Amant Founder and chief executive Lonti Ebers with artistic director Ruth Estévez on site at the Amant Foundation Lyndsy Welgos. Courtesy the Amant Foundation.
The American philanthropist and mega-collector Lonti Ebers will launch a sprawling non-profit art centre in Brooklyn this summer called the Amant Foundation. The 21,000 sq ft complex will span four buildings across two blocks in East Williamsburg and include two galleries, a performance space and studios for resident artists.
The centre aims to “emphasise practitioners coming from the disciplines of theory, poetry and literature”, says its artistic director, Ruth Estévez, the former senior curator of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and the co-curator of the forthcoming São Paulo Bienal.
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If you’re looking for the opposite of social distancing – and who isn’t, these days? – then Alice Neel is there for you. There, that is, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has recently opened a full-scale survey of this greatest of 20th-century portraitists (‘Alice Neel: People Come First’; until 1 August). Go if you can, and revel in the sheer presence of so many unmasked faces, so many interesting humans – the encounter with each one unforgettable.
The timing of the show could not be better. Newly decamped from the Breuer building on Madison Avenue, and finally emerging from months of reduced visitation, the Met – again, like all of us – could use a shot in the arm. Neel most definitely provides it. Over the course of her long career, she was wildly out of step with prevailing tendencies. Only now are we finally catching up to her, at last able to see her paintings as the bracingly essential works that they always have
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night at Tate Britain 2020. Photo: Tate. (Seraphina Neville).
After leaving Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s blockbuster mid-career Tate Britain retrospective, “Fly In League With The Night,” I rushed to post my thoughts about the show on Instagram. My own impassioned views were swiftly swallowed by others, as the often-touted “art-world darling” met almost unrelenting praise from critics.
Indeed, this is the exhibition we needed. We needed to see Black people Black joy, angst, trouble, and all its complexities. We needed painting that hits at the soul like this.
For all its merits in contributing to depictions of Black people in art, and the poignancy of filling Tate Britain with proud Black figures, the exhibition cements how Yiadom-Boakye triumphs as a figurative painter, irrespective of her chosen subject.