On social media over the weekend, Rose also denounced the Kunstmuseum for hosting a talk on artistic freedom connected to her show. She claimed that she had not been invited to the panel, which included one of the exhibition’s curators and the museum’s director.

“This is prejudicial to the global audience to whom my Artwork speaks, as well as elitist and exclusionary – distasteful to say the least; and abjectly draconian given that the discussion will centre around the horrors of the imbalanced war in The Holy Land, and the genocidal slaughter of unarmed civilians in Palestine by the Israeli government,” Rose wrote in a statement posted to Facebook on Saturday, the day before the talk was held.

A Kunstmuseum Bern spokesperson did not respond to request for comment.

Rose has frequently addressed misogyny, racism, South African politics and history, and more in her art, which has been shown widely in the art world, appearing in editions of the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Sharjah Biennial, the Bienal de São Paulo, and more.

Her retrospective, “Shooting Down Babylon,” first appeared in 2022 at Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, which organized it, and then traveled to New York’s Queens Museum in 2023. At both of those venues, the exhibition was praised by critics and staged without controversy. (Both exhibitions took place prior to the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent military actions in Gaza.)

In her posts over the weekend, Rose alleged that the Kunstmuseum Bern had censored the phrase “Stop the Muslim Holocaust” from her 2012 video A Muster of Peacocks: THE SHOAH. The video had appeared in both the Cape Town and Queens iterations of the exhibition.

Initially commissioned for a show that took place in Cairo during the Arab Spring, Rose made the video in response to her stay in the Egyptian city, where she watched footage of the Port Said Stadium massacre of 2012, which killed dozens of people. Egyptians have claimed the lack of security at the stadium was intentional, since fans of the Al Ahly soccer league had shown up at anti-government protests. Rose said she made the work while pregnant with her son, in her Berlin apartment, not far from where the building’s inhabitants were once deported for Auschwitz.

“The museum directors told us that it is illegal to use the word ‘holocaust’ in Switzerland to describe mass genocide of any other group of people outside of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe during WWII,” Rose said in an email to ARTnews, speaking on behalf of herself and her studio representatives. “As South Africans, this challenged our belief in freedom of speech and expression.”

Rose said that she tried to come up with an alternative in which the video’s audio, partially crafted from her son’s sobs, would play in the Kunstmuseum Bern’s galleries. But she said that when she went to the opening, the audio was not installed.

In Switzerland, Rose’s show gained negative press before the show opened because the artist had in 2021 signed an open letter addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That letter, which was signed by thousands of artists, referred to Israel’s actions as an “apartheid” and called the country a “colonizing power.”

Ahead of the show’s opening in February, the Swiss media resurfaced Rose’s signature, spurring Jonathan Kreutner, secretary general of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, to accuse her of having “radical and non-constructive positions.” In response, the museum added a lengthy statement to its online description for the show.

“Tracey Rose has Jewish and Muslim roots,” the statement reads. “She condemns the cruel attacks by Hamas on Israel and the severe retaliatory measures by the Israeli government, which also affect the unarmed civilian population in Palestine. She condemns all forms of Islamophobia, racism and anti-Semitism and has clearly spoken out in favor of a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine: ‘I believe in the right of the State of Israel and the State of Palestine to exist.'”

A description for Sunday’s talk reiterated some of the background about the controversy over Rose’s signature of the 2021 letter. The stated aim of the panel was to discuss “the meaning and limits of artistic freedom.” Among the panelists were Zeitz MOCAA director and chief curator Koyo Kouoh and Kunstmuseum Bern director Nina Zimmer, along with political science and African studies experts and Ralph Lewin, president of the Swiss Federation of of Jewish Communities.

Rose accused Swiss politicians and Kouoh of “abusive treatment.” Speaking directly to the panelists, she wrote on Facebook, “You have all failed in your duties as cultural practitioners and are not deserving of your positions, where you receive overly generous salaries while failing to pay Artists labour and adequate loan fees.”

A representative for Zeitz MOCAA did not respond to a request for comment.

Her gallery, Gladstone Gallery, currently has locations in New York, Brussels, Seoul, and Rome. It has amassed a roster studded with celebrated artists, among them Matthew Barney, Alex Katz, Joan Jonas, Wangechi Mutu, Keith Haring, Robert Rauschenberg, Carrie Mae Weems, Arthur Jafa, and many more.

She opened her gallery in New York in 1980, and has since risen to become one of the city’s most notable dealers.

Steady, carefully thought-out growth has characterized the gallery since then, but even in a market climate where bigger is thought to be better, Gladstone kept her business modest. In 2020, for example, dealer Gavin Brown merged his space with Gladstone’s, a move that many observers saw as a gigantic step forward for two gallerists who are so closely watched. But Gladstone generally did not make much of it.

“The goal of our gallery does not involve having a global presence, which seems to me a core idea of a mega-gallery,” she told ARTnews around that time. “We do not need an outpost in every city, like a retail shop. Rather, my gallery remains attuned to the granular movements and energies that best serve artists and the spirit of their intentions in a localized and nuanced way. I still think of it as a small operation built solely on relationships and the hard work of getting better at what we do.”

In 1980, when Gladstone opened her gallery, she was twice divorced and a mother to three sons. She was an art history professor at Hofstra University at the time, and she had been collecting prints because they were obtainable for lower prices than artworks in other mediums. Subscribing to a newsletter dedicated to prints spurred her to getting into the business of selling ones in her holdings.

“I bought a print, I listed it, someone bought it, I rolled it up, I put it in a tube, I sent it, I bought another. Very boring,” she told journalist Charlotte Burns. “And at a certain moment, I thought, ‘There have to be other artists, there just have to be.’”

She began seeking out artists who were showing at alternative spaces but lacked commercial representation. Then she would cultivate relationships with those artists and sell their works on paper through her gallery.

When she started her gallery, Gladstone was paying $700 for a space on 57th Street that she described as being “the size of a shoebox.” Her ambitions quickly exceeded her means, and she later moved to a bigger space in SoHo, where she began to show cutting-edge art by artists who were not so established.

One was Matthew Barney, who, in 1991, did an exhibition that featured one performance in which the artist donned a harness, inserted an ice screw in his anus, and ascended the gallery’s walls. He was just 23 years old at the time. Today, that show, which also featured sculptures formed from petroleum, is considered iconic.

“It takes some wisdom to steer a path through what everyone else wants you to do and what serves you best,” Gladstone told critic Linda Yablonsky in 2011. “Each situation is different. There’s no formula. I trust my instincts.”

Further signs of Gladstone’s business savvy arrived in 1996, when, with the galleries Matthew Marks and Metro Pictures, her enterprise bought a 29,000-square-foot space in Chelsea. The neighborhood was not yet a budding art district, though it would in the coming decades become one. “Because I’ve started showing big sculptures, I needed a different kind of space, one with concrete floors and big garage doors,” she told the New York Times.

Then, in 2002, she doubled down on Chelsea, bringing on the dealer Curt Marcus to help man her operations there. She had officially moved her gallery out of SoHo less than a year beforehand. The Times reported that Marcus’s hiring was the result of six months of negotiations—yet another example of the slow, deliberate quality that imbued Gladstone’s dealings.

Her legacy is abundantly evident in the art world. Many artists who passed through her gallery have gone on to ascend to the art world’s highest ranks: Jenny Holzer, the subject of a current Guggenheim Museum survey, had some of her earliest shows with Gladstone, and Richard Prince was represented by the dealer before he joined the mega-gallery Gagosian.

There have recently been signs of discord among staff at Gladstone Gallery. A former gallery manager sued the enterprise and Gladstone in 2022, claiming that workers there experienced verbal abuse and racial discrimination. A gallery spokesperson said at the time that those claims “lack merit.” (As of June 12, the lawsuit was still pending in the New York court system.)

In the past few years, Gladstone said she had taken a step back from certain tasks at the gallery. She described a healthy relationship between some of the high-ranking figures at her gallery. Max Falkenstein, who joined the gallery in 2002, currently serves as senior partner; Gavin Brown serves as partner alongside Caroline Luce and Paula Tsai.

“Barbara valued her relationships with artists above all else and remained their advocate up until the end,” Falkenstein, Brown, Luce, and Tsai said in a statement. “She championed artists who are breaking new ground with their work and stood with them as they developed their practices, noting that ‘you have to sense in someone’s work the possibility of longevity.'”

Gladstone is survived by her two sons, David and Richard Regen. Her third son, Stuart Regen, who co-founded the Los Angeles gallery Regen Projects, died at age 39 in 1998 after battling cancer.

Asked about the future earlier this year, she told journalist Charlotte Burns, “I think it will be fine because I think that these people are all working together now very well. I don’t go to art fairs anymore. They do perfectly beautifully without me. Everybody has developed their own relationships with artists, their own relationships with collectors. These things are bigger than one person. Way bigger.”

Though better known in the art world for her paintings, some of which are now on view in a sprawling show at Jack Shainman Gallery’s School location in Kinderhook, New York, Abney has also produced sneakers that have gained a following.

In 2022 she did an entire collaboration with Nike x Air Jordan that included hoodies and T-shirts emblazoned with her signature typography. She also designed a set of Air Jordan 2 sneakers for it. High Snobiety called Abney’s Jordan attire a “collaboration for the books.”

“My primary objective of the collection was to create something that spoke to a different demographic that maybe we don’t typically see represented in these spaces,” Abney told High Snobiety then. “I also wanted to insert art into everyday products, so people could enjoy it outside of a museum or gallery setting while bringing it into the athletic space to shake things up.”

The follow-up to those shoes, a pair of sneakers known as the Air Jordan 3, will officially go on sale later this month. They have been touted widely in the fashion press, with British GQ terming them the “sneaker drop of the summer.” The sneakers are expected to retail for $225, and will be available for purchase on June 20.

Ahead of their official on-sale date, Abney made available some pairs of these sneakers via raffle on Super Cool Studios’s website Thursday. But some social media users claimed that by the time they could access the website, they received a notice saying the shoes were already gone.

In a social media post on Thursday, Abney said the raffle website had experienced unexpected issues.

“We had an overwhelming amount of demand, however the platform was affected by an unordinary malicious attack,” she wrote. “The raffle is now closed. The team [is] working to ensure that the shoes get into hands of actual people. Winners will receive an email to checkout. Emails will start going out within an hour.”

She teased another opportunity for purchasing the shoes, due to take place June 20 via the SNKRS app.

Astray’s winning picture, a photograph of a flamingo whose head appears to be bent into its body, took first place in the AI category of the People’s Vote Award at the 1839 Photography Awards.

This year, the judges had also given Astray’s photograph, titled F L A M I N G O N E, a third-place prize in the AI category. The juried prizes are decided by representatives from the New York Times, the auction house Christie’s, the publishing house Phaidon, and elsewhere.

On his website, Astray wrote that he had deliberately submitted his photograph as a means to advocate for human-made pictures: “With AI-generated content remodelling the digital landscape rapidly while sparking an ever-fiercer debate about its implications for the future of content and the creators behind it – from creatives like artists, journalists, and graphic designers to employees in all sorts of industries – I entered this actual photo into the AI category of 1839 Awards to prove that human-made content has not lost its relevance, that Mother Nature and her human interpreters can still beat the machine, and that creativity and emotion are more than just a string of digits.”

Astray’s photograph was deleted from the contest’s website upon a review.

“Each category has distinct criteria that entrants’ images must meet,” the competition’s organizers told PetaPixel. “His submission did not meet the requirements for the AI-generated image category. We understand that was the point, but we don’t want to prevent other artists from their shot at winning in the AI category.”

Astray still treated the debacle as a victory, writing, “I hope that winning over both the jury and the public with this picture, was not just a win for me but for many creatives out there. I won’t go as far as to say that it’s a win for Mother Nature herself because I think she’s got bigger things on her plate; who knows, maybe AI can help her with that, by computing climate change models and the likes.”

AI-generated art and photography contests have held a vexed relationship. In 2023 artist Boris Eldagsen won the World Photography Organization’s Sony World Photography Awards for a picture that had been created with the help of an AI generator. After that outcome, Eldagsen declined to accept the award, saying “AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this.”

The traveling exhibition, subtitled “An Archaeology of Silence,” debuted at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in March 2023. The exhibition next traveled to the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, where it opened in November 2023 and closed on May 27 of this year.

According to Wiley’s website and the Art Newspaper, the exhibition would then go to the Pérez Art Museum Miami with run dates between July 2024 and January 2025, meaning it would be on view during Art Basel Miami Beach, and finally to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where it was to open in February 2025.

In a statement to ARTnews, the Minnesota museum said, “Mia was considering taking the Kehinde Wiley exhibition, but as a result of these unfortunate allegations we will not be proceeding with this presentation.”

A Pérez Art Museum Miami spokesperson said the institution had also put its iteration of the show on hold.

Wiley said in a statement to ARTnews, “It is disappointing that this social media-driven fabrication is distracting from the goal of the tour: shedding light on the inequities Black and Brown people face in our society. These allegations are completely false, raising more questions about their credibility and motivation than there are facts supporting their authenticity.”

A Kehinde Wiley show due to open at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, this September has also been quietly postponed as the artist faces allegations of sexual assault from multiple men.

In the past few weeks, Wiley, a painter widely known for creating Barack Obama’s official portrait, has faced accusations of rape. Those claims have been posted to Instagram by people including artist Joseph Awuah-Darko and activist Derrick Ingram, who have said they plan a class-action lawsuit against Wiley in New York.

Wiley has denied these allegations, saying that he had encounters with Awuah-Darko and Ingram while also claiming that they were consensual. (The artist said he had never met a third accuser, Terrell Armistead.) Wiley called the allegations against him “baseless and defamatory.”

The Joslyn’s Wiley show was to feature a new series of portraits that a release from February described as being “specific to the diverse communities of Omaha.” The exhibition was slated to open in September, when the museum itself will reopen following renovation and expansion. It has been closed since 2022 for that project.

On Wednesday, the Flatwater Free Press reported that the exhibition would no longer open this year, although it was not clear whether the allegations against Wiley played a role in the postponement. A spokesperson for the museum told that publication “we are revisiting our exhibition schedule.”

“We are working with The Joslyn Art Museum to find a new date that works with their revised exhibition schedule,” Georgia Harrell, a spokesperson for Kehinde Wiley, told ARTnews.

A representative for the Joslyn Art Museum did not respond to an ARTnews request for comment.

Update, 6/13/24, 6:10 p.m.: A statement from Wiley has been added to this article.

Goldsmiths’s Centre for Contemporary Art said on Wednesday that it had been forced to close because its staff could not resume operations as usual.

“We’re doing this because while the occupation continues, we are unable fulfil the terms required by our insurers for keeping artworks safe and unable to maintain health and safety standards for visitors and staff,” the art space said in a statement.

A show devoted to the German artist Galli will be rescheduled from this summer to early 2025. A residency program at the center was also put on hold.

The students’ occupation of the Centre for Contemporary Art was related to a larger protest at Goldsmiths surrounding the school’s ties to Israel. Students had occupied other buildings at the school, moving the university to make a set of commitments in May that included a scholarship fund for Palestinian students, a statement on the conflict, and a review of the school’s investments.

That set of commitments did not include a call for a ceasefire in Gaza, where more than 37,000 people have been killed since October 7, according to the local health ministry. As a result, students at the school announced an occupation of the Centre for Contemporary Art.

“We reject an institution that co-opts the student movement for Palestine whilst continuing to fund genocide,” a group representing the students wrote on Instagram in late May. The statement called on the center to cut ties with Candida and Zak Gertler, two donors who have been linked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Outset, a British arts fund cofounded by Candida, has also been the subject of recent Palestine-related protests.

The center’s statement did not mention Israel and Palestine by name, and said the protest “prevents us from being able to operate properly as a public art gallery.”

“We want to express our extreme sadness and sorrow to stakeholders (artists, educators and audiences) and staff for this temporary closure, which is a decision we have taken with a heavy heart,” the center wrote. “We hope for an end to the occupation, so Goldsmiths CCA can return to supporting artists, making exhibitions, and hosting our Residents.”

A spokesperson for Goldsmiths said, “We have looked to work with the campaign group and are making progress on the College’s commitments to them, so it is very disappointing that they are occupying a campus building again. It’s also deeply regrettable that their presence in the gallery means it cannot operate normally which includes being able to insure works of art and meet health and safety guidance for visitors. The gallery is a very special place which provides a cultural space for students, staff and our local community through a dedicated outreach programme.”

Update, 6/12/24, 1:20 p.m.: This article has been updated to include a statement from Goldsmiths University.

But in 2002, when dealer Wendi Norris visited the British-born artist at her home in Mexico, Carrington was known primarily to Surrealism enthusiasts. One was the art historian Whitney Chadwick, who wrote what is now regarded as the most important book about female Surrealists (now in its second edition); Chadwick recommended that Norris seek out Carrington.

Norris, who was just getting her start as a dealer, followed Chadwick’s tip, expecting to spend just a few hours with the artist. She ended up chatting with Carrington all day—mostly about politics and literature, not art, as was Carrington’s preference. But because Norris did not initially come out of the art world, she brought a perspective to Carrington’s paintings that the artist prized.

“I don’t have an art history background. I have an economics background,” the San Francisco–based dealer told ARTnews, speaking by phone. “She really appreciated my way of viewing her paintings. She knew I was seeing something in a way that wasn’t through a scholarly lens, but in the way most people probably would.”

That first visit was the start of a friendship and business relationship between Norris and Carrington that lasted through the artist’s death in 2011, and continues to this day via her estate. In 2022, Norris’s gallery lent one of the five paintings by Carrington—Portrait of Madame Dupin (1949), featuring a lithe figure whose neck sprouts a flowering branch—that featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale. This week, her gallery will spotlight Carrington’s art once more, this time at Art Basel, the world’s most preeminent art fair, where Norris’s dealership is making its Swiss debut.

The booth will feature Portrait of Madame Dupin and other gems by Carrington, including one piece that includes text Carrington wrote backwards, so that it is only legible when a mirror is held to it. (“I think only Carrington and Leonardo da Vinci were able to do that,” Norris conjectured.) Dealers regularly bring older works to Art Basel, but these Carringtons are likely to be some of the most art historically important pieces at the fair this year.

Their presence in Norris’s booth testifies to her commitment to Surrealism, a movement which her gallery has quietly helped rewrite in the past decade. Although Norris’s gallery is not limited to Surrealism specifically, with contemporary artists such as Chitra Ganesh and María Magdalena Campos-Pons on her roster, it is shows for modernists such as Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, and Remedios Varo that have defined her programming. Norris has been exhibiting these artists for over a decade, but only recently have they begun appearing regularly in blockbuster exhibitions that reassess Surrealism, often by adding more women and non-European artists to the movement’s canon.

But, Norris said, “I didn’t start out wanting to represent Surrealists.” In fact, she didn’t start out in the art world at all.

While studying economics during the ’90s, she spent time abroad in Madrid, where she was given the option to take one class outside her chosen discipline. She chose to take an art history course, and as part of it, she visited the Prado. “I remember just standing in front of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas,” she recalled. “I had goosebumps.”

Though she had a strong attachment to art, Norris continued to pursue a business career, graduating in 1996 from Georgetown University with an MBA and soon taking a job as a Paris-based director of strategic planning for the biopharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb. After that, she worked for several years at Scale Eight, which she recalls as a “really geeky data storage company that was probably ahead of its time.”

Then the dot-com bubble burst, and Norris sought a new direction. “I decided I needed to change what I was doing and do something that I loved, and I just kind of came to it naturally,” Norris said of her transition to the art world. “I had no real idea about the art industry—and it is an industry. Thankfully, I had a business background where I analyzed industries, so I was able to get a sense of it. But it took a while.” She went on to open her eponymous gallery in 2002.

Gallerists are generally not fond of talking publicly about their businesses in percentages and numbers, but Norris credits her business background with making her comfortable with doing just that. In 2017, amid a wave of gallery closures, Norris made the decision to turn her space nomadic, staging shows beyond one base in San Francisco. In an Artsy op-ed, she said that “less than 10 percent” of the gallery’s sales were actually done in its space in San Francisco. “The data,” she wrote, “is not adding up for me or for my artists with respect to maintaining a stationary gallery space.”

It was a gamble, and Norris said it paid off. Through the offsite program, she has staged shows by Carrington and Varo in New York. The Carrington one, held in 2019, ended up in New York Times critic Roberta Smith’s list of the top art shows of the year. The Museum of Modern Art bought a Carrington painting from that show that now hangs in the institution’s Surrealism gallery.

Since the pandemic, however, most of Norris’s shows have been staged in San Francisco, whether at the gallery’s headquarters or elsewhere in the city. She said she is now more focused on “helping my artists realize their visions and meeting them where they are.”

And part of that project has been finding unusual forms of crossover between her Surrealists and the contemporary artists she represents.

Norris said that María Magdalena Campos-Pons, who recently had a Brooklyn Museum survey, joined the gallery in the first place because it had shown work by Remedios Varo, a Spanish-born Surrealist who made a name for herself in Mexico. Campos-Pons’s first show was with Norris’s gallery in 2017; the catalogue for her 2023 Brooklyn show ended up featuring a reproduction of a Varo painting within its first few pages.

Last year, Campos-Pons won a MacArthur “genius” award, a moment that Norris has continued to celebrate alongside the record-breaking Sotheby’s sale of the Carrington painting earlier this year. “I want to continue to be the catalyst for these momentous art moments for each and every one of my artists,” Norris said.

On Instagram on Monday, activist Derrick Ingram accused Wiley, a painter most widely known for doing Barack Obama’s official portrait, of having raped him in 2021. Ingram alleged that the assault happened in Wiley’s SoHo apartment. Then, on Tuesday night, Terrell Armistead also accused Wiley of having raped him.

“Posting something to Instagram doesn’t make it true,” Jennifer Barrett, an attorney for Wiley, said in a statement to ARTnews in response to Ingram’s allegations. “Yet, in today’s world, anyone can spread blatant lies with a single post, and the public accepts it at face value.” She said there was “no evidence” for Ingram’s claims.

Ingram, a prominent Black Lives Matter activist and the executive director of social justice non-profit Warriors in the Garden, said he was in a three-month-long relationship with Wiley, whom he accused of “extreme violence” and “severe emotional manipulation” during their time together. According to the timeline laid out by Ingram, the alleged rape happened during their relationship. He said he planned to sue Wiley in New York.

Barrett said that Ingram and Wiley had had a “one-time consensual encounter.” Ingram did not respond to a request for additional comment.

In the text posted as an image to his Instagram, Ingram explicitly named Wiley. In an accompanying caption that did not name Wiley, he wrote that he had been assaulted by “a predator that met me at my most vulnerable and knew that I was just starting to heal. He actively exploited my pain and today I am taking back my power.”

Ingram linked in his bio to a petition launched by Joseph Awuah-Darko, who accused Wiley of sexual assault last month. Like Ingram, Awuah-Darko claimed he had been assaulted in 2021. Also like Ingram, Awuah-Darko said he planned to take legal action against Wiley.

Armistead’s claims revolved around an alleged encounter in 2010 at Wiley’s New York apartment. Armistead accused Wiley of having made an effort to “grab my genitals aggressively” and of “performing forced oral penetration on me.” Armistead said he planned to join a class action lawsuit filed by Awuah-Darko, Ingram, and Nathaniel Lloyd Richards, who had also previously accused Wiley of sexual misconduct on social media.

Through Barrett, Wiley denied having known of Armistead or having ever met him. Barrett disputed certain details of Armistead’s claims, including a portion referring to “two big dogs” that Wiley allegedly held within his apartment. She said Wiley did not acquire his two Afghan hounds until 2015.

Armistead did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Monday, Barrett alluded to Awuah-Darko’s allegations, which she said were untrue.

“The false claims against Mr. Wiley began as a vendetta by an individual who shared a single consensual encounter with him,” she said. “This person pursued Mr. Wiley for over a year, unsuccessfully pushing for a relationship. Recently, this individual has reinvented himself, soliciting cash contributions from followers and encouraging others to join his fraudulent Instagram campaign. His efforts have produced one other person, who also had a one-time consensual encounter with Mr. Wiley years ago and subsequently spent months sending him romantic texts seeking a deeper relationship.”

In a follow-up statement posted to Instagram on Tuesday, Wiley called the allegations from Awuah-Darko and Ingram “baseless and defamatory,” and questioned whether money, fame, and an “insatiable need for attention” had driven the two to come forward. Wiley included what he said were screenshots of text conversations between him and his accusers, which he said discredited their claims.

“What is clear,” Wiley wrote, “is that my accusers wanted far more than I was willing to give them.”

Wiley previously denied Awuah-Darko’s claims, saying, “Someone I had a brief, consensual relationship with is now making false, disturbing, and defamatory accusations about our time together. These claims are deeply hurtful to me, and I will pursue all legal options to bring the truth to light and clear my name.”

Wiley is renowned for his paintings of Black sitters that reference Old Masters portraiture techniques. A 2022 New Yorker profile labeled him “one of the most influential figures in global Black culture,” and said that with his Black Rock Senegal artist residency program, he was “shifting the art world’s center of gravity toward Africa.”

A Wiley survey held the following year at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco was a hit, drawing massive crowds. It has since traveled, appearing recently at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, with future stops planned at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Minneapolis Institute of Art in the coming year, according to Wiley’s website. Spokespersons for the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Minneapolis Institute of Art did not respond to requests for comment.

Update, 6/11/24, 10:15 a.m.: This article has been updated to include a follow-up statement from Wiley.

Update, 6/12/24, 3:15 p.m.: This article has been updated to include mention of new claims posted on Tuesday by Terrell Armistead. Through his lawyer, Wiley denied these claims.

Le Quotidien de l’Art reported last week that Honoré’s suicide had been determined a “work accident” by French social security and featured allegations from unnamed MO.CO workers who claimed Honoré had a tense relationship with museum management. The publication quoted a text from Honoré to a friend in which he said he felt “trapped.”

In an unusual move, MO.CO issued a lengthy statement Friday rebutting the Le Quotidien de l’Art article, saying that the museum considered the report “an unbearable exploitation of a tragic event which deserves dignified, measured and respectful treatment for all.”

The museum said it had set up a “psychological support unit” for staff there following Honoré’s suicide in November and wrote that his “memory was sensitively honored” in a number of ways, including via the staging of a Huma Bhabha exhibition that he had organized, which the museum has offered to the public free of charge.

Responding to Honore’s text about feeling “trapped,” the museum said that he had never taken sick leave “in recent years,” and that it had never denied a request by him for time off.

Le Quotidien de l’Art reported that Honoré had been facing a “hidden demotion” just prior to his death wherein certain unspecified responsibilities were to be taken away from him. MO.CO denied this, saying that his “positions and responsibilities have never been called into question.”

The museum did not deny that French social security had determined his suicide was a “work accident,” noting that the institution confirmed receipt of the decision in March. MO.CO is currently appealing that decision.

Honoré was 48 when he died by suicide last year. He had been head of exhibitions since 2019, and had before that been senior curator at the Hayward Gallery in London, where he gained a reputation as a closely-watched figure in the European scene.

Between 2021 and 2023, Sigfrids ran a gallery in New York as well. She is the second dealer in the city to announce a closure this week, after Simone Subal, who will shutter her 12-year-old Lower East Side gallery this month. News of the closure of Sigfrids’s gallery and her hiring by Canada was first reported by Annie Armstrong in Artnet News’s “Wet Paint” column.

First opened in 2013 in Los Angeles, Tif Sigfrids showed artists such as Thomas Dozol, Mimi Lauter, and Becky Kolsrud. The gallery relocated to Athens, Georgia, in 2018. The gallery’s last show, a group exhibition called “Bedroom Furniture,” closed in May.

“I’ve been doing this thing by myself for 11 years now, and while some people would love to have all that autonomy, I miss being part of a bigger world, or something that feels bigger than myself,” she told Artnet.

Although artists that Sigfrids has shown will be integrated into Canada’s programming, her roster will not be entirely ported over to that gallery.

Canada’s stable includes Katherine Bradford, Katherine Bernhardt, Matt Connors, Samara Golden, Joan Snyder, and Rachel Eulena Williams. In 2018, the gallery relocated from the Lower East Side to Tribeca, which has become one of the central gallery districts in New York.