Hirshhorn hires Performa alumnus
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, is making a major investment in performance. The museum has hired Mark Beasley, a former curator of New York’s Performa festival, as its first curator of media and performance art. Beasley—now one of five full-time curators at the museum—will be tasked with planning one-off events, exhibitions and acquisitions of live art. The appointment was fast-tracked by a gift from the philanthropists Robert and Arlene Kogod, who are supporting a Smithsonian-wide initiative to fund new positions for scholars. “We want performance and media works to be fully integrated,” says the museum’s director, Melissa Chiu. The Hirshhorn is hosting its first durational performance—in which a female guitarist endlessly strums an E chord—as part of an exhibition of work by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson (until 8 January). J.H.
The world’s newest UN ambassador?
Design Miami is joining forces with an unlikely partner—the United Nations (UN)—to promote green initiatives in design and architecture. The programme brings together designers, architects, educators and policymakers to discuss eco-friendly building solutions. Rodman Primack, Design Miami’s chief creative officer, says that the partnership will enable the UN to connect with an audience that it has had difficulty reaching on its own. “We can get our community to understand that cities have to become more efficient and buildings need to be multifunctional,” he says. The initiative, called Building Legacy: Designing for Sustainability, launches this week with a series of talks at the fair. E.S.
Public sector gets a new face
There’s a new public art curator in town. Philipp Kaiser will take over as the curator of Art Basel in Miami Beach’s Public sector from 2017. The Swiss-born, Los Angeles-based curator and critic served most recently as director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and as senior curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He succeeds Nicholas Baume, the director of the Public Art Fund in New York, who has organised the display of outdoor sculpture on Collins Avenue for the past four years. J.H.