Art Movements: Meet MoMA's New Photo Chief
By Valentina Di Liscia
Art Movements, published every Thursday afternoon, is a roundup of must-know news, appointments, awards, and other happenings in today’s chaotic art world.
Makeda Best is joining New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as chief curator of Photography starting in September. Currently serving as deputy director of curatorial affairs at the Oakland Museum of California, Best's roots can be traced back to the medium itself: She earned an MFA in studio photography at the California Institute of the Arts before getting her PhD at Harvard, where she focused her research on Civil War chronicler Alexander Gardner. Best then served as photography curator at the Harvard Art Museums from 2017 to 2023.
Though MoMA has had a dedicated photography department since 1940, it has been without a permanent leader since Clément Chéroux's departure in 2022. Best succeeds Roxana Marcoci, the department's senior curator, who has served as interim head over the last few years.
The Asian Cultural Council (ACC) awarded over $1.6 million to 70 grantees across four fellowship categories: New York, Individual, Graduate, and Organization. The NYC-based nonprofit fosters artistic exchange between the United States and Asia and within the continent. Pictured above: the wonderfully inventive fiber artist and sculptor Tan Yubing, who received an ACC grant to research the evolution of Chinese puppetry in Penang, Malaysia, and throughout cities in Indonesia.
At least one sector of the art market is hot, hot, hot. “Hell,” believed to have been painted by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch in the first half of the 1500s, fetched a whopping $537,600 at Sotheby's Old Masters sale in New York this week — more than 10 times its high estimate. At just over 10 by 13 inches, the oil on panel is a miniature world unto itself, depicting a grotesque, giant-mouthed central figure surrounded by embodiments of the deadly sins and other infernal attributes.
David Pollack, Sotheby's head of Old Master Paintings, credited the enthusiastic bidding in part to our "image-driven market." While the artist displayed technical skill, it is “the incredible image of Bosch-like creatures and characters that made the work truly irresistible,” he said. The buyer’s name has not been made public.
This article was originally published by Hyperallergic.