Orlando Smith, Aging Is A Fact!, 2025. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Ruth Nash Fund purchase. © Orlando Smith. Photo by Tenari Tuātagaloa.

Ninety+ works go to SFMOMA

Italian-American sculptor Bruno Lucchesi.

Bruno Lucchesi dies at 99
In early July, acclaimed Italian-American sculptor Bruno Lucchesi passed away at the age of 99, just weeks before his 100th birthday. For more than seven decades, Lucchesi created figurative sculptures in bronze, terracotta and marble inspired by everyday life. His work explored themes of family, compassion, spirituality and the human experience. Lucchesi’s sculptures are held in many of the world’s leading museums and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Dallas Museum of Art, amongst others, as well as numerous universities, churches and civic institutions throughout the United States and Europe. “Bruno had an extraordinary gift for capturing the human spirit,” says Ron Cavalier, founder of Cavalier Galleries, who represents the artist. “He sculpted effortlessly—it was as if the clay in his fingers came from his soul. He was the first major artist to show with the gallery early on in my art career. He was a creative genius and one of the kindest people I’ve ever met.”

Pro-Vietnam-War Demonstration, New York, 1970. Photo taken by Benedict J. Fernandez. Museum of the City of New York, 99.150.15.

Art & Activism in New York
Opening September 25, the Museum of the City of New York will host a new permanent exhibition titled Raise Your Voice: New York Activism. The inaugural show of the newly established Puffin Foundation Center for Social Activism, Raise Your Voice traces more than 250 years of activism in New York, from the earliest 17th-century petitions to the mass mobilizations of the 21st century, organized around four tactics that generations of New Yorkers have used to drive change: demonstrations, organizing, art and media, and direct action. “From the earliest days of this city, New Yorkers have gathered, organized and spoken out to demand a better city,” says Stephanie Hill Wilchfort, the museum’s director and president. “Raise Your Voice and the Puffin Foundation Center for Social Activism give that long history a permanent home at our museum and remind every visitor that they, too, are part of that story.”

Takeshi Kawashima, New York M-33 (detail), 1966, acrylic on canvas, 68 x 68 in. Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Gift of Anne and Arthur Goldstein © Takeshi Kawashima. Photo © Bruce M. White.

Huge Zimmerli Art Museum acquisition
The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey recently announced a gift of more than 70 modern and contemporary works from the collection formed by longtime benefactors Anne and Arthur Goldstein. Spanning painting, sculpture, photography and a major selection of works on paper, the gift features established artists Tauba Auerbach, Darren Bader, Mark Bradford, Nicole Eisenman and John Waters, alongside emerging voices, including Ever Baldwin, Troy Lamarr Chew II and Lamar Peterson, as well as artists only now receiving broader institutional attention, such as Alice Mackler and Kunié Sugiura. —