{"id":271361,"date":"2026-02-06T22:41:16","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T22:41:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/271361\/"},"modified":"2026-02-06T22:41:16","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T22:41:16","slug":"ekow-eshun-heads-to-santa-fe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/271361\/","title":{"rendered":"Ekow Eshun Heads to Santa Fe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Community<\/a><\/p>\n

The London curator is tapped to curate the SITE biennial, Mnuchin Gallery closes, a buyer spends big money on a tiny Michelangelo foot drawing, and other industry news. <\/p>\n


\n \"Valentina
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

\"Art
\n Ekow Eshun (photo by Zeinab Batchelor, courtesy SITE SANTA FE)<\/p>\n

Art Movements,<\/a>\u00a0published every Thursday afternoon, is a roundup of must-know news, appointments, awards, and other happenings in today\u2019s chaotic art world.<\/p>\n

Now Boarding: London \u2014> New Mexico<\/p>\n

British curator and writer Ekow Eshun has been tapped to curate the 13th SITE SANTA FE International Biennial, which will take place in the summer of 2027. Eshun became the first Black leader of a major British arts institution when he took the helm of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Asked what is most exciting to him about curating a biennial in New Mexico, Eshun told Hyperallergic that the region’s art is \u201cinseparable from a long history of imaginative reaching toward different possible futures.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHere I\u2019m thinking of the many visionary artists and alternative communities that have established themselves in the state across the decades. But I\u2019m also thinking of how New Mexico holds within its landscape deep Indigenous histories and layered legacies of migration that continue to unsettle and complicate ideas of nation, identity, and belonging,\u201d Eshun said.<\/p>\n

\u201cArt is a means not of smoothing over those contradictions, but of widening our sense of what is possible within them,\u201d Eshun continued. \u201cOf imagining new forms of connection in a region that has always been open to different ways of seeing and being.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mnuchin Gallery Calls It<\/p>\n

New York City’s Mnuchin Gallery announced it will shutter this month following the death of its founder, investment banker Robert Mnuchin, at the end of last year. Despite its unpleasant associations (Robert’s son Steven Mnuchin<\/a> served as treasury secretary during Trump’s first term), the gallery put on some incredible shows, including a truly mind-blowing Willem de Kooning survey<\/a> in 2019. The gallery’s swan song was an exhibition<\/a> of … Julian Schnabel plate paintings? Kind of an anticlimactic coda if you ask us.<\/p>\n

What Else Happened?\"\"Chelsea Bighorn at\u00a0Anderson Ranch (photo by Evan Soroka, courtesy Walker Youngbird Foundation)Chelsea Bighorn\u00a0is the recipient of the\u00a0Walker Youngbird Foundation’s 2026\u00a0Emerging Native Arts Grant. The Lakota, Dakota, and Shoshone-Paiute artist is pictured above working on one of her textile pieces, which often fuse elements from her Native American and Irish-American heritage.The Tulsa Artist Fellowship announced its 2026\u20132028 cohort, comprising Myiesha Gordon Beales, Derrick Estrada \/ Baseck, Amy Hoagland, Rebecca Nagle, Aaron Robertson, Amir Saadiq, Sabrina Saleha, Leonard Suryajaya, Dustin Tahmahkera, and Loren Waters. The Asian American Arts Alliance announced the 2026 recipients<\/a> of its What Can We Do? grant, which provides $1,500 stipends to artists supporting New York’s Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. Japanese sculptor Yuko Mohri won the $50,000 Calder Prize.Conny Maier is now represented by Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 gallery in collaboration with Hauser & Wirth. Ulrike Al-Khamis will retire from her role as director and chief executive officer of the Aga Khan Museum after nine years.The Warhol Foundation is expanding its grant program<\/a> to support visual arts projects at organizations with budgets under $200,000, citing \u201cdramatic shifts in the national funding landscape\u201d as one of its motivations.\"\"Michelangelo, “Study for a foot of the Libyan Sibyl (recto); Study of a leg with knee bent (verso)” (photo by Max Touhey, courtesy Christie\u2019s)<\/p>\n

What if you had a chance to acquire a piece of history? What if that piece of history was a study for one of the most famous artworks of all time \u2014 Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes? The catch: It’s a five-by-five-inch drawing of a foot, and it’ll cost you $27 million. Those were seemingly minor details for today’s winning buyer at Christie’s, who, undeterred by a 45-minute bidding war that catapulted the work’s price to 20 times its low estimate, proudly took home the red chalk sketch and set a new record for the Italian Renaissance artist. Weird flex, but okay!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Community The London curator is tapped to curate the SITE biennial, Mnuchin Gallery closes, a buyer spends big…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271362,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-271361","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}