Artist Pope.L Has Died

William Pope.L, the performance and conceptual artist whose provocative works surfaced the complexities of race and class in America, has died aged 68.  

His passing was announced by his gallery, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which wrote in an Instagram post: “Pope.L fundamentally challenged and changed the last 50 years of visual art in the United States… His elegant, indeterminate, and often humorous, yet bitingly poignant criticism of our history has only recently begun to be fully recognized.”

VIa Artnet

Founder of the National Museum of Mexican Art Set to Retire: ‘The Arts Should Belong to Everybody’

When Carlos Tortolero founded the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in 1982, he said some colleagues in the art world didn’t think opening an art museum in a working-class neighborhood like Pilsen would work.

Now, Tortolero, who serves as president of what’s now known as the National Museum of Mexican Art, announced he will be retiring at the end of the year, more than 40 years after the museum’s founding. 

Via WTTW

2023 Was a Year Through the Art Market Looking Glass

Read the Artnews 2023 art market summary. 

Via ARTnews

The Artists We Lost in 2023, in Their Words 

“I paint because I believe it’s the best way that I can pass my time as a human being. I paint for myself. I paint for my wife. And I paint for anybody that’s willing to look at it.”

— Brice Marden, artist, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)

Via NYTimes