According to AFP, three men were caught carrying out construction work on Mykonos despite a suspension on development. On the island of Rhodes, a tour operator was arrested for illegally occupying part of a beach with metal and wooden structures. The arrests were made amid a government crackdown on illicit tourism development on Greek islands home to imperiled fragile archaeological sites.

“The law will be enforced in Mykonos,” Kostas Skrekas, Greece’s environment minister, said in a statement. “No illegal plan will be legalized… there will be no loophole.”

In March, 58-year-old archaeologist Manolis Psarrosan, an employee at the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades, was assaulted in a suburb of Athens. According to the Washington Post, Psarrosan has been involved in several cases with alleged violations, including ones revolving around “illegal constructions” and “arbitrary building activities in areas of archaeological interest” on Mykonos. He has been called as a witness in related trials. 

Due to the abundance of archaeological sites in Greece, local organizations have the power to veto development plans. 

Later that month, state-employed archeologists staged a five-hour protest outside the Culture Ministry in Athens to protest Psarrosan’s attack of a colleague in a suburb of the Greek capital, an incident they say is linked to the “mafia-style” violence targeting those tasked with persevering the country’s ancient heritage.

Last week, the International Council of Museums published a report from Sara Abdalla Khidir Saeed, director of the Sudan Natural History Museum, detailing the dire circumstances of numerous institutions.

“Museums are now without guard to protect them from looting and vandalism,” Saeed said. “In light of the daily deteriorating situation due to the lack of food and life resources, weak souls will be exploited to steal [artifacts from] important museums and smuggle them out of the country.”

Saeed singled out the Sudan National Museum, the Ethnographic Museum, the Republican Palace Museum, and the Sudan Natural History Museum, all located in the capital city of Khartoum, which is currently besieged by gunfire between army and rival paramilitary forces.

Reports surfaced at the end of April that the National Museum, a repository of thousands of years of human history, had suffered looting. It houses the world’s most wide-ranging Nubian archaeological collection, with some artifacts dating back to the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras.

Present-day Sudan was a significant crossroads centuries ago for early African kingdoms, and surviving artifacts are invaluable to constructing a comprehensive human history. Khalid Albaih, a Khartoum-based artist and journalist, recently told the Art Newspaper that the museum “has also become a battleground” and that “no one knows how much damage the [National Museum] took.”

The civil war in Sudan has raged since mid-April, when Sudan’s military ruler Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the country’s deputy and head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group, began vying for political power. The two men were allies during the 2019 popular uprising against Sudan’s longtime leader, Omar al-Bashir, and tentatively shared power following his ouster.

However, the alliance collapsed in 2021 when the power-sharing government was dissolved by the army, crushing civilian hopes for a peaceful transition into democracy. According to the UN refugee agency UNHCR, at least 860,000 people have fled Sudan to neighboring countries. Those that remain face severe food, water, and fuel shortages, as well as limited transportation and communication.

Saeed shared that no one has been able to access the National Museum since the beginning of the war, leaving countless live specimens—endangered Nile crocodiles and monitors, rare birds, and more—to slowly die from thirst and starvation. “The [Museum] is located close to the Sudanese army’s headquarters, which means anyone walking around will be shot immediately as was the case with one of the university students.”

“The war in Sudan must be stopped immediately,” she said.

The Austrian Foreign Minister, Alexander Schallenber, has announced that “technical talks are currently under way” between the Vienna institution and the Acropolis Museum in Athens. They focus on “the possibility of a loan” of the small 2,500-year-old marbles works in its collection.

The Associated Press reports that the Greek representative, Nikos Dendias, expressed “deep satisfaction” with the development, but has not shared details of the in-progress loan agreement.

“This will add to a series of highly symbolic gestures that may create a positive momentum” for the long-sought repatriation of the marbles from the British Museum, Dendias added.

In recent months, Greece has seen a slew of foreign institutions return the fragments of the Acropolis frieze and pediment in their collections.

In January, a museum in Palermo, Sicily, sent back its piece of the 520-foot-long frieze that once wrapped around the façade of the Parthenon Temple: a foot broken off a likeness of the goddess Artemis. Shortly after, Pope Francis returned three fragments of the Parthenon Marbles housed in the Vatican Museums, a move the Catholic leader described as a “donation” to His Beatitude Ieronymos II, the Orthodox Christian Archbishop of Athens and all of Greece, rather than a proper repatriation.

“So, [Vienna’s] will be the third one,” Dendias said. “And this, for us, is of huge importance.”

Late last year it was revealed that the British Museum was in talks with Greece over a potential agreement that would see some of the Parthenon Marbles return to Athens. The two parties had been secretly meeting for months about the contested antiquities, which have been on view in the British Museum since 1832, after being stripped from the Acropolis in Athens by the Scottish nobleman Lord Elgin. While British Museum chairman George Osborne has in recent months signaled a willingness to forge a deal to settle the centuries-old controversy, any plan that sees the works return to Greece has yet to advance beyond hypotheticals.

The controversy has taken place online, where supporters of Cole have accused the Met Gala of plagiarism.

The curator Ellen Hawley, who has previously worked with Cole, wrote on Instagram: “Willie’s work is on display at the Met and the second-floor Mezzanine store sells many of his prints and home décor. Interestingly, Willie wasn’t asked to be involved to collaborate on this installation, nor asked for his permission to use the likeness of his art … The fashion and art worlds face copycat challenges all the time. This seems like a blatant copy – at the Met of one of their exhibiting artists.”

Cole is a New Jersey–born sculptor whose work has been widely exhibited, including at the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana. Among his works on view at the Met is Shine (2007), an assemblage of black women’s shoes that form the shape of a man’s head. The face, heavy-lidded and intensely focused, deliberately recalls 19th- and 20th-century masks from Cameroon.

Cole weighed in on the chandelier controversy earlier today in a blistering Instagram post. “I’ve been receiving message[s] since last night about the blatant rip off of my water bottle works,” he wrote. “I agree.”

He added: “Is this flattery or thievery?” 

At the time of publication, the post had garnered nearly 500 likes. Among the prominent art figures to demonstrate their support of his statements were artists Michele Pred and Pamela Council, as well as curator Jasmine Wahi.

Though most lauded for his sculptures, Cole’s practice spans prints, sculpture, drawings, and photography. Over the past 20 years, he has had three touring survey exhibitions that visited institutions across the world. Throughout, wide-ranging materials are used to explore social and political matters, in particular the intersections of race, African artistic traditions, and history. 

Cole created Spirit Catcher and Lumen-less Lantern, two large-scale chandeliers made of water bottles strung together with metal wire, as a statement on the water crisis in Newark, New Jersey, and the planet’s plastic reliance.

“We have a water bottle crisis and a water crisis in general,” Cole wrote on his website. “Plastic is killing the environment, and lead pipes have impacted big cities around the country, including in Newark. Making a public structure draws attention and makes people ask questions, which can lead to conversation and potential solutions.” 

Both works are on view at Express Newark, where Cole is this year’s artist-in-residence, as part of the institution’s “Aliveness” series.

Tadao Ando, designer of the exhibition that the gala launched, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” also created the chandelier. Event planner Raul Àvila told Vogue that every water bottle used was recycled. “Given today’s climate, we wanted to highlight the importance of giving our everyday items more than one life cycle,” he said. “We wanted to find a way to create a sustainable design that would implement the bottles in a breathtaking installation unlike anything we’ve done before.”

Cole and a Met representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Carrasquilla’s story made headlines worldwide after parents at the Tallahassee charter school she once led complained about her syllabus containing images of the famed statue, which they deemed “pornographic.” In April, she was invited by the mayor of Florence, Dario Nardella, and Cecilie Hollberg, director of the Galleria dell’Accademia, where David is exhibited, to view the statue with her family.

“It is an immense pleasure to have Ms. Carrasquilla as our guest at the Accademia Gallery in Florence,” Hollberg said in a statement. “I am delighted to welcome her and show her the magnificence of our museum, as well as personally introduce her to David, a sculpture that I reiterate has nothing to do with pornography. It is a masterpiece representing a religious symbol of purity and innocence, the triumph of good over evil.”

Carrasquilla’s situation became a flashpoint in debates unfolding in the American South over what constitutes “age-appropriate” education. (It even inspired a Saturday Night Live skit.) The charter school follows the “classical education curriculum model” that stresses a return to “core virtues” and the “centrality of the Western tradition.”

Amid conservative criticism that public education has recently prioritized issues of race and gender identity, Republican lawmakers in Florida have pushed to mandate classical education courses in the secondary school system.

In an interview with Slate, the chair of the school’s board, Barney Bishop III, said the issue was not with David, but rather with the “egregious” failure to warn parents about their children seeing the “potentially controversial” artwork. “Showing the entire statue of David is appropriate at some age,” said Bishop. “We’re going to figure out when that is.”

Carrasquilla, meanwhile, enjoyed her meeting with David. “The thing that impressed me the most and that I didn’t know, is that this whole gallery was built for him,” she said in a statement. “I think it’s beautiful, it looks like a church. And to me, that just represents really the purity of this figure and you see his humanness. And that’s what I’ve always loved about it. There is nothing wrong with the human body in and of itself.”

“A prominent figure in the New York art world, [Jacquette] was known for her expansive aerial views of cities and landscapes that documented the rapidly changing environments across the country, including scenes of New York and Maine,” the gallery said in a statement.

Throughout her career, Jacquette observed, with a Darwinian dedication, the view from an airplane window. There, in the clouds, reality loosens its grip on light and scale; rough swaths of land are flattened, and at night—when she often travelled—cities are clusters of lights skimming a velvet black sea. She crisscrossed continents for those brief glimpses of natural and man-made landscapes, which she often made into watercolors while on board. 

In 1975, she charted a private plane in Maine to study its rugged outline; the result, titled Passagassawaukeag I, became her first major aerial painting. Three years later, she made her first nocturnal aerial painting, East River View at Night, based on New York’s East River and FDR Drive. Living in New York, her peers included Alex Katz, Mimi Gross, and Lois Dodd, all of whom played with scale, depth, and light in their direct observations of urban life. Jacquette especially adopted photographic techniques in her painting such as severe crops, close-ups, and off-kilter perspectives. 

 “What is the point of the aerial view [in Yvonne Jacquette’s paintings]? You can look at it and say, Oh, that’s an aerial view, but there must be more than that,” Vincent Katz wrote in 1984. “There must be a reason this artist has become obsessed with this view of the world. To me, a view from a plane, especially at evening or night, is very romantic. The pretty way the lights glow and all those lives. It’s a distant view, removed, and yet it includes an intimacy of looking into people’s backyards.”

Yvonne Jacquette was born in Pittsburgh in 1934, and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. She began studying art at the age of 10, and after graduating high school enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design. Jacquette taught variously at Moore College of Art, the University of Pennsylvania, and Parsons School of Design while maintaining her painting practice. It was during a trip to Maine with fellow painters—Alex Katz, Neil Welliver, Rudy Burckhardt, among others—that she decided to find a style “that was different from all of them.”

“It happened by accident, of course,” she told the Brooklyn Rail in 2008. “I didn’t ever plan it, I was going to visit my parents who had just moved to California and I was in a plane with watercolors and I started to see that the clouds were amazing when you’re right in them.”

Jacquette’s work is included in the collections of major art institutions nationwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum in New York, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC.

In 2002, Stanford University’s Cantor Center for Visual Arts in California organized a retrospective of Jacquette, which traveled to institutions in Waterville, Maine; Salt Lake City, and Yonkers, New York. A solo show at the Museum of the City of New York came in 2008.

An exhibition dedicated to Jacquette’s work, organized in collaboration with her son Tom Burckhardt and titled “Yvonne Jacquette: Looking Up/Down/Inside/Out,” will open at DC Moore on May 4. Planned as a retrospective, it will now double as a tribute to her memory.

Many brandished signs (“Solidarity with the Union”) and chanted (“overworked and underpaid” and “Brooklyn is a union town”).

In August 2021, some 130 employees of the Brooklyn Museum, including curators, conservators, editors, fundraisers, educators, and members of the visitor services department, voted overwhelmingly to unionize. They affiliated with the Technical, Office, and Professional Union, Local 2110, part of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union which also represents workers at the Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among other cultural institutions across the US.

Contract negotiations between Brooklyn Museum leadership and the union began in January 2022, but eventually stalled on issues of healthcare benefits, job security, and wages. According to a union press release, employees have not received a wage increase since 2020, despite skyrocketing inflation and rent in New York City. They’ve made good progress on issues such as healthcare, however, negotiations have stagnated on economic issues, according to Carmen Hermo, an associate curator of feminist art who has worked at the museum for more than five years.

The union is asking for an across-the-board wage increase of 16.25 percent over a 3.5-year period. Additionally, the union is seeking raises for part-time front of house staff, such as those working in visitor services and retail, and improved hours and job security for all employees.

According to the union, the museum has offered a 3.5-year contract with wage increases across department that would amount to 9 percent by the end of the contract. Local 2110 reports that this is significantly less than unionized workers achieved through contract negotiations at comparable New York institutions, such as the Whitney Museum and the Bronx Museum.

“The Museum is reducing union positions and creating higher paid positions that it refuses to include in our union,” the union wrote. “These are obvious attempts to undercut our bargaining power and weaken our union.” They also accused the museum of “undermining” their “collective bargaining relationship by “committing unfair labor practices.”

In an emailed statement to ARTnews, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn Museum wrote: “We respect the rights of our bargained employees to demonstrate safely and remain committed to reaching an agreement as soon as possible.”

By now, the union and their supporters are familiar presences at the museum’s luxe events, having made an appearance most recently at the Thierry Mugler VIP Gala last November. Then, the weather had dipped from cold to frigid, and a heavy rain fell. Last night, clear skies and a crisp spring evening surely contributed to a greater turnout of union supporters. At the peak of its activity, the rising din of demonstrators and honking horns of passersby overtook the chatter of VIPs trickling through the front doors (and side doors, which were quietly opened by the event’s attendants).

The union, however, stressed that any ire was aimed at museum leadership, not the artists attending the ball. And absolutely there was no hard feelings toward the guest of honor, world-renowned photographer Carrie Mae Weems. (The host committee also included artists Mickalene Thomas, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Shirin Neshat, and Kehinde Wiley.)

If anything, union members believed that the artists would appreciate their fight for an equitable workplace. Owen O’Brien, manager of individual giving and campaigns in the museum’s development office, pointed out that Weems had once engaged in the labor movement as a union organizer.

“We hope that this [protest] will open some of the eyes of the artists here,” said O’Brien “Wages are stagnant, and that even though we all love working here, we love art—people are frustrated.”

The union negotiators returned to the table today, with the aim to reach a contract as colleagues at other New York institutions recently have.  

“We’ve seen our colleagues at the Whitney and the Bronx Museum achieve good, very fair contracts,” Hermo said. “This is a world-renowned institution; there’s no reason its workers shouldn’t be given the same.”

The work, titled Spider (1996), is expected to fetch between $30 million and $40 million. Even if the work achieves the low estimate, it would mint a new auction record for Bourgeois, whose current benchmark stands at $28 million (without fees). That record was set by another Spider (1996) at Christie’s in May 2019.

And if the work sells at or above its high estimate, it could become the most expensive work by a woman ever sold at auction. The holder of that record is Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting Jimson Weed (1936), bought by Walmart heiress Alice Walton for $44.4 million (without fees) in 2014.

Per Sotheby’s, Spider comes from the collection of Fundação Itaú, the philanthropic wing of Brazilian bank Itaú Unibanco. It debuted in 1996 Bienal de São Paulo and was subsequently acquired by Olavo Setubal, a collector and cofounder of the bank.

Like each entry in the world-famous series, it is a mammoth creation at ten-foot-tall and 18-feet wide. Its spindly, reaching legs may be nightmare fodder for arachnophobes, but according to Bourgeois, the spiders are stand-ins for sensitive subjects, in particular motherhood.

“The spider—why the spider? Because my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as a spider,” the artist once said.

Bourgeois’s spiders are on view in public spaces worldwide and have been acquired by leading cultural institutions, including Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Dia Art Foundation in New York, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and Tate Modern in London.

“The Spider has become a global icon, recognizable by all given its prominent presence in cultural institutions around the world,” David Galperin, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art in New York, said in a statement. “It is not only a paragon of modern sculpture but has taken on a larger symbolic presence within contemporary culture internationally.”

According the New Indian Express, the collector, Shobha Durairajan, told the Tamil Nadu Police department’s Idol Wing unit, which is tasked with tracking down looted relics, that she had purchased the idols from a deceased art dealer and accused smuggler named Deenadayalan, of the Aparna Art Gallery. The Archeological Survey of India (ASI) is currently assessing the lot, which likely date back to the 9th or 10th century CE.

“Since the inception of the idol wing, as many as 1,541 stolen antique idols of bronze and stone have been recovered and kept safely at 19 icon centers,” the director-general of Chennai police, Sylendra Babu, of the Idol Unit, said in a statement. “Armed police personnel are guarding them and CCTV surveillance has been also provided. We will investigate who was involved in the theft and nab them. We have seized over 300 idols in the last two years.”

Durairajan has previously been the subject of scrutiny by the Idol Wing. Last December, police recovered seven missing Hindu relics, including three stolen from the Adhi Kesava Perumal Temple in Ulundurpet, Kallakurichi, from her collection after she registered several with the ASI. A subsequent search of Durairajan’s Chennai estate uncovered relics of the Hindu figures Adhi Kesava Perumal, Veera Bhadra, Bhoodevi, Sree Devi, Asthira Devar, Amman, and Mahadevi.

The group had been purchased from Aparna Art Gallery between in 2008 and 2015. Durairajan reportedly only provided receipts for four of the idols, and two others were inscribed on their undersides with “Adhi Kesava Temple.”

The Italian-funded project is focused on preserving Bamiyan Valley, whose cultural landscape and archaeological remains were placed on UNESCO’s World Heritage in Danger list in 2003. The area contains numerous wall paintings and religious relics from the 3rd to the 5th century C.E.

The project’s goals include strengthening the infrastructure on the site and developing a long-term conservation plan, in the process providing generations of employment to the local community. Special attention will be given to the Bamiyan cliffs, a long rocky stretch of the central highlands of Afghanistan, and Shahr-i Ghulghulah, a fortress dating from the 6th to 10th centuries CE. Carved into the cliffs are numerous Buddhist artifacts, which once included a famed pair of seated Buddha statues that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

“The Bamiyan Valley is the most monumental expression of the western Buddhism. It was an important center of pilgrimage over many centuries,” UNESCO wrote in its citation. “Due to their symbolic values, the monuments have suffered at different times of their existence, including the deliberate destruction in 2001, which shook the whole world.”

Following the Taliban takeover, international funding to Afghanistan was immediately halted, including development and humanitarian aid. Meanwhile the country’s heritage was largely left undefended from damage and looting. In several statements, Unesco appealed for precautions to safeguard the region’s historical artifacts from the organization, given their “well-documented” cultural destruction.

UNESCO operates in the country within the perimeters of the Transitional Engagement Framework (TEF), a strategic planning document for its assistance in the country implemented in 2022. The plan prioritizes humanitarian aid and the preservation of local heritage but restricts any legitimization of the Taliban regime.   

In addition to Bamiyan, UNESCO is currently engaged in the preservation of the Minaret and Archaeological Remains of Jam, a World Heritage site in western Afghanistan; and sites in Zabul, Kandahar, Kabul and Ghazni.