To obtain Morning Links in your inbox each weekday, signal up for our Breakfast with ARTnews publication.
The Headlines
NEA NIXES GRANT. Within the newest anti-DEI information, the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has cancelled its Problem America arts grant program for 2026, studies Hyperallergic. The 2001-founded program awards $10,000 for arts initiatives focusing on “underserved communities,” together with these with restricted entry to psychological well being companies. New necessities for the grant additionally not too long ago said that recipients should certify they won’t use the cash to “promote gender ideology.” The cancelation “sends a message to company donors that they need to rethink their grant-making,” noticed Robert Kesten, government director of Stonewall Nationwide Museum, Archives, and Library. He added that many of the museum’s company donors have “vanished” because the new Trump insurance policies. “That has been the most important shock, simply how briskly company and basis America has closed its doorways and is decreasing the scale and scope of the general public dialog on vital points,” he added.
UNCLEAR FUTURE FOR FEARLESS GIRL. In a associated story, Artnet News studies that the “destiny” of the Fearless Woman sculpture reverse the New York Inventory Alternate by Kristen Visbal is in query. The corporate behind it has reportedly “quietly backed away from its dedication to variety.” The landmark bronze sculpture, put in on Worldwide Girls’s Day in 2017, exhibits a younger lady along with her palms on her hips. In its preliminary location, she appeared to stare down the Wall Avenue Bull sculpture reverse. Nevertheless, the funding agency State Avenue World Advisors, which paid for Visbal’s set up, launched new 2025 tips on Friday, detailing the place shoppers ought to make investments, minus earlier necessities that firms meet sure gender, racial, and ethnic quotas, notably amongst board membership. “We consider nominating committees are finest positioned to find out the simplest board composition,” state the rules. “We encourage firms to make sure that there are enough ranges of numerous experiences and views represented within the boardroom.” The corporate has renewed the sculpture’s momentary allow at its present location many instances prior to now, however Artnet studies that it’s unclear whether or not it can wish to safe a 10-year allow, making certain its long run show.
The Digest
The Japanese Fluxus artist Tatsumi Orimoto, born in 1946, additionally recognized for his Bread Man character, has died. The artist famously connected loaves of bread onto his face like a masks, creating an alter-ego he carried out within the streets, and likewise together with his mom. [ArtReview]
German artist Anselm Kiefer says he feels “threatened” by his native nation’s far-right AfD celebration, and its current beneficial properties in a federal election. The 79-year-old spoke through the preview of his exhibition, “Inform Me The place the Flowers Are,” in Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum, from March 7 to June 9, 2025. [Le Figaro and AFP]
Banksy’s portray Crude Oil (Vettriano), a re-imagined model the late Scottish painter Jack Vettriano’s portray, The Singing Butler, bought at Sotheby’s in London for $5.4 million (inside its estimate). [BBC]
Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed will curate the forthcoming third version of the Diriyah Up to date Artwork Biennale in Saudi Arabia, opening in January, 2026. Razian is deputy director and head of exhibitions at Dubai’s Artwork Jameel, and Ahmed is a curator at Dubai’s Ishara Artwork Basis. [ArtReview]
The Kicker
YOKO ONO’S MIND. Yoko Ono’s largest retrospective to this point, “Music of the Thoughts,” has traveled from the Tate Trendy and is presently displaying at K20 in Düsseldorf till March 16, earlier than heading to Berlin. Writing for the London Review of Books, Frances Morgan takes readers via the artist’s observe and radical considering, in addition to the exhibit of over 200 items, which feels like one in every of this 12 months’s highlights. Ono, 92, who lived via the bombing of Tokyo by US forces, has seen “first-hand the expansion of the postwar counterculture trade, flyers and different ephemera recast as talismans for followers, investments for collectors or objects to be displayed in a museum or gallery,” writes Morgan. “An insistence on the facility of the speculative and a sense for the way in which materials issues accrue that means coexist in her work with out an excessive amount of friction,” she provides. A spotlight entails revisiting Ono’s 1971 piece by which she positioned adverts within the New York Occasions and Village Voice asserting her fictive, solo exhibit at MoMA. When guests got here to see the present, a person in a sandwich board instructed them Ono had seize flies in a jar, plus the perfume of her favourite fragrance, and launched them within the “actual middle of the museum.” Guests have been kindly invited to go discover them.
