April 21 | Yayoi Kusama among the world’s most influential people

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Artist Yayoi Kusama and architect Bjarke Ingels are among the world’s most influential people according to Times’ annual 100 list.

Known for her dazzling and “idiosyncratic” work, Kusama — nicknamed the polka dot princess — has been active since the 1960s and has produced art across a number of different media, including painting, performance, film and literature.
Marc Jacobs’s profile of the Japanese artist praises her as someone “who’s done some really radical and revolutionary things in the art world”. Danish Bjarke Ingels, responsible for the creation of the 2016 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, makes the list as a major architect who “who wants to make the world a better place without the existential hand-wringing of previous generations”. For Time 100’s full list, you can visit the magazine’s website.


Bartolomeo Pietromarchi — former director of the MACRO (Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma) and curator of the 55th Venice Biennale — has been appointed director of Rome’s MAXXI. (National Museum of 21st Century Art) Pietromarchi will fill in the role left vacant by former director Anna Mattirolo, Artribune reports.

Art Basel has revealed the full list of its 2016 film program. Among the artists chosen by curator Maxa Zoller, are Fiona Tan, Jonas Mekas, Timothy Marrinan and Pierre Bismuth, the latter with a film on Ed Ruscha. More information is available on artnet News.


Billionaire socialite and heiress Wilma “Billie” Tisch has filed a lawsuit against Ken Hendel — owner of Gallery Art — following the latter’s attempt to sell a $1 million Picasso, the very Picasso that had stolen from Tisch’s property sometime in… 2009, only Billie didn’t realize that it had been missing until almost a decade later. The painting, a portrait of Picasso’s mistress Marie-Therese Walter, was bought by Hendel for $500,000 in June 2013. The New York Post explains.


As of 2017, Betsy Broun will no longer serve as director of The Smithsonian American Art Museum. (SAMM) Broun, at the head of the institution since 1989, will retire at the end of the year. artnet News has more information.