The painting in question. (Courtesy Wikipedia)

The Houston, Texas, man accused of spray -painting Pablo Picasso's Woman in a Red Armchair (1929) at the Menil Collection has said that he never intended to harm the painting.

The judge hearing his case was unsympathetic to the argument (at least partially because the man has granted interviews in which he has admitted to being the one behind the vandalism). Anyway, now he's a flight risk.

More details via the AP.

Medina. (Courtesy Manifesta)

Houston's Menil Collection announced today that its 2012 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement will go to the Mexico City–based curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, who earlier this year organized the generally well-received Manifesta 9 in Genk, Belgium. Mr. Medina will receive a $15,000 stipend for winning, and join a list of former Hopps winners that includes Eungie Joo, Maria Lind and Adam Szymczyk.

Mr. Medina served as the inaugural associate curator of Tate Modern's Latin American art collections from 2002 to 2008, and has curated and published widely. He also has a habit of giving his shows really great names, like "20 Million Mexicans Can't Be Wrong," shown at the South London Gallery in 2002, and "Cannibal Dominoes," at the Contemporary Art Project in Murcia, Spain, in 2010.

The award, which has been given to an early to mid-career curator every two years since 2001, is named for trailblazing contemporary art curator Walter Hopps, who cofounded the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1957 and ran the Pasadena Museum of Art (now the Norton Simon), which gave important shows to Warhol, Duchamp and others during his tenure.

The jury for the prize was comprised of Russell Ferguson, the chair of UCLA's department of art, Whitney curator Elisabeth Sussman and independent curator Ulrich Loock.

Congratulations, Mr. Medina.

Still from cell phone video, posted by fused00828, 2012. (Courtesy YouTube)

A video of a young man shown vandalizing Pablo Picasso's painting Woman in a Red Armchair at the Menil Collection surfaced on YouTube recently and is making the rounds. The video captures the vandal in flagrante delicto by an amateur cellphone videographer as the vandal was stenciling an image of a bullfighter killing a bull, and the word "Conquista."

According to the Houston Chronicle, which has a good report of the episode, the vandal, a self-described up-and-coming Mexican-American artist, stopped to tell the cell-phone-wielding person that he did it in the hopes of honoring Picasso's work.

The painting, which was rushed to the conservation lab, where chief conservator Brad Epley swiftly went to work before the paint dried, is reported to have an "excellent prognosis."

Menil Collection. (Photo by Jetheriot / Flickr)

Michelle White, who helped organize the Richard Serra drawing retrospective, which recently graced the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been promoted from associate curator to curator at the Menil Collection.

Ms. White has been with the Menil since 2006, when she joined as an assistant curator, and was appointed to associate curator three years later, Dallas Art News reports. Previously she had been a curatorial assistant at the nearby Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

Menil director Josef Helfenstein said in a statement, "Michelle distinguished herself … by organizing splendid exhibitions, presenting lectures and participating in other programs, and making important contributions to our scholarly publications.”

As Glasstire notes, there are major changes happening at the intimate museum: last month, the museum announced plans to open a café across the street from the main Menil building, which was designed by Renzo Piano and opened in 1987.

In other Menil-related news, former Menil curator Franklin Sirmans, who is now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was just named artistic director of the Prospect 3 biennial in New Orleans.

The Artists Documentation Program website.

The Artists Documentation Program, a branch of the Menil Collection, has opened the doors on its impressive collection of artist interviews and placed the whole archive online. Previously only available to curators and art historians, the online project was funded in association with the Whitney and the Harvard Art Museums’ Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art.

It's an excellent time-suck for anyone looking for a distraction over the weekend, a bit like when The Paris Review put their entire interview collection online, though these are video interviews and often you can see the works being discussed. Standouts of the 33 interviews, which were all conducted in the past 30 years, include Jasper Johns, Brice Marden and Lawrence Weiner.

Here's how the interview with the recently deceased Cy Twombly ends:

Cy Twombly [caught up in the conversation]: Yeah, I—oh, look at how much time we’ve killed!

[ADP Associate Director] Carol Mancusi-Ungaro: In the preservation of art, we killed time. I like that. (laughs)

Take a look over here.