Artists remove works from Design Museum in protest over arms-trade event

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Artists remove works from Design Museum in protest over arms-trade event | Following an open letter criticising the Design Museum’s decision to host a private event for Leonardo, an Italian aerospace and defence company, on 17 July, a dozen artists visited the museum to protest in person yesterday, reports artnet. An estimated third of the display has now been removed from the exhibition ‘Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics (2008–2018)’. Earlier this week Deyan Sudjic and Alice Black, the directors of the museum issued a statement saying ‘we stand by our curatorial independence’. According to the Evening Standard the protesting artists plan to reunite the work in an alternative exhibition called ‘From Nope to Hope’ later this year. The Design Museum’s exhibition is now free until the end of its run.

New Museum receives $660,000 grant to develop technological art | The New Museum in New York has received a grant of $660,000 from The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for its New Inc initiative. New Inc supports artists, engineers and production companies to develop new technologies for art. (Last year the Knight Foundation donated $250,000 to the New Museum programme.)

Sotheby’s names Simon Shaw vice chairman of global fine art division | Simon Shaw has been named vice chairman of the global fine art division at Sotheby’s. He was previously co-head of Impressionist and Modern art. In 2012 Shaw oversaw the sale of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and more recently he sold Modigliani’s Nu couché (1917) for $157.2 million, an auction record for Sotheby’s.

Recommended reading | Hester Lacey interviews Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, in the Financial Times. In The Guardian, Jake Nevins surveys the Trump administration’s toxic effect on the arts.