic]

THE KICKER

SHE’S OUR VENUS. Katie White asked herself why Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, one of the most celebrated and reproduced images in the history of Western art, keeps mesmerizing us? The title of this Renaissance masterpiece is misleading—it does not depict the goddess of love’s birth, emerging fully formed from seafoam, but rather her arrival on the island of Cyprus or Cythera. Numerous art historical allusions are at play in this composition—Venus’s pose harkens to the Greco-Roman tradition of the “Venus Pudica”, her figure also embraces visual strategies found across centuries of Catholic religious art, her swaying contrapposto conveys Gothic sculptures of the Madonna and Child. The earlier painting Primavera which hangs next to it offer clues to the meaning of the Birth of Venus. Many believe that the imagery in the latter was inspired by the poem “Stanze per la Giostra” (1475–8) by Angelo Poliziano. [Artnet]