ICA Philadelphia is the first museum certified for paying artists fairly

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

ICA Philadelphia is the first museum certified for paying artists fairly | The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia has announced that it is to become the first museum certified by W.A.G.E (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) – a New-York based organisation that advocates for artists to be fairly compensated by the institutions that show their work. The ICA joins a group of more than 50 cultural institutions, including the Swiss Institute, Artist Space, and Locust Projects.

Lottery grant boosts multimillion redevelopment of the Museum of Oxford | The Museum of Oxford has been awarded a grant of £1.63 million by the Heritage Lottery Fund, which will contribute towards a £3.2 million redevelopment project entitled Oxford’s Hidden Histories. The redevelopment will triple the size of the Old Museum and increase the number of exhibits from 286 to around 750. The new museum, which will aim to explain the town’s history, is due to open in summer 2020.

Inaugural Riga Biennial announces artist list | The first edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art has named the 99 artists who are to be represented in the Latvian capital this summer. Major artists include Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jonas Mekas, and Mark Dion, along with the Situationist theorist Raoul Vaneigem. The biennial, which runs from 2 June to 28 October, is to be entitled ‘Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More’, after Alexei Yurchak’s 2005 book on his experience in Soviet Russia.

Lee Grant has won the Australian National Photographic Portrait Prize | Canberra-based photographer Lee Grant has been awarded the $50,000 National Photographic Portrait Prize for an image of a resident at Ainslie Village social housing complex. Grant’s portrait, entitled Charlie, will be displayed alongside the entries of the remaining 42 finalists at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra from 24 March–17 June.

Recommended reading | In the New York Review of Books, Richard Dorment assesses the cultural legacy of Kenneth Clark. In Even magazine, Susannah Thompson asks how political upheavals of the last half-decade have affected Scotland’s artistic self-confidence. And in the Paris Review, Nicole Rudick interviews Etel Adnan, while Adam Morgan narrates the story of a vanished Chicago bookstore designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Lead image: used under Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 3.0; original image cropped)