Edward Hopper archive goes to Whitney Museum

Edward Hopper archival materials go to Whitney Museum | The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is the recipient of a major gift of archival materials relating to the career and life of Edward Hopper, Artforum reports. Around 4,000 items, ranging from letters and notebooks to photographs and dealer records, are included in the donation from the Arthayer R. Sanborn Hopper Collection Trust, which will be known as the Sanborn Hopper Archive and housed at the Whitney’s Frances Mulhall Achilles Library. The Whitney already holds the largest collection of Hopper’s artworks in the world.

The Art Newspaper editor to step down | Javier Pes, editor of the Art Newspaper, is to step down from his role this coming autumn, the publication reports. Pes, who joined the visual arts journal in 2008 and became deputy editor in 2009, has been serving as editor since June of last year. In a statement, Pes wrote that his departure was prompted by a desire to ‘write about a greater variety of artists and museums and pursue other projects’.

Art Gallery of New South Wales announces prize winners | The winners of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s 2017 Archibald, Wynne, and Sulman prizes – for portraiture, landscapes, and subject paintings, respectively – have been announced. Sydney painter and cartoonist Mitch Cairns has been awarded the $100,000 (AUSD) Archibald prize, which is now in its 95th edition, for a portrait of his partner and fellow artist Agatha Gothe-Snape. The $40,000 Sulman prize is awarded to Scottish artist Joan Ross, while the $50,000 Wynne goes to Australian aboriginal artist Betty Kuntiwa Pumani.

Staff changes at the Met | The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has announced a slew of in-house staff promotions. Most prominently, the museum’s associate director for exhibitions Quincy Houghton has been appointed deputy director of exhibitions. New curators in charge have also been announced for the Robert Lehman collection, the department of ancient Near Eastern art and the musical instruments department, and Janina Poskrobko has been named conservator in charge for textiles. A new director for the museum, following Thomas P. Campbell’s resignation earlier this year, has yet to be announced.

Miami Beach ArtCenter appoints new director Dennis Scholl | Dennis Scholl, a prominent contemporary art collector and museum board member in Miami, has been hired as director of the non-profit ArtCenter/South Florida, the New York Times reports. The appointment follows the organisation’s 2014 sale of a building for $88 million, which left ArtCenter with a hefty endowment with which it plans to develop an ambitious new exhibitions and education programme, to be overseen by Scholl.

Recommended reading | At Artnet, former Met director and new arrival at Acquavella Galleries Philippe de Montebello gives the first of two in-depth interviews, covering the role of the museum in contemporary society and his own role as chairman of the board of New York’s Hispanic Society. Meanwhile, in the London Review of Books, Charles Hope assesses the Ashmolean’s current exhibition of Raphael drawings. And the Guardian takes its readers behind the scenes of the upcoming Giacometti biopic Final Portrait, revealing that hundreds of reproductions created for the film had to be destroyed after production due to forgery concerns.