The year 2014 in art involves various significant events.
Events
A series of annual editathons entitled art + Feminism commences. Held by members of the Wikipedia community, they are undertaken in order to try to level off a gender disparity gap on the subject of the visual arts on the internet reference tool's site.[1]
January 22 – The value of Canada's leading contemporary art award, the Sobey Art Award, is increased to a total of $100,000.[2]
February 16 – Dominican-born Miami-based artist Maximo Caminero walks into the recently opened Pérez Art Museum Miami in Miami, Florida, and smashes one of twelve vases employed in an installation by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei. Caminero later tells the Miami New Times that he destroyed the vase "for all the local artists in Miami that have never been shown in museums here." Miami's museums and galleries, he claims, "have spent so many millions now on international artists," without, in his view, giving any attention to local talent. Later Wei Wei tells The New York Times "The argument does not support the act... It doesn't sound right, his argument doesn’t make much sense. If he really had a point, he should choose another way, because this will bring him trouble to destroy property that does not belong to him."[5] Caminero also tells police that he had been inspired by Wei Wei's own performance piece and triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn.[6]
April – The organization A Gathering of the Tribes and its founder and longtime executive director Steve Cannon are forced to relocate and its art gallery permanently shut when the occupancy agreement they had with the woman to whom the building had earlier been sold, Lorraine Zhang, ends. Simultaneously, a wall which retained some of an art-piece by David Hammons (which in a prior transaction had been sold to the art collector Dimitris Daskalopoulos after having been reproduced and the originality of the object transferred) is removed and relocated by the organization and replaced by another minus the previously pedigreed adornment.[7]
May – A section of We the People by the Vietnamese born Danish artist Danh Vo consisting of pieces of a disassembled replica scale model of the Statue of Liberty in the original sculpture's initial copper sheen is stolen by a thief as the work is laid out in City Hall Park in New York City for installation and then public exhibition.[9]
May 13 – A painting by Joan Mitchell of a bouquet. Untitled (1960), sells at auction during the post-war and contemporary art auction at Christie's in New York City for $11.9 million U.S., the highest price ever paid at an auction for a work of art by a woman, surpassing the $10.9 million paid for Berthe Morisot's "After Lunch" (1881) the previous year.[10][11]
July 7 – Odalisque in Red Pants by Henri Matisse (which was stolen off the wall at the Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas in the capital city of Venezuela and replaced with a forgery placed inside its former frame and then recovered in an FBI sting operation in Miami, Florida) arrives back in the South American nation after being returned by the United States government.
September 14 – A Statue of Amy Winehouse, created by Scott Eaton is unveiled at Stables Market, Camden Town in London, to mark the 31st birthday of the singer/songwriter Amy Winehouse (died 2011). Winehouse was heavily associated with Camden Town and the bronze sculpture will remain in this location as an armorial to the star.[20]
November - The statue of Adam by Tullio Lombardo which fell off its pedestal at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 2002 is put back on display at the museum after extensive period of repair and restoration said to be the most elaborate costly, and time consuming in the institution's history to date.[21]
November 20 – A canvas by the American painter Georgia O'Keeffe entitled Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1 (1932) sells for $44.1 million at Sotheby's in New York City, rendering it the highest known price ever paid for a work of art by a female artist and doubling and nearly tripling the $11.9 record previously paid only six months earlier for the Joan Mitchell work Untitled (1960).[25]
Exhibitions
February 1 – April 28 – "Anglo-American Portraiture in an Era of Revolution" at the Louvre in Paris, France.[26]