Danielle Forest Brandi Joins Beaumont Nathan, Kenta Murakami Named Partner at Ortuzar, and More: Industry Moves for September 17, 2026
by Maximilíano Durón · ARTnewsEditor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.
Industry Moves
Danielle Forest Brandi Joins Beaumont Nathan: After eight years as a senior sales director at Pace Gallery in New York, Forest Brandi will be a New York–based senior director at the global advisory firm. “She will play an important role in our ambitions to expand in New York and across the wider US, working with collectors to develop and evolve their collections,” said founding partner Wentworth Beaumont.
Kenta Murakami Named Partner at Ortuzar: Murakami joined the New York gallery in 2021 and “his close relationships with artists, curators, and collectors have been foundational to Ortuzar’s growth and success,” a press release says. He is now partner alongside founder Ales Ortuzar. The gallery also announced that Jeffrey Rowledge, who was previously a partner at Greene Naftali, has joined the gallery as senior director.
kąrî’kạchä seid’ou Wins 2026 Prince Claus Impact Award: Given by the Amsterdam-based Prince Claus Fund, the award comes with a grant of €50,000 ($57,300) and recognizes “an established changemaker, magnifying their impact globally.” An artist, poet, and educator, seid’ou is the founder of the Emancipatory Art Teaching Project at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and a cofounder of the artist collective blaxTARLINES, which is currently featured in Koyo Kouoh’s 2026 Venice Biennale exhibition, “In Minor Keys.” In a release, the Fund described him as “a key catalyst for artistic innovation in Ghana and across West Africa. For decades, he has challenged the systems through which art is taught, knowledge is produced and cultural authority is distributed—and built alternative ways of working.”
Pem Lham Wins 2026 Rubin Museum Himalayan Art Prize: Based in Thimphu, Bhutan, the painter and mixed-media artist will receive $30,000. “I have followed the Rubin Museum’s work in celebrating Himalayan art for many years, and receiving this recognition feels truly meaningful and beyond what I ever imagined,” she said in a statement.
Alexander Gray Associates Now Represents Márcia Falcão: The Rio de Janeiro–based artist, known for her gestural paintings of Black figures, is also represented by Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin and Basel. She will have her first show at Alexander Gray in spring 2028.
Pilar Corrias Takes on Sarah Ball: The British painter, known for her evocative portraits, will have her first exhibition with the gallery in June 2027, followed by her first institutional solo show in the UK at the Holburne Museum in Bath. “Sarah has a distinct ability at distilling the essence of a person,” gallerist Pilar Corrias said in a statement.
Marina Adams Joins Peter Blum Gallery: The New York–based artist had a show with the gallery this past spring. She is known for “a dynamic and powerful abstract language that explores the possibilities of form and movement through the structural force of color,” per a gallery release.
Tina M. Campt Named as MoMA’s 2026–27 Scholar in Residence: Campt is a feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and an art history professor at Princeton University. She is the author of several books, including A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (2021), Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), and the forthcoming Art in a Time of Sorrow, to be published in 2027.
Upė Foundation Names Two Curatorial Fellows in London: Connecting the Baltic region with the international contemporary art world, the London-based foundation will support the curatorial fellowships of Diāna Mikāne (of Latvia) at the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery and Martyna Ratnik (Lithuania) at Camden Art Centre. They are the first fellows from the Baltic region to work at UK art institutions.
Tropical Cream Names Deputy Editor: In her new role, Paige K. Bradley will oversee the publication’s editorial workflow and collaborate with the editor-in-residence. An artist, writer, and editor, Bradley has shown her art at Somerset House in London and Kunsthal Rotterdam and previously worked as an associate editor at Artforum and arts editor at Garage.
Big Number: $150 M.
That’s the price tag that Sotheby’s has given the art that will be on view at Chez Sotheby’s, a new project opening during Art Basel Paris next month that the auction house is billing as a restaurant-cum-salon. Located on Rue de Rivoli with views of the Jardin des Tuileries, the space will host works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Francis Bacon, and others. It goes without saying that the works will all be for sale.
Read This.
For the next month during opening hours between Saturday and Thursday, choreographer Sarah Michelson will stage nowhere, a dance performance without a beginning or end, in the second-floor atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She rarely gives interviews, so her thoughts on her practice are alone worth a read in this lengthy profile by New York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas. But Michelson, who has been represented by David Zwirner since 2023, also muses on what it means to present an ephemeral dance piece like nowhere in our current market-fueled art world. “I think it is extremely hard not to be objectified and not to be spoken down to,” she told the Times. “I think it’s really hard for dance not to be mediated in relationship to the value systems of other kinds of art, even when that seems to not be happening. It’s still demanding dance to be an entertainment or a success story, and it is not allowing longevity until longevity has already happened.”