Art Movements: Meet The Met’s New Photography Curator

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Oluremi C. Onabanjo’s new position, grants for Queens artists and orgs, the “pinkest pink” turns 10, and extra artwork business information.

Art Movements, printed each Thursday afternoon, is a roundup of must-know information, appointments, awards, and different happenings in at this time’s chaotic artwork world.

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Oluremi C. Onabanjo Heads to The Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a brand new curator of pictures: Oluremi C. Onabanjo, a scholar with a deep dedication to African and Black diasporic histories of the medium. Born in London and raised in Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and the United States, she heads to The Met from the Museum of Modern Art, the place she’s held curatorial roles within the pictures division since 2021, engaged on exhibitions of Ernest Cole, Ming Smith, and others. Among her celebrated publications is Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos (2022), centered on the Brooklyn photographer’s chronicles of a historic 1977 Pan-African artwork competition. Onabanjo was the inaugural recipient of the Vilcek Foundation Prize for curatorial work, awarded in 2025.

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A Boost for Queens Artists

A whopping 129 Queens-based artists, collectives, and nonprofit organizations will get $493,350 in grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. Among this 12 months’s Queens Arts Fund recipients is artist Adelle Yingxi Lin, pictured above. “This funding makes possible a connection between ecological observation and cultural practice — translating water quality data from Newtown Creek, a recovering Superfund site, into multilingual calligraphic textiles created with the communities who live alongside it, making environmental conditions visible and personal,” Lin informed Hyperallergic. See the total checklist of awardees right here.

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What Else Happened?

• Melissa Chiu will step down from her position helming the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, to hitch the Guggenheim Museum in New York City as its new director. Read extra at Hyperallergic.
• United States Artists introduced the awardees of its $50,000 Knight Arts + Tech fellowship: LIZN’BOW (Liz Ferrer and Bow Ty), Miguel Novelo, Rhonda Holberton, Taeyoon Choi, and Wes Taylor.
• 47 Canal, the 15-year-old gallery identified for bolstering the careers of artists together with Anicka Yi, Josh Kline, and Janiva Ellis, is transferring to Chelsea, the place it’s going to share an area with Marlborough Gallery inheritor Max Levai‘s new enterprise. Will 47 Canal turn into 529 West twentieth? Unlikely. (The gallery has relocated earlier than, but it surely’s at all times saved its identify.)
• The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art has chosen Bryan Collier as its artist honoree for this 12 months’s Carle Honors, which acknowledges essential contributions to the beloved and formative artwork type.

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Wildcard

British artist, paint mixer, and provocateur Stuart Semple is celebrating 10 years of his “pinkest pink” pigment by giving freely signed editions without cost to anybody besides Anish Kapoor. That’s proper: If you add the paint to your cart on Semple’s web site, you have to affirm that you’re not Kapoor, who controversially holds unique inventive rights to the world’s blackest black since 2016. The ultra-bright, fluorescent-pink powder can be utilized to create watercolors, acrylics, oils, and extra. Most importantly, Semple says, it reveals Kapoor “how nice it feels when you share your colours.”