Morning Links from July 10, 2019 -ARTnews

Douglas Crimp.

KATHERINE MCMAHON/ARTNEWS

California

Christopher Knight pens an open letter to Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, who has designed a controversial expansion for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, following an interview Zumthor gave to a Swiss publication. Knight pleads with him, “LACMA’s encyclopedic collection is not an accident, and no architecture can compensate for lost context. And you have to get this building right.” [Los Angeles Times]

Famed tattoo artist Ed Hardy’s paintings and illustrations are now on view at San Francisco’s de Young Museum.  [NBC Bay Area]

Sarah Lucas’s survey “Au Naturel,” which includes a piece calling for fried eggs, has traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the museum’s chief art preparator Jason Pugh has been busy frying eggs for the exhibition. He explains of his practice, “I’ve made a bunch of aesthetic decisions in cooking the eggs, so I do consider these things to be components of the artwork.” [Los Angeles Times]

Mark di Suvero’s popular public art piece Declaration, installed in 2001, is set to be removed from Los Angeles’s Venice Beach at the end of the summer.  [New Yorker]

Long Reads

Critic Joseph R. Wolin takes a close look at the Dallas Museum of Art’s Jonas Wood retrospective. He writes of the exhibition, “middle-class comforts and heteronormative nuclear families abound, as does a certain self-regard.” [Glasstire]

Masha Gessen mourns critic, curator, and art historian Douglas Crimp as a prominent voice in AIDS activism by way of two classic Crimp essays: “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic” and “Mourning and Militancy.” [New Yorker]

What Makes A Place

Here’s an exploration into the legacy, controversies, and lasting mystique of 1980s gallery Gracie Mansion, run by husband and wife duo Gracie Mansion and Sur Rodney (Sur). [Frieze]

ARTnews executive editor Andrew Russeth takes a critical look at Indianapolis’ sweeping, entertainment-filled Newfields, formerly known as the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  [ARTnews]

In the wake of the abrupt departure of Peter Schäfer, director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, earlier this summer, the question arises: “Who and what are Jewish museums for?”  [New York Times]

Misc.

In Pittsburgh, an Airbnb host has dedicated one floor of a home to displaying local artists, creating a live-in gallery. [Pittsburgh Current]

The New York Post reports that Museum of Modern Art board chairman Leon Black—a billionaire art collector and a fixture on the ARTnews annual “Top 200 Collectors” list—kept Jeffrey Epstein on as a director of Black’s family charity after Epstein’s pedophile conviction in Florida more than a decade ago. [New York Post]