Anne Ellegood appointed director of ICA, Los Angeles

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Anne Ellegood appointed director of ICA, Los Angeles | The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles has named Anne Ellegood, senior curator of the Hammer Museum, as its new director. She succeeds Elsa Longhauser, who was in the role for 19 years. Before her tenure at the Hammer Museum, Ellegood held curatorial posts at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. and the New Museum in New York. She plans to uphold the museum’s mission of ‘supporting social justice and upending hierarchies of race, class, gender, and culture’ and begins at the ICA in September.

Egypt to sue over Christie’s Tutankhamun bust sale | Controversy over the sale a 3,000-year-old quartzite bust of the pharaoh Tutankhamun has escalated, with Egypt’s National Committee for Antiquities Repatriation planning to file a civil lawsuit over its sale by Christie’s auction house. The bust was sold last week for £4.7 million to an unidentified buyer. Egyptian authorities maintain that the artefact appears to have been stolen in the 1970s; Christie’s says that it has ‘carried out extensive due diligence” in confirming its provenance.

Open letter opposes destruction of George Washington mural in San Francisco high school | Following a unanimous Board of Education vote to paint over a controversial 1936 mural by Victor Arnautoff of the life of George Washington – which depicts slavery, violence against Native Americans, and colonialism—some 480 academics and artists have signed an open letter opposing its destruction. The letter claims that the mural ‘exposes and denounces in pictorial form the U.S. history of racism and colonialism’

Philip Freelon (1952–2019) | American architect Philip Freelon has died at the age of 66. Freelon led the design team for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016; his firm, the Freelon Group also worked on the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta and Emancipation Park in Houston. In 2012, he was appointed to the US Commission of Fine Arts by President Barack Obama.