Art news daily: 11 February

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Robert Ryman (1930–2019) | The minimalist painter Robert Ryman has died at the age of 88. Ryman was working as a jazz saxophonist when he moved to New York in 1952 and got a job as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art. His admiration for Rothko pushed him to produce his own paintings and over time he developed a distinctive style – works that are typically white and strikingly spare, with subtle but significant variations. Ryman was the subject of a retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1972 and, more recently, at the Dia Art Foundation’s Chelsea gallery in New York in 2015.

Nan Goldin leads anti-opioid protest at the Met and Guggenheim | The photographer Nan Goldin led a protest outside New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and inside the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Saturday night, addressing their history of receiving charitable donations from the Sackler family. Goldin spoke about her own struggle with addiction to the Purdue Pharma manufactured painkiller OxyContin and distributed pamphlets stating that ‘200 people die from opioid overdoses in the US every day’.

Baltimore Museum of Art receives $3.5m to endow chief curator position | The Baltimore Museum of Art has received $3.5m from Eddie and Sylvia Brown in order to endow the position of chief curator, which will be renamed after the couple. The Brown’s are local philanthropists who have supported the institution for over 20 years, primarily in efforts to expand their collection of African American art through the Collectors Circle Fund for Art by African Americans. Dr Asma Naeem was named chief curator of the museum in August 2018.