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.

Mohamed-Amin Atch, Mohamed Rilaz Waleedh, and Daood Hassan, all 23 years of age, were charged on allegations of running a scam with false promises the purchase of the Evolved Apes NFTs would help develop a video game.

According to a recently published announcement from the United States Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, the suspects took the investor funds of $2.7 million from thousands of people in 2021 and pocketed the proceeds to personal accounts.

In the cryptocurrency industry, this type of scam is known as a “rug pull.”

It involves the advertising and sale of a digital project to public investors, the collection of funds, and then quietly shutting down the project or suddenly disappearing. The three suspects allegedly created and promoted the NFT project “Evolved Apes.”

The promises for the profits of the project included Ethereum cryptocurrency tokens added to a community wallet; as well as donations to charities “supporting endangered apes”, “fighting global hunger” and “creating prosthetic limbs”.

The creators and promoters of the Evolved Apes project sold the “10,000 unique” NFTs and collected a reported $2.7 million from purchasers through public promises the money raised would be used to develop a videogame based on the digital images. The accused suspects claimed the videogame would increase the value of the NFTs. But the project’s videogame never happened and its website was shut down.

According to Coindesk, which first reported news of the unsealed indictment, the project’s anonymous developer Evil Ape “vanished a week after launch, siphoning 798 ether ($3 million at today’s price, $2.7 million at the current time) from the project’s funds.”

According to US Attorney Damian Williams and FBI New York Field Office Assistant Director James Smith the funds were transferred through multiple cryptocurrency transactions to the personal accounts of Atcha, Waleedh, and Hassan.

The charges—one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering—each carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

The charges were announced on June 6 due to the indictment against Atcha, Rilaz, and Hassan being unsealed.

S&P ratings, which are issued to both companies and countries, indicate the degree risk to investors. They span from AAA to D.

The auction house’s revenue has dropped 22 percent on the heels of a new, simplified fee structure that drastically lowered—and standardized—the traditional buyer’s premium, sellers’ fees, and commissions. At the time of the restructured fee announcement, chief executive Charlie Stewart said these are “changes [that] we’ve been contemplating for a long, long time.”

“I think this it’s good to have a fair, and clear, set of terms in the art market. This is kind of a growing-up moment. It’s a step toward maturity for the art world,” Stewart added. Some in the art world, however, considered the restructuring a risky move, since negotiating sellers’ fees is among the most powerful tools in an auction house specialist’s arsenal. For headline-grabbing lots, sellers’ fees are often brought down to zero. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, the price of Sotheby’s bonds has dropped by about 8 percent in the last month, leading to worry among investors that the auction house won’t be able refinance loans that are due in 2026. Prices for bonds due in 2027 have dropped to below 87 cents on the dollar, down from around 93 cents in mid-May.

The auction house’s debt-to-EBITDA ratio, which compares the company’s total debt to its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, and is used as a measure of how easily a company can pay off its debt, increased from 7.7 times to 10 times, indicating higher debt relative to earnings.

Despite a cloudy financial outlook, Sotheby’s paid shareholders $8.5 million in dividends in the first quarter of 2024 and a total of $90 million last year.

S&P has a negative outlook on Sotheby’s rating, meaning it could downgrade the rating further if performance doesn’t improve. Sotheby’s is a private company owned by French telecom entrepreneur Patrick Drahi, who bought the house in 2019 for $2.7 billion.

Sotheby’s did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The artist’s rare archives were released ahead of a dedicated study center slated to open near the museum later this year, Radio France Internationale reported on Sunday. The center is intended for researchers and artists in residence.

This digital portal, however, makes accessible the museum’s vast collection of Picasso artworks, essays, conferences, podcasts, and interviews. A total of 19,000 photos, which have never been seen by the public, are included.

An additional 200,000 texts from Picasso’s workshops are also slated to be digitized and added to the portal in the coming years.

The Spanish painter and sculptor is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, most notably as cofounder of the Cubist movement with Georges Braque. Born in 1881, he lived most of his life in France; he died in 1973. In 1992 his family archives were entrusted to the French state, which has continued to oversee them.

Last year, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the painter’s death, there were a number of exhibitions highlighting his lasting legacy.

CIMA was founded by Italian art historian, curator, and collector Laura Mattioli in 2013. It promoted scholarly and public engagement with Modern and contemporary Italian art.

Many of CIMA’s 13 total exhibitions highlighted major Italian Modern artists who had scarcely been shown in North America, including Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero, Greek-Italian painter Alberto Savinio (and brother of Giorgio de Chirico), still life painter Giorgio Morandi, and sculptors Medardo Rosso and Marino Marini.

“This was not an easy decision,” Mattioli said in a statement to the Art Newspaper. “At present, we are holding conversations with various cultural institutions to find the place that will best preserve Cima’s archival documentation, including the video archive of public events, and the online academic journal. It is our goal that these resources will continue to remain accessible to scholars and to the general public, free of charge.”

CIMA also hosted 42 residential fellows and supported 10 travel fellows in their scholarly research. The institution helped to produce numerous articles, catalogues, and books that promoted the exchange of Italian-American scholarship.

“Meeting these fellows was a constant source of learning and inspiration for us, and we know that many of you enjoyed the opportunity to meet and converse with them during our tours, scholarly conferences and public events,” Mattioli added.

CIMA’s current exhibition Nanni Balestrini: Art as Political Action—One Thousand and One Voices is the first stateside retrospective for the experimental Italian visual artist and novelist and will mark the institution’s final show.

The Broome Street location was previously home to Health Ledger, before his untimely passing in 2008. It also housed the Leonard Gallery between 1984 to 2003.

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.”

Steib, who will take on the role of chief executive at the media company Tegna, will remain in an advisory role with Artsy through July and a board member following his departure. 

Yin has also been with the Artsy since 2019. Since joining the company, he has overseen Artsy’s strategy and operations, as well as investments into the company and investor relations. Yin also oversaw the expansion of Artsy’s e-commerce transaction capabilities, which now include 37 countries and three currencies, the dollar, the British pound, and the Euro.

In an email interview with ARTnews, Yin said that he doesn’t foresee any abrupt shifts in Artsy’s business strategy. Rather, his focus will be enhancing current efforts and “supporting our gallery partners, building out our secondary market business, and expanding the reach of artists globally.”

“My approach will bring a renewed focus on a few specific areas,” Yin said. “I have been involved with the business for five years, ensuring a deep understanding of our strategy and operations.”

Yin cited his passion for collecting works by emerging LGBTQ+, AAPI, Californian, French, and Italian artists as being influential to the company’s future path under his leadership. “My personal connection to these communities and regions … drives my commitment to diversity and representation within the art world. This perspective will shape our strategies and initiatives moving forward.”

He moves in to his new role at a time of cautious optimism in the art market, which over the last two years have shown collectors to be more thoughtful about their spending.

“The art market has proven uneven for many over the last year,” Yin said. “However, collectors continue to buy on Artsy and offline, and I am cautiously optimistic about the resilience of the art market because the joy people feel when collecting and appreciating art hasn’t diminished.”

According to the 2024 Global Art Market Report by Art Basel and UBS, online collecting, which began in earnest following the Covid-19 pandemic and was thought by some to be in decline after restrictions eased, has grown significantly in the last years. Per that report, online sales accounted for $11.8 billion last year alone, a 7 percent rise from 2022’s figure.

Aimed to recognize artists at all stages of their careers, the Latinx Artist Fellowship is awarded to five early career artists, five mid-career artists, and five established artists. Among this year’s winners, whose practices span painting and printmaking to installation and performance to photography and social practice, are pillars of the Latinx art community like Pepón Osorio, Yreina D. Cervántez, John Valadez, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, as well as closely watched ones like Elle Pérez, Sandy Rodriguez, Joel Gaitan, and Chris E. Vargas. (More information on each artist can be found on USLAF’s website.)

“This is what we want this fellowship to be, and this is how we think about the X [in Latinx],” USLAF executive director Adriana Zavala told ARTnews. “This, to me, feels like such an extraordinarily intersectional cohort of artists. I think of all of them, in distinct ways, as dissenters and disruptors—the way they disrupt, siloing tendencies and political exclusion writ large, not just for Latinx artists but for the Latinx community, the Black community, the LGBTQ community.”

This year’s cohort was selected by jury that consists of curators from USLAF’s partner institutions—Angelica Arbelaez at the Whitney Museum, Rita Gonzalez at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Cesáreo Moreno at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Maria Elena Ortiz at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth—as well as three of last year’s fellows: artists Felipe Baeza, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, and Tina Tavera. In having artists serve on the jury, Zavala said the organization wanted to ensure that it was “co-creating this with the artists.”

Earlier this year, USLAF launched “X as Intersection: Writing on Latinx Art,” which will commission short essays on each of the previous and current winners divided into seven different collections. The series title, Zavala said, is meant “to signal that, for us, Latinx is a concept. It’s not an aesthetic. It’s not a homogenizing identity. It’s a concept, a political concept, a creative concept.”

The inaugural collection, “Latinx Unsettling,” is edited by Zavala and focuses on artists like Elia Alba, Coco Fusco, Ester Hernandez, Juan Sánchez, and Vincent Valdez, while the second collection, “Materiality of Memory,” is edited by Mary Thomas, USLAF’s director of programs, and will highlight artists such as Lucia Hierro, Carmelita Tropicana, Consuelo Jimenez-Underwood, and Mario Ybarra Jr. The first collection will go live in January, with calls for papers for the other five categories being announced through next year.

“What these artists really need is writing about their work, across multiple genres,” from journalistic pieces to more scholarly articles by both established and early-career writers, Zavala said. “At the end of 2026, we will have 75 essays on Latinx contemporary artists on our website that we’ll be building. I think that’s going to be an extraordinary tool for general audiences, for students at every level, and for scholars seeking out new artists.”

The Latinx Art Fellowship was established in 2021 with $5 million from the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation to fund the first five years of the program, which is set to expire in 2025.

“We’re working very hard to keep all of the work that we do going,” Zavala said. “We’re hopeful that 2025–26 will not be the sunsetting of USLAF or the Latinx Artist Fellowship. But it’s important for people to understand that this is not a given. There’s a lot of work that goes into it every single day.”

The full list of the 2023 Latinx Artist Fellows follows below.

Alberto Aguilar
Artist
Chicago, IL

Yreina D. Cervántez
Painter, Printmaker, and Muralist
Los Angeles, CA

Lizania Cruz
Participatory, Installation, Multidisciplinary, Conceptual Artist, Printmaker, and Designer
New York, NY

Jenelle Esparza
Multidisciplinary Artist
San Antonio, TX

Fronterizx Collective
(Jenea Sanchez & Gabriela Muñoz)
Interdisciplinary Social Practice
Phoenix, AZ / Agua Prieta, Mexico

Joel Gaitan
Sculptor
Miami, FL

Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Performance Artist and Writer
San Francisco CA / Mexico City, Mexico

Maria Maea
Multidisciplinary Artist
Los Angeles, CA

Charo Oquet
Multidisciplinary Artist
Miami, FL

Pepón (Benjamin) Osorio
Visual Artist
Philadelphia, PA

Elle Pérez
Artist and Photographer
Bronx, NY

Gadiel Rivera Herrera
Visual Artist
San Juan, PR

Sandy Rodriguez
Artist and Researcher
Los Angeles, CA

John Valadez
Painter, Muralist, and Photographer
Los Angeles, CA

Chris E. Vargas
Transdisciplinary Artist
Los Angeles, CA / Bellingham, WA

THE HEADLINES

RECORD CHARDIN. A Jean Siméon Chardin still-life painting The Sliced Melon sold to a European collector for a record $28.7 million (€26.7 million), more than twice its high $12.9 million estimate (€12 million) estimate at Christie’s on Wednesday, according to French reports. The painting was shown at France’s official Salon in 1761, the same year as another much-talked-about Chardin painting of a basket of strawberries, which sold two years ago for $26 million with fees, and is now in the Louvre’s collection, thanks to a public funding campaign and private donations.

SOTHEBY’S DOWNGRADE. The S&P has downgraded Sotheby’s debt to B-minus from B, due to a 22 percent revenue drop and higher costs in the first quarter of 2024, reports The Wall Street Journal. The company’s bond prices have dropped about 8 percent in a month, as concerns mount over whether it can refinance loans by 2026. Revenue fell as Sotheby’s launched a new fee structure to boost margins, just as costs rose as larger consignor advances and sales exhibition expenses raised costs. “Despite the hit to both its top and bottom lines, Sotheby’s continues to pay shareholder dividends, doling out $8.5 million in the first quarter and $90 million last year, according to S&P,” reports the WSJ.

THE DIGEST

The newly launched Artists & Mothers grants aims to help New York–based artists with their childcare needs. The inaugural winner is Carissa Rodriguez, who last month opened her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe. [ARTnews]

Ukrainian artist and musician Artur Snitkus, 36, was killed in combat near Donetsk. His death comes amid intense fighting in eastern Ukraine against the Russian military offensive. Snitkus was described as an “icon of [the] Ukrainian queer underground,” by arts worker Natalia Martynenko. [The Art Newspaper]

British actor Stephen Fry compared the removal of the Parthenon marbles from Greece to the hypothetical scenario of the Nazis stealing the Arc de Triomphe while they occupied France. Speaking on Australian TV, he said it would be “classy” for the British Museum to return the sculptures. [The Guardian]

Influential figures in France’s art scene have signed a petition arguing the planned closing of Paris’ Centre Pompidou for renovation is a “serious error.” Former Pompidou president Alain Seban, art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, the artists Daniel Buren and Gérard and Elisabeth Garouste, are among those who signed the letter published in Le Figaro, and arguing for alternatives to a total museum closure, which they say would give private art institutions a competitive advantage. Rather, they insist closing individual floor sections as they are renovated is a doable alternative. [AFP and Le Figaro]

Later this month, at a Sotheby’s modern and contemporary sale in London, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 triptych Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict, will head to auction for the second time in three years, for an estimated value that is half its price two years ago. Christie’s estimated it was worth $30 million in 2022, but withdrew it, and now Sotheby’s estimates it is worth $15 to $20 million. [ARTnews]

The entertainment company Live Nation has cut ties with Barclays, after a number of artists pulled out of their events in protest against the bank’s tie to Israeli defense industries. [The National]

The Center for Italian Modern Art (Cima) in Manhattan, announced it will close permanently June 22. Its current exhibition about the Italian experimental artist and novelist Nanni Balestrini will be the last. [The Art Newspaper]

The Picasso museum in Paris has launched an online archive of artworks, photos, and other memorabilia from the artist, many of which have never been shown, ahead of a dedicated study center set to open near the museum later this year. [RFI]

Performance art has gained popularity in Hong Kong, particularly among younger audiences hungry for lived experiences, and despite the region’s new national security laws reducing freedom of expression. [South China Morning Post]

THE KICKER

LOST IN THE ALGORITHM. Social media algorithms influence what is blasted on our screens, and as Kate Brown examines for Artnet News, it is also shaping how performance artists work—whether consciously or not—along with what versions of their creations we are experiencing online. The costs can be significant. “More and more, their content finds traction if it makes sense to us in under ten seconds. What gets buried and seen is tightly bound up in what fits into the rules of virality,” writes Brown of performance art in particular, which she says has been booming thanks to Instagram’s latest reel-era. As a result, a repeated recipe for viral success increasingly risks dictating creative output, leaving little room for nuance and depth, which, even when initially embedded in the work, are edited out of online clips, argues Brown. “Social media has, at the same time, made a lot of artists a lot of money and brought the art world new levels of attention. But it is worth asking if it is pushing forward the medium,” she writes, “… if performance art follows the push of the algorithms and is formed and made anew under virtual logic, then it can risk, like painting did, to become equalized and rendered average in the face of the flattened feed, to fade into ambient buzz.”

Artists & Mothers was founded by artist Maria De Victoria and arts consultant Julia Trotta, who had been “workshopping an idea around a resource for artists who are mothers,” Trotta told ARTnews in an interview.

Initially, they thought the project could take the form of a residency program with studios and childcare, but ultimately they decided to “boil it down to the most impactful path, thinking about what really do people need and what we established that they needed was funding to be able to pay a childcare provider, flexible to their needs,” which can range from daycare to hiring a nanny, Trotta said.

The prize money was calculated at $25,000 based on what the average cost of full-time childcare in New York for a year. “We decided that we wanted it to really be something that would make a difference—$25,000 is really a lot,” Trotta said.

“I am grateful to Artists & Mothers for recognizing that social reproduction—or more simply put, the care work that holds us together as families and communities—is a vital part of what makes art possible,” Rodriguez said in a statement. “By addressing the crisis of care that so many of us are experiencing, Artists & Mothers stepped in to provide much-needed support that the professional sphere has long overlooked.

As the inaugural winner, Rodriguez will receive the funds over the course of the next year. As an artist, she is known for her research-based practice that examines the structures of the art world and how they facilitate the creation of work. She was also a founding member of the collective Reena Spaulings Fine Art, which she collaborated with for over a decade.

Among her best-known works is The Maid (2018), which was commissioned by SculptureCenter in New York and has been shown across the country, including in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The film follows several “Newborn” sculptures by Sherrie Levine over the course of a day and their lives in different settings, including museums and private collectors’ homes.

Last month, Rodriguez opened her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe at the Kunstverein München in Munich, Germany. Titled “Imitation of Life,” the show presents a new video work that Rodriguez created during the first year of her firstborn’s life. (Trotta said that selected artists’ practices or forthcoming works do not necessarily have to revolve around motherhood in order to qualify for the grant.)

The exhibition, Trotta said, comes at a “critical juncture” in Rodriguez’s career, one of the main criteria for the prize. Artists often “have children, not at the very beginning of their careers, but [after] they’ve had some success, some attention, some momentum, at that moment, where you have to add this other very important, but very consuming, element to your life,” she said. “We want to make sure that that gap is filled, and that they’re able to still meet the projects, opportunities, and attention that they’ve received so far.”

The geographic restriction for Artists & Mothers, Trotta said, came down to the founders’ own experiences of raising children in the city, having to make decisions based on childcare costs, and “exponentially high costs associated with having a kid here.”

Similarly, the grant is currently restricted to artists with children under 3 years old because enrollment for universal 3-K beings at that age in New York. Trotta said that as the nonprofit grows, they will explore introducing additional programs that would accommodate childcare at different stages.

To help realize their vision, De Victoria and Trotta assembled an advisory board consisting of several other art world professionals that included artists Camille Henrot and Maia Ruth Lee, gallerist Bridget Donahue, communications strategist Sarah Goulet, and publisher Elizabeth Karp-Evans, all of whom Trotta described as important figures who “are leading with care.”

The founders and the board all work on a volunteer basis and have been actively fund-raising. The Niki Charitable Art Foundation, founded by artist Niki de Saint Phalle, provided funding for the inaugural 2024 grant, while the James Family Foundation has supported the 2025 grants. Additional donors include artists Sam Moyer, Hilary Pecis, and Arlene Shechet; curators Lumi Tan, Loring Randolph, and Carolyn Ramo; and dealers Hannah Hoffman and Martha Moldovan. “It’s a simple mission; I think people understand the need right away,” Trotta said of her experience soliciting donations. “There’s so much need out there, so, obviously, the more funds we can raise, the more grants we can give out.”

Trotta said the inaugural grant was designed as a pilot program and would differ from subsequent years. For the first year, artists were nominated and selected by the board as a way to “almost move things along faster,” she said. “There was this urgency to getting this project launched,” she said.

Going forward, the grants will have an open-call application that will be decided by an anonymous jury. For 2025, the foundation will dole out at least two grants, though that cohort could rise to three. Trotta said the open-call is key to the program because the board or invited nominators “don’t necessarily know who has children or who doesn’t” and will allow for us to “expand the net wider.”

She added that the application will not be too labor intensive, as “we understand everybody applying to this will already be extremely busy trying to juggle their professional life and their home life.”