On November 11, the Louvre Abu Dhabi opened on Saadiyat Island, a cultural district off the coast of the capital city of the United Arab Emirates. The museum was designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel and is the result of a €1 billion agreement between Abu Dhabi and France.
On September 22, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) opened in Cape Town, South Africa. It’s a major development, locally and globally, and is described in superlatives: the first major contemporary art museum in Africa; the largest museum to open in Africa in a century; and the largest contemporary African art museum in the world.
The Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) has received a grant from the Getty Foundation to support a plan for the long-term care and maintenance of its landmark Brutalist building. The museum has the most important art collection in Latin America, but is most recognized for its modernist architecture and installation design.
In Santander, about 60 miles west of Bilbao on Spain’s north coast, the new Centro Botín opened on Friday, June 23. The waterfront arts center was designed by Renzo Piano as a new regional museum along with the redevelopment of an urban park.
A beautiful new art center opened on a Friday evening last month. 2,000 people attended the opening. The building was designed by a major architecture firm. There’s talk of gentrification. And it’s in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo.
In the summer of 2016, 11.5 million documents from the world’s fourth largest offshore banking law firm were leaked by an anonymous source, exposing financial and attorney-client information of more than 214,000 offshore companies. The Panama Papers, as they are known, reveal some of the complex structures that allow the extremely wealthy to exploit offshore banking and shell corporations to commit fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, and other crimes.
The art world’s newest biennale is also the smallest. On an uninhabited Caribbean island, works by 14 artists comprise In a Land of, the inaugural edition of the Biennale de La Biche.
Five years after Maurizio Cattelan announced his retirement, following a 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York, a new exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris marks his return to the art world. Not Afraid of Love includes 44 artworks installed within the Monnaie’s 18th century salons and is Cattelan’s largest exhibition in Europe to date.
On Viðey Island, near Reykjavík, Iceland, a beam of light shines up into the sky, penetrating the clouds up to an altitude of at least 4,000 meters. The light comes from the Imagine Peace Tower, a work conceived by Yoko Ono as a memorial to John Lennon and dedicated to peace.
In České Budějovice, a historic capital in the south of the Czech Republic, the city’s public art gallery has temporarily appropriated a fountain within the town square. Designed by Jan Šépka Architects for the Domu umění města (House of Art), the project creates a site-specific experience to reconsider perceptions of public space.