April 21, 2022 • View in browser

Good morning. 🌤️ Today, the first-ever Nepal Pavilion will open at the Venice Biennale, writer Abdul-Aliy Muhammad writes that the Penn Museum still has a lot of questions to answer about the remains of the MOVE bombing victims, and reviews of Lucy Mullican, Birgir Andrésson, Maggi Hambling, the film Paris, 13th District, and much more.

— Hrag Vartanian, editor-in-chief 

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Decades After Philadelphia’s MOVE Bombing, Penn Museum Still Keeps Secrets on the Remains of 12-Year-Old Girl

"Delisha’s mother, Janet Africa, deserves to know where her child’s sacred remains are." | Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad

LATEST NEWS

From left to right: Nepal Pavilion Curators Hit Man Gurung and Sheelasha Rajbhandari with exhibiting artist Tsherin Sherpa (photo by Chhiring Dorje Gurung, courtesy the artists)

• Nepal will make its debut at the 59th Venice Biennale with support from New York’s Rubin Museum of Art.

• The grandchildren of a Holocaust victim sue the Israel Museum over an illuminated manuscript allegedly stolen from the family during WWII.

• Museums in Glasgow will restitute 17 Benin bronzes, seven Indian artifacts, and 25 Lakota items to their communities of origin.

ART & FILM

The Beauty of the Ephemeral World

Whereas the creators of landscape abstractions generally believed their paintings were impervious to time, Lucy Mullican makes artworks that are exposed and susceptible. | John Yau

For An Icelandic Conceptual Art Pioneer, Home Was His Inspiration

Birgir Andrésson was steeped in Iceland's ways and lore, landscape, and history. It was also his complex subject and an energizing force. | Gregory Volk

A Cryptic Dance Between Understanding and Incomprehension

Rather than dismissing illegibility as a lack of clarity, Steffani Jemison embraces opacity as a strategy that provides other ways of practicing freedom and connection. | Allison Conner

Maggi Hambling's Visceral Abstractions Reflect Environmental Destruction

Hambling’s paintings nudge viewers to consider what we will be losing if humankind continues on its current path, and how much we’ve already lost. | Ilana Novick

Abstract Art in the Southwest Is as Vast as the Region’s Terrain

The exhibition is a compelling, if at times dissonant, examination of the formal and material possibilities at the heart of abstraction. | Scotti Hill

A Film Follows Wayward Lovers in the 13th Arrondissement of Paris

Drawing on several short stories by graphic novelist Adrian Tomine, the film pins down many of the odder elements of contemporary dating. | Dan Schindel

IN MEMORIAM

Letizia Battaglia (1935-2022)
Italian artist who documented the Sicilian Mafia | New York Times

Ann Hutchinson Guest (1918-2022)
Pioneer in dance notation | New York Times

Hermann Nitsch (1938-2022)
Austrian artist | Associated Press

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