Good morning! Let’s start with a fun story today.  

Tiernan Morgan writes about the Colony Room, “London’s most infamous private drinking club,” frequented by the likes of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Tracey Emin. “For sixty years,” he writes, “membership was contingent on wit, with prospective members expected to verbally spar with the staff.” It certainly sounds like one of a kind. 

In your must-read art news, students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts have taken down their artworks from their MFA show and replaced them with protest signs and letters to the administration. 

And while most eyes have been on museum losses and layoffs, a new study reveals that galleries have significantly struggled this year. 

Wishing you all a good week.

—Elisa Wouk Almino, Senior Editor

Darren Coffield’s Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia is an oral history of London’s most infamous private drinking club, which ran continuously and riotously from 1948 to 2008. Francis Bacon was undoubtedly the Colony’s most famous member, and other celebrated regulars included Cecily Brown, Lucian Freud, Peter O’Toole, John Hurt, and Lady Rose McLaren.

Angelenos now have a one-stop website consolidating exhibitions and events for Latinx art and culture. The website, LatinxArtsAlliance.org, is one of the first initiatives created by the newly formed Latinx Arts Alliance, which is comprised of five notable art spaces in the greater Los Angeles area.

A new survey by Art Basel and UBS found that 37% of major galleries have made sizable staff cuts during the pandemic.

At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, more than a dozen students are sitting out their final show and presenting their work at alternative, artist-run spaces instead.

A new bridge recently unveiled in China’s Guangdong province has broken a Guinness World record for the longest glass-bottomed bridge.