LA Broad Museum Debuts Second Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirror Room

Los Angeles’s The Broad has acquired works by Yayoi Kusama, Mark Bradford and Kerry James Marshall. Kusama’s Longing for Eternity (2017) is the second of the Japanese artist’s Infinity Mirror Rooms to enter the Broad’s collection, alongside The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013). In the new work, viewers cannot physically enter the space, but must dip their head into a mirrored box filled with twinkling LEDs. ‘The new Infinity Mirror Room in our collection will offer The Broad’s visitors a deeper understanding of an artist who has resonated profoundly with them since the museum opened more than two years ago’, Sarah Loyer, assistant curator commented.

The Southbank Centre in London has announced that it will host a regular monthly club night, titled ‘Concrete Lates’, held in the foyer of the newly renovated Queen Elizabeth Hall. Its first night will be on 13 April, with a programme influenced by the current Andreas Gursky survey at the newly reopened Hayward Gallery – featuring Pan Daijing, JASSS and Giant Swan, in collaboration with Boiler Room (guests will be able to visit the Gursky show until 1am).

Anselm Kiefer is creating his first site-specific outdoor sculpture in the US with a piece launching at New York’s Rockefeller Center on 2 May. Uraeus has been commissioned by the Public Art Fund and Tishman Speyer. For the piece, Kiefer has cast a gigantic open book, held by eagle wings, in lead, on top of a 6-metre-high column. ‘A public commission several years in the making, the iconography of Uraeus evokes classical mythology,’ Public Art Fund director Nicholas Baume commented, ‘Kiefer returns to the symbolism of the book: elevated and powerful but also dangerous and vulnerable.’

Art teacher Andria Zafirakou, from North London’s Alperton school, UK, has won a USD$1 million prize and been named the ‘world’s best teacher’. Zafirakou was presented with the fourth annual Varkey Foundation Global Teacher prize in a ceremony held in Dubai over the weekend. In her drive to build better relationships between the school and students, Zafirakou learned basic phrases in Gujarati, Hindi and Tamil, and visited family homes. In her acceptance speech, she said: ‘Too often we neglect this power of the arts to actually transform lives, particularly in the poorest communities’.

Following an outcry, architects behind the 140 Broadway redesign in Manhattan have followed up with a revised proposal. The owners of the ‘privately owned public plaza’ attracted criticism earlier this year when their renovation plans included a tree planter which offset Isamu Noguchi’s iconic Red Cube sculpture, situated in the space – the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum claimed the designers had failed to consult with them, and the development went against Noguchi’s vision. The new plan has removed the offending planter.

The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) has announced the first list of artists taking part in the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. The exhibition is scheduled to open on 24 November, with around 80 artists from 30 countries, including Iman Raad and Aisha Khalid.

In awards and appointments: the Sharjah Art Foundation has named Mounira Al Solh, Doa Aly, Fatma Belkis and Onur Gökmen, Taus Makhacheva, Joe Namy and Ghassan Salhab as awardees of its 2018 Production Program with a total of USD$200,000 supporting new work; Jan Gerchow, the director of the Historisches Museum Frankfurt has been awarded the KAIROS Prize which comes with a USD$90,000 award for individuals with an ‘entrepreneurial spirit, persistence and creativity in the field of European culture’; and artist Thomas Demand was awarded the Grand Art Prize Berlin by the Akademie der Künste, which comes with an award of EUR15,000.

Hauser & Wirth have announced representation of Amy Sherald. ‘As a gallery, we aspire to represent an ever more diverse range of voices and visions. Amy’s distinctive approach to both painterly traditions and urgent issues of contemporary identity make her one of the most powerful new voices in American art today,’ Marc Payot, the gallery’s vice president and partner, said in a statement. Sherald and Kehinde Wiley were chosen last year to paint the Obamas’s official portraits: the first black artists to paint a presidential couple. Don’t miss Ian Bourland writing on her work for a recent frieze feature: ‘Sherald’s palette is muted, restrained, but somehow more vivid in spite (or because) of its economy of means.’

And in further Hauser & Wirth news, the gallery’s founders Iwan and Manuela Wirth are heading into the luxury hotel business. The couple are opening a boutique hotel in Braemar, Scotland, called the Fife Arms, according to Artnet. Formerly a hunting lodge of the Duke of Fife, the new hotel will also host site-specific artworks.