NYC's Swiss Institute Heads to the Bowery
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.
The Swiss Institute in New York City is acquiring a new permanent home at 250 Bowery, just across the street from the freshly renovated New Museum. The organization tapped architectural firm Johnston Marklee to renovate the space, which will open next spring with The Environment, a group exhibition inspired by a participatory project led by filmmaker Bud Wirtschafter in the 1960s Lower East Side. It's a milestone moment for the Swiss Institute, which will own its location for the first time in its four-decade history.
Frank Feltens was named the new chief curator of the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), which includes the Seattle Asian Art Museum and the Olympic Sculpture Park in addition to SAM's downtown headquarters. Feltens previously spent a decade at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, where he was associate director for curatorial affairs and curator of Japanese Art. His appointment to the Pacific Northwest’s largest cultural institution comes just weeks after workers at the museum voted to unionize in a landslide election calling for better wages and job protections.
Villa Albertine, the charming bookstore and cultural center run by the French Embassy on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, is getting a monumental new artwork. The Upper East Side gem, housed in the landmarked Payne Whitney Mansion steps away from The Met, has commissioned artists Abdelkader Benchamma and Raymond Pettibon to design a new ceiling mural for its iconic Ballroom.
Benchamma described the forthcoming installation, “Stella Terrea,” as “a vast mural in perpetual motion” that will engage celestial and cosmological motifs.
“From this idea emerges the installation: to reintroduce a poetic force into the sky at a time when outer space is increasingly becoming a territory to control, exploit, and colonize,” the French-Algerian artist said in a statement.
Pettibon will collaborate on additional figurative elements for the piece, which is slated to be unveiled in September.
This article was originally published by Hyperallergic.