– Met Costume Institute Honors Wintour: The Metropolitan Museum’s famed Costume Institute, which is currently closed for renovations, will reopen in May with a new name — the Anna Wintour Costume Institute— after the implacable Vogue editor-in-chief and Condé Nast artistic director. A Met trustee for the past 15 years, Wintour has been instrumental in raising funds for the $40-million renovation. [NYT]
– Anish Kapoor Deploys Blow-up Concert Hall in Japan: The British sculptor Anish Kapoor has created a highly reflective and inflatable curvilinear concert hall that can accommodate some 500 spectators and is currently touring regions of Japan hit by the 2011 tsunami. The pavilion, a collaboration with Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, is called “Ark Nova.” “It was interesting to watch it being inflated,” Isozaki said. “I was surprised it inflated so quickly.” [Telegraph]
– British Museum Is Booming: Attendance at the British Museum in 2013 was the highest in many years with 6,701,036 visits, a figure that is 20 percent higher than in 2012. The museum attributes the increased attendance to its Shunga, Ice Age art, and Pompeii exhibitions. Meanwhile, today’s U.K. Google Doodle is in celebration of the museum’s 255th anniversary. [Artdaily, Guardian, ITA]
– Pussy Riot Public Appearances: The recently freed members of Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, sat down with a radical Russian Orthodox missionary for a public meeting in Moscow over the weekend. Later this week, Alyokhina will be appearing at a Singapore Art Week awards gala where the Russian punk collective is among the nominees. [TAN, Bloomberg]
– Art at the Mumbai Airport: A new ambitious public arts program in Terminal 2 of the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai is putting more than 7,000 artworks on display, including both antiquities and contemporary pieces. [NYT]
– Sotheby’s Stands Behind Scroll: Sotheby’s has released a 14-page report in defense of the authenticity of a Chinese scroll allegedly created by Song Dynasty poet Su Shi that sold for $8.2 million last September. [NYT]
– A public art installation slated for the Olympic Park at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi will render visitors faces in a giant 3D mural. [Business Insider]
– Chelsea gallerist Zach Feuer and dealer Joel Mesler, owner of the Lower East Side’s Untitled, have opened a new gallery, Retrospective, in the artsy upstate New York town of Hudson. [NYT]
– A 2,000-year-old sculpture of a lion was badly damaged during renovation work at the National Museum of Kolkata. [TAN]
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Gavin Delahunty Joins Dallas Museum of Art
National Gallery Garden Gets Chagall Mosaic
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