Venice Biennale Curator Koyo Kouoh Dies, Kunstmuseum Basel Removes Gauguin After Authenticity Questioned, Danish Museums Hit by Mold: Morning Links for May 12, 2025
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The Headlines
IN MEMORIAM. Koyo Kouoh, the celebrated, Cameroonian-born curator appointed to lead the 2026 Venice Biennale, has died unexpectedly at the age of 57, reports ARTnews. When she was appointed in December of last year to curate the storied exhibition in Venice, Kouoh became the second African-born curator to take on the job. But on Saturday, the Venice Biennale announced her passing, describing her as a figure of “passion, intellectual rigor, and vision.” The New York Times also reported that her husband, Philippe Mall, said that a recently diagnosed cancer was the cause of her death in a hospital in Basel, Switzerland. Since 2019, Kouoh had been executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, and was widely admired for her commitment to expanding the global narrative of contemporary art, particularly when it came to her focus on African art. “I’m interested in critical artistic practices and how they play out in society, particularly societies like ours. I believe that context defines pretty much everything that we do,” she told Artforum in 2016.
GAUGING GAUGUIN. Is the final painting attributed to Paul Gauguin a fake? Le Quotidien de l’Art asks the question in a report about Self-portrait with glasses, held in Basel’s Kunstmuseum. The Swiss museum is taking no chances, and has begun examining the oil painting, officially believed to have been made in 1903. This comes following new information reported to them by former art dealer Fabrice Fourmanoir. He claims the self-portrait was painted by a certain Vietnamese political exile, Nguyen Van Cam, better known as Ky Dong (1875-1929) years after Gauguin died. [Ky Dong did meet the artist on a Polynesian Island, where the former had been exiled.] Now, the museum is conducting further tests using new technology to determine the credibility of Fourmanoir’s allegations. But there are troubling facts to consider: the artist’s eyes are painted blue (instead of brown), his nose is a bit too straight, and there’s no signature or date. Among other issues, questions have swirled around the painting’s provenance for decades, despite its presence in the artist’s catalogue raisonné. According to Fourmanoir, who has managed to convince museums in the past to change their Gaugin attributions, Ky Dong painted the portrait from a photograph provided by the artist’s dealer, Louis Grélet, who hatched an elaborate plan to have Ky Dong make the artwork and sell it as a fake. Fourmanoir even asserts Ky Dong’s son told him personally about his father’s forgery years ago.
The Digest
US studio Diller Scofido + Renfro has won the Golden Lion for best project at the Venice Architecture Biennale, while Bahrain won the Golden Lion for best pavilion. Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s project, titled Canal Café, is designed as a laboratory and espresso bar, that purifies water from the Arsenal lagoon to create drinkable coffee for visitors. Bahrain’s pavilion curated by Andrea Faraguna, titled Heatwave, presents a ventilation system that cools a seating area underneath a low ceiling. [Dezeen]
A debate is heating up over a new monumental sculpture in Times Square by Thomas J Price depicting a Black woman dressed in everyday clothes. Grounded in the Stars was unveiled at the end of April to confront “preconceived notions of identity and representation,” according to a description. But while opinions are divided, critics have decried the artwork online as unflattering. [Artnet News]
An “epidemic” of mold has contaminated up to 12 museums in Denmark, threatening to damage paintings and objects. The highly resistant white mold coating has been detected in the National Museum of Denmark and Skagens Museum, among others. [The Guardian]
Director Ava DuVernay defended the Smithsonian Institution against President Donald Trump’s executive orders undermining it, during a speech while accepting an award at the National Museum of American History. At the ceremony for the Great Americans Medal she received on Thursday, she said, “Let me tell you about the families — Black, white, Native, immigrant — who walk through the doors of Smithsonian museums and feel that this country might just make room for them after all,” she said. “That is not indoctrination. That is belonging. That is education. That is democracy.” [The New York Times]
The Kicker
OPENED PARADISE AND CLOSED A PARKING LOT. Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, opened last week following a $53-million expansion. Among the changes, reports Apollo Magazine, are two parking lots that have been planted over, and nearly five additional acres of natural space for artworks and programming, including about 650 trees and local plants. The expansion, which began in 2017, “is about who we are and what we’re known for, and what we want to bring to the table,” says Nora Lawrence, the center’s executive director. The project also comes with a number of new exhibitions and acquisitions, including Kevin Beasley’s largest installation to date, which has been added to an over 100-work collection of art installed across a two-square-kilometer landscape of rolling hills. Joni Mitchell, who poetically observed, “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” in her iconic song, Big Yellow Taxi, “must be smiling,” notes writer Helen Stoilas.
