On Wednesday, November 5, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors approved $125 million in funding for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) new building. The additional $475 million needed for the project will be raised by LACMA’s director, Michael Govan, and the museum’s nonprofit board. 

While  the $600-million revitalization project is still in the early stages, preliminary plans involve tearing down a portion of LACMA’s existing campus and replacing it with a sprawling structure designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. Located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile section of Los Angeles, LACMA’s campus features three William Pereira-designed structures from 1965.

The V&A have announced the re-launch of  the newly refurbished Italian sculpture Cast Court. Measuring 24 meters in height, the two galleries house some of the V&A’s largest objects and are among the most visited galleries in the museum.

Collecting plaster cast reproductions and electrotypes reached the height of popularity in the mid to late 19th-century when few people could afford to travel abroad. The South Kensington Museum (as the V&A was then known) was at the forefront of this enthusiasm, enabling visitors to admire and study faithful reproductions of important European monuments and works of art.

Before it was located on the National Mall and was still an independent museum on Capitol Hill, the Museum of African Art included both African and African-American art in its collection. That changed in 1979, when it became the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, focused on Africa, not the American diaspora. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the museum, and to celebrate it the museum has returned to its roots, supplementing its own collection with works by African-American artists in the collection of Camille and William Cosby, Jr.

Yes, that Bill Cosby.

The 18th-century cabinetmaker Nathaniel Gould left inkblots in his battered gray notebooks as he recorded the luxurious mahogany output of his workshop in Salem, Mass. His listings of clients and fees, found seven years ago in forgotten boxes at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, have enabled researchers to attribute his mostly unsigned antiques. Next weekend, about 20 of these pieces will go on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem in the exhibition “In Plain Sight: Discovering the Furniture of Nathaniel Gould.”

The show’s catalog blends tragic family lore with statistics. Gould’s clients lost their furniture in fires, their fortunes in bankruptcies and war and their family members in shipwrecks. Coffins for children were among his workshop’s frequent commissions.

The troubled life and demise of Vincent van Gogh follows a well-known trajectory: the precocious genius, the art world's indifference, the onset of angst and madness, and then, tragically, his suicide at age 37.

Or so we thought. But according to the groundbreaking research of Pulitzer Prize-winning biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, the painter didn't shoot himself: he was killed. When they first exposed this theory in their 2011 biography "Van Gogh: The Life," it was viciously attacked and contested. Rewriting history is not an easy task.

American artist Jeff Koons opened his first major solo exhibition in Asia at Gagosian Hong Kong on November 6.

Deftly interposed between his major career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York earlier this summer and another large-scale exhibition at the Pompidou Center scheduled to open later this month, “Jeff Koons: Hulk Elvis” showcases precision-machined bronze sculptures from his ongoing series that are inspired by inflatable figures of the popular comic book character, transplanted into a three-dimensional format.

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) remains one of the most important and influential artists of the Post War period and the central figure associated with pop art. Transmitting Andy Warhol is the first exhibition to explore Warhol’s role in establishing new platforms to disseminate art, and his experimentation with new approaches to art reception that redefined artistic practice and distribution.

The first major solo exhibition in the north of England that focuses on Warhol’s expanded practice, it brings together more than 100 works, across a range of media with major paintings to explore Warhol’s experiments with mass-produced imagery. He ‘transmitted’ these images back into the public realm using processes of serial repetition and mass dispersal, establishing new approaches to distribute his work. Warhol’s transmission of ideas and imagery brought to life his democratic conviction that ‘art should be for everyone.’

Get ready for Night at the Museums where anyone can visit nearly two dozens museums for free and one stop is featuring an exhibit on modern masters. It’s all part of Denver Arts Week.

“Matisse and Friends” at the Denver Art Museum will be open Saturday as part of the regular museum exhibits.

Twenty-three Denver-area museums will be open from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday.

During the inauguration of the Centre Pompidou’s new Photo Gallery, the museum’s president, Alain Seban, announced plans for an exhibition space dedicated to architecture and design. The new gallery will be located within the Centre Pompidou’s existing building in Paris’ lively Beaubourg neighborhood. According to “The Art Newspaper,” Seban said that he plans “to create, as soon as possible, a gallery of architecture and design by reclaiming spaces closed to the public.”

The new Photo Gallery, which is housed in former technical facilities at the Centre Pompidou, opened to the public on Wednesday, November 5. Stretching over 200 square meters, the gallery allows the museum to display a larger portion of its vast photography collection, which includes 40,000 prints and over 60,000 negatives.

The leadership of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) has once again condemned the St Louis chapter of its organization for consigning artifacts to auction. Held by the society since 1911-12, the two objects, a Mayan vase from Quiriqua in Honduras (est £3,800-£5,000) and a Zapotec urn from Monte Alban, Mexico (est £1,900-£3,100) are due to be sold at Bonhams, New York, on 12 November. Last month, the group put up its “Harageh Treasure” of Egyptian artifact for auction at Bonhams London, but the collection was pulled at the last minute and privately acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an undisclosed sum.

Fear was the emotion that came to mind when Ana Gamazo was first approached about putting her private art collection on display.

Gamazo and her husband, prominent Spanish businessman Juan Abelló, had spent nearly three decades amassing some 500 pieces in a collection considered by Spanish curators to rank among the best in the world. But the collection had been guided by the pair’s personal taste, leaving Gamazo terrified of how revealing the exhibition would be. “What would critics say? What would people think of the art we own?”

The couple were eventually convinced and the Abelló Collection, currently on display at Madrid’s CentroCentro Cibeles, features 160 works spanning five centuries.

Cornell University and its conservators faced a lot of challenges rescuing three rare 7-by-50-foot murals from the Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island.

The first challenge was finding two of them.

“We didn’t even know what colors they were, because no one had seen them since they were painted over,” said Andrew C. Winters, the director of capital projects and planning for Cornell Tech, the home of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute.

As a junior talent agent at MCA a half-century ago, Jerry Perenchio was assigned to accompany British actor Charles Laughton as he toured the U.S. giving staged theatrical readings.

In his off-hours, Laughton wanted to visit art museums, and Perenchio went along with him. A lifelong fascination with art had begun, and as Perenchio rose in the entertainment industry — ultimately becoming chairman of Univision Communications — he used his wealth to amass some of the world's greatest art.

At his Bel-Air home Wednesday, the 83-year-old Perenchio said that he will be giving almost all of it — at least 47 works valued at $500 million — to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The colonial-era statue of a woman caressing a gazelle has mysteriously disappeared from a busy roundabout in Tripoli, the capital of Libya, "Art Daily" reports.

The historic bronze was removed in the early hours of Tuesday by “unidentified men who were probably offended by its nudity for religious reasons," a witness told AFP. Although the authors of the removal remain unknown, many locals blame Islamist militias.

This is not the first attack directed towards the iconic statue, which was sculpted by an Italian artist in the early 1930s, when Libya was an Italian colony.

The Norton Museum of Art presents "Master Prints: Dürer to Matisse," featuring astonishing works on paper including woodcuts, etchings, engravings, aquatints, and lithographs that range from the 15th to 20th centuries. This not-to-be-missed exhibition brings together several of the earliest as well as later examples of the golden age of printmaking. Works by old masters Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, and Canaletto, will be displayed alongside those of modern masters Degas, Matisse, Picasso, and Cezanne. The exhibition is on view through Sunday, Feb. 15, 2015, and is accompanied by a video demonstrating printmaking processes, and texts describing the role prints held in society before the advent of photography.

“Each and every work in this exhibition is rare, and of a breathtaking quality that is no longer available on the market,” says Jerry Dobrick, the Norton’s Curatorial Associate for European Art.

A Chinese movie tycoon dished out $61.8 million for a Vincent van Gogh painting at a Sotheby's New York auction this week, the highest auction price for a painting by the artist in over 15 years.

The 1890 "Still Life, Vase with Daisies, and Poppies," sold to Wang Zhongjun, one of China's richest men, fetched far more than the $30 million to $50 million estimate, and is said to be the highest price paid for Western art by a Chinese collector.

A celebrated portrait of a Parisian actress by Edouard Manet set a new auction record for the artist Wednesday, during the second day of a major fall sale in New York of impressionist and modern art.

“Le Printemps,” or “Spring,” was sold at Christie’s Wednesday for $65 million, almost doubling the previous record of $33.2 million for the French impressionist.

Works by American artist Frank Stella are currently being featured in three exhibitions organized by leading galleries. Dominique Lévy is inaugurating her London outpost with the show “Local History: Castellani, Judd, Stella,” which is complemented by a partner exhibition of the same title at her Manhattan gallery. Meanwhile, Marianne Boesky Gallery is hosting a show of Stella’s sculptures in New York. Stella is co-represented by Lévy and Boesky.

Stella, who has been a dominant figure in abstract painting since the early 1960s, is best known for his Minimalist works and post-painterly abstractions. He gained immediate recognition in 1959, thanks to his “Black Paintings” -- a series of precisely-striped canvases that were created according to a predetermined, circumscribed system conceived by the artist.

It's not the sort of thing you generally see in a museum: a comfortable easy chair, a working TV set turned to an afternoon talk show on which "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" mom Kris Jenner is making salsa.

But this unlikely arrangement is, in fact, a work of art, on view as part of the Hammer Museum's Robert Heinecken retrospective, "Object Matter." The longtime L.A. artist, who passed away in 2006, was known for his pioneering use of found photographs in sculptural assemblages and vast wall installations. He was also known for undertaking guerrilla actions, such as surreptitiously printing images into new editions of "Time" magazine and then returning the copies to the newsstand. (San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art has an example.)