Walker Art Center forms Indigenous Public Art Selection Committee

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Walker Art Center forms Indigenous Public Art Selection Committee | The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has announced the establishment of an Indigenous Public Art Selection Committee, to commission a public artwork from a Native American artist for the museum’s sculpture garden. The project has been created in response to last year’s controversial installation of Sam Durant’s Scaffold sculpture at the Walker, which was intended to commemorate the hanging of 38 Dakota men in 1868 but drew protests from Native American communities. The new artwork will be installed in the spring of 2020.

Anne Olivier Bell (1916–2018) | The art historian Anne Olivier Bell has died aged 102. Bell worked for the Art’s Council in the early years of its development in the 1940s; later, she helped her husband Quentin Bell complete his influential biography of his aunt Virginia Woolf, while she also edited five volumes of Woolf’s diaries. Together with Quentin, she was responsible for establishing Charleston Farmhouse – the Sussex meeting-house of the Bloomsbury Group – as an independent charitable trust. For an account of Bell’s life and accomplishments, read Charles Saumarez-Smith’s obituary for the Guardian.

Recommended reading | In the New Yorker, Doreen St. Félix reviews the Met’s exhibition of mid-century African American portrait photographs, noting the feeling of eeriness that occurs when a museum turns ‘relics of real and recent life’ into ‘art objects’. In the summer edition of the Paris Review, a portfolio by Edie Fake and an accompanying essay by Renee Gladman posit that, in the ‘Cities of the Future’, colour will form the basis of architecture. Finally, a thank-you letter to street artist Banksy by the Turkish-Kurdish painter and activist Zehra Dogan is available to read in full on Hyperallergic. Dogan was imprisoned in Turkey in 2016 after her depiction of the destruction of the city of Nusaybin; recently, a public mural by Banksy was unveiled in New York, drawing international attention to her situation.