In January 2024, news about Brent Sikkema’s brutal murder in Brazil shocked and horrified the art community. Last week, a federal jury found his estranged husband, Daniel Sikkema, guilty of arranging the murder. Our senior editor Valentina Di Liscia has the details of this grim story.
Also today, a peek into the ideas brewing among the latest crop of MFA students at Columbia University, the secret life of Anni Albers, and Karla Knight’s cosmic paintings.
—Hakim Bishara, editor-in-chief
Husband Found Guilty of Scheming Murder of Art Dealer Brent Sikkema
A federal jury has found Daniel Sikkema guilty for his role in the murder-for-hire of his estranged husband, the New York art dealer Brent Sikkema. The 75-year-old gallerist was stabbed 18 times in his Rio de Janeiro townhouse in the early hours of January 14, 2024, in a brutal crime that shocked the art world and left Sikkema’s loved ones searching for answers. | Valentina Di Liscia
News
- Unionized staff at the Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts officially called for the renaming of the institution and other campus buildings due to Les Wexner’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
- Artist Alejandro Valencia’s work in the Columbia University MFA show is an indictment of the school’s crackdown on pro-Palestine activists, including a student who says she has been denied her degree.
From Our Critics
Anni Albers Wasn’t Afraid to Start From Zero
You recognize Anni Albers from her revolutionary, abstract woven artworks, incisive essays, books, art prints, or fabric designs.
But you might not know about the artist’s obsession with white blouses, how much she delighted in English-language idioms, and her penchant for extra-crispy Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Packed with lively detail and illuminating anecdotes, Nicholas Fox Weber’s Anni Albers: A Life traces the historic sweep of the artist’s biography and career, from her birth to a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin in 1899 to her 1933 escape from Nazi Germany to her later years in Connecticut. | Julie Schneider
Karla Knight’s Cosmic Conspiracies
What to make of such half-familiar signs? Are they richly composed blueprints for mysterious systems connected to extraterrestrial lifeforms — schematics for advanced engines that could guide us toward wormholes to new coordinates of potential? Or attempts at mapping some underlying substrate of the universe? Such questions emerge from the shifting arrays in paintings and tapestries in Orbit. | Brian Karl
Features
Human Connection Cuts Through Technology at Focus Art Fair
The show, New York’s only art fair dedicated to contemporary Asian art, featured uniquely tender subversions of this year’s topical theme.
Community
A View From the Easel
Kevin Callahan marks three years in his studio after losing his partner of 39 years and moving to a new home. He still finds reasons to smile as he paints and draws under the California sun.
Memorable Moment
From the Archive
Anni Albers’s Thoughts on Textiles Loom Large
On Weaving offers a model for how to write in a way that incorporates theoretical examination alongside practical content; in it Anni Albers provides valuable — and often overlooked — thoughts on art and creative work. | Becky Peterson
