Art Movements, published every Thursday afternoon, is a roundup of must-know news, appointments, awards, and other happenings in today’s chaotic art world.
Smithsonian American Art Museum Names New Director
Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, currently executive director and CEO of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, will lead the Washington, DC, institution at a crucial juncture. In the Trump administration’s push to sanitize the telling of United States history, the museum’s exhibition on race and sculpture was specifically targeted in the president’s notorious executive order threatening funding for the Smithsonian Institution. Last fall, artists withdrew from a symposium linked to the exhibition, citing concerns that leaders caved to Trump pressure by making the event private.
Roscoe Hartigan’s appointment to helm the American Art Museum is also a return: She began her career at the institution in the 1970s and became its chief curator in 2003 before moving on to the Peabody Essex. In her early days at the Smithsonian, Roscoe Hartigan was a founding curator of the Joseph Cornell Study Center, later penning the first biography of the enigmatic artist — whose work exemplifies the unusual, unappreciated brand of modern art that she excels at elucidating.
Roscoe Hartigan will succeed Acting Director Jane Carpenter-Rock, who will stay on at the museum as deputy director for museum content and outreach.
Turner Prize Shortlist Announced
It’s that time of the year again. Simeon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau, and Tanoa Sasraku have been shortlisted for the 2026 Turner Prize. All four artists will show their work in a group exhibition at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art at Teesside University, opening this fall. Finalists receive a £10,000 ($13k) award; the winner of the top £25,000 ($33k) prize will be announced in December.
What Else Happened?
- Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama has been awarded the city of Kassel’s 2026 Arnold Bode Prize.
- The Portland-based artist residency Indigo Arts Alliance has appointed Mia Bogyo as deputy director. Tim Dooley, Whitney Hess, Ruki Neuhold-Ravikumar, and Michael Derek Thomas were named board members.
- Four Bay Area artists working in dance, film, public space, and theater — Sarah Crowell, Cheryl Dunye, Cece Carpio, and Danny Duncan — have been selected for the Rainin Arts Fellowship, administered by United States Artists.
- Print Center New York announced its fourth annual New Voices cohort: Noah Breuer, Zoran Dobric, Johannah Herr, Jazzmen Lee-Johnson, Michael Menchaca, Melih Meric, Anette Millington, and Amy Yoes.
Wildcard
It’s not every day that a high-profile museum director helps finance another institution’s latest acquisition. Johns Hopkins University announced this week that it has purchased Lindsay Adams’s massive diptych “Kind of Blue (1959)” (2024), an abstract meditation on Miles Davis’s eponymous album, with funds gifted by Dan Weiss, Philadelphia Museum of Art CEO and director. (Weiss, a Hopkins alumnus, chaired the university’s Art History department and later became dean of the School of Arts and Sciences; he is now a professor of humanities and an advisor to the provost for the arts.) Friends in high places, I guess!
