MoMA makes exhibition archive available online

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

MoMA archive to be made available online | The Museum of Modern Art is to make thousands of images in its exhibition archive available online for the first time, reports the New York Times. After years of planning and digitising, images stretching back as far as the museum’s first show in 1929 will be available to view on its website from today. The archive will include more than 33,000 exhibition photographs, along with hundreds of out of print catalogues and previously unseen documents. ‘The entire website is conceived of by the museum now as a living archive,’ MoMA archive chief Michelle Elligott told the NYT, ‘and this is really just the beginning, the first phase of bringing its history out in all its detail.’

Renders of Thomas Heatherwick’s Hudson Yards project unveiled | Designer Thomas Heatherwick has released digital renders for a monumental structure at Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The basket-shaped monolith will rise to 15 storeys, made accessible by 2,500 steps, and comes with an estimated price tag of $150 million. While it serves no apparent function, Heatherwick describes it as a ‘keep fit project’. ‘The idea was that we could make something that you could get up at 6am every morning and you’re walking up the equivalent of 16 storeys,’ he told The Art Newspaper. ‘It’s an achievement to get to the top and get back down.’

Design competition for UK Holocaust Memorial Centre launched | The UK government has formally invited designers, architects and artists to enter an international design competition for a proposed Holocaust Memorial Centre in central London. ‘We need to ensure that we never forget the horrors of the Holocaust and the lessons that must be learnt from it’, UK Prime Minister Theresa May said yesterday. ‘[The memorial] will ensure that there will be opportunities for young people and others to learn the lessons of the Holocaust and the appalling atrocities that took place.’ An exhibition of the final shortlisted designs will take place in London in January 2017, and the winning candidate announced at a date later in the year.

Solveig Settemsdal awarded Jerwood Drawing Prize | Norwegian artist Solveig Settemsdal has been named winner of the 2016 Jerwood Drawing Prize for her work Singularity, a nine-minute video that she describes as a ‘temporal and sculptural process of drawing’. Singularity is the first video work ever to win the £8,000 prize, which has run annually since 2001. Second place went to Danish artist Anna Sofie Jespersen, who was awarded £5,000 in recognition of her work Sid in a Bathtub. Runners-up were Jade Chorkularb and Amélie Barnathan, who were awarded £2,000 each.

Hamza Walker named director of LAXART | Academic Hamza Walker has been appointed director of Los Angeles’s LAXART non-profit art space, replacing founding director Lauri Firstenberg. Walker, who is currently associate curator and director of education at the Renaissance Society of Chicago, is expected to take up the position in California on 1 October.

Northern England dominates Victorian Society’s ‘Top Ten Endangered Buildings’ list | The Victorian Society has revealed its 2016 list of Britain’s most endangered buildings, which for the first time in its history includes not a single building in London or the South East. All the buildings on the list are deemed at ‘real risk of being lost if action is not taken in the immediate future’. For a full overview, see our piece from yesterday here.