The week in art news – Turner Prize shortlist announced

This shortlist for the Turner Prize was announced this week. The nominees are the multimedia artist Heather Phillipson, the photographer Ingrid Pollard, the sculptor Veronica Ryan and the performance artist Sin Wai Kin. Of the four artists, the work of Phillipson may be the best known, as her whipped cream sculpture ‘THE END’ has been featured on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square since 2020. An exhibition featuring the work of all four shortlisted artists will open at Tate Liverpool on 20 December and the winner will be announced in December.

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) announced the promotion of Jessica Bell Brown to curator and head of the museum’s contemporary art department this week. Bell, who joined the BMA in 2019 as an associate curator, has most recently worked on the exhibition, ‘A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration’. Asma Naeem, chief curator at the BMA, said in a statement, has said of Bell’s appointment, ‘her vision, keen insight, and commitment to artists will be integral as the BMA continues to diversify its collections’.

The UK’s largest annual festival of visual art, the Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF), has announced that Kim McAleese will be its new director. McAleese takes up her post in July, just before the festival celebrates its 75^th anniversary, taking over from Sorcha Carey who led the event for 11 years. McAleese, who is co-founder and co-director of Household Collective in Belfast, has said, ‘Scotland has always been close to my heart, and I cannot wait to begin working there.’

A series of paintings by the artist Francis Hines, which were discovered in a barn in Connecticut in 2017, will be shown at Hollis Taggart in New York next month. The 30 abstract paintings discovered in a dumpster by a local mechanic, Jared Whipple, were among hundreds of works discarded near the former studio of the artist, who died in 2016. The Guardian reports that the paintings could fetch around $22,000 each, with Hines’s drawings valued at around $4,500.