Museum Millions and a Narrative Art Takeoff
Today's Stories
- A big B’Day gift: Beyoncé gives $2m to the Studio Museum in Harlem — The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
- $1bn Lucas Museum of Narrative Art lifts off at long last — The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
- Art Books We’re Reading This Fall — Hyperallergic
Full Transcript
It is Monday, September seventh, two thousand twenty-six. Let’s dive in.
Beyoncé turned 45 on 4 September, and she marked it with two moves: a deluxe anniversary edition of her 2006 album B’Day and a two dollarsm donation to the Studio Museum in Harlem. In a statement, she said, “Art tells all our stories; the past and the present, but is not always accessible to everyone,” and praised the museum’s goal of being “an integral part of the community.” The Art Newspaper notes the gift comes just under a year after the museum reopened in a new three hundred dollarsm, eighty two thousand-sq.-ft building on 125th Street, designed by Adjaye Associates with Cooper Robertson as executive architect. Director and chief curator Thelma Golden thanked Beyoncé for recognising the museum’s “vital role.”
The one dollarsbn Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is scheduled to open in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park on 22 September—eight years after its 2018 groundbreaking, and after delays from an original 2021 target. The Art Newspaper describes its curving, science fiction-style building by Ma Yansong of Mad Architects, with gardens and paths by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA, plus stylised touches like three curved elevators in glass tubes. In 35 galleries, inaugural exhibitions will show more than one thousand two hundred objects from George Lucas and Mellody Hobson’s forty thousand-piece collection, spanning comics and illustration to works by Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell, and Maxfield Parrish. The museum stresses “narrative art,” and tickets are free for children 17 and younger.
Hyperallergic is leaning into fall reading season with “Art Books We’re Reading This Fall,” a staff roundup that spotlights 15 forthcoming titles. The pitch is broad—art novels, catalogs, memoirs, and more—framed as a way to find your next art book, from “a catalog on Kent Monkman’s response to a Vermeer painting” to “essays by Elizabeth Alexander.” The package also points readers toward additional Labor Day weekend reads, including Matt Stromberg’s dispatch headlined “LA’s Lucas Museum Displays ‘Narrative Art’ for the Few, Not the People,” and it highlights an artist feature, “A View From the Easel: Rujuta Rao,” where Rao says, “My studio is presently portable, modular, and itinerant.”
That’s today’s Daily Art Download. Links to all the stories are in the show notes—meet me back here tomorrow for more. Chinga la migra