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The Headlines
FROM BARN SALE TO AUCTION. After being picked up earlier this year at a barn sale in the Hamptons for just $50 dollars by an eagle-eyed art dealer, a painting later revealed to be a rare artwork by Emily Carr has sold at auction in Toronto for $250,000 ($349,000 CAD), the CBC reports. That’s a 500,000 percent return on investment for the signed work, titled Masset Q.C.I., which Heffel Fine Art Auction sold at above its $200,000 CAD high estimate. Carr was a member of the Group of Seven landscape painters. The piece depicts a carved grizzly bear atop a totem memorial post that once stood in the British Columbian village of Masset, and it reflects the artist’s known interest in recording First Nations heritage in the area through her paintings. Allen Treibitz, the dealer who spotted the painting at the barn sale, admitted he didn’t know about Carr’s work at the time. But, he said, “It had a look.”
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SAN FRANCISCO’S MUSEUMS ARE STRAINED. In the wake of the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s announcement of its indefinite closure, many other local art institutions have said they are struggling. Attendance figures at a range of institutions in the city remain stubbornly below pre-pandemic levels, and there has been a lack of fundraising in recent years, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Diminished tourism and perceptions of crime in downtown San Francisco have also contributed. Even the biggest museums are ailing. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art said 598,000 people visited the institution during the last fiscal year, and while that figure is projected to increase slightly this year, it still remains far below the 2019 level of 892,000. The museum has had to eliminate 20 staff positions this year, and has reported a nearly $30 million deficit in tax filings for the last fiscal year.
The Digest
India’s Kochi Biennale Foundation has announced that Goa-based artist Nikhil Chopra and the artist collective he cofounded, HH Art Spaces, will curate the sixth iteration of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, South Asia’s most high-profile recurring art exhibition. The exhibition will take place from December 12, 2025 to March 31, 2026. [Artforum]
About 30 towns around France are replacing publicity billboards in commercial zones with images of paintings by Monet, Van Gogh, and others, in an effort to “subvert what is ugly.” The project dubbed, “Beauty will save the world,” may extend throughout France next year. [Le Figaro]
A newly revealed bronze of English soccer captain Harry Kane has been called “dreadful,” with some claiming that it “makes him look mean and pinched.” [The Times]
Wrightwood 659 has become Chicago’s “buzziest art destination,” but not that much is known about its mysterious, deep-pocketed founder, Fred Eychaner, the chairman of the media company Newsweb Corporation, who ranks fourth on the list of top individual donors to Democrats. [WBEZ Chicago]
The Kicker
THE WILD WORLD OF JAMIAN JULIANO-VILLANI. If you haven’t heard about the artist Jamian Juliano-Villani, you either haven’t been hanging out with New York’s cool kids or you haven’t read Jay Bulger’s Vulture account of her chaotic life and practice. The article includes an inside look at her assembly-line-produced canvases—“ironic oil paintings,” as Bulger calls them—that appeared at Gagosian earlier this year. Sales of those works have helped fund her Manhattan gallery, O’Flaherty’s. A memorable paragraph recounts a conversation had before the opening of the Gagosian exhibition in which the artist and her O’Flaherty’s cofounder, Billy Grant , debate whether to be transparent about Juliano-Villani’s paintings being made by a team in China. “We should fly the whole village to the opening,” suggests Juliano-Villani as an option. Based on this piece, it’s not clear what Juliano-Villani decided to do in the end, but it appears that the Chinese team stayed home.
