February 2022 Art News

Anyone familiar with the Midas touch of Philip F. Anschutz won’t be surprised that the magnate has amassed one of the most impressive and important private Western art collections in the world.
The exhibition highlights the popularity of the cartes de visite in American society of the early 1860s and how becoming a carte de visite meant being famous, or at least, worthy of collection. Women were no exception to this trend.
Carrying the landmark estimate of $20/30 million, the sale marks the highest valued estimate for an NFT or digital art ever offered at auction, and follows Sotheby’s record-breaking sale of CryptoPunk #7523 for $11.8 million in June 2021.
Primarily drawn from the LACMA's collection, the exhibition brings together around 140 works spanning roughly 200 years. Subjects include a wide range—from iconic change-makers to ordinary people rendered extraordinary through art.
Few museum curators have had as big an impact on a city’s cultural life as William A. Fagaly. The internationally renowned scholar, who died last year aged 83, built up important museum collections of Outsider, African and contemporary art during his 50 years at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He also made a substantial contribution to the understanding of southern Outsider art. Fagaly — universally known as Bill — was known for seeking out and championing self-taught African American artists from the surrounding region, including David Butler and Sister Gertrude Morgan, bringing them to national and international attention. The New Orleans curator pioneered mainstream acceptance of work by self-taught artists.
After half a century, the Musée du Pays Châtillonnais has been reunited with a first-century Bacchus statue. First unearthed by archeologists in 1894 at the Roman Vertillum site, the bronze figure has long been considered a French treasure.

Looking Up - D’Arcy Simpson Art Works is pleased to feature new work by Jeremy Bullis and Michael Larry Simpson in Looking Up, opening on Saturday, February 12th, 2022. The large scale color field paintings by Simpson shown alongside Bullis’ ethereal kinetic mobiles fashions an immersive atmosphere of movement filling this intimate gallery with music for the eyes. In this exhibition, each artist explores ideas of movement, balance, tension and harmony within their own practices of composition and construction.

The upcoming exhibition Assembly Required features eight artists who engage the public as co-producers of their artworks. Visitors are invited to build, use, and shape the works of art both individually and collectively.
At 130 pounds, Brie Ruais is equal in weight and material substance to her collaborator: clay. Each work they embark on involves pulling out the partner’s guts and pushing them into a shape.
The first female Haitian artist to exhibit at the Met, Fabiola Jean-Louis was commissioned to create a piece for its groundbreaking current exhibition, Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, inspired by nineteenth-century Seneca Village.