In the upcoming New York sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips later this month, one of the priciest artworks won’t be on the walls, or even in New York. Rather, it will be sitting between Hole 10 and Hole 17 at Gillette Ridge, a public golf course in Bloomfield, Connecticut.

The Family by Isamu Noguchi is due to hit the auction block at the Sotheby’s New York Modern Evening Auction on May 16 with an estimate of $6 million to $8 million. It will almost certainly reset Noguchi’s current auction record of $4.73 million, set at Christie’s in 2017 by the sculpture Garden Elements.

The Connecticut General Life Insurance Company commissioned the monumental sculpture in 1956 for its then new corporate campus in Bloomfield. The Stonehenge-like arrangement of three totemic forms—the tallest rising 16 feet—consists of granite from the Stony Brook quarry, around 50 miles south of Bloomfield. It was installed on the grounds in 1957, the year the headquarters opened. 

Named for Connecticut General former president, Frazar B. Wilde, the headquarters is an iconic building designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who is also responsible for such similarly iconic buildings as Lever House in Manhattan. Noguchi also designed a garden for the Wilde Building, as well as other sculptural elements. In 1982 Connecticut General merged with INA Corporation to become the health care company Cigna Insurance. (Cigna had plans to tear down the Wilde building in 2001, about which local architect Tyler Smith wrote in the Hartford Courant, “For Cigna to destroy this site is an act of barbarism.” Cigna ended up nixing the idea.)

Cigna is the seller of the Noguchi, which sits on a portion of the campus developed in the early 2000s into a company-owned public golf course, the only one in the Northeast designed by Arnold Palmer, of pro golf and half-iced-tea-half-lemonade fame. On a clear fall day, the Noguchi is visible from the clubhouse. At least one local art lover is sad to see it go. Jordan Stein, general manager of Gillette Ridge, told ARTnews earlier this week, “I’m going to miss it.”
 
This isn’t Cigna’s first venture on the auction block; the company sold some 200 pieces through Sotheby’s in 2004. At the same time, it donated 5,000 artworks and artifacts to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., among other institutions. A Cigna rep told the Courant at the time that the company would keep its contemporary art collection, which sat in employee offices and common areas, and that it would use proceeds from the auctioned works to buy works by emerging artists. Cigna did not return a request for comment on whether the Noguchi sale indicates that more art sales are in store.

But wait, there’s more! 

The Ellsworth Kelly painting Black White (1967) is due to sell at the Christie’s New York 20th Century Evening Auction on May 11 with an estimate of $3.5 million to $5.5 million. The painting had long been in the collection of Dallas-based philanthropist and ARTnews Top 200 Collector Marguerite Hoffman. However, it appears that it is not Hoffman selling the painting. According to the provenance, the current owner bought it from an unnamed collector who purchased it from New York’s Matthew Marks Gallery. It appears likely that Hoffman and her late husband, Robert, purchased the painting from Marks and then sold it to the current consignor. If that is the case, it would be a relatively quick turnaround: the painting appears in Amor Mundi, a book devoted to Hoffman’s collection published only last year. 

Hoffman’s collection, along with that of two other Dallas families—the Rachofskys and the Roses—was bequeathed to the Dallas Museum of Art in 2005, meaning the collection goes to the museum after the owner’s death. Black White appeared in Fast Forward, a 2006 exhibition and catalogue at the museum dedicated to those collections. It is understood that bequeathing families may sell works during their lifetime, and Howard Rachofsky has already done so, selling a Christina Quarles painting for $4.5 million at Sotheby’s last year. The Rachofskys and Hoffman continue to acquire artworks; Amor Mundi shows that Hoffman has been diversifying her collection.

“We are grateful that Marguerite continues to steward her collection in a way that allows it to grow, change, and stay relevant for the long-term benefit of the Dallas Museum of Art,” a spokesman for the museum told ARTnews. 

Christie’s declined to comment, citing client confidentiality.

In other news, David Shuman, founder of Northwoods Capital Management and a Guggenheim trustee from 2015 to 2019, is listed in public documents as the owner of Matthew Wong’s 2017 canvas The Jungle, which is slated for the Sotheby’s New York May 18 Now Evening Auction, with an estimate of $1.2 million. The painting had been listed in a Sotheby’s sale in Hong Kong last year, but was ultimately pulled. 

Sotheby’s is also selling Picasso’s Nu devant la glace (1932), depicting French model Marie-Thérèse Walter  and created in Boisgeloup, at its Modern Evening Auction on May 16, with an estimate of $12 million to $18 million. The work, which is guaranteed, comes from the collection of Bettina and Donald Bryant, who have appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. It was last shown at Tate Modern in 2018 as part of the exhibition Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy. 

(A Sotheby’s spokesperson declined to comment on either sale citing reasons related to consignor confidentiality; Shuman could not be reached via a representative.) 

And, last but not least, three abstract paintings by Morris Louis—all of which have been exhibited in connection with 91-year-old Washington, D.C., real estate developer Robert P. Kogod—are to be offered at the Christie’s New York 20th Century Evening Sale on May 11. They have a collective estimate of $5.8 million. Kogod, and his wife, Arlene, are noted philanthropists; a courtyard connecting the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery bears their name.

SFAI, whose campus is host to a historic Diego Rivera mural from 1931, had been plagued by financial troubles in the years leading up to the pandemic. It wasn’t until 2020, however, that the school announced it would cease admissions and degree-granting programs due to decreased enrollment and mounting debts.

The school, which celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2021, is considered hugely important, not just to the Bay Area scene but nationally. Its alumni include Kehinde Wiley, Joan Brown, Richard Diebenkorn, Enrique Chagoya, Annie Leibovitz, and many more.

This latest maneuver will require the school to liquidate its assets in order to repay hundreds to millions of dollars’ worth of debts. Creditors for the school include private companies and former faculty who were laid off during the pandemic and received severance.

In February 2022, SFAI announced that it had been in discussions to merge with the University of San Francisco. Meanwhile, the San Francisco school’s administration and board members made moves to fundraise in order to keep the institution afloat. A controversial sale of the Rivera mural was considered, drawing the condemnation of many.

The mural had been appraised at an estimated $50 million. In 2021, it was granted landmark status by the city, blocking the planned sale. Officials who designated the status made it so that the mural’s removal has to be approved by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Last year, SFAI received a $200,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation for its preservation.

The efforts led to $4 million in capital fundraising and the University of California’s Board of Regents purchasing the school’s $19.7 million debt, a deal that effectively made the institution the art school’s landlord. The school held its last graduation ceremony in July 2022 after a deal to merge with the University of San Francisco fell through.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Rivera mural could potentially be converted into a public gallery.

A representative for SFAI did not immediately respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.

According to documents filed on Monday at the Porter County Superior Court in Indiana, the retired professors argue that the planned sale violates the museum’s agreement with Percy H. Sloan, who donated them to the school. The two plaintiffs in the case are Richard Brauer, the museum’s first director and its namesake, and Philipp Brockington, a former professor at Valparaiso’s law school who has an endowment in his name at the museum. The Chicago Tribune had first reported that the lawsuit would be filed last week.

The motion for the restraining order was withdrawn in a hearing on Wednesday, Patrick B. McEuen, an Indiana-based attorney representing the claimants, told ARTnews over email. McEuen said he received “assurances the proposed auction was ‘months away’ and likely would not occur before September. “(McEuen said that the defendants would file motions to dismiss the suit.)

Brauer and Brockington’s suit claims that the sale presents “immediate danger of suffering a direct injury to the reputation of the art museum” and that “any harm” to the museum “will frustrate the purposes and intents of the Brockington Reeve Endowment Fund.”

The dispute revolves around the controversial sale of three valuable works of art from the university’s museum’s permanent collection. The paintings—Georgia O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills (1930) and two others by Frederic E. Church and Childe Hassam—are estimated to be worth a collective $20 million.

The announcement drew pushback from professors at the school and museum advocates. The Association of American Museum Directors (AAMD), a prominent museum group that oversees rules related to deaccessioning, condemned the move in a letter addressed to the museum’s current director, Jonathan Canning, shortly after the plans were made public in February.

That month, Jose D. Padilla, the university’s president, announced that the funds generated from the sale would be allocated to refurbishing freshmen dormitories. The deaccession plan, Padilla has said, is part of a larger move by the administration to attract and retain full-time students to the Lutheran university. The move comes after a report from Moody’s earlier this year called into question the school’s financial position.

The lawsuit names Padilla, Valparaiso University, and Todd Rokita, Indiana’s attorney general, as defendants, and states that the sale “contravenes the donor’s intent.” Rokita oversees standards related to organizations with charitable status and the legal standards guiding the management of their financial assets.

“Mr. Brauer, who lent his name to the museum, and Mr. Brockington, who has endowed a fund to maintain and preserve the museum, are heartsick at the thought that Percy Sloan’s intent to build a permanent memorial to his parents in the form of an art museum would be ignored by Valparaiso University,” McEuen said.

Valparaiso University is among a group of other schools throughout the country that have made controversial attempts to sell works in order to fund campus operations. Fisk University in Tennessee and Rockford College in Illinois, alongside Randolph College in Virginia and Brandeis University in Massachusetts, have all been the subjects of similar debates around plans to deaccession gifted artwork.

“The University apparently believes that they accepted Percy Sloan’s donation to pay for capital improvements, not art education,” McEuen added.

Darron Farha, the unviversity’s general counsel, did not immediately respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.

With the major May auctions around the corner, the Art Business Conference has landed in New York for the first time since before the pandemic with a full slate of panels that examine the state of the art market and art finance. Back in spring 2020, a new trend was on the rise: firms that put artworks into securitized funds for fractional ownership investment.

The 2023 conference opens today in a very different financial environment that sees those same firms in rocky waters. 

The Art Business Conference was founded in 2014, just as collectors started to dip their toes into using art as collateral for loans, the precursor of the fractional funds. Four years later, Deloitte estimated that that sector was worth $20 billion. In May 2020, Morgan Stanley analysts released a wide-ranging report on how artworks could be used as financial vehicles: they could be placed in trust to shield fortunes from inheritance taxes (as Succession cheekily referenced with its recent nod toward “investment impressionism” after a certain character’s untimely death); or they could be used as collateral for loans. In 2021, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan reported growth in their art loan businesses up to 30 percent over the previous year.

The Morgan Stanley report also gestured to the new area of securitized funds, but it took the pandemic to rev that up. In the following months, booming tech stocks, low interest rates, and a rise in disposable income fueled a series of bubbles in alternative assets, namely cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and so-called “meme-stocks.” But newer fintech players splitting equity in artworks among retail investors also saw their growth supercharged.

The best-known firms, Yieldstreet, Mintus, Masterworks, and Securitize, each have slightly different business models, but they all promise to unlock art’s investment potential to a population beyond the elite collector class. In 2021 Masterworks raised $110 million in a series A funding round, Yieldstreet raised $100 million in series C funding, and Securitize raised $48 million in its series B capital round. 

This past January, however, the financial papers of record declared the end of “cheap money,” as central banks ended a period of ultralow interest rates and quantitative easing that defined the global economy of the last 15 years. Now, with global interest rates hiked and inflation running high, there are far higher barriers to attracting investors to alternative assets.

As ARTnews reported in December, Masterworks used its sizable cash runway to purchase more than $450 million worth of paintings, while cutting over two dozen employees as it struggled to reach ambitious sales targets. Former staffers revealed that the cost of netting retail investors was an ongoing challenge. Mintus has faced a similar hurdle, an anonymous source familiar with the company’s business strategy told ARTnews. A more restrictive regulatory environment in the United Kingdom, where Mintus is based, forced it to pivot from retail to institutional investors and family wealth offices. The cost of marketing to regular investors while adhering to regulatory standards was too high in the face of a prospective recession, the source said. 

Vedat Mizrahi, Mintus’s CFO and chief economist, told ARTnews that the company’s focus is on “mass affluent” individuals, an industry term used to describe those with at least $100,000 in investable assets. “We have always been of the view that mass retail is not the right client category to target for alternative assets due to the complexity and relatively more illiquid nature of the asset class.”

Yieldstreet, which bills itself as an alternative investment platform and has funds in real estate, law, and art, cut at least two employees from its small art-focused division, Athena, according to former employees, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Athena launched a series of art equity funds last year. Its fourth fund, launched last May, holding works from Ed Ruscha, Cy Twombly, and Sol LeWitt, among others, has yet to be fully bought into nearly a year later. A former Yieldstreet employee familiar with the funds told ARTnews that the weak selling is a sign the company and its peers have yet to bounce back from a dip in investor interest that began last summer. (A Yieldstreet spokesperson declined to comment on the extent of the layoffs.)

A wealth adviser based in Florida whose firm has researched and invested in fintech companies told ARTnews that “cheap money” fueled a surge of interest in “exotic alternatives.” But the current economic environment has squelched that trend. “When traditional asset classes get really stressed, that’s when things start to break in the rest of the financial market,” he said.

Meanwhile, at a Bloomberg panel last month, Sotheby’s European chairman Oliver Barker questioned the viability of fractional art investment companies in the new economic climate. “I haven’t yet seen one painting that’s been sold privately since acquisition by a fund like that for a major profit,” Barker told the panel. 

Some of the companies seem not to be denying the situation. A Yieldstreet spokesperson told ARTnews the company recently issued “a number of cost-cutting initiatives” consistent with “the current market backdrop,” and did not refute the assertion that its art equity funds were seeing lower interest, but did say Yieldstreet was betting on “continued” interest in alternative assets. Those assets, the spokesperson said, bring returns “even during stock market crashes, recessions, and wars.” Meanwhile, Mizrahi said Mintus has “been anticipating a decline in the retail investor appetite as the central banks signaled tightening and interest rate hikes.” The dissenting voice was Masterworks, whose spokesperson, Matt Sutherland, told ARTnews that the company has not been affected by the retail climate and that it “continues to see strong growth with retail investors.” The company expects capital raising to grow at least 50 percent in 2023. “Our view is that investors who are serious about art investing are coming to us versus smaller players,” Sutherland said.

It is worth noting that, in terms of finance as a whole, these companies are small players in a widening landscape where all kinds of special assets are being fractionalized. An internal document from a midsize New York investment firm reviewed by ARTnews showed Masterworks, Mintus, and Yieldstreet among the more than 50 such early-stage fintech companies with funds it was monitoring for “curated venture capital investment opportunities.”

And even amid the chillier environment, art continues to be a magnet for finance’s new instruments. Case in point: Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), online social clubs that are often venture-backed, where investors collectively govern funds through various blockchain mechanisms. 

Last summer, Web3 start-up Arkive launched with $9.7 million in funding and a promise to “decentralize the museum.” While structured as a DAO, Arkive describes itself as a lending institution. It crowdsources its member-investors for funds and direction on what to acquire, and then brokers loans of art and ephemera to private and public spaces. 

But while founder and executive director Tom McLeod has often pitched Arkive as “artist-centric,” he told Hub Culture Davos in January that Arkive wants to be a vehicle for investors and a means of aggregating creative types as art advisers. He seemed to be imagining Arkive as an asset manager, while arguing that its structure could solve a problem at the heart of using art as an asset class: how to know what to buy. 

“It’s an opportunity to put your capital or a family office’s capital to work in alternative assets,” McLeod said in January. With “thousands of people” working to advise on an acquisition, he said of investors, “you’re getting a ton of edge.”

According to a press release, the district, which will carry Perelman’s name, will host a performing arts center scheduled to open in the fall. The district will also include various other performance centers and teaching, gallery, rehearsal, and performance spaces. Perelman’s gift will go toward the school’s “BrownTogether” campaign, which aims to raise $4 billion to support research, teaching, financial aid, and athletics at the university.

“The open-ended concept behind the arts district affirms the arts exist everywhere at Brown, and in fact, migrate wherever Brown’s artists go,” Perelman said of the donation in a statement. Perelman, the chairman and CEO of MacAndrews & Forbes Inc., formerly served as a Brown trustee.

A statement from Brown described Perelman as “one of the country’s leading philanthropists,” though his giving has previously come under scrutiny. In 2018 Perelman pledged $65 million to Princeton University to build a residential college in his name; in August 2021, however, the school terminated the agreement for the gift after Perelman failed to fulfill payments toward it through his namesake foundation. The school rejected Perelman’s attempt to renegotiate a payment plan.

The failed donation came after Perelman, a majority shareholder in the Revlon cosmetics company who has been featured on the ARTnews list of Top 200 collectors, began parting with financial assets in 2020 in a dramatic sell-off—auctioning a super yacht, a private jet, and $40 million worth of blue-chip artworks from his 1,000-item collection. He also sold his majority stake in Humvee-maker AM General, along with shares in two other businesses: Merisant and MAFCO. Additionally, questions were raised about this family foundation’s transactions.

In a statement published by Bloomberg in September 2020, Perelman maintained that the asset sales were not made under financial duress, but were rather part of a mid-pandemic strategy “to seek new investment opportunities.”

Among the items repaired by the Czech museum’s restorers and currently on public view are limestone funerary portraits from the ancient site of Palmyra. The area suffered damage in 2015 during an invasion by Islamic State group militants. Syria regained control of the territory in 2017.

Prague National Museum director Michal Lukes told AFP, which first reported the news, in a statement that “fighting,” “ideological reasons,” and “local people looking for something to sell” are common ways artifacts are damaged in conflict zones. Lukes said the museum believes these works were intentionally damaged with a metal hammer.

The museum has been working with Syrian government officials overseeing restoration of cultural heritage sites since 2017. In 2022 officials transferred the 20 artifacts from Syria to be restored by a conservation team of six.

Palmyra’s relics have been the subject of diplomatic efforts by cultural experts before. The region was retaken from Islamic State militants by the Syrian army with support from Russia in 2017. Restoration work around the site, located in central Syria’s Homs Governorate province, has been ongoing since Russian specialists were called on to help rebuild the site in 2018.

The museum has carried out similar restoration partnerships with cultural officials from Sudan and Afghanistan. The Syrian artifacts, others of which include metal and bronze objects, are on display at the Prague museum’s current exhibition, “Restored Face,” that is slated to close in May.

The painting, titled El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile), depicts floating skulls and figures set against a background riddled with scrawled phrases alluding to pharaohs and ancient Egyptian sites. At the center of the conjoined triptych painting, the god Osiris leads a yellow boat down the Nile River.

It has resided in Garavani’s personal collection for 18 years, appearing in a 2010 issue of Vanity Fair in which the Italian fashion mogul was photographed seated in front of it. Four years earlier, Garavani paid tribute to the artist with a collection of graffiti print dresses using imagery licensed from the Basquiat estate archive. (In May 2021, Valentino cofounder Giancarlo Giammetti sold a 1983 painting by Basquiat for $93.1 million.)

A 2005 traveling Basquiat exhibit that originated at the Brooklyn Museum in New York showcased The Nile. Garavani presumably loaned it for the exhibition after having acquired it that same year at a Sotheby’s New York auction, where it sold for $5.2 million.

Backed with a third-party guarantee, the work will be offered during Christie’s 21st-century art evening sale at the house’s Rockefeller Center location on May 15. It is being sold “from a distinguished collection,” according to the house’s catalogue entry. The painting’s current estimated price is more than eight times the figure it achieved in 2005.

In a statement, Christie’s chairman Alex Rotter said that the artist completed the work at the age of 22, when “unpacking historical constructs of race” was at the forefront of his practice. The work’s Spanish title translates to “The Great Show”; it is sometimes referred to as “The Nile,” a phrase written on the back of the canvas, and as Untitled (History of the Black People).

In some corners, Basquiat’s paintings are considered financial trophies. Although the artist never lacked a market following, his works have in recent years commanded some of the largest sums at auction, with his name becoming a brand in the market sphere. The forthcoming sale is yet another sign that, 35 years after his death in 1988, Basquiat has become synonymous with luxury.

The Nile has also made its way into the pop-cultural mainstream. It appeared as a reproduction in the 2016 Showtime TV series Billions, the guiding plotline of which followed a high-profile rift between hedge-funder and collector Steve Cohen and a prominent US attorney. In interviews, the show’s organizers said that the staging for the series imagined Basquiat as a luxury symbol for the financial sector’s top echelons.

A portion of the proceeds from its sale in May will go to the Accademia Valentino in Rome, an institution run separately from the fashion label’s umbrella, but that shares its founders. A spokesperson described the academy’s mission as “dedicated to art, fashion, and education.” Some of the sale’s proceeds will support a project to build new spaces at its headquarters.

“The worlds of fine art and luxury are historically linked,” Christie’s contemporary art specialist Isabella Lauria told ARTnews. Lauria described Basquiat’s references “from art history to street art” as having becoming “engrained in shared cultural consciousness” across audiences.

Lauria added, “In a way, Basquiat saw the future, and his references have continued to become that much more salient.”

Public demonstrations on March 9 by members of the climate activist group Ultima Generazione left the structure partially covered in gold paint. The Milan city council’s earlier attempts to have the monument cleaned following those actions were unsuccessful, according to the Italian cultural ministry.

Milanese officials have accused the group of damaging the site permanently, telling an Italian news outlet that the city is considering a civil action against the protestors. The activist group has claimed materials used in protests do not cause permanent damage to monuments.

The target of the March protest is a focal point of Milan’s Piazza del Duomo: a bronze equestrian monument designed by Italian artist Ercole Rosa that commemorates the military victory of 19th-century Italian official Vittorio Emanuele II. Two climate activists, a 26-year-old male and a 23-year-old female, sprayed the antique statue with yellow paint and were apprehended by Carabinieri officers.

Ultima Generazione, which is affiliated with the A22 network of climate groups devoted to “civil disobedience,” according to the organization’s website, said the demonstration in Milan was staged to protest Italian government’s investments in fossil fuels. “The Italian government invested 41.8 billion euros in the extraction of fossil fuels in 2021 alone,” said Ultima Generazione in a public statement.

The Milan protest is one of several that climate activists have recently staged at public sites. During demonstrations in Rome, using non-permanent paint and dye activists targeted the 15th-century building facade of the Italian Senate building and the 17th-century, Pietro Bernini–designed Fontana della Barcaccia.

In a report requested by Milan’s department overseeing archaeology, fine arts and landscape to assess conversation needs for the monument, Italy’s culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, said that prior attempts by Milanese officials to remove paint from the Rosa monument using high-pressure water risked damaging its marble.

“From what I have been told, a real restoration intervention seems necessary which entails greater costs for the community,” Sangiuliano said. The estimated cost of restoring the monument to its prior state have not been disclosed.

The report comes as tensions between Italian officials and protestors heighten. Last week, the Italian government passed a law imposing five-figure fines on individuals found to have vandalized the country’s monuments or cultural sites to cover repair costs. In a statement, Sangiuliano condemned the targeting of public monuments as “economic damage to all.”

The workers, represented by the Teamsters Local 251 chapter and spanning groundskeeping, operations, and maintenance, went on strike April 3.

Organizers have been in contract negotiations since June 2022 over wages increases, seeking an hourly wage increase from the current $16.74 average of a RISD custodian or groundskeeper to a $20 hourly minimum. The strike authorization followed a halt in negotiations with the school’s administration in mid-February.

On April 12, RISD students walked out in a show of support for the workers. The following day, the school’s president, Crystal Williams, defended the school’s offer of an average wage of $17.90 per hour for the school’s lowest-paid maintenance workers, describing it in a statement as “a fair and reasonable resolution.”

RISD faculty accommodated student demonstrators, an action supported by some RISD officials in public statements. RISD’s Full-Time Faculty Association, the union representing RISD’s full-time faculty, moved to support the strike, the Brown Daily Herald reported last week. Members of the Providence City Council encouraged Williams and RISD’s board of trustees to move forward with “honest negotiations” in a letter issued on April 10.

A spokesperson for RISD told ARTnews the school’s officials are meeting with Teamsters Local 251 leadership on Monday “in hopes of coming to a final agreement.”

Matthew Maini, a representative for the Teamsters Local 251 told The Art Newspaper that the strike is aimed at Williams, who took up the position as the school’s president in April last year, citing her role’s $600,000 salary and rent-free living accommodations as prompting the action.

Prior to the strike, RISD students distributed a petition that has drawn more than 3,000 signatures calling for the university to meet the union’s wage requests and provide reasoning for proposal rejections. The petition criticized RISD’s handling of the negotiations and funding priorities saying: “The more money RISD pours to temporary solutions, shows the more blatant exploitation and denial of workers rights RISD upholds.”

In public documents related to RISD’s now $440 million endowment and $161 million operating budget from 2020, the school said it “relies on students to fund the majority of the institutions operating costs.”

In a statement released on April 10, the school said “we respect our workers’ right to strike, but are disappointed the union is choosing to do this rather than discussing reasonable wages and benefits with us.”

The strikes follows widespread unionizing efforts across arts institutions in the last year.  In December, a 25-day strike among staff at the New School in New York and Parsons School of Design over contract negotiations related to wages led to a successful contract update. The negotiation ended the longest adjunct faculty strike to date in the US.

The museum’s press materials describe the exhibition, titled “Comparative Hell: Arts of Asian Underworlds,” as the first comprehensive showcase in the United States dedicated to exploring religious depictions of Hell deriving from Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism and Islam. The exhibition, which opened in February, is slated to run until the first week of May.

A virtual tour is being used to promote the exhibition online. Some scholars involved with the show noticed that pictures of the Prophet Muhammad that appear in the show were obscured, the Times reported on Monday.

Two of these academics—Kjeld von Folsach, director of Copenhagen’s David Collection, a museum which has a large holding of Islamic art, and Christiane Gruber, a scholar of Islamic art based in Michigan—claimed they were not told the images would be blurred in marketing efforts.

Representatives for the Asia Society told the Times that the virtual tour was handled by an outside contractor and that the blurring of the images was done without the museum’s official approval. The museum removed the online tour from its website to make the correction and has since apologized for the error, telling the Times: “Our goal with this exhibition has always been to display these historic works fully while also including necessary context and information.”

Signage at the New York exhibition space is installed to warn against photography of those images. Additional text within the show notes that these works’ subject matter is sensitive for religious reasons.

Von Folsach helped lend a 15th-century manuscript depicting Hell’s gates during the night of the Prophet Muhammad’s ascent to heaven as illustrated in a copy of al-Sara’i’s “Nahj al-Faradis.” Gruber, who acted as an adviser for the exhibition and authored a catalogue essay, has been a vocal advocate for showcasing uncensored images of the Prophet in academic settings.

A representative for the Asia Society did not immediately respond to ARTnews‘s request for comment.

The handling of historical depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in institutional settings remains a point of debate. In some sects of Islam, and for many observant Muslims, viewings or renderings of the Prophet are commonly believed to be forbidden. This applies not only to contemporary depictions but to historical ones as well.

Earlier this year, administrators at the Minnesota-based liberal arts college Hamline University were embroiled in controversy over the school’s dismissal of an art history adjunct professor, whose use of historical images of the Prophet were flagged as offensive by an observant Muslim student. Hamline initially defended its decision not to renew the professor’s contract and described the incident as “Islamophobic” in internal communications sent to staff. The school later walked back the claim after a debate ensued over academic freedom.

The aftermath of the controversy led to widespread calls by the university’s professors and academic advocacy groups for the resignation of Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller. Earlier this month, Miller announced that she would step down from the position in June 2024.