Jeff Koons’s ‘Bouquet of Tulips’ Gets Opening Date, Monique Meloche Gallery Adds Artists to Roster, and More from September 16, 2019 -ARTnews

Jeff Koons’s ‘Bouquet of Tulips’ under construction near the Petit Palais in Paris.

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Monday, September 16, 2019

October Opening Date Set for Controversial Jeff Koons Sculpture in Paris
After several open letters and much controversy, Jeff Koons’s monumental sculpture Bouquet of Tulips will go on view to the public in Paris on October 4. Since first being announced in 2016, Koons’s 34-foot-tall sculpture—a monument to the victims of the 2015 terrorist attacks in the French capital—had caused concern among the Paris art community for the high fabrication costs for the work. (According to a press release on Monday that likened the Koons work to the Statue of Liberty, the fees have been “entirely covered by private funds” from “French and American donors.”) The work will appear in the gardens of the Champs-Élysées, near the Petit Palais.

Americas Society Appoints New Director
Aimé Iglesias Lukin has been named director and chief curator of the Americas Society in New York. Taking up the role in October, Iglesias Lukin is currently a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American art, and her dissertation examines immigrant networks and communities in New York between 1965 and 1975. Iglesias Lukin has previously held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Institute for Studies in Latin American Art, and Fundación PROA in Buenos Aires.

Monique Meloche Gallery Adds Candida Alvarez and David Antonio Cruz to Roster
The Chicago-based gallery Monique Meloche now represents Candida Alvarez and David Antonio Cruz. Cruz’s first solo show with the gallery opened on September 7, and Alvarez will have a solo presentation in 2020. Alvarez is a professor of painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her work has been exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Queens Museum in New York, the Museum de Arte de Puerto Rico, and elsewhere. A professor of painting and drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Cruz has shown his paintings, drawings, videos, and performances about the intersections of queerness and race at El Museo del  Barrio and Performa 13 in New York, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, among other institutions.

First Artworks In City Canvas Initiative Go On View in New York
As part of the street art initiative City Canvas, which was organized by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the Mayor’s office, and the NYC Department of Buildings, murals created by seven New York–based artists have been installed on a construction shed outside Google’s headquarters in Chelsea. The works were commissioned by the nonprofit ArtBridge and Google, and they were designed by BKFoxx, Danielle Mastrion, Indie184, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Gera Lozano, Natasha Platt, and Jess X Snow. In a statement, Stephen Pierson, executive director of ArtBridge, said, “New York City currently has 310 miles of construction fencing—a staggering amount that corrodes the vibrancy of our city. Through City Canvas, we can now transform this eyesore into canvases for local artists.”