Sirmans Takes Warhol Foundation Chair; Turner Collection Eyes $20M

Franklin Sirmans, director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, has been elected chair of the Andy Warhol Foundation board, succeeding scholar Deborah Willis. The foundation also announced three new board members — Cheryl Finley, Candice Hopkins, and Suzi Kwon Cohen — while Naomi Beckwith and Cary Davis completed their terms.

The news leads this week's roundup of appointments, grants, and market developments across the art world, first reported in ARTnews's "On Balance" newsletter on November 11, 2026.

Who got the money this week?

Photographer Ming Smith and installation artist Pepón Osorio each receive $75,000 as the 2027–29 CARA Fellows. The fellowship, administered by the New York–based Center for Art, Research and Alliances, honors "mid-to-late career artists and artists' legacies across disciplines, with an intention to uplift voices and knowledges that offer alternatives to established historical perspectives," according to a release.

The money isn't the whole package. CARA support can take "different forms, from archival assistance, debt counseling, and legal advice to connections with social services, scholars, curators, and institutions."

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts spread its giving wider: more than $400,000 in Creative Research Grants went to 41 artists, with each recipient receiving $10,000. Named grantees include Marjani Forté-Saunders, Dakota Gearhart, Chloe Alexandra Thompson, Harrison Wayne, and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo. The full list is on FCA's website.

Artadia named its three 2026 Boston awardees: Cathy Della Lucia, Harry Gould Harvey IV, and Eric Rannestad. Each receives an unrestricted $15,000 grant.

Which curators and boards changed?

The Studio Museum in Harlem hired Ade Omotosho as associate curator, where he will oversee the museum's permanent collection. He's a familiar face there — Omotosho took part in the museum's six-month Art Leadership Praxis program in 2025. He arrives from the Dallas Museum of Art, where he was most recently an assistant curator.

Two boards gained members:

• American Folk Art Museum: Christopher C. Giglio, a longtime folk art collector and senior managing director at Rubenstein Communications, becomes board president. He succeeds Elizabeth V. Warren, who becomes president emerita.
• Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA): Four new trustees joined — Jeremie D. Talbot, Juliana Diaz, Nicholas B. Hawkins, and Heather McPherson. Talbot and Diaz are both alumni, with BFAs in illustration and graphic design respectively.

What's happening in the gallery and fair world?

Katie Adams joined the Outsider Art Fair as partner. A longtime supporter of the fair, she spent 14 years at the Barnes Foundation in development roles.

On the representation front:

• Regen Projects now represents Los Angeles painter Brandon D. Landers, known for figurative portraits of friends, family, and community. His first solo show with the gallery opens in January.
• Mariane Ibrahim added textile artist Cristina Flores Pescorán. The gallery will show her work at MIRA Paris, running November 12–15.

The Big Number: $20 million

Christie's expects Ted Turner's collection of Western art to bring $20 million when it hits the block on January 20. The sale spans roughly 20 works, and the top two lots each carry high estimates of $6 million: Albert Bierstadt's 1866 landscape Yosemite Valley and Thomas Moran's The Inner Gorge, Grand Canyon.

The Bierstadt has been here before. It carried the same $6 million estimate when it sold at Sotheby's in 2003 — where Turner bought it.

Read this: the Lauder case study

The great wealth transfer — the passage of assets from aging collectors to their children — keeps reshaping the market. Recent major sales from the collections of Rosa de la Cruz, S.I. Newhouse, and Patricia and Robert Weis suggest heirs often aren't keeping what their parents built.

Ronald Lauder offers the most revealing current example. The billionaire cosmetics heir has appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list since it began in 1990. This month, both the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal published features on the merger between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Neue Galerie — Lauder's Fifth Avenue museum of German and Austrian modern art, which opened in 2001 and reopens tomorrow. The merger will be completed by 2028.

The reporting shows Lauder pulling back on multiple fronts. He has lent his art to museums less frequently and stopped giving to political campaigns. One dealer told the FT he sold works at Christie's this past summer. A spokesperson framed it all as "long-term philanthropic and estate planning."

The two papers even disagree on what the collection is worth: the Journal says $1.5 billion, the FT more than $2 billion. The Met has raised $200 million for the Neue Galerie's upkeep, $50 million of it from the Lauder family.

What does the merger actually change?

The fine print matters. Met director and CEO Max Hollein told the FT that Lauder had created "not only a beloved institution but a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art." But he admitted to the WSJ that the Met could technically move the Neue Galerie's works and that they fall under its general collection-management policies.

Lauder drew his own line: the "Klimts have to stay in the Klimt room."

The FT also details how much the deal owed to Lauder's elder daughter, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, who joined the Met's board in 2023. Her father calls her "the merger queen" — a talent, he said, she inherits from both him and his mother, Estée Lauder. How the Met honors that Klimt-room condition, and how the 2028 completion plays out, will be the test of whether this wealth-transfer story ends differently.