Israel Museum names Ido Bruno as new director

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Israel Museum names Ido Bruno as new director | The Israel Museum in Jerusalem has named its new director: Ido Bruno, a designer and lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, also in Jerusalem. Pending government approval, Bruno will replace the museum’s current interim director Ayelet Shilo Tamir, who was drafted in six months ago when the institution’s former director Eran Neuman resigned only four months after his appointment. Although no reason was provided for Neuman’s rapid departure, there was speculation that James Snyder, the museum’s previous director and current international director, had remained too involved in the institution’s management (for Apollo’s coverage on these events, see here). Tamir will return to her role as deputy director once Bruno begins work at the museum next month.

2017 Sobey Art Award goes to Ursula Johnson | Ursula Johnson is the winner of this year’s $50,000 (CAD) Sobey Art Award for Canadian artists under the age of 40. The announcement was made during a gala yesterday evening at the University of Toronto’s Art Museum, which hosts the award’s associated exhibition until 9 December. Johnson, who is aged 37 and was born in Nova Scotia in the Atlantic region, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work engages with her indigenous heritage as a member of the Mi’kmaq people to explore issues of identity and colonial history and tradition. The other four finalists for the prestigious prize – Raymond Boisjoly, Divya Mehra, Bridget Moser and Jacynthe Carrier – each received $10,000 (CAD).

Knight Landesman resigns from Artforum following sexual harassment suit | Knight Landesman, co-publisher of Artforum, has resigned from the publication. Yesterday afternoon in New York a lawsuit was filed by former Artforum employee Amanda Schmitt, accusing Landesman – who has worked at the magazine since the early 1980s – of sexually harassing at least nine women on multiple occasions over nearly a decade, the New York Times reports. (Further details of the allegations are contained in the Times article.) In a revision of an earlier statement issued on Tuesday defending the organisation’s policies, Artforum’s three other co-publishers, Anthony Korner, Charles Guarino and Danielle McConnell, have publicly announced plans to ‘creat[e] a special task force of women at the magazine’ to oversee a ‘transformation’ of its workplace environment.

David Velasco will succeed Michelle Kuo as Artforum editor | Also at Artforum, editor-in-chief Michelle Kuo has resigned from the publication. According to the Artnews report, Kuo submitted her letter of resignation last week on Wednesday – five days before news broke of the sexual harassment allegations against the magazine’s publisher Knight Landesman. Kuo will be succeeded by current Artforum.com editor David Velasco.

Sixth Nazi-looted artwork is identified in Gurlitt collection | A sixth Nazi-looted artwork has been identified from the extensive collection of the late Cornelius Gurlitt, which was seized by German authorities in 2012 and subsequently bequeathed to the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland. Researchers at the German Lost Art Foundation investigating the provenance of Portrait de jeune femme assise (Portrait of a seated young woman), a 19th-century painting by French artist Thomas Couture, identified its former owner as Georges Mandel, a French-Jewish politician imprisoned by the Nazis and murdered by a collaborationist militia in 1944. Germany’s culture minister Monika Grütters has stated that the work will hopefully now be returned to Mandel’s descendants.