The Pillsbury Owl, a 12th- or 13th-century BCE bronze owl-shaped wine vessel, was at the entrance of the museum’s exhibition “Eternal Offerings: Chinese Ritual Bronzes” when the damage occurred on April 9. Shang-dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BCE) aristocrats would have used the vessel in rituals offerings to honor their ancestors.

A museum spokesperson confirmed that the vessel has since been removed from the show for further assessment and conservation. The extent of the damage, as well as how long conservation efforts on the artwork will take, however, remains unclear.

No visitors or staff were harmed during the incident. The museum will “continue to monitor and enhance measures to prevent accidents”, according to spokesperson.

In the owl’s place now sits a set of bronze winged dragons from the 4th- or 5th-century BCE, which were already on view and moved from the second gallery of the exhibition.

Upon X-raying the lump, experts identified gold and bronze metals. After cleaning away the dirt, they found an intricate piece of metal jewelry that they determined was once a buckle or possibly a brooch.

The buckle features a series of interconnected loops that appear to depict an animal. Some believe the figure could be a lion encircled by serpents, while others believe it could be a horse or dragon. The artifact would have been made with a clay mold—an indication that it was mass-produced.

It is unclear who would have worn the accessory or exactly for what purpose.

Based on the style, however, researchers believes the piece dates to roughly 1000 CE. It would have been popular among the vikings of modern-day Norway, before the spread of Christianity.

Vikings throughout Scandinavia were forced to convert to Christianity around 900 CE, wherein it became the dominant religion around 1050 CE. While Viking culture was known for including animals in its designs, Christians opted for more abstract decoration.

Spearheaded by the artist Sam Barnett, The Royally Big Portrait, as the project is known, was created using thousands of crowd-sourced line-drawn profiles of the king. Though online submissions wrapped on April 28, those wishing to contribute can still upload images, which will be part of the larger digital image, via Outernet through May 8.

Individual contributions can be viewed within the portrait at Outernet using an iPad. The company is planning to announce the final number of submissions on May 9.

A canvas iteration and prints of the portrait are slated to be auctioned and sold, respectively, by Christie’s during an event at Outernet on May 4 to support the Children in Need charity for kids living in poverty or experiencing social injustices.

Additionally, Christie’s is holding its annual exhibition of works by students from the Drawing Year, which is an intensive program for 10- to 18-year-olds that the king established as part of the Royal Drawing School in 2000. The school offers in-person and online classes to young artists focused primarily on observational drawing.

For the coronation, Christie’s organized an additional show of works this year by the Drawing Year alumni, which will be on view from May 2 to 25. The show features commissioned works by the Royal Drawing School, along with an archive of drawings—one made by each student after successfully graduating.

Of the commissioned works, five will be available for purchase as limited edition prints. A portion of the funds will go towards the Drawing Year Scholarship Fund.

Kevis House Gallery is also selling signed limited edition lithographs of King Charles III’s watercolors, accompanied by an exhibition showcasing more than a dozen of his paintings, on view from May 2 to 21. Sales will benefit his The Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund.

Not only does the statue—made from Mediterranean marble—shed greater light on trade between ancient Rome and India, it also is the first Buddha found west of Afghanistan, according to the New York Review of Books.

A joint Polish-American archaeological team, lead by historian Steven Sidebotham of the University of Delaware and archaeologist Mariusz Gwiazda of the University of Warsaw, uncovered the statue during excavation work in the city’s ancient temple.

At 28 inches or a little over two feet tall, the statue depicts Buddha standing and holding part of his robes in his left hand. There is a halo with sun rays around his head and a lotus flower at his side. Researchers believe it was made in Alexandria around the second century.

The team also uncovered a Sanskrit inscription dating to the reign of the Roman emperor Marcus Julius Philippus, who hailed from present-day Syria and was known as Phillip the Arab (244–49 CE), along with two coins from the middle Indian Kingdom of Satavahana dating to the second century CE.

These finds indicate greater connection than previously known between Ancient Rome, Egypt, and India. Due to its central location along Roman trade routes, Egypt served as a gateway between the Roman Empire and its ancient counterparts.

Berenike, which was founded in the third century BCE, became one of the largest ports in Egypt under Roman rule until it was abandoned in the sixth century CE. In its heyday, the city served as a hub for the trade of such goods as ivory, textiles, and semi-precious metals.

Every year on the first Monday of May, the museum hosts the art and couture ball to support its costume department, which holds around 33,000 objects across seven centuries of fashion history. Guests are invited to the Met Gala by invitation and a single ticket can cost up to $50,000. Though the price may seem high, there are expected to be roughly 400 guests in attendance tonight.

This year’s theme centers around the late German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who perhaps most notably served as the creative designer for the French fashion house Chanel. The theme is decided on by the Costume Institute’s chief curator Andrew Bolton before it is presented to the Met’s director and president.

For “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty”, roughly 150 original looks will be on view next to Lagerfeld’s sketches and video interviews.

“At its heart the exhibition will look at the evolution of Karl’s two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional garments,” said Bolton in an interview with Vogue. “Karl never tired of telling me that fashion did not belong in a museum…He would say, ‘Fashion is not art—fashion belongs on the street, on women’s bodies, on men’s bodies.’”

Previous themes have included “Camp” (based on Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay) in 2019 and “Heavenly Bodies” (which borrowed from the Vatican collection) in 2018, among others.

British screenwriter and actress Michaela Coel, Spanish actress Penélope Cruz, Swiss tennis player Roger Federer, and Albanian pop singer and songwriter Dua Lipa are this year’s co-chairs of the event, alongside Vogue‘s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.

Those wishing to watch the red carpet event can tune in on E!, beginning at 6 p.m. EST.

Quick-to-See Smith spoke with Art in America about how she began making memory maps, the importance of Native languages, and bringing different communities together.

How did you start making memory maps?

I started making these kind of abstract landscape maps from fields of fireweed and mustard—things that I would see on my reservation—when I was in graduate school. In the early work from the 1970s, you can see these abstract maps with bars of color intermixed with pictographs. For roughly the last 50 years, I’ve been collecting books on pictographs, petroglyphs, and glyphs, and I visit sites. I’ve always had a long-running interest in how we Native people each see the land because we come from various terrains and geographical areas, all with different foods, housing, traditions, and origin stories. There are 574 federally recognized tribes and hundreds more that are not recognized.

One thing I discovered was that most of us didn’t make a horizon line. I really didn’t know why, but, in talking to people and thinking about myself and how I work, I believe it’s related to our stories, which portray a holistic world: the sky above and the land below, groundwater recharge. Everything is connected. Our stories are often interwoven with things that come down from the sky, particularly in relation to water. Near my house, there’s a site that’s at least 1,000 years old or older and, if I go down in the kiva, all the images inscribed onto the wall—the catfish, the river, a woman giving birth, the eagle with water spray coming out of its mouth sharing with the cactus—center around water. Water is life. Now we’re in a drought, so that makes it even more important.

How have your lived experience and research influenced the making of these maps?

In my research, I’ve found that each community has petroglyphs specific to them. And that’s how the memory maps got started. I was documenting different communities in the United States by looking at petroglyphs or pictographs in each area so that the markings tie into each community’s stories and language. It’s grown from there. I also discovered in doing this work that, though it’s been claimed that we have no written language, we had so many ways of documenting. Of course, our history books and school curricula don’t tell us this. But in our cuneiform writing and objects like quipus—colored ropes and twines with knots used to communicate messages—we can see how our ancestors communicated. These languages carry our culture, our land, food, housing. Our languages are so embedded in the land and, when the Europeans invaded, they took all of this and moved us off of our land, where we had lived for thousands of years. It created a genocide that’s still ongoing.

Without this language, a whole part of our culture is missing. What I’m doing with my art is extracting what I know is relevant information in today’s world. Each piece tells a story and it revolves around this genocide and what has been taken away from us. Scholars and advocates like myself have had to go back to retrieve this information. A lot of us are also involved with trying to change public school education in this country because our history has been left out. I’ve been writing to the state board of education in New Mexico. In Montana, we have Native American history and current events in the kindergarten through 12th-grade curricula. In my work, you will find a reflection of this—both our history and current events.

Taking all that information and looking at your memory maps, those symbols that we see are representing different Native communities?

That’s exactly right. They are from specific places, whatever is left on rocks or walls. Some of them are in the open, while others are inside of caves.

How do you go about selecting which ones to highlight on your maps?

When I do the research, I get so involved in considering the terrain and whether there are still Indigenous people living in that area or nearby. In general, I focus on figures or the number of tribes, but I’ve made big maps tracking where the tribes are located.

Before computers, I used to search newspapers and cut out articles of what Native Americans were doing state by state. For example, there would be a woman’s health conference in Florida and a gathering on food in Indiana. It stood out to me that everything was about survival. So many of these gatherings centered around basic needs for heath, food, housing, and childcare. The Native communities, whether there was a reservation or not, were coming together to work on such issues as that. And just because there wasn’t a federal reservation doesn’t mean that there aren’t Native people and communities.

That’s a lot of research to do without modern technology.

Yes, it’s like being a super sleuth or detective. I remember one research project that [multimedia Indigenous artist] G. Peter Jemison and I did together a long time ago. We found there were 57,000 people that we knew were recorded as living there, and something like 75 tribes. Native people would come into the city for the arts. Jemison founded the American Indian Community House, and people would gather there. It brought all these Native people out of the woodwork to a place where we could meet each other and share information.

A lot of the artists today—like Jemison, Cara Romero, Jeffrey Gibson, Marie Watt, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Jolene Rickard, Julie Buffalohead, Edgar Heap of Birds, and Emmi Whitehorse—are doing research like I have been.

How do you plan to continue incorporating such findings in your art and activism work?

Every time I do research, it opens Pandora’s box. I have piles of notebooks where I’ve documented this research. I think about all our artists who are engaged with this and how, when we come together, we share this information.

In conjunction with my show, the Whitney is sponsoring the first and only event that I know of for an all-day Native American convening on May 19. We will have Native American artists and panels where we will discuss how our art intersects with the land, because all our languages recorded everything in the land.

On that note, you’re the first Indigenous artist to have a retrospective at the Whitney. How does it feel to be recognized in such a way?

I’m just so grateful. In the beginning, I began talking about things that I would like to do that would reach a broader Native community so that this would be a celebration that would go beyond me, like ripples in the stream. I hope that it will open the door so that other Native artists can have exhibitions there and elsewhere.

When I began working with the museum, I wanted to open more doors to bring in more Native people because once they see them and hear them, they’re more inclined to work with them. These interventions are important. And what it’s doing is, it’s making them feel comfortable with Native people.

The hoard was found by an archaeological group hiking through a newly cut forest northeast of the Tuscan city Livorno in 2021. The area has since been investigated by archaeologists, who yielded no further results.

The silver Roman denarii, found inside of a terracotta pot, are all from between 157 BCE and 82 BCE. Experts believe the hoard could have possibly belonged to a solider caught in conflicts or a merchant seeking to hide his wealth. They do know for certain that whoever buried the coins never recovered them.

Since the last of the coins date to a time of internal strife, archaeologists believe whoever buried them did so for safekeeping.

In 91 BCE, a war had broken out between Rome and its Italian allies seeking citizenship. The Roman general and statesman Sulla, who had previously been declared a public enemy of the state in 87 BCE and who had attacked the city in 88 BCE, returned with his army from Asia to confront his Roman enemies in 82 BCE. As the first man of the Republic to seize power through force, his victory paved the way for future dictators such as Julius Caesar.

After remaining hidden for 2,000 years, the coins are slated for display at the Museum of Natural History of the Mediterranean in the Province of Livorno, Il Terrino reported.

“By the announced law, all artefacts must be delivered to the Oba of Benin who exercises the rights of original owner. This covers the ones already repatriated and those yet to be repatriated,” reads a report on the online news outlet Arise.

The Benin Bronzes are a group of thousands of objects plundered by British troops from the Kingdom of Benin during the 19th century. Believed to exceed 3,000 total objects, the hoard includes figurines, tusks, sculptures of Benin’s rulers, and an ivory mask primarily dispersed among European and US museums. The British plundered the Kingdom of Benin in 1897 after an unarmed British explorer was killed there. The kingdom was later added to the British protectorate of Nigeria, which then became the independent Federal Republic of Nigeria in 1960.

Over the last few years in particular, the Benin Bronzes have been at the center of an ongoing restitution debate. This decision now further complicates an already fraught process for Western institutions seeking to restitute these artifacts, which have in recent years gone through the Nigerian government as part of diplomatic processes.

A number of the bronzes have already been returned to Nigeria, including most recently ones that previously belonged to London’s Horniman Museum and Gardens and the city of Glasgow in Scotland. The Benin Bronzes can also be viewed as part of a recently established online database.

Local Edo State governor Godwin Obaseki supports the housing of the Benin Bronzes at the Edo Museum of West African Art, while Ewuare II has said he would would like the bronzes to be held by his family in the royal museum or palace. Managed by the nonprofit organization Emowaa Trust, the Edo Museum is slated to open in stages beginning in 2024.

With the recent transfer of ownership, it remains unclear where the artifacts—restituted or in the process of being restituted—will reside.

The circular artifact contains hieroglyphic writing in a ring around two players, who are shown standing with a ball between them. The piece, dating between 800 CE and 900 CE, measures more than 12 1/2 inches in diameter and weighs about 88 pounds.

The stone serves as a record of a traditional Mesoamerican ball game believed to have possible ties to ritual practices.

“In this Mayan site, it is rare to find hieroglyphic writing, let alone a complete text,” archaeologist Francisco Perez, who coordinated the investigations in the Chichanchob or Casa Colorada complex at the site, told Reuters.

While preparing for further conservation, researchers are conducting a detailed study of the text and iconography on the stone.

A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Chichén Itzá is believed to have been built between 500 CE and 600 CE. Earlier this year, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) uncovered elite residences within the Mayan city and announced the construction of a new museum that is expected to bolster tourism at the archaeological site, which currently sees about 2 million visitors each year.

The Afghan heritage site Mes Aynak is currently at risk of being destroyed due to a delayed mining project. The site, just 25 miles southeast of Kabul, is believed to contain the second largest untapped copper mine in the world. The deposits are estimated to be worth $100 billion.

In 2008, Afghanistan’s former government, led by then-president Hamid Karza, signed a lucrative contract with a Chinese company to extract the copper through an open-pit mine in 2008, however, the project was delayed to allow for research and the relocation of any valuable artifacts.

While the new government has indicated that it aims to preserve the site’s remains, there are concerns that the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan has already resulted in long-term damage to heritage sites. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) has recently started to repair temporary structures erected to protect more than 50 sites at Mes Aynak, as part of a $1 million project funded by the Swiss foundation Aliph, a global fund focused on the protection and rehabilitation of cultural heritage in areas of conflict. These efforts include the protection of such structures as stupas, statues, wall and floor paintings. Additionally, the project plans to create a conservation plan for the remains and the relocation of several artifacts to a nearby site.

Not only is there a race against time with the pending mining project, but artifacts that were uncovered over the last 15 years are also at risk of decay.

The project is expected to provide employment for 350 people in Afghanistan including laborers, architects, engineers, archaeologists, and technical staff.

In the past, the Taliban has actively destroyed Afghani cultural heritage including, perhaps most famously, the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001.