ARTnews

Click here to read the full article. The U.S. has sent back to Cambodia 30 artifacts that were allegedly stolen by Douglas Latchford, a late antiquities dealer who has been accused of leading a network that trafficked in objects that were looted from the country. Among the objects that were officially returned to Cambodia this week was a 10th-century sculpture of the Hindu god Skanda atop a peacock. Deeming the work a “masterpiece,” New York authorities alleged that Latchford had stolen the sculpture in 1997 and subsequently sold it for $1.5 million. The Skanda sculpture had come from the ancient Khmer capital...

Click here to read the full article. The Tate in London has reached a settlement agreement involving three artists who sued the British museum for breach of contract and discrimination earlier this year. The resolution, which was first reported by the Guardian this week, will see a six-figure sum paid out to the artists. The settlement follows allegations that the institution had acted illegally when it barred an outside curator from working with the artist Jade Montserrat. In 2017, Montserrat publicly accused the art dealer and Tate benefactor Anthony d’Offay of sexual misconduct and racist behavior during the course of a...

Click here to read the full article. For the first time since 2018, Ballroom Marfa, the 19-year-old kunsthalle in far west Texas, brought together supporters for a summer benefit on Saturday in Bridgehampton, New York. Hosted on cofounder Virginia Lebermann’s estate, the fête began with guests taking a golf cart past a potato field and down a long, winding driveway to a charming shingled cottage that veiled the property’s enormous value. In Lebermann’s twinkling garden, guests mingled as performers danced in black gauzy costumes. Some twirled on aerial silks, while another spun in a human-sized hamster ball grazing the pool’s edge. A...

Click here to read the full article. London’s Horniman Museum and Gardens said last week that it would return to Nigeria ownership of 12 plaques from the Benin Bronzes, a cache of objects seized from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897 by British soldiers. The museum said it was transferring ownership of these Benin Bronzes, plus 60 other objects that include an altar piece and brass bells, to Nigeria. However, it did not provide details about when—or whether—the objects themselves would be repatriated. In many circles, the Benin Bronzes have been considered painful symbols of a colonial conquest. The objects made their...

Click here to read the full article. To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. The Headlines THE MUSEUM-LEADERSHIP NEWS DOES NOT QUIT. Last week, the Met said its director, Max Hollein, will add chief executive to his title. Now, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art has named its next director, the Commercial Appeal reports. She is Zoe Kahr, who is currently the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ’s deputy director for curatorial and planning. Kahr takes the place of Emily Ballew Neff, who stepped down last year and now runs the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas. She will be tasked with overseeing the institution’s move to a new Downtown locale, a project...

Click here to read the full article. The Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy, has unveiled plans for a €50 million ($51 million) landscaping project that aims to safeguard its beloved Boboli Gardens against the effects of climate change. Dubbed “Boboli 2030” the redesign plan will be carried out across 40 separate projects, some of which will also upgrade the gardens’ energy efficiency. The sprawling garden park, a vast section of the Uffizi Galleries’s campus that is located behind the Pitti Palace, was installed by the Medici family in the 16th century. The grounds include fountains, frescoed grottos, and around 300 classical statues. The museum...

Click here to read the full article. Italian authorities seized artworks and other valuable properties from Lanfranco Cirillo, the architect who designed what is dubbed “Putin’s Palace.” The enormous luxury property on the Black Sea allegedly belongs to Putin, though he and Cirillo have both denied that. The Art Newspaper reported that authorities confiscated $144 million worth of valuable assets such as jewelry and cash, as well as 150 pieces of art, including works by Modigliani and Picasso. Cirillo has been accused of various offenses, owing some 50 million euros ($51 million) in taxes. He is also being investigated for money laundering....

Click here to read the full article. Maya Lin, whose elegant blend of art, architecture, and landscape has won worldwide acclaim, has been tapped to create an installation for the campus of the Obama Presidential Center. The work will be placed in the Water Garden, named for former president Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham. Titled Seeing Through the Universe, the sculpture will “feature an upright ‘oculus’” piece that mists and a flat “pebble” piece that fills with water and then cascades over,” according to the Center’s website. A project of the Obama Foundation, the Center broke ground in September 2021 and...

Click here to read the full article. In a lineage that includes the likes of Tintoretto, Titian, and Rubens, artists have long maintained large studios, in which assistants—previously called apprentices and students—helped execute these famed Old Masters’ major commissions in order to keep up with demand. With a team of nearly 10 people, Paris-based artist Olivier Masmonteil is following that example, as one of the last peintres d’atelier in France. The impulse stems mainly from his adoration and respect for Old Masters, but is also pragmatic as it allows him to keep up with an increasing amount of commissions since 2016....

Click here to read the full article. To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. The Headlines GARDEN PARADISES. It has been a big week for art and parks! The Storm King Art Center in New York just announced a $45 million upgrade of its grounds, and now the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy, has said it will spend €50 million (about $51.1 million) to renovate its glorious Boboli Gardens, according to the Art Newspaper . “Our objective is not only to return the Boboli to the glories of the times of the Medici and the Lorena dynasties, but to go further, making it the best open museum in the world,” the museum’s...

Click here to read the full article. As part of a collaboration between Macy’s, the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and Community Partnership, Keeco, and Artists Rights Society, reproductions of the quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama are available for purchase online and in select Macy’s department stores. Percentages of the sales will be used to support individual artists including Lucy Mingo, Loretta Pettway, Louella Pettway, Lucy T. Pettway, and Stella Mae Pettway, as well as the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Inc. Considered to be major contributions to African-American and American art history, the colorful abstract fabric pieces have been produced within the small,...

Click here to read the full article. This fall, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei will curate a show of works created by incarcerated people in London. The exhibition, titled “Freedom,” is organized by the Koestler Arts charity, which promotes and sells works by incarcerated people, and will open at the Southbank Center this October. It’s intended to mark the 60th anniversary of the Koestler Awards, a prize initiative honoring the artistic achievements of detainees across the U.K. criminal justice system. “Freedom” will reflect a diversity of people’s experiences with incarceration, with works created by individuals in prisons, mental health facilities, immigration detainment...

Click here to read the full article. The primary feature of gouache is its opacity. While these paints are similar to watercolor in the way they’re applied to paper, they are formulated so pigments remain near the surface of the paper rather than getting absorbed into its fibers. Like any other paint, gouache comes in a range of grades, and it can get pretty expensive. Pro-grade gouache is typically made with carefully sourced pigments with a low amount of binder; these paints often have a high lightfastness level as well. A good way to save a little money when going...

Click here to read the full article. Takahiko Iimura, an artist and filmmaker whose early experiments with video during the 1970s made him one of the first to use the medium to artistic ends, has died at 85. A representative for New York’s Microscope Gallery, which represents him, confirmed his death. Iimura’s experimental films of the ’60s gained him a following in the New York underground, where his earliest admirers included filmmaker Jonas Mekas. These early works pondered the materiality of cinema as a medium, exploring concepts like the nature of time and projection. He later applied that approach to video...

Click here to read the full article. Takashi Murakami is a collaborator extraordinaire, having worked with brands like Crocs, Supreme, Vans, and Macy’s to pump out merch like sneakers, shoes, t-shirts and skateboards. Tomorrow, Murakami will be breaking into card games, with a Murakami-themed UNO card deck. The deck features Murakami’s signature motifs—smiling, rainbow-petaled flowers and sharp-toothed bears—as well as an image of Murakami himself rendered as a cartoon. Four of the cards are double-sided, and when pieced together, they create two different, poster-sized images. The deck is one in a series of UNO’s “Artiste Series,” which has formerly featured designs by...

Click here to read the full article. Like paints, pastels, and other media, markers perform better on certain papers than on others. Sure, you could achieve a lovely design on a piece of printer paper, but you really won’t be getting the nicest results out of, say, your cherished Copics or Prismacolors if that’s your go-to canvas. To bring out the best qualities your markers have to offer, pick up some paper expressly made for them. These papers are typically coated to prevent bleed-through, and the best ones offer fibers that allow complex blending. Find your next drawing pad in...

Click here to read the full article. To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. The Headlines BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS. The Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York is embarking on a $45 million redesign and upgrade of its 500-acre campus that will include “visitor pavilions, a relocated parking lot, infrastructural improvements, and an art conservation and fabrication facility,” the Architect’s Newspaper reports. A team has been tapped for the effort: Heneghan Peng Architects, which is based in Dublin; WXY Architecture + Urban Design, of New York; Reed Hilderbrand , of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New Haven, Connecticut; and Gustafson Porter + Bowman, of London. Promoting biodiversity will also be...

Click here to read the full article. U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi concluded her controversial visit to Taiwan by going to the National Human Rights Museum in Taipei, where she met with prominent human rights advocates who were once persecuted by China. After weeks of intense buildup, Pelosi’s trip lasted less than one day, but it has already inflamed tensions between China and the island democracy, which Beijing claims as its own. After meeting with Taiwanese lawmakers and Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, to whom she offered assurances of United States support for Taiwan’s self-governance, Pelosi travelled to the museum....