Liz Collins had her work cut out for her when she conceived the two 16-foot-long tapestries she showed at last year’s Venice Biennale. Both textiles feature mountain ranges whose peaks emit rainbows that twist through a dark sky, and though they were among the largest works in the Biennale, they were crafted with such elegance that they appeared effortless.
In 2022, when she began work on them at the TextielLab in the Dutch city of Tillburg, Collins envisaged the two textiles as one 40-foot weaving. She thought, “I’m just going for the mother lode. I want to make this huge.” Going for the mother lode quickly revealed itself to be no easy task, however.
Collins quickly realized that her ambitions had outstripped what was actually possible, leading her to split her planned mega-tapestry in two. After an initial trial that didn’t look quite as she wanted, she switched to a lighter yarn. She was pleased with the final product, which she brought home to New York in duffel bags, not yet aware that curator Adriano Pedrosa was interested in showing them at his Biennale.
During a recent visit to her Brooklyn studio, Collins was transparent about the difficulty of producing these textiles, titled Rainbow Mountains: Moon and Rainbow Mountains: Weather (both 2023). But despite the arduous process of making the works, she also spoke of the resulting pieces as being transcendent and transporting. She described both as representing “this monumental space of distortion” and said her mountain ranges evinced “a persistent duality for me: the idea of danger, precarity, horror—the bad things—alongside joy, euphoria, the force of life, being alive, love and community and passion and emotion. Awe and wonder are in the mountains, but they’re also in the rainbows.”
The textiles depict “the promised land—this idea of something you’re looking toward that’s always a little out of reach,” as Collins put it.
Since the 1990s, Collins has been creating fiber art that attempts to reach that promised land. She has crafted wearable garments, painting-like weavings, and performance pieces involving collaborators, many of whom have knit large textiles as a collective. She weaves queer themes into her work—rainbows and Pride flags recur throughout—and often creates textiles that have a corporeal quality, with spills of yarn that recall locks of hair or rivulets of blood.
These labor-intensive pieces have been featured at commercial galleries, art fairs, and design expos and will now be surveyed by the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, where Collins did both undergraduate and graduate work and later was a faculty member in the textiles department. The RISD survey, opening on July 19 and running through January 11, 2026, coincides with the Museum of Modern Art’s iteration of “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” which features three works by her.
To create such elegant art requires physical and mental endurance (and sometimes the help of mills in Italy, Peru, and other foreign nations). The RISD exhibition’s catalog features an essay by Zoe Latta, cofounder of the clothing label Eckhaus Latta and student of Collins who participated in one of the artist’s “Knitting Nation” performances, for which Latta and others helped produce a giant red weaving using a loom in the auditorium of the Institute of Contemporary Art. “At some point,” Latta writes, “I remember that my machine was turning red and I realized my hands were bleeding from blisters popping on the handle of the carriage.” (Museum workers bandaged Latta’s wounds, and she returned to the performance thereafter.)
From such burdensome labor spring weavings in shades of deep crimson, gleaming pink, and alluring blue. The fact that Collins is able to spin pain into beauty has not been lost on her collaborators. The artist Nayland Blake, for example, once enlisted Collins to fix a beloved sock monkey torn apart by a dog and filmed Collins’s hands in close-up for a video called Stab (2013).
Kate Irvin, the curator of Collins’s RISD survey, said that for the artist, “the idea of labor leads to this idea of magic, of alchemy—of creating form or structure out of a line of fiber.” Irvin compared Collins to a trickster, saying, “She’s finding a pathway to other places that are generative and creative and safe.”
Collins herself said that the physicality of her process has helped to root her in her body—and that she even welcomes the tedium that accompanies weaving. “Either it’s boring, or you find a way for it to be transformative,” she said. “You can transcend the monotony.”
Collins was born in 1968 in Alexandria, Virginia, and spent her childhood visiting Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C. “It was so much a part of my life to experience art,” she said, recalling such formative experiences as attending the National Museum of African Art, where, during one visit, she viewed a video about men who make kente cloth.
She described an early compulsion to make “something with the heaviness of painting.” But she eventually found herself dissuaded from taking up that medium. As part of her required foundational studies as a freshman at RISD, she tried painting, but “there was something about it that felt stressful to me—the rectangle, the rigid rectangle,” she said. She found herself gravitating toward modernists like Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anni Albers, and Sonia Delaunay, all of whom fluidly translated their abstractions across paintings and textiles. Those artists “really helped me know that I could do that too,” Collins said.
When she became a textiles major in her second year, she finally found her purpose. She learned to weave using a warp board and found the experience of running yellow yarn through it “so special and new and perfect for my body,” as she says in the RISD catalog.
Yet even the textile program left something to be desired: She wanted to create clothes, and all her teachers were fiber artists or designers. “I wanted to work with Jean Paul Gaultier, who could take my magical fabric and turn it into a magical garment,” she told me. Despite being unable to find a Gaultier-like mentor on RISD’s faculty, Collins followed her own intuition. When she was assigned to create a “political piece” for one class, she took camouflage-print fake fur and slashed it. She has since continued to produce weavings with gashes in them.
After graduating with an MFA in 1999, Collins launched a knitwear company that briefly made her a fixture within the world of fashion. “I had this meteoric rise to visibility and recognition, because my work was very unusual,” she said. “I was breaking rules. I was hand-making things with knitting machines, not using factories, and making these very unusual constructions that people hadn’t seen.”
Many of those constructions aspired toward liberation. A tight-fitting bustier from 1999 that appears in MoMA’s “Woven Histories,” for example, features red veins that run across the torso and over one shoulder; sheer dresses donned by runway models featured dangling red threads and gaping holes. “I came out as a queer person through my clothing,” Collins said. “It was a raw expression of my emotional landscape, my sexuality, my anxiety, my repression.”
Her clothes entered the mainstream, with the rapper Lil’ Kim wearing a pink silk and wool top designed by Collins in a 2000 music video. Some in the art world gained appreciation for them, too, including the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, a longtime friend who dedicated her 2017 book, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, to Collins. “When I want to feel at my most fierce, protected, and glamorous, that’s when I choose to wear a Liz Collins garment,” said Bryan-Wilson, whose wedding dress was designed by Collins. “They are witchy and eye-catching. They’re statement pieces. People are always, like, ‘Oh, my God, what is that you’re wearing?’”
But Collins began to feel burnt out by the business of fashion. She wasn’t making enough money, and she had grown exhausted by customers who placed specific demands on her, not realizing all that went into the production of her clothes. Collins knew she could not make it on her own anymore, so she applied for work with other designers, including Donna Karan. But when she came across a position in RISD’s textile department, “everything shifted for me,” she explained. She recalled having “slowly segued” out of fashion while continuing to take on projects with designers such as Gary Graham, with whom she crafted the Pride Dress (2003), which was made from a tattered American flag.
Bryan-Wilson herself donned the Pride Dress for Knitting Nation Phase 1: Knitting During Wartime (2005), the first in a series of performances that helped cement Collins’s place within the art world. Staged on Governors Island, Knitting During Wartime involved many collaborators working together to knit an American flag that was then laid on the ground, trod upon, and defaced. Collins intended the piece as a response to Sunny A. Smith’s The Muster, a series of artworks interrogating Civil War reenactments. Smith aspired to answer the question “What are you fighting for?” Knitting During Wartime appeared as many Americans were asking something similar of themselves while the United States continued its conflict in Afghanistan. Bryan-Wilson recalled Knitting During Wartime as a “ruckus” highlighted by the loud noises of knitting machines and said she understood the piece as a “critique of wartime nationalism and the feminized labor of knitting.”
Future “Knitting Nation” performances involved producing Pride flags and heaps of red fabric. Collins said that, with these performances, she was “focused on telling a story about the physical labor of making fabric and laying bare this medium that I thought was like alchemy, taking a spool of yarn and then putting it through this machine.”
Collins staged the last “Knitting Nation” performance in 2016 and has since produced a range of dreamy textiles. In 2017, working on commission for the Little River Cafe in New York, she produced Inheritance, a group of hanging white textiles that dangle over the heads of diners. (These were an allusion to the sails of boats like the one manned by Collins’s father when she was a child.) That same year, for a New Museum show called “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” Collins made Cave of Secrets, an installation bathed in bluish lighting that included two chairs of differing heights yoked together by violet fibers.
These days, Collins said, she is experiencing a “strange color moment” in which her work often features clashing hues. She pointed out a new weaving from a series called “Zagreb Mountains,” which showcases jagged, zigzagging lines in a range of colors, from raucous yellow to soothing cerulean. “Left on my own, I can come up with some wacky shit like this,” she said.
The Venice Biennale will move forward with its 2026 edition—even after the unexpected death of its curator, Koyo Kouoh, earlier this month.
On Tuesday, the Biennale revealed that it intended to realize Kouoh’s exhibition, which she had already begun to devise prior to her passing. The exhibition’s leaders said she had already begun selecting artists, thinking through their commissions, and building out programming, and that she had also come up with her show’s central concept.
Her exhibition will be titled “In Minor Keys,” and it is still due to open on May 9, as was initially planned. It is going ahead with a team of five advisers that Kouoh had herself selected: curators Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helene Pereira, and Rasha Salti; Siddartha Mitter, a critic who will serve as the editor of written materials associated with Kouoh’s Biennale; and Rory Tsapayi, who will act as an assistant to the team.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Cristiana Costanzo, the Biennale’s lead press officer, said that the choice to realize the show was done “with the full support” of Kouoh’s family. According to the Biennale, Kouoh worked on the show between mid-October, when the Biennale accepted her proposal, and early May.
Kouoh died earlier this month at 57 after a recent cancer diagnosis. She was formerly executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa. Born in Cameroon and raised in Switzerland, she was the second African-born curator to be appointed the organizer the Biennale’s main exhibition and one of the very few women ever to receive the honor.
Her passing appeared to have come suddenly, occurring less than two weeks before she was expected to reveal her Biennale’s theme.
Tuesday’s press conference began with a brief video of a smiling Kouoh welcoming everyone to Venice. Those in the press room stood and applauded once the video concluded.
Salti, one of the curatorial advisers, started the presentation of Kouoh’s concept with an invitation to slow down, as written by Kouoh herself: “Take a deep breath. Exhale. Drop your shoulders. And close your eyes.” This, Kouoh’s text explained, befits the show itself. “The minor keys refuse orchestral bombast,” Salti said, reading Kouoh’s words.
“The minor keys ask for listening that calls on the emotions and sustains them in return,” Pereira, another adviser, explained. “The minor keys are also small islands with endlessly rich ecosystems.” Beckhurst Feijoo followed, noting that there would be an emphasis on “the sensory, the affective, and the subjective.”
Moreover, Mitter said, “In refusing the spectacle of horror, it has come time to listen to the minor keys, to listen to the sotto voce, to find the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is regarded.” He said there would be a focus on artists whose practices “seamlessly bleed into society.”
Behind these advisers played a slideshow of images: pictures of cave paintings and city streets, images of tiny isles surrounded by blue oceans. The advisers also quoted from a litany of influential thinkers, including Édouard Glissant, a writer born in Martinique, based in France, and known for his writings on concepts such as opacity; the American novelist Toni Morrison, known for books such as Beloved; Patrick Chamusso, who was born in Mozambique and became a hero to many during the fight against Apartheid in South Africa; and James Baldwin, an American poet and novelist known for books such as Giovanni’s Room.
The Venice Biennale is commonly considered the world’s greatest art exhibition, with a main exhibition surveying a theme or a tendency taking place alongside presentations selected by countries from across the globe.
No curator of any Biennale edition staged in the past century has died during the making of their exhibition, but there have been editions that were disrupted by world events. In 1974, a show for “democratic and anti-fascist culture” was held in place of main exhibition as a protest against the Pinochet regime in Chile, and in 2020, the Covid pandemic forced the Biennale to push its planned 2021 edition to 2022.
Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the Biennale’s president, insisted that the 2026 edition was not severely disrupted, however. “We are realizing today her exhibition as she designed it, as she imagined it, as she gave it to me personally,” he said, adding, “La Biennale is doing today what it has been doing for 100 years.”
Buttafuoco movingly recounted the moment when Kouoh first found out that she had been selected to curate the Biennale in 2024. “May I tell this to my mother?” she asked him.
“Koyo’s work is speaking to us, facing the work of curators before her and the ones that will come after her,” said Buttafuoco. To that end, the conference closed out with words from Tsapayi, the curatorial team’s assistant, who read a piece of writing penned by Kouoh in 2022.
“And quite frankly, I am tired,” said Tsapayi, reading Kouoh’s words. “People are tired. We are all tired. The world is tired. Even art itself is tired. Perhaps the time has come. We need something else. We need to heal. We need to laugh. We need to be with beauty, and lots of it. We need to play, we need to be with poetry. We need to be with love again. We need to dance. We need to rest and restore. We need to breathe. We need the radicality of joy. The time has come.”
Though an artist list for Kouoh’s show will not be announced until next year, some countries have already revealed their picks for their national pavilions at the 2026 Biennale. The national pavilions are not part of the main exhibition and therefore are not related to Kouoh’s curatorial vision.
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The Headlines
IN MEMORIAM. Koyo Kouoh, the celebrated, Cameroonian-born curator appointed to lead the 2026 Venice Biennale, has died unexpectedly at the age of 57, reports ARTnews. When she was appointed in December of last year to curate the storied exhibition in Venice, Kouoh became the second African-born curator to take on the job. But on Saturday, the Venice Biennale announced her passing, describing her as a figure of “passion, intellectual rigor, and vision.” The New York Times also reported that her husband, Philippe Mall, said that a recently diagnosed cancer was the cause of her death in a hospital in Basel, Switzerland. Since 2019, Kouoh had been executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, and was widely admired for her commitment to expanding the global narrative of contemporary art, particularly when it came to her focus on African art. “I’m interested in critical artistic practices and how they play out in society, particularly societies like ours. I believe that context defines pretty much everything that we do,” she told Artforum in 2016.
GAUGING GAUGUIN. Is the final painting attributed to Paul Gauguin a fake? Le Quotidien de l’Art asks the question in a report about Self-portrait with glasses, held in Basel’s Kunstmuseum. The Swiss museum is taking no chances, and has begun examining the oil painting, officially believed to have been made in 1903. This comes following new information reported to them by former art dealer Fabrice Fourmanoir. He claims the self-portrait was painted by a certain Vietnamese political exile, Nguyen Van Cam, better known as Ky Dong (1875–1929) years after Gauguin died. [Ky Dong did meet the artist on a Polynesian Island, where the former had been exiled.] Now, the museum is conducting further tests using new technology to determine the credibility of Fourmanoir’s allegations. But there are troubling facts to consider: The artist’s eyes are painted blue (instead of brown), his nose is a bit too straight, and there’s no signature or date. Among other issues, questions have swirled around the painting’s provenance for decades, despite its presence in the artist’s catalogue raisonné. According to Fourmanoir, who has managed to convince museums in the past to change their Gauguin attributions, Ky Dong painted the portrait from a photograph provided by the artist’s dealer, Louis Grélet, who hatched an elaborate plan to have Ky Dong make the artwork and sell it as a fake. Fourmanoir even asserts Ky Dong’s son told him personally about his father’s forgery years ago.
The Digest
US studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro has won the Golden Lion for best project at the Venice Architecture Biennale, while Bahrain won the Golden Lion for best pavilion. Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s project, titled Canal Café, is designed as a laboratory and espresso bar, that purifies water from the Arsenal lagoon to create drinkable coffee for visitors. Bahrain’s pavilion curated by Andrea Faraguna, titled Heatwave, presents a ventilation system that cools a seating area underneath a low ceiling. [Dezeen]
A debate is heating up over a new monumental sculpture in Times Square by Thomas J Price depicting a Black woman dressed in everyday clothes. Grounded in the Stars was unveiled at the end of April to confront “preconceived notions of identity and representation,” according to a description. But while opinions are divided, critics have decried the artwork online as unflattering. [Artnet News]
An “epidemic” of mold has contaminated up to 12 museums in Denmark, threatening to damage paintings and objects. The highly resistant white mold coating has been detected in the National Museum of Denmark and Skagens Museum, among others. [The Guardian]
Director Ava DuVernay defended the Smithsonian Institution against President Donald Trump’s executive orders undermining it, during a speech while accepting an award at the National Museum of American History. At the ceremony for the Great Americans Medal she received on Thursday, she said, “Let me tell you about the families — Black, white, Native, immigrant — who walk through the doors of Smithsonian museums and feel that this country might just make room for them after all,” she said. “That is not indoctrination. That is belonging. That is education. That is democracy.” [The New York Times]
The Kicker
PUT UP A PARADISE AND CLOSED A PARKING LOT. Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, opened last week following a $53 million expansion. Among the changes, reports Apollo Magazine, are two parking lots that have been planted over, and nearly five additional acres of natural space for artworks and programming, including about 650 trees and local plants. The expansion, which began in 2017, “is about who we are and what we’re known for, and what we want to bring to the table,” says Nora Lawrence, the center’s executive director. The project also comes with a number of new exhibitions and acquisitions, including Kevin Beasley’s largest installation to date, which has been added to an art collection of more than a hundred works installed across a 500-acre landscape of rolling hills. Joni Mitchell, who poetically observed, “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” in her iconic song, “Big Yellow Taxi,” “must be smiling,” notes writer Helen Stoilas.
Koyo Kouoh, the celebrated Cameroonian-born curator behind some of the most significant exhibitions of African contemporary art in recent decades, has died unexpectedly at the age of 57.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that she died the day before in a hospital in Basel, Switzerland, and that the cause was cancer. Her husband, Philippe Mall, told the Times that she had only just recently received her diagnosis.
Kouoh’s death comes just months after being appointed curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale—making her the second African-born curator to lead the storied exhibition, following Okwui Enwezor’s groundbreaking edition in 2015.
The Venice Biennale announced her passing on Saturday, describing her as a figure of “passion, intellectual rigor, and vision.” The theme and title of her exhibition, which she had been developing since her appointment in December 2024, were set to be unveiled in Venice in less than two weeks.
Kouoh was widely admired for her commitment to expanding the global narrative of contemporary art beyond the US and Europe, and in particular for her focus on African art. Since 2019, she had been executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa—an institution that she helped shape into a critical platform for artists from across the continent and its diaspora.
She helped the institution gain international attention with shows such as 2022’s “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,” which has been widely regarded as the defining show on its subject. Three years on, the show is still traveling. Having journeyed far beyond South Africa, it can currently be seen at the Bozar arts center in Brussels.
Kouoh was also committed to fostering art scenes within Africa, most notably within Senegal. In 2008, she founded RAW Material Company in Dakar, an independent art center that is now considered one of the top art spaces in West Africa.
“I wanted to really reflect on art, on artistic practice, and to contribute to the understanding of artistic practice as its own system of thought and as a mechanism for participating in visual culture, society, politics,” she told Artforum in 2016, describing her choice to open RAW Material Company. “I wanted to think of it as a means for proposing, speculating, investigating, exploring, experimenting. As a curator, I’m interested in critical artistic practices and how they play out in society, particularly societies like ours. I believe that context defines pretty much everything that we do.”
She was acutely attentive to the ways that prevailing narratives for African art have been defined—and of who has defined them. In her Artforum interview, Kouoh described herself as part of a “second generation” of African curators that rebelled against what she described as “advocacy curating” seen in the West. Though she praised the work done by Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe, and others in the US and Europe, she wanted to create shows of African art for African people.
“For me,” she said, “working in Dakar, it is important to engage with the ideas and issues that concern our region here first—to reflect on them and research them, write about them, show them—and to share them with the world only secondarily.”
And she did just that, working on the curatorial teams of two editions of Documenta (in 2007 and 2012), organizing Ireland’s EVA International biennial, and doing a show-within-a-show for the 2018 edition of the Carnegie International, an esteemed recurring show that takes place at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
All this work, whether taking place within Africa or beyond it, was a form of institution building. “It is very important to build institutions as opposed to careers,” she told ARTnews in 2019, “because those institutions will leave a legacy that promotes knowledge.”
Koyo Kouoh was born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1967. Though she moved to Zurich when she was 13 and went on to spend more than a decade in Switzerland, studying banking and business administration, she never forgot her roots in Cameroon. She spoke in interviews of the women in her family who had preceded her: her grandmother, a seamstress whose work gave her “access to creativity”; her great-grandmother, who was forced into a polygamous marriage when she was still a teenager.
“My great-grandmother only had her hands and her intellect to raise her four children,” Kouoh told ARTnews. “This is the family I come from. That is the essence of my feminism.”
During the ’90s, following a divorce and the birth of her son Djibril, she began to shift her attention to a new field of work. (She raised Djibril as a single mother and would go on to adopt three more children.) Inspired by Margaret Busby’s Daughters of Africa, a 1992 anthology of writings by women of African descent, she started—“in a very shy way,” she once said—to undertake editorial work. She edited Töchter Afrikas, a German-language anthology of her own, and she initiated long-standing connections with African artists of all kinds. One of them—the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, whom she was assigned to profile—even took her to Dakar, the city to which she relocated for good in 1996.
There, she met artist Issa Samb, who cofounded the art collective Laboratoire Agit’Art with filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, painter El Hadji Sy, and playwright Youssoupha Dione. “But apart from the work Samb did, and the discourse he supported at his studio,” Kouoh told Artforum, “there was really nowhere to discuss art the way I think it should be discussed—which is to say, in an analytic and social way.” She wanted to change that, though she never forgot the work undertaken by Samb, whose art she surveyed for the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo in 2013.
Kouoh became known internationally in part thanks to the two editions of Bamako Encounters, the Malian photography biennial, that she organized with Simon Njami. Njami told ARTnews in 2019 that “she had a will, a driving force to change things, and all the choices she made were right—without compromising. She’s not a complainer type. When something is wrong, she tries to find the way to fix it.”
RAW Material Company was established in 2008 as a riposte to the state-run art spaces in Senegal. It was independent, and most of its staff were women. Progress came slowly: RAW Material Company did not inaugurate a brick-and-mortar location open to the public until 2011. Today, it has galleries, a library, studios, a residency program, and countless other resources for the local art scene. It has been a crucial space within Senegal and a model for art spaces that have cropped up elsewhere.
Kouoh was “a real force, a source of warmth, generosity and intelligence,” RAW Material Company said in a statement today. “She always affirmed that people were more important than things and today we feel her absence deeply.”
She arrived at Zeitz MOCAA, the Cape Town museum founded by collector Jochen Zeitz and David Green, in 2019 as the institution faced controversy. Its previous director, Mark Coetzee, had been ousted amid allegations of racist remarks and sexual harassment. Kouoh was determined to turn around the museum’s reputation, and she did just that.
“There was a feeling that we cannot let this fail,” she told the New York Times. “The scale and ambition of Zeitz MOCAA is unique on the continent and someone had to take responsibility and make this museum live up to its rightful ambitions.”
She reorganized the entire collection and rethought the museum’s programming, with a new emphasis on retrospectives. Accordingly, she organized shows such as a 2022 retrospective for Tracey Rose, her longtime friend, and “When We See Us,” her survey of Black figurative painting staged that same year. Both of those shows have gained widespread praise, in particular “When We See Us,” which established an ambitious lineage of painters that was intergenerational and cross-national. That lineage included Moké, a Conoglese self-taught artist known for painting the hustle and bustle of Kinshasa; Amy Sherald, an American widely known as Michelle Obama’s portraitist; and Thebe Phetogo, a young Botswanan artist who has critically taken up the very notion of the Black figure in paintings made with shoe polish.
Kouoh’s death comes as she was to take on the Venice Biennale, in what would’ve been her greatest project to date. She was the second-ever African-born curator to organize the world’s biggest art exhibition, after Enwezor, and one of just a few women ever to curate it. The future of her Biennale was unclear as of Saturday; a theme has not yet been detailed for her show.
She had spoken in recent interviews of wanting to continue bringing African art to the rest of the world. In 2020 she reflected on having helped launch the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in 2014. “1-54 was a great and necessary political interlude in my professional trajectory in terms of being involved with an art fair,” she told Art Basel, “and I believe the post-COVID-19 future will bring new forms of relations through which the interdependence of the art industry will come more to the fore.”
But she remained carefully attuned to the needs of the African continent. In her Artforum interview, she described “first-and-only syndrome,” which she described as “whenever an African person achieves something, we always hear that he is the only African or she is the only African, or she is the first African or he is the first African. It is always extraordinary.” The syndrome had officially been “challenged,” she said, adding, “It means we are talking to ourselves now, which is where the real discussions begin.”
Update, 5/11/25, 11:55 a.m.: This article has been updated to include Kouoh’s reported cause of death.
As President Donald Trump systematically guts the United States’ art programs and funding to roll out an aesthetic program of his own making, questions around the country’s participation in the forthcoming 2026 Venice Biennale loom large.
In a new piece for Vanity Fair, culture correspondent Nate Freeman tried to find out if the US will participate next year or if it even possible, given that the process seems to be running behind schedule.
The Venice Biennale is a prestigious, yet Herculean task. The Giardini is filled with a pavilion for each participating country, with the work of a single artist chosen to represent their nation that year. In 2022, such spectacle drew a record crowd of 800,000 visitors to Venice.
As such, every two years, the cultural exchange staffers at the U.S. State Department begin the process of working on the US pavilion, which during the last edition featured work by Jeffrey Gibson. The Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs typically kicks off the selection process by posting a grant around $375,000 to fund the pavilion and inviting interested parties submit applications for artists through a portal on the website for its Office of Citizen Exchanges. Revenue is subsequently raised from donors to cover any additional costs.
For previous Biennales, the grant process has typically started about 18 months ahead of the opening, with the National Endowment for the Arts posting a federal notice to convene the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, a panel of museum experts and arts scholars, who oversee the applications a few months later. The following month, the artist and curators with the winning proposal are informed. It is announced to the public in the month after.
But, as Kathleen Ash-Milby, who co-commissioned the US Pavilion in 2024 and serves as the curator of Native American art at the Portland Art Museum, told Vanity Fair, the process may already be so late as to “be past the point of no return.”
“When they open the portal, it’s not like it’s open for two weeks. They open it for a couple of months, and then they need a couple of months to process it,” she said. “And if you don’t get notified until September or October, I don’t know how you could manage it.”
With only one year until the exhibition is slated to be mounted, a number of other countries have already started and many have already announced the artists helming their respective pavilions. These shows take months of planning, and even processes such as shipping the work can take quite a bit of time to get to Venice.
In addition to concerns of a tight timeline, the National Endowment for the Arts, which forms the committee that parses the applications, has since been halted; the assistant secretary position for the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs who normally coordinates the Biennale selection is vacant.
Despite these factors, there is still funding available that was set aside by the Biden administration as part of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ January 2024 budget.
The application portal is open; however, there have been noticeable changes made to the fine print, writes VF‘s Freeman, including creating “works of art that reflect and promote American values” and “fostering peaceful relations between the United States and other nations.”
It is, perhaps, unsurprising that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts have been scrubbed, given Trump’s nationwide removal of the initiatives. Those wishing to participate must demonstrate “compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws” and cannot “operate any programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that violate any applicable anti-discrimination laws.”
Additionally, the State Department will be “monitoring site visits” to “gather additional information on the recipient’s ability to properly implement the project.”
The only times the US has not mounted a show were the years leading up to World War II, when they were boycotting fascism in Italy, and in the years during the war in 1942 and 1944, when the entire exhibition was cancelled.
As the world becomes increasingly volatile, however, other countries have abstained. Due to the war in Ukraine, for example, Russia has not had pavilions for the last two years. In 2024, the Israel pavilion closed after its artist refused to participate until a ceasefire in Gaza and an agreement to release Israeli hostages was made.
When she was 12, Claudia Alarcón learned the yica stitch, which doubles as both a loop of yarn and a form of knowledge in the Wichí tradition. For generations, Wichí women in Argentina and Bolivia have taught their daughters and granddaughters the process of creating these stitches; Alarcón learned from her mother and her grandmother. More than two decades on, she still makes yica-based weavings.
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To a Western onlooker, yica appear unassuming: they result in weaves that hang loose while still retaining a certain tautness, like a sweater that is baggy from being worn too many times. But for the Wichí people, life is impossible to imagine without these plainspoken stitches, because they exist both on the clothes they wear and on the crossbody bags they use to transport fruit plucked from a tree or goods bought at a market. Alarcón described yica as being imbued with unlimited importance.
“Our yica are always with us,” Alarcón told me recently by Zoom. “We cannot be without them.”
Suddenly, it seems the art world can’t be without them either. Alarcón’s art made using yica was a standout of last year’s Venice Biennale, where a set of modest weavings by her, made in collaboration with the all-female collective Silät, managed to compete with monumentally scaled installations. In his review for the Nation, critic Barry Schwabsky called the works “unforgettable.” Others seem to agree: her collaboration is the subject of a gallery show at James Cohan Gallery in New York, is currently featured in Brazil’s Bienal do Mercosul, and will go on view later this year at the De La Warr Pavilion in England, the Museo de Arte de São Paulo, and the Guggenheim Bilbao.
By some measures, Alarcón’s success marks a breakthrough for the Wichí, who have been “completely abandoned by the Argentine government,” as the artist’s London dealer, Cecilia Brunson, put it. A recent article about Alarcón in La Nación, the paper of record in Argentina, began with a litany of firsts, noting that no other Indigenous woman before had ever sold her work as art, not craft, at Buenos Aires’s arteBA fair.
But Alarcón talks with such modesty that it is easy to forget all of this. Speaking from her home in La Puntana, Argentina, last month, she quoted her mentor Margarita Ramírez: “Excuse my delay. It took a while to get here, but here we are.”
La Puntana, where Alarcón was born in 1989, had recently been wracked by rains so bad—a year’s worth in just eight hours—that her community lost power, and she missed her James Cohan opening. That went unmentioned, because she instead focused on the power of her art, which she was determined to put before the public eye.
“We want to continue showcasing our knowledge, our ancestral weaving knowledge,” she told me, speaking in Spanish and Wichí through a translator. “Before it was always seen as crafts, not as art. We want to show people the meaning that it has for us.”
Crucial to achieving that goal has been Buenos Aires–based curator Andrei Fernández, who has helped bring Alarcón and Silät’s art to the attention of curators and dealers, in part to rectify a gap in her own college education—her professors dismissed work by Indigenous artists as craft. “I thought these women couldn’t show this art,” Fernández said. “I wanted to show them a pathway to be able to do it.”
Perhaps Alarcón and Silät’s work has played so well in museums and biennials because it resembles recently canonized fiber art by Western artists. Many of the Alarcón-Silät weavings contain bright, hard-edged swatches of color. Sometimes, there are visible figures and stars, but their weavings are dominated mostly by rectangles and other shapes. In form and medium, they recall the modernist abstractions of Anni Albers and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Yet Fernández discouraged those comparisons, noting that this work is not merely a formalist exercise for Alarcón and Silät, who are using centuries-old patterns that they have remixed.
“I understand these references because I’ve studied these works,” Fernández said, referring to modernist abstractions. “But after knowing [Alarcón and Silät’s] work, after knowing their process and their region, I see it as a language that they use. It’s a way of modernity for other societies, but for them, these geometric figures and abstractions don’t correspond to specific periods of time [in the past]. It has always been the present for them.”
According to Wichí lore, a group of women descended from the sky, where they existed as stars, and came to earth on fibers made from the chaguar, a plant in the same family as household bromeliads. When the women touched down, they proceeded to make weavings from these very fibers. The chaguar has occupied a central place in Wichí life ever since. As Alarcón put it, “It is a vital plant for women. We value this plant—we take care of it, and we treat it as best as we can.”
One way they honor the chaguar is through the tradition of tayhin, or weaving. The process is not an easy one. In videos made available online, you can watch with awe as women athletically hack the deep-rooted chaguar out of the ground and then repeatedly pound it with bars, turning its leaves into flimsy strips that can then be made into threads. Those threads are then dyed brilliant hues—mint green, buttery yellow, and cool turquoise—using seeds, bark, leaves, and more. Some weavings are then hung from trees, where they are visible to birds flying by. “When a bird comes to the village, there’s a message,” Brunson said.
The act of weaving has always been a collective endeavor for the Wichí, but it has come to take on a new valence over the past decade, thanks in large part to Fernández, who has helped lead workshops around the country’s Salta province with Wichí women since 2015. At those workshops, women can discuss their needs as they weave, all the while divining new directions for their art. “I wanted to offer this tool of knowledge to generate social improvement for everyone,” Fernández said. (Fernández is not officially a part of Silät, but she has acted as a collaborator since its inception.)
In 2017, Alarcón and other Wichí women formed a group called Thañí (Viene del monte), and they began bringing their work to design fairs and craft markets in Argentina. “Until then,” Fernández wrote in an essay for the Archives of Women Artists Research & Exhibitions (AWARE), “sales prices had been fixed by others. Men.” Now, the women set their own prices and were able to assume control of their market, with any profits routed directly to their community, which has routinely faced periods of poverty.
In 2023, the year that the collective had its first international solo show, at Bard College’s museum, some members of Thañí left and formed Silät, which translates from Wichí to “message,” “notice,” or “alert.” Fernández said, “This new group proposed to work with art but especially to have autonomy from the state projects that had helped to found Thañi and demanded to participate in the decisions taken by the group.”
Silät’s membership now counts around 100 women. Its weavings are produced collaboratively in smaller groups that are sometimes multigenerational. “Some weaves are made by a great-grandmother, a grandmother, a daughter, and a granddaughter,” Brunson said.
Brunson saw the Bard exhibition, and then began showing Alarcón and Silät’s work that same year. The artists had already been exhibiting at art centers in Argentina, but they were not yet well-known abroad, so she found herself surprised when her gallery’s exhibition quickly sold out. “That had never happened to me before,” she said. “I thought it only happened at Gagosian!”
Museums have responded in kind, with Alarcón works landing in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Denver Art Museum, and the Museo de Arte Latinamericano de Buenos Aires. The latter museum staged a show last fall at its Puertos outpost, where Alarcón’s art was placed alongside grand sculptures by Gabriel Chaile, another rising figure of the Argentine art scene.
When seen in galleries, Alarcón and Silät’s weavings tend to be framed and hung on a wall. Yet she and the collective have begun branching out, exhibiting large-scale weavings that are shown unframed, as may appear in the forests of Salta. Several such works currently appear at Brazil’s Bienal do Mercosul, whose organizer this year is Raphael Fonseca, a curator at the Denver Art Museum who helped acquired Alarcón’s work for his institution. He said Alarcón was quickly “gaining experience in this very Western art system,” and had adapted their work accordingly. But, he added, Alarcón’s art remains connected to Wichí tradition. “It responds to a collective way of living that’s a part of her life,” he said.
Notably, each weaving is titled, as any other Western abstract painting might be. Alarcón provides the names, but they are adapted from the words of a shaman that she relies upon to continue a connection with Wichí lore. When Alarcón visits the shaman, he narrates “the story of [her] ancestors,” Brunson said. “Claudia and Andrei are very close to him.” And so, even this aspect of her practice is a collaborative effort, something reinforced by a 2024 weaving in in the James Cohan show. It features strung-together black triangles, rows of beige striping, and two mountain-like forms, and it has a title could also stand in well Alarcón and Silät’s practice as a whole: ¡Nuestra fuerza es unirnos! (Olahiajutejwek). It translates to “Our strength is to unite!”
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The Headlines
BERLIN CULTURE MINISTER RESIGNS. Berlin’s culture senator, Joe Chialo, has announced his resignation, reports dpa. “Today, I asked the governing mayor to release me from my position as senator for culture and social cohesion,” he stated. His reasons for doing so are related to a disagreement over far-reaching budget cuts to the city’s arts sector. Until recently, Chialo was considered a favorite candidate for the next federal culture ministry position, which was instead given to a former journalist and conservative author Wolfram Weimer. “Last year, I supported the requested cuts in the cultural budget with a heavy heart — aware of our shared responsibility for the city,” Chialo said. “However, the further cuts now planned interfere too deeply with existing plans and objectives, alter key professional requirements, and thus lead to the imminent closure of nationally renowned cultural institutions,” he added. “I see it as my responsibility to create space for new perspectives.”
CREATIVE AUSTRALIA FUNDING QUESTIONED. If elected on Saturday, a center-right Liberal-National Coalition government in Australia would make a more than 10 percent cut to funding for Creative Australia, the group that organizes the country’s Venice Biennale pavilion, and instead redirect that money to support the “Melbourne Jewish Arts Quarter and supporting broadcasting,” reports the Guardian. Creative Australia has been under fire since abruptly dropping its selection of Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative at the next Venice Biennale. The Coalition is pledging $33.2 million AUD of Creative Australia’s current annual funding for celebrating Jewish arts, culture, food, and shopping in Melbourne’s Elsternwick neighborhood, according to the report. Last month, the opposing Labor party announced an $18 million AUD for Jewish arts, and soon after, the Coalition party announced they would match that with support that has now been upped to almost $44 million AUD. “The Coalition prefers to fund art rather than arts bureaucracy,” a spokesperson for the center-right alliance said. For Saturday’s national election, Australians will choose between the incumbent, center-left Labor party leadership and its conservative challenger, known as the Coalition.
The Digest
An ornate sword that once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte is heading to auction in Paris and could sell for more than $1 million. The French leader commissioned the sword, decorated with a mother-of-pearl handle and a carved Medusa likeness and the Nemean lion killed by Hercules, after he was elected consul for life in 1802. [Artnet News]
Rachel Uffner Gallery has brought on a new partner, Lucy Liu, to expand the New York City gallery. Born in China and raised in Canada, Liu, 25, joined the gallery as a sales assistant in 2023 and was promoted to director in 2024. She “understands the art world in Asia … and has cultivated relationships with the growing community of young collectors in the US,” Uffner said. [The Art Newspaper]
Alex Rotter has been named Christie’s new global president in the latest management shuffle since Guillaume Cerutti stepped down. Prior to his nomination, Rotter led the 20th and 21st century art department, and in will now work across categories to develop private sales and “innovative strategies for auction.” [Press release]
The Los Angeles County Museum of American Art (LACMA) has acquired a rare painting by Rome and Paris-based artist Virginia da Vezzi, who lived from 1600 to 1638, and has been ignored by much of art history. Her painting, Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, is one of 112 new objects added to the museum’s collections over the 39th edition of the Collectors Committee Weekend at the end of April, which raised $2.5 million, as the museum waits the completion of its David Geffen Galleries building. [Press release]
The Kicker
FRENCH NATIONAL TRUST? French culture minister Rachida Dati wants a “National Trust a la francaise,” or a French version of the UK’s National Trust, to help manage the country’s many, costly heritage sites. But does the British model, which boasts thousands of volunteer workers, fit within a nation of “fanatic individualists?” asks reporter Roxana Azimi for Le Monde. The answer is anything but simple, and by the end of May, a special commissioned report on the topic should help shed more light on the issue.
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The Headlines
TRUMP AXES HOLOCAUST MUSEUM BOARD MEMBERS. The Trump administration has fired US Holocaust Memorial Museum board members nominated by former president Joe Biden, including former second gentleman Doug Emhoff, reports the Washington Post. The White House said it plans to replace them “with steadfast supporters of the State of Israel.” Emhoff, who is Jewish and the husband of former vice president Kamala Harris, commented on social media that “Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized. To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous — and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum was created to preserve.”
ART ON WATER. San Francisco’s long-vacant Pier 29 warehouse will be converted into a large artist studio and exhibition space by the Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST) in partnership with the SF Port Commission, reports Axios. The 47,000-square-foot indoor space, along with a 23,000-square-foot outdoor area, will host a six-month studio residency program called Art + Water, publicly accessible exhibitions, performances, and other creative events. Meanwhile, local author Dave Eggers will spearhead the residency with the city’s Arts Commission-member JD Beltran, according to a statement. “At a time when studio space is ever-less affordable, and art instruction costs a fortune, Art + Water will bring both together in one radically accessible space,” Eggers said.
The Digest
Ames Yavuz gallery in London has opened its new, 2,600-sq.-ft Mayfair space with a show titled “Ellipsis” by Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan. It is the gallery’s first “European” base. [Ames Yavuz]
Criticism is mounting over the appointment of former journalist Wolfram Weimer as Germany’s new culture minister. Weimer is being faulted for his lack of art world experience, but also his conservative ideas, with some cultural workers expressing concerns he will push a right-leaning agenda, which they warn must not mirror the US administration’s infiltration into the arts sector. [3sat]
The Los Angeles Lakers player Luka Dončić is paying the full $5,000 cost for restoring a mural of deceased Lakers star Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gigi, who perished in a helicopter crash. After the mural was vandalized, its creator, artist Louie Palsino, created a GoFundMe page to help restore it. [The Guardian]
Ai Weiwei has designed a large-scale camouflage netting installation for the forthcoming Art X Freedom art program on Roosevelt Island in New York City. [Dezeen]
Kathleen Reinhardt, who heads the Kolbe Museum in Berlin, will be curating the German pavilion at the forthcoming Venice Biennale. Since Reinhardt began leading the Kolbe Museum, she has fostered exhibitions that connect with contemporary art, making her a “wise choice” according to observers. [Monopol Magazine]
The Kicker
TRUMP PROPAGANDA MACHINES. President Trump is an adept image manipulator, and a few articles are taking a closer look at how he does this, from gilded portraits, to tightening restrictions on what the White House’s official photographer is allowed to document. On that note, renowned White House photographer Pete Souza dissects “how Trump is perverting the presidential photo stream,” in an enlightening piece for Vanity Fair that draws comparisons to past presidents and what these official photographs can show. Similarly, the New Yorker’s Katy Waldman analyzes how Trump uses “A.I. slop” – but not only – to create visual propaganda not unlike the work of royal court painters of old, or some sort of digital cross between the two.
Los Angeles–based performance artist Ei Arakawa-Nash will represent Japan at the 2026 Venice Biennale, the Japan Foundation announced Thursday. A curator has not been announced yet.
For the Pavilion, Arakawa-Nash will create a new installation that, according to the announcement, will explore his perspective as a queer parent of newborn twins in order to “dissect nationalism and patriarchy.”
“I thought I would never have a chance to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale after I gave up my Japanese nationality a few years ago … Now, my husband and I busily raise two children who are new parts of the Asian diasporic community in Los Angeles,” Arakawa-Nash said in the announcement.
“Recently, we re-watched the 1962 film Being Two Isn’t Easy written by Natto Wada. Her script will be a reference point for my performative engagement at the Japan Pavilion in 2026.”
Active since the early 2000s, Arakawa-Nash has long created performance works that draw on the 1950s and ’60s avant garde, particularly drawing on the post-war Japanese Gutai movement, Tokyo Fluxus, Viennese Actionism, and Happenings. Often his performances are seemingly improvised and involve collaborations with other artists or even audience members in ways that blur the lines between the three.
In 2021, for example, Arakawa staged Mega Please Draw Freely at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, in which museum-goers were allowed to sketch and draw on the hall’s floor. In July and August of that year, the performance marked the first time that many had been able to enter the museum since London’s third Covid lockdown. That work specifically draws on Gutai artist Yoshihara Jirō’s Please Draw Freely (1956), in which Jirō invited children to collaborate and draw on board staged outside. Arakawa’s version expanded the work to monumental scale.
Arakawa-Nash is currently a professor in the Graduate Art program at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. His most recent exhibition, “Paintings are Popstars,” held at the National Art Center Tokyo last fall, was his first solo exhibition in Asia.
In 2016, ARTnews followed Arakawa-Nash as he worked on his musical How to DISappear in America to talk about why the genre appealed to him.
Japan is the latest among a number of countries to announce its pavilion presentation in advance of the 2026 Venice Biennale.
Pope Francis died on April 20 at 88, marking the end of an epoch for the Catholic Church and the beginning of its search for the next spiritual leader, who will also become proprietor of the Vatican’s library and vast art collection.
He was born in 1936 as Mario Bergoglio, and was named Pope in 2013, following the resignation of Benedict Pope Benedict XVI. Francis was the first Jesuit priest to lead the 1.3 billion Catholics worldwide and having hailed from Argentina, he was the first from the southern hemisphere to hold the position. He signaled almost immediately upon his election a principle of austerity and altruism over pomp, as the first pontiff to take his title from St. Francis of Assisi.
Though keeping a hardline on Catholic doctrine, Francis distinguished himself for his willingness in the modern era to advocate on behalf of occupied peoples. He was a vocal critic of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and called out the persecution and destruction of their Christian populations. During a papal visit in 2022 to Canada, which he called a “penitential pilgrimage,” he apologized to First Nations leaders and the survivors of residential schools for the role of the Catholic church in forced assimilation of Indigenous communities.
The late Pope’s alignment with St. Francis of Assisi, the Italian mystic, poet, and friar who adopted an impoverished life of itinerant preaching, also aligned him more closely than his predecessors with the arts. St. Francis is one of the most beloved figures in Catholicism, and his pastoral travels are frequent subjects of church painting. Giotto’s frescos in the basilica at Assisi narrating the life of St. Francis have been credited as a touchstone of Italian Renaissance. Pope Francis, a trained chemist, took inspiration from the frescos in his encyclical address and titled it Laudato Si’ (Praise Be to You), from the Saint’s Canticle of the Creatures. The encyclical was published in 2025 in the lead up to the signing of the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Francis made headlines at the 2024 Venice Biennale when he stopped by to see the Holy See Pavilion, marking the first time a Supreme pontiff had attended the prestigious international exhibition.
Francis, then 87 years old met, with the president of the Venice Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, and the curator of the 2024 main show, Adriano Pedrosa, who had organized that year’s presentation under the theme “Foreigners Everywhere.” Francis traveled to Venice by helicopter and touched down in the Women’s Prison on the island of Giudecca. Some of the works in the show, titled “With My Eyes” and curated by Chiara Parisi and Bruno Racine, were created in collaboration with inmates.
Speaking to the crowd gathered at the prison, he cited the late Catholic nun and activists Corita Kent, Frida Kahlo, and Louise Bourgeois as women whose works have “something important to teach us,” as ARTnews reported at the time.
“The world needs artists. This is demonstrated by the multitude of people of all ages who frequent art venues and events,” Francis added. “I beg you, dear artists, to imagine cities that do not yet exist on the maps: cities where no human being is considered a stranger.”
In his address, Pope Francis also acknowledged the impact of climate change on the lagoon city, which has since introduced a €5 charge for day visitors in an attempt to reduce crowds. “Venice is one with the waters on which it stands, and without the care and protection of this natural environment it could even cease to exist,” he said.
The Venice Biennale acknowledged the death of Pope Francis in a statement published to its website today, writing that its leadership board expressed “their profound sorrow” for the news and remembered “with deep emotion the extraordinary gesture of closeness made by the Holy Father.”
“Foreigners Everywhere,” the statement added, “focused on artistic expressions that addressed human rights, the marginalized, and the most vulnerable. It reflected on the building of a culture of encounter—an approach that was respectfully considered to be close to the sensibility of Pope Francis.”
Under his leadership, the Vatican also opened a dialogue about the return of colonial-era artifacts that the Vatican Museum acquired from Indigenous civilizations.
“The Seventh Commandment comes to mind: If you steal something you have to give it back,” Francis said during a press conference onboard the papal plane in 2023, as quoted by the Associated Press. Francis had recently returned to Greece three fragments of the Parthenon sculptures that were held in the Vatican Museums’s collection for two centuries. Pope Francis, in his inaugural public address of the debate, called the restitution “the right gesture” for institutions to make when possible.
“In the case where you can return things, where it’s necessary to make a gesture, better to do it,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t, if there are no possibilities — political, real or concrete possibilities. But in the cases where you can restitute, please do it. It’s good for everyone, so you don’t get used to putting your hands in someone else’s pockets.”
Pope Francis’s administration was not free from controversy. In April 2024, nearly 50 employees at the Vatican Museums filed a class-action complaint against the administration over allegedly unsafe working conditions. The workers, many of whom are custodians, claimed that they were treated as “commodities” by an institution with labor rules that “undermine each worker’s dignity and health,” according to a petition first reported by the Corriere della Sera. The complaint cited poor overtime pay, as well as health and safety risks purportedly caused by cost-saving initiatives at the museum such as reduced security at highly attended attractions.
The workers called for greater transparency on the process of promotion, the reinstatement of seniority bonuses, and a structure for sick days that they claim would be closer to the norm for Italy. It was an unprecedented legal action in the history of the papacy, and while still ongoing, its means of resolution is unclear. Unions are not permitted in Vatican City; the Holy See, the effective central bureaucracy for the Catholic Church, is not a member of the court or a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights. However, it did sign onto the European Union monetary convention in 2009, suggesting a willingness to uphold European human rights law.