Taiwanese Sculptor Ju Ming Dies at 85, U.S. Repatriates Peruvian Antiquities, and More: Morning Links for April 24, 2023

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The Headlines

POLICE BLOTTER. More than 30 artworks valued at some £200,000 (about $249,000) were allegedly stolen from the former Dutch footballer Edgar Davids in a roughly two-year span, the Sunday Times reports. A suspect has been charged, and is said to have used some of the street art-style work (by artist Ron English and others) to apply for a loan. ● Angela Hamblin, who disappeared after being sentenced in 2009 to a year and a day in U.S. prison for selling fakes attributed to Juan Gris, Milton Avery, and others, is now back in U.S. custody after being extradited from Germany, where she was nabbed last year, according to the Department of Justice. ● At a collector’s home in Chennai, India, law enforcement seized 55 antiquities they believe were stolen from various temples, the New Indian Express reports. Officials said that the collector claims to have bought them between 2008 and 2015 from a dealer accused of smuggling.

ARTIST UPDATES. The always surprising Jeremy Deller has written a memoir, Art Is Magic, and was profiled in the Guardian. “The book is written in my own words, and the tone I was aiming for is someone sitting in a pub chatting to you about what they’ve been up to,” Deller said. The paper has excerpts. ● The filmmaker Issac Julien is about to open a Tate Britain show and, speaking with the Financial Times, shared his frank view on the British film industry: “The people who decide what should be greenlit [choose] a reflection of themselves.” ● Also in the Guardian: Oum Jeongsoon, whose art takes the form of sculpture and workshops with the public, discussed winning the $100,000 top prize at South Korea’s Gwangju Biennale. “It was a cheer for what I have done for quite some time,” she said. “Community art involving non-artists is quite a new form of art and, in the eyes of a very conventional field in Korea, it has been underestimated.”

The Digest

U.S. officials repatriated antiquities to Peru, including khipu knot-work pieces (which have inspired the great Cecilia Vicuña). Some of the items were given to the authorities by a gallery that had received them over a decade ago.. [The Associated Press]

The pioneering and inventive Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming, who depicted abstracted people in a wide range of media, and who founded the outdoor Juming Museum in New Taipei City, died Saturday at the age of 85, in an apparent suicide. [Taipei Times]

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Western museums nixed plans with state art institutions in Russia. Curator MaryAnne Stevens, who organized a show at London’s National Gallery that started as a collaboration with a Moscow museum, said that the situation recalls the dynamics of the 1970s. [The New York Times]

The Louvre’s director, Laurence des Cars, took part in the “Lunch with the FT” series, dining with journalist Victor Mallet at the Café Marly. (Total bill: €77, about $85.) One tidbit: The Louvre is at work on a 2026 show with the codename “Rodin-Michelangelo” that looks at how modern sculptors mined the Renaissance. [Financial Times]

The buyer of the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton (actually made of three separate skeletons) that sold last week for $6.1 million was the Phoebus Foundation, an art nonprofit that intends to exhibit it at its Boerentoren cultural centet in Antwerp, Belgium. [AFP/France 24]

Architect Kengo Kuma—whose recent projects include the Andersen Museum in Odense, Denmark, and the Hanling Museum in Ningbo, China—said that he’d “like to design a street for the city of the future.” Cars have “killed public space,” he said. “I feel a need to bring humanity back into the street.” [Abitare]

The Kicker

FAMILY BUSINESS. The New York Times hung out with artist and art teacher Lyora Pissarro as she conducted a drawing class for a few dozen people with live models, wine, and pizza in Manhattan. That familiar last name that she has? Her great-great-grandfather is the legendary Camille Pissarro, and like him, she paints, but she also does installation work and enjoys attending Burning Man. Having that famous ancestor has been complicated, it sounds like. In high school, she said, she had a “teacher who in my art history class would say, ‘We have Lyora Pissarro here, and she will explain everything about Impressionism,’ and I didn’t know anything.” [NYT]