Italian museums, France upheaval, Artist teachers wages=McDonalds workers, Whitworth best museum, artist's 100 years wait

Italian ministry of culture announces shortlist of directors for Italy’s top state museums
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/museums/157697/

Head of France's most prestigious art school abruptly dismissed

French culture minister decides its time to replace Nicolas Bourriaud who was caught by "surprise"

Art teachers 'paid the same as McDonald’s workers'

Artists join campaign that pushes for minimum-wage hike
by Corinna Kirsch | 2 July 2015
Art teachers 'paid the same as McDonald’s workers'
Artist have been creating banners, costumes and slogan designs, and hosting silkscreen workshops at rallies for the Fight for $15 campaign
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As President Obama this week announced plans to extend overtime pay to more US workers, many artists and non-profit organisations are pushing for wage increases, including Andrea Bowers, an artist and senior lecturer at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. “Faculty [members] are making the same amount as McDonald’s workers,” she says. Instructors are paid per course with a semester-long fee, but this hovers around minimum wage if the number of hours spent on the course are taken into consideration, Bowers says.

Bowers, along with other art faculty members in Los Angeles, has been directly involved with “Fight for 15”, a national US campaign to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour. They identify with other low-wage earners, even though their employment will not see any direct benefits from the increase. Artists have been bringing a visual component to the Fight for 15 campaigns. Many, including Andrea Bowers, Ken Ehrlich, Sandra de la Loza, Matthew Owen Driggs and Janet Owen Driggs, have been creating banners, costumes and slogan designs, and hosting silkscreen workshops at rallies.

In June, Los Angeles became the largest city in the US to introduce a $15-per-hour minimum wage. The implementation will be incremental, with wages rising from July 2016 and scheduled to reach $15 an hour by 2020. The announcement follows in the footsteps of Seattle and San Francisco, both cities that have brought the minimum-wage to $15 an hour. States including Minnesota and Oregon are seeing an increase in their minimum wage as well.

Some in the art world argue that the minimum wage increases do not go far enough. “A living wage is vital for a strong economy and a healthy society,” says Ben Heywood, director of the Soap Factory, an experimental art gallery set in a former 19th-century factory in Minneapolis. “If you can't pay people you shouldn’t hire them.” The state of Minnesota is currently undergoing an incremental increase in the minimum wage, which will see the hourly minimum go up to $9.50 in August 2016, followed by annual raises adjusted with inflation. Heywood says that his staff’s salaries will not be affected because they are already above minimum wage.

The New York-based activist organisation, Working Artists for the Greater Economy, sees only “ ‘pros’ to raising the minimum wage, whether in the non-profit [organisation] or for-profit sectors,” according to an email statement. “In fact, a living wage should be implemented as a minimum base standard across all sectors.” Some artists agree: Los Angeles-based Allison Miller calls the new minimum-wage figure “arbitrary”. “It is exceedingly difficult to survive on the $15-an-hour, 40-hour work week model, let alone nurture a family, artistic practice, both or otherwise,” she says.

But not everyone in the art world supports the increase. Some non-profit organisations are worried that they will not be able to cover the costs. “There is little guarantee that grants will go up,” says Nancy Berlin, policy director of the California Association of Nonprofits. The organisation produced a survey on how the minimum-wage increase would affect non-profit organisations last November, which found that many organisation fear being “forced to either lay off workers or severely cut back hours”.

Whitworth named UK museum of the year

Transformation of Manchester University's art gallery earns it £100,000 Art Fund prize

The Whitworth in Manchester has won the Art Fund's Museum of the Year prize after the university art gallery's £15m expansion and modernisation, which was unveiled in February. The gallery's director, Maria Balshaw, accepted the prestigious award at a ceremony held last night, 1 July, at London's Tate Modern.

Founded in 1889, the Whitworth, like its home city, has international ambitions. The Manchester International Festival, in which the gallery takes part, kicks off today (2 July). For the festival the artist Gerhard Richter and composer Arvo Pärt have collaborated, resulting in a group of four new works by the German artist, which will be presented along with a performance of Pärt's Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fátima in the galleries. The Whitworth is also showing part of the founding collection of Hong Kong's museum of visual culture, M+, and the British artist Cornelia Parker created new works for her solo show for the reopening, which includes loans from the Tate.

The expansion of the gallery by Muma (McInnes Usher McKnight Architects) was supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund among others. The judges of the Art Fund's Museum of the Year were: Stephen Deuchar, the fund's director; the artist Michael Landy; Alice Rawsthorn, a design critic and author; Fiammetta Rocco, the books and arts editor of The Economist magazine, and Axel Rüger, director of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/reviews/media/156896/
The film-maker Alison Klayman’s latest subject was for many years a marginalised artist, arguably because her work was ahead of its time, but perhaps even more so because of her gender and ethnicity. Cuban-born Carmen Herrera, who turned 100 in May, had to wait until she was in her 90s to sell her first work. In the past decade she has had shows at the Museo del Barrio in New York and the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK, and finally achieved recognition as an important artist.

“I find Carmen’s story particularly inspiring as a film-maker, and for anyone with an artistic career or undertaking long-term pursuits that may or may not ‘pay off’,” Klayman says. “What makes you keep going? How do you do it without external validation?”

The 100 Years Show reveals the centenarian artist’s vitality, her determination to keep working and her all-round sheer sassiness. When Klayman asks for her reaction to her retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, scheduled for autumn 2016, she replies: “About time, I would say. About time. Better late than never …”

Herrera was born in Havana, where her father founded a newspaper and her mother was a journalist and founder of a feminist group. She was sent to school in France, before returning to Cuba in the 1930s and beginning a degree in architecture. She met her future husband, Jesse Loewenthal, during her studies; after their marriage they moved to New York in 1939. She did not complete her degree. It was only after the couple moved again, to Paris in the years following the Second World War, that she began to paint in the definitively abstract, geometric style for which she is now widely known (the film quotes a Christie’s description of her as “very possibly the oldest contemporary artist working today”, but she is strictly Modernist). Although in France she exhibited alongside Josef Albers and others, and was influenced by Suprematism, on returning to New York in the early 1950s, she could not get a dealer. In the film she relates the story of a (female) gallerist who told her she was a better painter than many of her starrier male contemporaries but there would be “no show because you are a woman”.

“I walked out of the place as if someone had struck me,” Herrera says. “A woman to a woman?” Nevertheless, she kept painting. Finally, in 2004, the gallerist Frederico Sève told the painter Tony Bechara, then the chairman of the board of El Museo del Barrio, that he needed a third participant for a show of female geometric painters after one artist pulled out. When Sève saw Herrera’s work he thought it was by Lygia Clark, but quickly realised that it was earlier than Clark’s work by at least ten years. According to the New York Times, Herrera’s work almost immediately sold to collectors including Ella Fontanals-Cisneros and Estrellita Brodsky; Agnes Gund donated a work to the Museum of Modern Art. The shows at El Museo del Barrio and at Ikon quickly followed.

Pressing engagements

Nicholas Logsdail, of Lisson Gallery in London (stand B8), says: “The discovery for me was an artist who seemed to be like the missing link in the history of painting.”

Herrera is too frail now to leave her apartment for anything other than the most pressing engagements, and Klayman largely films her at home as she prepares work with the aid of her assistant, Manuel Belduma, and Bechara, her friend and neighbour. It’s a warm and intimate study of a tenacious and highly talented artist. In an ideal world, everyone would live such a long and—finally—fulfilled life and have such a portrait. /