21c Hotel Launches in Bentonville

21c Museum Hotel, a boutique hotel-cum-museum that opened its first location in 2006, in Louisville, Ky., has now come to Bentonville, Ark. The spacious, minimalist structure is designed by New York-based Deborah Berke Partners and is a stone's throw from the center of the small Arkansas town put on the national art map in 2011 by the opening of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.  Read More

Yale University Art Gallery Reopens to Acclaim

After 14 years and an approximately $135-million outlay, the newly renovated Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven opened its doors on Dec. 12 to near-universal acclaim. With an upgrade by architects Duncan Hazard and Richard Olcott of New York-based Ennead Architects, it has added 25,000 square feet of exhibition space (now totaling 65,000 square feet), permitting a far greater selection of its holdings to be exhibited.
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Liu Ye's Bamboo Modernism

Beijing-based artist Liu Ye is in New York to finish painting his ultra-refined nine-part Bamboo Bamboo Broadway in situ at Sperone Westwater for his show of the same name [opens Sept. 6].  The title riffs on a Mondrian favorite, Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942-43), signaling a blend of Chinese imagery (bamboo) and Western modernism (grids).
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Valerie Hammond and Kiki Smith Are Not Afraid of Ghosts

"Streaming Spirits" is the evocative title of a show of new prints by Kiki Smith and Valerie Hammond organized by curator Crista Cloutier at Galerie Pfriem at the Savannah College of Art and Design's Lacoste, France, campus [through Sept. 1]. The exhibition, loosely based on Victorian "ghost" photography (in which spirits were putatively captured on film), is only fitfully vested in the supernatural; the artists are more concerned with human energy. Incidentally, Lacoste is the site of the chateau of the Marquis de Sade (now owned by Pierre Cardin), where ghosts are believed to linger. Hammond was raised Catholic and says she still believes in spirits and saints. "I am always interested in people who believe in illusions since as artists, we are illusionists," she told A.i.A.
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