Events
- A series of annual editathons entitled art + Feminism commences. Held by members of the Wikipedia community, they are undertaken in order to try to level off a gender disparity gap on the subject of the visual arts on the internet reference tool's site. [1]
- January 22 – The value of Canada's leading contemporary art award, the Sobey Art Award, is increased to a total of $100,000. [2]
- February 7 – The British National Gallery in London announces its first ever purchase of a major American painting, George Bellows' Men of the Docks (1912). [3]
- February 12 – The discovery of two new portraits, presumed to depict William Shakespeare, the Wörlitz portrait and the Boaden portrait, is announced by German scholar Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel. [4]
- February 16 – Dominican-born Miami-based artist Maximo Caminero walks into the recently opened Pérez Art Museum Miami in Miami, Florida, and smashes one of twelve vases employed in an installation by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei. Caminero later tells the Miami New Times that he destroyed the vase "for all the local artists in Miami that have never been shown in museums here." Miami's museums and galleries, he claims, "have spent so many millions now on international artists," without, in his view, giving any attention to local talent. Later Wei Wei tells The New York Times "The argument does not support the act... It doesn't sound right, his argument doesn’t make much sense. If he really had a point, he should choose another way, because this will bring him trouble to destroy property that does not belong to him." [5] Caminero also tells police that he had been inspired by Wei Wei's own performance piece and triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn . [6]
- April – The organization A Gathering of the Tribes and its founder and longtime executive director Steve Cannon are forced to relocate and its art gallery permanently shut when the occupancy agreement they had with the woman to whom the building had earlier been sold, Lorraine Zhang, ends. Simultaneously, a wall which retained some of an art-piece by David Hammons (which in a prior transaction had been sold to the art collector Dimitris Daskalopoulos after having been reproduced and the originality of the object transferred) is removed and relocated by the organization and replaced by another minus the previously pedigreed adornment. [7]
- April 26 – The artist Judy Chicago, as part of her retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum and in celebration of her 75th birthday, presents a fireworks display in the New York City borough of Brooklyn's Prospect Park. [8]
- May – A section of We the People by the Vietnamese born Danish artist Danh Vo consisting of pieces of a disassembled replica scale model of the Statue of Liberty in the original sculpture's initial copper sheen is stolen by a thief as the work is laid out in City Hall Park in New York City for installation and then public exhibition. [9]
- May 13 – A painting by Joan Mitchell of a bouquet. Untitled (1960), sells at auction during the post-war and contemporary art auction at Christie's in New York City for $11.9 million U.S., the highest price ever paid at an auction for a work of art by a woman, surpassing the $10.9 million paid for Berthe Morisot's "After Lunch" (1881) the previous year. [10] [11]
- May 18 – The Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York reopens in its new building, a 187 meter long facility designed by the Swiss architecture firm of Herzog and de Meuron. [12]
- After May 22 – Politically subversive street art by "Headache Stencil" begins to appear in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand. [13] [14]
- June 17 – Infrared imagery of Pablo Picasso's 1901 painting The Blue Room reveals another painting beneath the surface. [15]
- June 27 – The Mauritshuis art museum is set to reopen in The Hague, Netherlands following a major renovation.
- July 4 – After having been closed in 2011 for expansion and renovation, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts reopens with the estimated $145 million additions of an exhibition and conference center designed by Tadao Ando and a reshaping of its existing galleries by Annabelle Selldorf. [16] [17]
- July 7 – Odalisque in Red Pants by Henri Matisse (which was stolen off the wall at the Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas in the capital city of Venezuela and replaced with a forgery placed inside its former frame and then recovered in an FBI sting operation in Miami, Florida) arrives back in the South American nation after being returned by the United States government.
- August 5 – Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red , an installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies in the moat of the Tower of London (England) by Paul Cummins with Tom Piper, is unveiled to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, being dismantled after November 11 after around 4 million people have visited. [18]
- August 9 – The Aspen Art Museum in Aspen, Colorado officially reopens to the public in a new structure designed by architect Shigeru Ban. [19]
- September 14 – A Statue of Amy Winehouse, created by Scott Eaton is unveiled at Stables Market, Camden Town in London, to mark the 31st birthday of the singer/songwriter Amy Winehouse (died 2011). Winehouse was heavily associated with Camden Town and the bronze sculpture will remain in this location as an armorial to the star. [20]
Bronze statue of Winehouse in Camden Town, London unveiled in September 2014 - November - The statue of Adam by Tullio Lombardo which fell off its pedestal at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 2002 is put back on display at the museum after extensive period of repair and restoration said to be the most elaborate costly, and time consuming in the institution's history to date. [21]
- November 16 – The Harvard Art Museums redesigned by Renzo Piano reopen after a six-year hiatus. [22]
- November 19 – The Whitney Museum of American Art says goodbye to their Marcel Breuer Madison Avenue home with a final commissioned work in the form of a Will Pappenheimer Whitney themed digital drug trip piece entitled Proxy, 5-WM2A and the institution's director Adam D. Weinberg announces the opening of their new space by Renzo Piano in Manhattan's meatpacking District adjoining the High Line on May 1, 2015. [23] [24]
- November 20 – A canvas by the American painter Georgia O'Keeffe entitled Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1 (1932) sells for $44.1 million at Sotheby's in New York City, rendering it the highest known price ever paid for a work of art by a female artist and doubling and nearly tripling the $11.9 record previously paid only six months earlier for the Joan Mitchell work Untitled (1960). [25]
