Briefing

Dana Lixenberg has won the 20th edition of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. The Dutch photographer was announced as the 2017 winner of the GBP£30,000 prize at a award ceremony at The Photographers’ Gallery, London for her project IMPERIAL COURTS (1993–2015), her portrait of the residents and community of the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts, Los Angeles. Adopting a strategu of ‘slowing things down,’ as she puts it, the project includes images from different years that follow the trajectories of individual stories. Over time, some subjects have disappeared or gone to jail, and the children of early photographs, have grown up and had children of their own. In later visits, Lixenberg used audio and video recording to document the conversations and soundtrack of the neighbourhood. The members of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2017 jury were: curator Susan Bright; artist Pieter Hugo; curator of Photography, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Karolina Lewandowska; Director, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Anne-Marie Beckmann, and Brett Rogers, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery, acting as the non-voting chair.

The Labour party has announced in its manifesto that it will introduce a GBP£1 billion Cultural Capital Fund should it come to power in the upcoming UK general election. Administered by the Arts Council, the fund will be available over a five-year period. In addition Labour said it will maintain free entry to museums, end cuts to local authority budgets to support the provision of libraries, museums and galleries and introduce an arts pupil premium to every primary school in England – a £160 million annual per year boost for schools to invest in projects that will support cultural activities for schools.

Artist Felipe Ehrenberg died of a heart attack on Tuesday, he was 73 years old (Spanish). Born in Tlacopac, Mexico, in 1943, Ehrenberg was one of the country’s leading cultural figures during the 1960s and 1970s.  Following the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, in which hundreds of left-wing students were killed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party–led government, the artist to relocated his family to Devon in England. During the six years he spent there, he and his wife, Martha Hellion, and artist David Mayor cofounded Beau Geste Press, which published books and journals written by artists associated with the Fluxus movement. The Jumex Museum and CAPC Bordeaux both recently staged retrospectives dedicated to the press’s output, the CAPC show was reviewed by frieze co-editor Jennifer Higgie here.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awarded USD$1.87m to 12 US art museums as part of an initiative to help institutions experiment with new ways of using digital tools to improve the visitor experience. Among the proposals selected from more than 100 submissions was Lumin, a mobile app tour of the Detroit Institute of Arts that uses augmented reality and 3D animations to guide visitors through the museum. Commenting on the grant Victoria Rogers, the Knight Foundation’s vice president for the arts, said, ‘people want those experiences to be personalised, interactive and shareable, just as they experience their daily lives.’

An untitled Jean-Michel Basquiat skull painting from 1982 sold for USD$110.5m with fees to the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, marking the highest price at auction for a post-1980 artwork, the second-highest price for any contemporary work at auction and the sixth-highest price for any work sold at auction, in a sale at Sotheby's. Maezawa, an active collector of Basquiat works is a founder of the Tokyo art institution Contemporary Art Foundation. In a statement, Sotheby’s said ‘the painting will eventually be housed in a museum based in Mr. Maezawa’s hometown of Chiba, Japan.’

British/Ghanaian architect David Adjaye received a Knighthood for services to architecture as part of the Queen’s biannual honours programme. ‘I am deeply honoured and delighted to have received a knighthood for my contribution to architecture, and absolutely thrilled to be recognized for a role that I consider a pleasure to be able to undertake,’ he commented. Adjaye joins only a handful of architects to have been knighted – among them Norman Foster (1990), Richard Rogers (1991), Michael Hopkins (1995), Nicholas Grimshaw (2002), Peter Cook (2007) and David Chipperfield (2010). Among Adjaye’s designs is the recently opened Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington D.C. Adjaye’s firm has also been shortlisted to design a National Holocaust Memorial in the UK, and is currently working on a major new art museum in Latvia.