December 23, 2022

Good morning. 🌧️  “So often, contained within the little salty bubble of a single tear, we find the big lessons we’re not yet ready to accept,” writes AX Mina in her review of the exhibition Understatements: Lost & Found in Asian America at Queens College in New York. That’s just one example of the clarity and beauty of Mina’s writing voice. Do yourself a favor and read her piece.

Also today, a gingerbread bakeoff at the Museum of the City of New York yields impressive results, a new sex museum comes to Miami, the aesthetic abomination of the Bolsonaro era in Brazil finally comes to an end, Required Reading, and more. Stay warm, everybody.

— Hakim Bishara, Senior Editor

Asian-American Identity Through Quiet, Ordinary Gestures

Sometimes, exhibitions about identity demand too much of those bearing the identities, expecting them to speak explicitly to their experience. | AX Mina

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WHAT’S HAPPENING

• An exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York celebrates the Big Apple in gingerbread: the most seasonal (and tastiest) medium of all.
   
• The Museum of Sex reveals plans for an expansion to Florida in 2023.
   
• As Jair Bolsonaro moves his art out of Brazil’s presidential palace, the internet remembers the “aesthetic crisis” that marked his tenure.

LATEST IN ART

Nellie Mae Rowe’s Story of Freedom

Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe is brimming with examples of the artist’s imaginative allegorical art. | Ekin Erkan

Required Reading

This week, a mysterious portrait of Joan Didion, considering Carolee Schneemann, privatizing libraries, Dalit discrimination, the “great internet grievance war,” and more. | Hrag Vartanian and Lakshmi Rivera Amin

TRANSITIONS

Carlos Basualdo was appointed deputy director and chief curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Jessica Todd Smith was appointed director of curatorial initiatives.

Salma Tuqan was appointed director of Nottingham Contemporary.

Aay Preston-Myint was named executive director of SF Camerawork.

Tsione Wolde-Michael was named executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

Adrienne Edwards, Candice Hopkins, and Eva Respini will curate the 2023 Armory Show.

AWARDS & ACCOLADES

Aperture and Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, in partnership with the 7|G Foundation, announced Pao Houa Her as the recipient of the 2023–24 Next Step Award.

Deborah Willis was announced as the recipient of the Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art, awarded by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

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