Arts news

• Argentina ends years of isolation

  22-02-2017 22:00
  
  As the guest country at the Arco fair (22-26 February) and the subject of concurrent exhibitions, art from Argentina will be all over Madrid this month. Curators and dealers are hoping this will help elevate names such as Luis Garay, Diego Bianchi, Alejandra Seeber and Sol Pipkin to the same kind of global renown as Liliana Porter and Argentinian-born Lucio Fontana.
  This new-found visibility will carry through to the Venice Biennale, Documenta in Kassel, and Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, Souther
  
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• Delcy Morelos to Stage Major Public Art Commission at Barbican in London This Spring

  09-01-2026 22:23 via artnews.com
  As part of its upcoming spring program, the Barbican in London will stage a major commission by artist Delcy Morelos, her first in the United Kingdom.For the commission, on view May 15 to July 31, Morelos will construct her most ambitious sculptural installation to date. Measuring around 78 feet in circumference, the new work, to be sited in the Barbican’s outdoor sculpture courtyard, will take the form of an oval-shaped pavilion made of soil, clay, spices, and plant materials.Morelos&rsqu
  
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• 1,500-Year-Old Byzantine Monastery Discovered in Egypt                

  09-01-2026 22:20 via artnews.com
  The foundations of a building complex from the 5th–6th century CE were recently uncovered at Al-Qarya bi-Al-Duweir, an archaeological site in Sohag, a city along the Nile River in central Egypt. The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities posted about the discovery on January 8 on X, noting that the mission was overseen by the Supreme Council of Antiquities.According to Ahram Online, Sherif Fathy, minister of tourism and antiquities, observed that the Byzantine-era residential complex “s
  
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• Columbia Museum of Art Opens Newly Configured Collection Galleries to Cap Year-Long Renovation

  09-01-2026 20:52 via artnews.com
  The Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, South Carolina, is unveiling newly reconfigured collection galleries to cap its 75th anniversary and culminate a yearlong renovation. While the institution is currently hosting “Keith Haring: Radiant Vision”—a traveling exhibition that previously visited the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, the Long Beach Museum of Art in California, and venues in Italy, Israel, and elsewhere—the museum will reopen its collection galleries followin
  
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• Belgian Dealer Paid $116,000 for Artwork Now Attributed to Peter Paul Rubens

  09-01-2026 20:27 via artnews.com
  Belgian art dealer Klaas Muller has identified a new study of a bearded man’s head by Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens, according to a lengthy report in the Dutch daily newspaper De Standaard.Muller bought the work, an oil on paper laid on panel that is now titled Bearded old man, looking down to his left (ca. 1609), at an auction three years ago from “lesser-known auction house in northern Europe,” declining to name it for fear of increased competition, he told the Guardian.Th
  
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• Sandra Mujinga’s Shadowy Figures Hit the International Spotlight

  09-01-2026 18:17 via artnews.com
  About a decade ago, when Sandra Mujinga visited Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she relished her time people watching, as travelers are wont to do. But Mujinga was not exactly a foreigner—she was born in Goma, another Congolese city, and had returned to the country multiple times since leaving it as a child—and so her version of people watching entailed observing not just how locals acted but how they dressed.“I felt like there was this innate, un
  
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• London’s Natural History Museum Braces for Pokémon Pop-Up After Tickets Sell Out

  09-01-2026 18:09 via artnews.com
  The Natural History Museum in London is set to host a Pokémon pop-up shop later this month, an event that has already proved popular enough to sell out timed entry slots well ahead of its opening.According to Time Out London, the pop-up will run from January 26 through April 19 inside the museum’s Cranborne Boutique, following an extension prompted by demand. The collaboration, themed “Pokécology: An Illustrated Guide to Pokémon Ecology,” includes
  
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• Barnes Foundation’s New COO, Heritage Reports $2.2 Billion in Sales for 2025, and More: Industry Moves for January 9, 2026

  09-01-2026 17:36 via artnews.com
  Editor’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.Happy Friday! Here’s a round-up of who’s moving and shaking in the art trade this week.Industry Moves
  Will Cary Promoted to EVP and COO of the Barnes Foundation: Cary will oversee new revenue initiatives, the Calder Gardens partnership, and a newly formed Brand department unifying commu
  
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• ‘Thoughtless and Malicious’: Trump Administration Withdraws from International Cultural Organizations, Saying They Are ‘Contrary to U.S. Interests’

  09-01-2026 17:20 via artnews.com
  While the world was dealing with horrific news about an ICE agent fatally shooting an American civilian in the streets of Minneapolis on Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s administration was withdrawing the US from 66 international groups, conventions, and treaties, including 31 United Nations-affiliated organizations. Several of them are devoted to arts, culture, historic preservation, and freedom of expression.The withdrawal was announced in a presidential memorandum that stated that th
  
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• South Africa Cancels Gabrielle Goliath Gaza Artwork Planned for Venice Biennale Pavilion

  09-01-2026 17:03 via artnews.com
  South Africa selected a Gabrielle Goliath work about Gaza for its Venice Biennale pavilion, then rescinded the decision amid concerns that the work was “polarizing,” according to a report by the Daily Maverick, a South African publication.The decision to pull the pavilion was reportedly made by the culture ministry on January 2, just eight days before nations must finalize their Venice Biennale pavilions. In an unusual move, the South African Pavilion’s selection committee then
  
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• Mauritshuis Loaning ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ to Japan, US Withdrawing from International Arts and Cultural Heritage Groups: Morning Links for January 9, 2025

  09-01-2026 16:14 via artnews.com
  The HeadlinesEXTRAORDINARY LOAN. The Mauritshuis in The Hague revealed on Thursday that it will send its most famous painting, Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (circa 1665), to Japan this summer, the Japan Times wrote. The work will be loaned to the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka while the Dutch museum temporarily closes from August 24 to September 20 for building alterations. The decision is surprising because the painting, one of just 37 works attributed to Vermeer, was e
  
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• Sotheby’s to Offer the Most Valuable Single-Owner Whiskey Collection Ever Sold

  09-01-2026 12:21 via artnews.com
  Sotheby’s is binning any notion of “dry January” by betting big on whisky at the end of this month. At its new Breuer Building HQ on January 24, the house will host its first-ever live, single-owner sale devoted entirely to American whisky.Called The Great American Whisky Collection, it will be the most valuable collection of its kind to hit the market, with a high estimate of $1.7 million. A total of 360 bottles will hit the auction block, spread across 320 lots.  The auc
  
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• A Show About French Theory Boils Big Ideas Down to Wall Decor

  09-01-2026 11:00 via artnews.com
  There is a danger in trying to say everything and it is not that you might say nothing. It is that you might say worse than nothing: You might say something that you didn’t intend.“Echo Delay Reverb: American Art, Francophile Thought,” an ambitious show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, aims to trace the effect of 20th-century French writers on American art since the 1970s. Works from 60 artists are set alongside quotations by, photographs of, and book covers from Jean-Paul Sart
  
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• Sperone Westwater Dissolution Fight Raises Questions Over Governance and Artist Payments

  08-01-2026 23:29 via artnews.com
  Sperone Westwater’s closure has exposed a deeper legal and financial dispute than first suggested by the gallery’s sudden shutdown at the end of 2025. Newly filed court documents allege governance failures, disputed payments to artists, and years of internal deadlock at the 50-year-old New York firm.As Artnet News reported earlier this week, the gallery closed amid a legal battle between its two principals, Gian Enzo Sperone and Angela Westwater, who each control 50 percent of t
  
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• MSCHF’s Latest Project Could See a Two-Year-Old Cow Slaughtered

  08-01-2026 22:56 via artnews.com
  In about two months, the fate of a cow named Angus will be decided. At present, the outlook is grim: Angus is slated to be turned into roughly 1,200 hamburger patties and four leather handbags. But MSCHF—the art collective behind viral artworks ranging from Big Red Boots to a branded ATM publicly displaying users’ account balances—appears to be hoping that might still change in the next 64 days.Angus, who lives on a farm in upstate New York, is the subject of MSCHF’s ongo
  
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• MSCHF’s Latest Project Could See a Two-Year Cow Slaughtered

  08-01-2026 22:56 via artnews.com
  In about two months, the fate of a cow named Angus will be decided. At present, the outlook is grim: Angus is slated to be turned into roughly 1,200 hamburger patties and four leather handbags. But MSCHF—the art collective behind viral artworks ranging from Big Red Boots to a branded ATM publicly displaying users’ account balances—appears to be hoping that might still change in the next 64 days.Angus, who lives on a farm in upstate New York, is the subject of MSCHF’s ongo
  
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• Scientists Extract DNA from Drawing That Could Connect to Leonardo da Vinci

  08-01-2026 22:34 via artnews.com
  Scientists extracted DNA from a possible Leonardo da Vinci drawing that may provide genetic links to one of the most storied humans to walk the Earth. In a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper posted Tuesday in a preprint database, researchers from the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project (LDVP) suggested that there may be connections between a chalk sketch titled Holy Child and materials thought to contain traces of members of the artist’s extended family.As reported in Science, “The preprint concl
  
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• Researchers Find 60,000-Year-Old Poisoned Arrowheads in Africa

  08-01-2026 22:34 via artnews.com
  Researchers from South Africa and Sweden have found traces of poison on 60,000-year-old arrowheads in South Africa. Their discovery, reported by Stockholm University in the journal Science Advances, is the earliest direct evidence of the use of poisoned hunting weapons in the world so far. The oldest poisoned arrowheads known prior to the present study date to approximately 6,700 years ago.The quartz arrowheads were collected from sediment at Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Afri
  
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• Smithsonian Reportedly Told Staffer to Remove ‘Unjust’ From Exhibition on Japanese American Internment

  08-01-2026 22:32 via artnews.com
  2025 was quite a year for the Smithsonian Institution, which found itself in the crosshairs of the second Trump administration early and often. Last year began with Trump calling for a purge of “anti-American ideology” from the institution’s 19 museums. 2026 appears to have brought more of the same.On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the Trump Administration has redoubled its efforts to bring the Smithsonian to heel and has put forward a deadline of next Tuesday
  
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• France’s Top Art Award, the Prix Marcel Duchamp, Names 2026 Nominees

  08-01-2026 22:19 via artnews.com
  The Prix Marcel Duchamp, France’s most esteemed art prize, has named the artists nominated for its 2026 award. While there are normally four nominees, this year there are technically five.Those nominees include Joël Andrianomearisoa, a Malagasy artist whose vibrant textiles have been exhibited widely, and Josèfa Ntjam, a participant in last year’s Bienal de São Paulo whose installations and sculptures address fluid identities, often by making reference to the Afric
  
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• Bonhams Saw Significant Revenue Drop in 2024, In Line With the Big Three

  08-01-2026 20:44 via artnews.com
  UK-based auction house Bonhams saw its pre-tax loss jump almost 90 percent to £213 million ($286.3 million) in 2024, as revenue fell 9 percent to £176 million ($236.6 million), according to its most recent filings with UK’s Companies House, as reported by the Financial Times.(Financial filings released through Companies House, the UK’s rough equivalent of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, typically trail by one year.)The house saw impairment charges of £1
  
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• Man Serving Life Sentence for Attacking Six-Year-Old at Tate Modern Faces New Assault Charges

  08-01-2026 20:25 via artnews.com
  Jonty Bravery, a 24-year-old man who was given a life sentence for throwing a six-year-old French boy from the 10th floor balcony at the Tate Modern in London, now faces an additional sentence for new charges.Bravery was charged for—and recently found guilty of—assaulting two nurses in September 2024 at Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security psychiatric hospital in the UK. He has been held at Broadmoor since being sentenced for the Tate attack in 2020. That year, he was handed another 1
  
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• Yoshiko Mori, Former Chair of Mori Art Museum, Has Died at 85

  08-01-2026 20:02 via artnews.com
  Yoshiko Mori, chairperson emerita of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, died on December 23 from pneumonia. She was 85 years old. The museum confirmed her death in a statement on Tuesday.  She and her husband, real estate developer Minoru Mori, who died in 2012, opened the museum, considered one of Japan’s top contemporary art institutions,in 2003. “For more than two decades since then,” the museum said in a statement, “she devoted herself with great passion to cont
  
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• The U.S. Returned 7 Ancient Artifacts to Egypt, From Mummified Fish to a Falcon Head

  08-01-2026 19:18 via artnews.com
  Thanks to the collaboration of several government organizations in the United States and Egypt, seven artifacts were recently repatriated to Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The objects had been smuggled from the country in separate cases and are from different time periods, according to Shaaban Abdel Gawad, director-general of the Repatriation of Antiquities Department and supervisor of the Antiquities Units in Ports. The news was first reported in Egyptian news outlet Ahram O
  
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• Steve Jobs’s Early Apple Artifacts Go Under the Hammer at RR Auction

  08-01-2026 19:17 via artnews.com
  A collection of early Apple computers and Steve Jobs memorabilia has gone up for auction as the technology company approaches its 50th anniversary, underscoring a growing appetite for artifacts linked to modern corporate mythology.The sale, run by Boston-based RR Auction, comprises 191 lots spanning vintage Apple hardware, original corporate documents, and personal belongings from Jobs’s childhood bedroom in Los Altos, California. Bidding opened this week and will run through January
  
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• Sexual Assault Lawsuit Against Norval Morrisseau Estate Is Tossed Out

  08-01-2026 17:18 via artnews.com
  A lawsuit that alleged sexual assault by the late artist Norval Morrisseau was tossed out by British Columbia’s Supreme Court this week, according to the Canadian Press.Filed against the artist’s estate, the lawsuit by Mark Anthony Jacobson claimed that Morrisseau had touched his buttocks without his consent. Jacobson claimed that he had visited Morrisseau in 2006, roughly a year prior to the Anishinaabe artist’s death, after an assistant told Jacobson that Morrisseau could hea
  
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• Fungi: Anarchist Designers review – a perverse plunge into mushroom mayhem, from stinkhorns to zombie-makers

  08-01-2026 15:03
  Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam
  They have poisoned emperors, taken over insect brains and survived atomic bombs. This Dantean journey through fungal hell is riveting – though frogs may disagreeSylvia Plath’s poem Mushrooms is a sinister paean to the natural world. Her observations on fungi are freighted with foreboding, noting how “very / Whitely, discreetly, / Very quietly” they “Take hold on the loam, / Acquire the air”. The poem ends: “We shall by morning
  
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• 6 Works to Know by Grandma Moses

  08-01-2026 15:00 via artnews.com
  “Her primitive paintings captured the spirit and preserved the scene of a vanishing countryside.” So reads the epitaph of American artist Grandma Moses (aka Anna Mary Robertson Moses), whose lifetime remarkably stretched from the Civil War to the Kennedy administration. A self-taught artist who didn’t start painting until her late 70s, Moses created scenes of a bygone American era that were treasured by the public yet kept at a distance by the art establishment. In the 1,500-pl
  
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• Calendar: Every Major Art Fair Taking Place in 2026

  08-01-2026 14:15 via artnews.com
  In 2026, there is no shortage of art fairs taking place around the world. When it comes to the art market this year, all eyes will be on the Gulf region as Art Basel launches a fair in Qatar this February and Frieze takes over Abu Dhabi Art, which runs in November. One other major change to the calendar is that Frieze Seoul and the Armory Show will no longer conflict with each other. Since last summer, there have been a slew of gallery closures, running the gamut from blue-chip dealerships to em
  
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• Amid Widespread Humanities Cuts, Elite Universities Suspend or Reduce Art History Graduate Admissions

  08-01-2026 11:00 via artnews.com
  Amid widespread budget deficits, several top universities have suspended admissions to their art history graduate programs or cut the size of the cohorts they will admit, along with modifications to other humanities concentrations. Boston University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and Princeton University are among those institutions seeing changes.The cutbacks come in the context of a widely discussed crisis in higher education. Philadelphia-based public radio station WHYY repor
  
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