Sophia Al-Maria wins inaugural Dunya Contemporary Art Prize

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

MCA Chicago awards inaugural Dunya Contemporary Art Prize | The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago has awarded its first Dunya Contemporary Art Prize to the Qatari-American artist Sophia Al-Maria. The new $100,000 prize, awarded biennially, aims to promote ‘mid-career artists from the Middle East or its diaspora’. Al-Maria’s work, encompassing visual art, writing and film, often explores what the artist has termed ‘Gulf futurism’. She is currently also writer in residence at Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Lindsay Pollock joins Whitney Museum | Lindsay Pollock, until last year editor-in-chief of Art in America, is to become the new chief communications and content officer at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Pollock was formerly a writer for several art journals and a manager at Sotheby’s, before joining Art in America. She is also the author of The Girl with the Gallery, a biography of the American dealer Edith Halpert.

‘Selfie monkey’ unable to sue for copyright, rules US court | In the conclusion to a three-year case, a US federal appeals court has ruled that a monkey that took a ‘selfie’ with a photographer’s equipment is not eligible to claim copyright on the image. The campaign group PETA had filed a motion on the monkey’s behalf, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously dismissed their suit. The copyright will remain with the photographer, David Slater. For more on this case, read Nicholas O’Donnell’s article for Apollo here.

Millicent Fawcett statue unveiled in Parliament Square | Gillian Wearing’s statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett has been unveiled in London’s Parliament Square. Wearing’s statue, which depicts Fawcett holding up a sign with a quotation from one of her speeches, was backed by the government’s £5 million Centenary Fund, which celebrates one hundred years of women’s suffrage.