US’s largest collection of Mexican art finds new San Francisco home

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Largest US collection of Mexican art finds a new home in San Francisco | San Francisco is to open the US’s largest and most comprehensive museum of Mexican and Latino art, spanning 60,000 sq ft over four storeys. When it opens in 2019, the museum will be the ‘realisation of a dream by Mexican-American artist Peter Rodriguez’, the Washington Post reports. Rodriguez, who died earlier this month at the age of 90, founded the city’s first museum for Latino art in 1975 and built a collection that grew into some 16,000 objects from Latin America. The new Mexican Museum will also contain around 800 works of Mexican Folk Art donated by Nelson A. Rockefeller’s family and it will be an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution.

Nathaniel Gee to mastermind Estorick refurb | The Estorick Collection has appointed architect Nathaniel Gee to oversee a major refurbishment of its north London home. Gee, who worked on the building’s original conversion in 1998, will be responsible for improving access and a complete renovation of the museum’s galleries. The Estorick Collection will be closed to the public from August 2016 to January 2017 while works are carried out.

Gagosian Gallery to pay $4.3 million in taxes back to New York State | New York State attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman has announced an agreement whereby the Gagosian Gallery will pay state authorities $4.28 million in unpaid taxes, interest, and penalties, reports the New York Times. Investigators discovered that a California-based affiliate organisation of the gallery sold and shipped some $40 million worth of art to New York over a 10-year period – a sum on the Gagosian Gallery should have paid taxes, the attorney general’s office says. No evidence of criminal activity was found.

Christie’s reports mixed half year results | Political unrest, a relative lack of showpiece lots, and a more general art-market slowdown have contributed to a 27 per cent drop in the value of sales reported by Christie’s earlier this year, reports The Art Newspaper. However, the auction house also reported a remarkable increase in e-commerce sales, which jumped by 96 per cent, and a 36 per cent increase in new buyers of works valued between £1–5 million.

Heathrow Airport chooses Grimshaw Architects to design proposed extension | Grimshaw Architects has been selected to draw up concept plans for a ‘hub airport of the future’ at London’s Heathrow Airport, reports the Architects’ Journal. The practice was chosen from a shortlist that included Zaha Hadid Architects, Benoy, and HOK. The project comes as part of the airport’s £16 billion growth plans, which involve the controversial proposed third runway.