Briefing

South London Gallery is launching a new space, Art Block, alongside a three-year programme, ‘Open Plan’, which commissions artists to create pieces for the local Elmington, Pelican and Sceaux Gardens housing estates, and includes a full-time gallery traineeship for school leavers. ‘The Open Plan programme will enable the gallery to take our work with artists and local residents to a new level of reach’, director Margot Heller commented, ‘deepening our commitment to working with our neighbours’. Art Block is a new space on the Sceaux Gardens estate: Morag Myerscough (who designed the exterior of the British Pavilion for the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale) is the first designer commissioned to transform the space.

Chana Budgazad Sheldon is joining ProjectArt, the non-profit which seeks to create art spaces in US libraries, inviting in artists to work and teach. Sheldon joins as the new Miami director and national programme advisor, overseeing work in libraries in Chicago, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. She was previously executive director of Miami’s gallery Locust Projects.

Massachusetts' Berkshire Museum is at the centre of an ethics debate after it put up 40 works, including pieces by Alexander Calder and Norman Rockwell, for auction to pay for renovations. The decision drew accusations that the museum had violated industry guidelines, which prohibits sales from institutional collections for operating expenses (as drawn up by the Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Alliance of Museums). Violation can result in sanctions, including the refusal of loans from other institutions. The artworks in question have now been transferred to Sotheby’s New York.

Skulptur Projekte Münster has been hit by vandalism again: equipment from Koki Tanaka’s video installation Provisional Studies: Workshop #7 How to Live Together and Sharing the Unknown has gone missing. The theft from the sculpture exhibition, with some of the works installed in public space, follows on from damage done to Nicole Eisenman’s fountain and the removal of a panel from Ei Arakawa’s LED painting.

Pictures Generation artist Sherrie Levine is now represented by Xavier Hufkens gallery in Brussels, joining a roster that includes Robert Mapplethorpe, Danh Vō and Cathy Wilkes. Levine’s early work was part of the ‘Pictures’ show at Artists Space, New York in 1977, which launched a generation of appropriation artists, commenting on notions of authorship and authenticity in an image-saturated age.

Bill Sherman is to head up the Warburg Institute – the Victoria & Albert Museum’s former director of research and collections succeeds David Freedberg at the University of London institution. The Warburg grew out of art historian Aby Warburg’s private library. The research institute ‘badly needs some profile raising’, Sherman told the Art Newspaper.