Have you ever imagined yourself, on a visit to a major museum, busting through a wall, arms full of ill-begotten African artifacts and ready to return them to their rightful homes? No? Well, you may soon have the chance, thanks to South African video game studio Nyamakop.

Earlier this month at the annual Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles, Nyamakop unveiled its latest project, Relooted, a side-scrolling puzzle platformer—think early Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia games—where players join a crew of Robin Hood-esque thieves staging elaborate heists to take back stolen artifacts from Western museums, and repatriate them to the peoples from whom they were taken.

As Nyamakop lays out on the game’s listing on the online video game marketplace Epic Games, Relooted takes place in a near future where “the political powers that be brokered a Transatlantic Returns Treaty, promising the repatriation of African artifacts from museums.” But the hitch in the treaty is that it only applies to artifacts on “public display,” leading museums to circumvent the requirement by placing the pieces in highly guarded private collections. And that’s where players come in: scoping out a given facility, carefully constructing an exit route, and then, of course, stealing the artifact and escaping.

As Ben Myres, the creative director of the game, explained to Epic in a news post, all of the artifacts in Relooted are based on real-world pieces in Western museums. In crafting the various missions, the developer team spent two years of research narrowing done the list of which pieces, of the hundreds still held by Western museums, into something manageable.

“We looked for artifacts with great stories in terms of how they were looted,” he said. “Why were they important to people? Just anything associated with them.”

By way of explanation, Myres pointed to the Ngadji drum, a wooden drum made by the Pokomo people in Kenya to call for worship or celebrate the start of a king’s reign. It was confiscated by the British in 1902 and has since remained in the British Museum’s collections despite the efforts of Kenyan researchers to have the piece returned.

“The first Kenyan people to see it in the last 100 years were in the 2010s,” Myre said. “The person who saw the drum was a descendant of the king it was taken from originally. So these aren’t artifacts that were just found in the dust and excavated by archaeologists. These were still active cultures.”

According to Myre, each artifact in the game was faithfully rendered into a 3D model based on available photos or scans, a challenge given that many of the artifacts are inaccessible and have long been in storage.

However, while the artifacts are based on real objects, the museums in the game are not.

While Nyamakop is based in Johannesburg, South Africa, the developer team includes people from Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. Relooted is the studio’s second game; the first was Semblance, a 2018 game that became the first African-developed original IP to release on a Nintendo game console ever. It is one of the largest independent game developers in sub-Saharan Africa, according to its website.

“There are not a lot of opportunities for people here to professionally make video games,” Myres said. “So if you’re offering people here that opportunity, and it so happens that it’s an African-inspired thing—which you don’t get to see a lot of in games—people are pretty, pretty excited about doing that.

Relooted has yet to announce a release date, but a rendering of its game play is visible in the trailer that accompanied its announcement:

Back in 1970, when Art Basel was founded, there were just a handful of major fairs. Today, however, by some estimates, there are more than 300 art fairs. But even still, Art Basel remains the main fair for many of the dealers showing in Switzerland this week.

David Fleiss, the cofounder of Paris’s Galerie 1900-2000, participated in the 1970 and 1971 editions of the fair, before taking a long hiatus until the ’90s. He’s been going ever since. “The fair is the fair for us. We meet the best collectors and the best museum curators we can meet in any fair,” he said. “It is still the fair where you can see the best works galleries have to offer.”

Art Basel was founded in 1970 by Swiss art dealers Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner, and Balz Hilt, and has now turned into a global behemoth, with editions also held in Hong Kong, Miami Beach, Paris, and soon even Qatar. Yet the Swiss edition is the one people cannot miss, and dealers told ARTnews that it seems poised to remain that way.

Technically, Art Basel was not the first fair in the city: the Basel Gallery Association staged a fair in 1968, though it only featured local galleries. Bruckner pushed for a larger fair with international representation, eventually bringing on Beyeler and Hilt, who then partnered with the local trade fair Mustermesse.

The first Art Basel had 110 exhibitors—90 galleries and 20 publishers—hailing from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the US. There were both primary market and secondary market dealers at the fair, which cost 5 Swiss Francs (about $20 in 2025 US dollars) to attend.

Austrian dealer Thaddaeus Ropac saw the fair in its early days, visiting for the first time in 1981 and making his debut as an exhibitor in 1985. As Ropac recalled to ARTnews, while Basel had already become the most important art fair at that point, it still faced strong competition from the Cologne Art Fair, due to Germany’s then-booming art market. He recalled Art Basel as a more “Eurocentric” gathering of “a small familiar group of people.”

Things used to be a bit more improvisational at Art Basel, according to Ropac, who remembered one year when he spotlit the work of Sturtevant, an artist known for copying others’ pieces. When Ropac was late with the transport for her work, Sturtevant insisted on bringing the work herself and found herself stuck at Swiss customs, which doubted that she was the maker of these objects.

“I had to rush over with catalogs and documentation to prove her identity and that she was the creator of the work,” Ropac said. “Only then did the customs officials become more forgiving. It was chaotic but very memorable.”

Art Basel has become intertwined with the lives of many dealers. Iwan Wirth, cofounder of mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth, first attended the fair in 1987 at just 17 years old—one year after he opened his first gallery. He visited the fair with Swiss painter Bruno Gasser, the first artist he ever showed, and Andy Jillien, his first collector. The gallery made its Art Basel debut a decade later, in the first year it was eligible.

For Wirth, one of his most cherished memories is watching his eldest son, Elias, then a young boy, playing in the gallery’s booth. “He was climbing and hiding inside aluminum barrels that were part of an artwork by Jason Rhoades,” he told ARTnews. “We have pictures of Elias sitting inside there and smiling like the happiest Art Basel visitor ever.”

Dominique Lévy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan was, like Elias, introduced to Basel as a child. She first attended Basel at around four years old, in the early ’70s, with her mother, who was close friends with Beyeler and lived in Lausanne. She did not attend the event as a professional until several decades later, when she was the director of Anthony D’Offay in London, managing American artists like Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns. She has been a longtime exhibitor through the many iterations of her eponymous gallery and, in her estimation, has not missed a single edition.

“Off and on, I’ve been attending for most of my life,” she told ARTnews, saying that to show at the fair in the early days was to be “part of the inner circle. It was essential.”

As Art Basel has become a global brand, with many iterations, the calculus has grown more complicated for galleries, Lévy said, as dealers have to increasingly weigh which edition is the best fit for their program. Still, she sees one major dividing line between pre- and post-Covid Basel.

Before the pandemic, she said, “I couldn’t imagine selling art unless I was wearing high heels. We kept ice packs in the back of the booth for our feet. Now? I live in sneakers. That little change says a lot about how the world—and the fair—has shifted.”

Basel has retained its allure over the decades arguably because so many dealers and artists have watched it change their careers. Such was the case for New York dealer David Nolan, who told ARTnews that he first exhibited at Basel in 1993 with works by American painter William N. Copley, who died three years later. On opening day, Nolan sold six paintings by Copley and called the artist in Key West. Copley told the dealer to get some champagne and they popped bottles simultaneously to celebrate. From that point on, the two repeated the ritual each night of the fair. From the jump, Nolan saw the influence a successful Basel could have, with Copley invited shortly after to mount a retrospective at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, with more museum exhibitions following.

For Mathieu Paris, a longtime director at White Cube and a participant of Art Basel for nearly 20 years, what has always stood out about the Basel fair is that influence, which told ARTnews stems from the cultural ecosystem in the Swiss city, from the Kunstmuseum and Fondation Beyeler to, especially, the Kunsthalle.

“When you look back at its exhibition history, it’s striking how many now-renowned artists had early, formative shows there,” Paris said of Kunsthalle Basel.

And there’s no doubt that Basel’s success over the years has meant a lot of change. To the eye of Marianne Boesky, who first participated in 2000 with a presentation of sculptor Rachel Feinstein in the Statements sector, the fair has become more global and diverse, particularly in recent years, in both its participants and exhibitors.

Paris, of White Cube, did have one gripe about the new Basel, however: “If I had to note one regret over the years, it would be a nostalgic one: I still miss the days when the old-town butcher was the only official supplier of the iconic Art Basel bratwurst.”

The Louvre in Paris closed on Monday, leaving visitors and tourists frustrated and confused during the start of the city’s busiest tourist season.

The museum is the most popular in the world, reporting around 8.7 million visitors to its galleries last year. However, that popularity has also led the museum to a “breaking point,” the Associated Press reported Monday.

During a “routine internal meeting,” museum docents, ticket sellers, and security workers announced a spontaneous strike to protest working conditions due to overcrowding and understaffing. While the museum has closed due to strikes in the past, few have come without notice, though it did happen in 2019 and 2013.

Sarah Sefian, a union representative of CGT-Culture, told AP that most staff plan to strike for the entire day, though some may return to open a “masterpiece route” for those with tickets to see Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, among other highlights. The Louvre is typically closed on Tuesday, and Sefian said that workers may return so that the museum can reopen on Wednesday.

The strike comes just months after the publication of a leaked memo by Louvre director Laurence des Cars in which she describes water leaks, overcrowding, and a “proliferation of damage in museum spaces.” Des Cars went on to call for a major overhaul of the museum, which is run by the state.

A week after the leaked memo, President Emmanuel Macron announced an extensive renovation plan dubbed the “Louvre New Renaissance,” that provide the Mona Lisa a dedicated room with a time-entry ticket, as well as a new entrance. The plan, which would be completed by 2031. has been estimated to cost  €700–800 million.

However, Sefian told the AP that the plan doesn’t help workers now.

“We can’t wait six years for help,” Sefian said. “Our teams are under pressure now. It’s not just about the art — it’s about the people protecting it.”

Leonard Lauder, the son of cosmetics entrepreneurs Estée and Joseph H. Lauder and a major art philanthropist, died Saturday at the age of 92, Estée Lauder Companies announced in a press release.

Lauder held the title of chairman emeritus at the company at his death, though he had previously served as president from 1972 to 1995 and CEO from 1982 to 1999. He served as chairman from 1995 to 2009.

Lauder was the eldest son of Estée, who founded the company in 1946 and helped build it into behemoth over his many decades working there. According to the New York Times, the company’s sales grew from $800,000 per year from when he joined in 1958 to over $16 billion as of 2021. Lauder’s personal fortune grew during that time to around $11.5 billion, making him one of the 100 richest Americans.

Lauder’s other passion was art. He was a longtime philanthropist of the arts, with a particularly deep and fruitful relationship with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2013, he gifted 81 pieces of Cubist paintings, sculptures, and collages, including works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Juan Gris. The Leonard A. Lauder Collection was the result of 40 years of collecting, and was estimated to be worth over $1 billion.

As Lauder told the New York Times at the time of the donation, “You can’t put together a good collection unless you are focused, disciplined, tenacious, and willing to pay more than you can possibly afford.”

Even after making the donation, he continued to support the museum. In fall 2018, the Met acquired the Gris still life The Musician’s Table (1914) with help from Lauder. The painting was offered at Christie’s New York that year from the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller in New York. With a winning bid from Lauder of $31.8 million, it was one of the top lots at the sale.

He later added five additional major works to that gift and his philanthropy helped establish the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the museum, which supports a robust program of film screenings, lectures, fellowships, and research exhibitions.

In a statement at the time, Max Hollein, director of the Met, praised Lauder for his contributions to the Met’s holdings, saying that “there is no one who better exemplifies the spirit of giving that has fostered the growth of the Met and the benefits it provides to the public than Leonard A. Lauder.” In response, Lauder said, “I am inspired by previous generations of supporters who have contributed to making the Met’s collections among the greatest in the world.”

Lauder also held the title of chairman emeritus at the Whitney Museum and was a trustee at that museum from 1977 to 2011.

“Throughout his life, my father worked tirelessly to build and transform the beauty industry, pioneering many of the innovations, trends, and best practices that are foundational to the industry today,” William P. Lauder, his son and the chair of Estée Lauder said in a statement. “He was the most charitable man I have ever known, believing that art and education belonged to everyone, and championing the fight against diseases such as Alzheimer’s and breast cancer. Above all, my father was a man who practiced kindness with everyone he met. His impact was enormous. He believed that employees were the heart and soul of our company, and they adored him and moments spent with him. His warmth and thoughtfulness made an imprint on our company, the industry, and, of course, our family. Together with my family, The Estée Lauder Companies, and the countless people he touched, we celebrate his extraordinary life.”

Lauder was born in 1933 in New York City, where he attended the Bronx High School of Science. He later graduated from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He served as a lieutenant in the US Navy and received a graduate degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business.

He appeared on 25 consecutive editions of the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, ranking each year between 1990 and 2024.

On Monday evening, the Smithsonian Institution released its first statement since President Donald Trump said he fired National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet.

In its statement, the institution affirmed that it is an “independent entity.” While the statement did not name Sajet nor call out Trump directly, it stated, “All personnel decisions are made by and subject to the direction of the Secretary, with oversight by the Board. Lonnie G. Bunch, the Secretary, has the support of the Board of Regents in his authority and management of the Smithsonian.”

The New York Times reported that the statement was released hours after the quarterly meeting of the Institution’s Board of Regents, of which Vice President JD Vance is a member.

Released on the Smithsonian’s website, the statement appears to confirm what has been happening in practice. Last week, the Washington Post reported that Sajet was continuing to work at the National Portrait Gallery despite Trump’s supposed firing. The Post also reported that the Trump administration provided, as justification for the dismissal, a 17-point list of what the administration described as times Sajet spoke or acted in ways critical of Trump.

The Smithsonian’s statement seemed to allude obliquely to the administration’s complaints, writing, “To reinforce our nonpartisan stature, the Board of Regents has directed the Secretary to articulate specific expectations to museum directors and staff regarding content in Smithsonian museums, give directors reasonable time to make any needed changes to ensure unbiased content, and to report back to the Board on progress and any needed personnel changes based on success or lack thereof in making the needed changes.”

The National Portrait Gallery is one of many museums managed by the Smithsonian, whose network also includes the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, all in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian also manages a few museums outside D.C., including the National Museum of the American Indian, which operates a New York branch in addition a D.C. one.

The statement comes just days after the White House released its proposed 2026 budget, which calls for a 12 percent reduction in funding to the Smithsonian. The cuts would eliminate separate funding to the long-gestating National Museum of the American Latino, forcing it to reduce staff from 35 people to just 6. The Anacostia Community Museum, meanwhile, would be folded into the NMAAHC.

In a video conference call with the National Portrait Gallery board of commissioners last week, Sajet said that the budget cuts would fall disproportionately on the museums’ facilities and infrastructure, the New York Times reported Monday. “That’s maintaining our museums, storage, upgrades and, you know, all the care that goes into it,” she said.

Trump has previously targeted the Smithsonian in the form of an executive order in which he accused its museums of putting forward “improper ideology” via “exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values.” That executive order singled out shows at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

On Tuesday, the Rijksmuseum announced that a rare condom dating from 1830 will go on display at the museum in its print room, where it will form part of a display on 19th-century sex work and sexuality. It will stay on display through November.

The condom is nearly 200 years old and is thought to be made from a sheep’s appendix. It features an erotic image depicting a nun and three clergyman and was likely a souvenir from a brothel. The piece, the museum said in a press release, is one of only two such objects that have survived to the present day.

The image, printed onto the condom, depicts a nun with her legs apart and pointing at three clergymen. Beneath it is the inscription Voilà mon choix—“This is my choice”—which the museum noted was a parody of a Greek myth, the Judgement of Paris.

The Rijksmuseum is the top museum in Amsterdam and serves as the national museum of the Netherlands, displaying around 1,000 objects from the over 1 million works in its collection, which also includes famed works from Dutch masters like Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, and Frans Hals.

The Rijksmuseum Print Room, which has some 750,000 prints, drawings, and photographs in its collection, purchased the condom at auction six months ago.

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.

In late April, MoMA PS1 opened its marquee exhibition for the season, “The Gatherers,” a sweeping group show that considers the psychic and material “burdens” of climate change, globalization, and neoliberalism.

Featuring 14 artists working across sculpture, video, assemblage, and installation, the exhibition connects wide-ranging practices across the world—from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Lithuania—that are unified by an urgent attention to a world defined by overproduction, waste, and failing infrastructure and systems.

Yet “The Gatherers” is far from a lecture. For curator Ruba Katrib, who has served as PS1’s chief curator and director of curatorial affairs since 2017, it was important to let the works “speak for themselves,” through form, material, atmosphere, or repetition.

“The artists have strategies of pulling from, extracting, and intervening that they use to speak about certain issues, but it’s really through the language of creative practice,” Katrib told ARTnews in a recent interview. “But these artists do something more than just tell a story.”

On view through October 6, the resulting show sprawls across PS1’s third floor as an immersive, sound-rich exhibition that invites viewers to engage deeply with the discomfort, dislocation, ambiguity, and—at times—quiet hope embedded in each artist’s practice.

ARTnews visited PS1 to speak with Katrib about the conception of “The Gatherers,” how artists are rising to and interpreting our current moment, and the limits of what art can do.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

ARTnews: This show opens amid global upheaval—from worsening climate change to economic precarity and the return of Trump. How did today’s socio-political moment inform the curatorial conception of “The Gatherers”?

Ruba Katrib: I’ve been working on the show for a couple of years now and, of course, it’s not responding to this exact moment since it’s been in formation for some time. But I did want to make a very contemporary show, with artists of not the exact same generation, but of a similar generation. And all the work has been made in the last few years, with some exceptions.

It also came out of the aftermath of the pandemic period. ..It took a minute to see what artists were really doing and responding to at that moment. We can’t anticipate everything that’s happening—particularly now as we’re in such volatile times—but I think these artists are responding to a moment in which we’re on a precipice of sorts. A lot of the subjects that the show is dealing with are interesting to many artists, not just the 14 artists [in the show], but I felt that these artists are rising to the moment in a particular way that I saw as relevant.

Was there something particular about the post-pandemic moment that you think caused a lot of artists to step back and look at exactly how these systems are working?

The pandemic shook up the narrative. A lot of things fell by the wayside, and a lot of things were interrupted. And then a lot of artists had a clearing to step out and become more active. The pandemic also represented a big global change that was also about certain failures in society and culture. I began looking for historical parallels. Emilija Škarnulytė’s 2022 film Burial, for example, is about the decommissioning of a nuclear power plant considered a sister to Chernobyl. I was fascinated. Chernobyl was not only a wide-reaching disaster with global impact—even though it was isolated to a region—but it also revealed failures in the government and infrastructure and scientific advancement that precipitated the fall of the Soviet Union. It pulled back the curtain to reveal the fallibility of so many structures and institutions that were presumed infallible before that. And, of course, that changed the direction of everything. We’re in one of those times now where, somehow, anything is possible, both good and bad.

When I think about Chernobyl, I see it also as a moment in which optimism collapses. Nuclear power was supposed to be a saving grace and Chernobyl, in some way, totally killed enthusiasm for it.

There’s an interesting link with Zhou Tao’s 2024 film The Axis of Big Data, which is about a data center in China. The data center that Zhou is talking about is not powered by nuclear, but hydraulic power, because of where it is built. But the film is in some ways about returning to things from a different era and using them to fulfill a new technological purpose that has a lot of implications and consequences, both positive and negative. I see parallels between the 20th century’s technological shifts and the 21st century’s.

Both of those films, and then a couple of the sculptures in “The Gatherers,” seem to be as much about the way in which there’s not really a clear line between the industrial and natural worlds.

There’s a blurring and flattening that is happening [in many of the works]. There’s this tension between things that are falling apart and becoming outmoded, with the things that are replacing them. And there are a lot of technologies in the show that are slowly being outmoded or have been forgotten, or objects that are fading away and then becoming trash. An artist like Tolia Astakhishvili is very interesting because her works act almost like a sieve that catches all this stuff. But many of the artists in the show are not looking at materials or objects as typologies, really, or even categories. They are more often looking at how categories and typologies get flattened when everything becomes waste or junk.

The title, “The Gatherers,” seems to suggest that, for many of these artists, the method or the material is almost more important than the end product of their process.

To me, it’s more about quantity. The title nods to a few things, but specifically it references The Gleaners, the 1857 painting by Jean-François Millet, and then Agnes Varda’s 2000 film The Gleaners and I. There’s this idea of gleaning, which happens on the edges of society or economies, where people pick up the scraps. But these days, it’s more like heaps. The show is really about this incomprehensible mass of stuff. Each artist has such a different methodology, but many have similar strategies for trying—through art—to gesture at something that is very hard to express, which is this physical mass of stuff. The works are not really informational, but about the psychic burden attached to [dealing with the mass]. There’s this great quote about still lifes that is very important to me by art historian Norman Bryson, “Still life is the world minus its narratives.” It’s this idea that things continue in some other life cycle or existence that we can’t really imagine. Many of these objects and materials will just continue on for hundreds, if not thousands, of years or longer. We don’t really know what the end of the story is at all.

There’s a type of hope embedded in that. We’re all suffused in climate doomer-ism. But a lot of the work seems to just suggest that actually, life is just going to keep going and changing and mutating into whatever it does.

It reminds me of something that someone not in art once said to me. We were talking about the climate, and we were really stressed about what’s going on, which, of course, is very stressful. But they were like, the Earth will continue. There’s all this discourse about the Anthropocene and human impacts, but also, we’re irrelevant within it too somehow. We should be worried about ourselves, but projecting outward is maybe not understanding the real calamity. 

Another touchpoint for the show is Michel Serres, who wrote Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution?, which is a small but fascinating book that argues that property [as a concept] claims and marks space by ruining and soiling things. A factory dumping toxic waste in a river essentially claims that river by making it repellent to other beings. In that sense, the idea of property is inherently destructive: in order to take over areas of the planet, it entails destruction somehow. But Serres broadens the argument in ways that are relevant to the show where he talks about how a billboard that you can see from a mile away is also interfering into all these spaces and realms. He also talks about graffiti in an interesting way, as a more ad-hoc minor way of claiming space, compared to more systematized, detrimental ways of claiming space.

The artists in “The Gatherers” are almost claiming objects—like Klara Liden’s repurposed highway signs or Nick Relph’s reproductions of urban ephemera—as public goods.

They’re objects that have been forgotten too. Klara’s work is so interesting because she’s taking municipal objects that serve purposes, like the junction box, or bus signage, but they’ve been taken over, not only by people—the little graffiti or doodles—but the plaster of flyers on them that have been peeling for however many years. And then they been abandoned, or they’re not really noticed. That’s something that’s important in the show. It’s about a sort of anti-spectacle, because it’s about the things we don’t really see, or notice, or the flows and systems that are largely invisible or hard to visualize.

As I walked through the show, I thought a lot about Minimalism—a movement rooted in industrial materials and manufacturing methods, where artists often imposed strict formal logic on their materials. In contrast, the artists in The Gatherers seem to critique that impulse, favoring salvaged or degraded materials that resist simplicity and order.

Another touch point of the show is a 1961 exhibition at MoMA called “The Art of Assemblage,” which showcased dozens of artists who were working on this new idea of assemblage. Assemblage had manifested prior to that, but it was this idea of the everyday and pulling things from the street, and using non-traditional art materials, and mixing materials. But that was also in a particular time in which it was more novel and the things that would be found on the street were changing because of the postwar consumerism. And so now, even if works look similar aesthetically, it’s very different because what these things mean and what system they’re a part of, and what they refer to, [has changed]. It was important to me that this show was less about the aura of any single object, and more about how each thing is part of a bigger network.

The 14 artists in the show are pretty spread out all over different parts of the world. How important was it to you to represent different parts of the world? What were the resonances that you were finding across the different regions, and how do you represent all that without flattening the very specific context that each artist represents?

I didn’t want to focus on one region or one place, necessarily. The goal was to show how there are shared concerns across global contexts, but that they are specific and based on where people are, where they’re working, and what their situation is. A lot of the artists in the show have a real proximity to issues of excess and waste, or some personal relationship to the materials they are working with, like Selma Selman or Jean Katambayi Mukendi. There’s several examples of that. But it’s also about interconnected economic and circulatory connections. Most of the artists are working in places that have had particular transformations over the last few decades, and they are really thinking through the 1990s and the 2000s. There was the end of the Soviet Union, which signaled the end of one economic-social model. That was replaced by global neoliberalism, which then didn’t really work in the way it was intended, and now we’re in some other situation.

The artists who are working in China, for example, have seen a lot of change in terms of a new globalized economy that has material impacts. For me, that was very interesting, because if you grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, there was a particular way the future has been presented or framed over the latter half of the 20th century. Now we’re seeing how its actually playing out. I feel like we’re in a new time where we can grapple with that and not hold back. We have to let go of the comforting narratives that we have been told because they’re not real. The sooner we do, the more we can address what’s truly at hand. For the show, I didn’t want to put on the burden of any political context, because things need to emerge out of the artists and their works. A lot of exhibitions, particularly group exhibitions, can be over determined. For me, as a curator, I often have a thesis or a question, but you want to allow the path to emerge [organically] and to follow it as much as you direct it.

You mentioned this new moment that we’re in right now. Do you see these artists, and their practices, as marking this new paradigm in terms of creating new narratives or coming to new understandings about the moment were in?

These artists are all very open eyed, and they are really thinking about how art and aesthetics and sensibility can communicate. That comes directly out of research-based or narrative practices. We’re in a time of not only an abundance of waste, but an abundance of information. It’s not like we necessarily need more notifications about everything that’s happening. It’s more about how art can unpeel layers and create a feeling that helps us understand where we are. They’re doing that.

This show is a spatial, experiential exhibition. You don’t see much installation or massive sculptures in shows anymore, and creating a spatial narrative was important to me. In the show, there’s a lot of sound that connects and bleeds in. There’s something palpable that emerges. There’s the sound of the scanner [in Tolia Astakhishvili and Dylan Peirce’s 2025 two-channel video work in so many things I’d like to tell you]], the sound of the construction claw [in Selma Selman’s 2024 sculpture Flower of Life], and then, every four minutes, Klara Liden’s sign [the 2024 sculpture Untitled (Haltestelle)] rotates. There are machine sounds that are also repetitive in a particular way that creates this evocative rhythm. The sounds speak to a quality that is hard to put into language, but which is something that exhibitions and art can do.

It seemed like the space really allows the works to breathe, and that there’s not an overabundance of text. Was that an intentional choice in the curation?

There are many artists that could be in this show, but [these 14 artists] was also an important scale for me in terms of this being a big show, with substantial works and investment made in those works. But I also wanted there to be room [for audiences] to understand individual practices too, and to have space to approach those practices. There’s hopefully space for a meaningful encounter with each of these artists. And it was important that the works in the show are impactful, not illustrative of ideas. They speak for themselves. Context is also important. When you work on any show, you know about the artists’ work and, for some of the artists, I’ve actually worked with them previously, or I’ve been following their practices internationally [for years]. There aren’t many [opportunities] to really dig into individual practices sometimes and I think there is a meaning that emerges when you see these works in context.

Earlier you mentioned that there is an abundance of not just waste, but information. And there is of course a lot of art these days that is explicitly political. But it seemed like the works in “The Gatherers” are not necessarily political, even if their context is, and they merely demonstrating or illustrating a state of affairs.

I think that art is at its best when it responds to and reflects qualities of a time in ways that other medias and formats don’t or can’t. It’s important to maintain that. So, in terms of the political, there’s a lot of different ways you could approach that. The artists [in “The Gatherers”] have strategies of pulling from, extracting, and intervening that they use to speak about certain issues, but it’s really through the language of creative practice. There are ways that can be compelling or not compelling. But these artists do something more than just tell a story.

They do something that only art can do.

I feel more and more adamant about that, because there’s a lot of expectation for art to do things that art maybe never has really done and it doesn’t necessarily lead to anything that great or interesting. It’s like asking all literature to operate in one specific way. Art can be incredibly valid, powerful, reflective and thought provoking and we, as viewers, need to allow space, room, and some sort of generosity to allow that to happen. Art can open perspectives in ways that aren’t necessarily so literal. Otherwise, it gets boring.

On Friday and Saturday, several Jewish sites in Paris were vandalized with green paint, including the Mémorial de la Shoah, the Tournelles synagogue, and the Agoudas Hakehilos synagogue—all in city’s Jewish quarter—as well as a third synagogue in a different part of the city.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on Sunday that it has been common in France for red paint to be used as a protest against Israel and the ongoing war in Gaza. Green paint, however, is new. There was no accompanying message in the graffiti, nor has a group claimed responsibility.

“Whatever the perpetrators and their motivations, these acts do not only target walls: they violently stigmatize French Jews, their memory and their places of worship,” French Jewish group CRIF told JTA. “These paint sprays are a stain on our republican values.”

According to Le Monde, an open can of green paint was found at the Chez Marianne restaurant, which was also vandalized. CCTV footage has shown a person dressed in black committing the vandalism at the Memorial at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday morning.

An investigation, the Paris prosecutor’s office told the AFP, is ongoing.

Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, said in a statement, “I condemn these intimidations in the strongest possible terms; anti-Semitism has no place in our city and in our Republic. I have asked the sanitation department to intervene urgently. We will file a complaint.”

Meanwhile, Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said in a statement that he was “appalled” by the acts, and called on French officials to “act swiftly and firmly to bring the perpetrators to justice and to defend the Jewish community against hatred and attacks of all kinds.”

Herzog’s great grandfather, Rabbi Joel Herzog, helped build one of the vandalized synagogues.

Jean Siméon Chardin’s 1760 painting The Cut Melon is officially headed to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, after a failed attempt to win it at auction.

Last June, the Chardin painting set a new record for the artist when it sold for $30.3 million at Christie’s France to then-unknown Italian real estate investor Nanni Bassani Antivari. At the time, it seemed like a disappointing miss for the Kimbell Art Museum, who was the underbidder on the work.

In 2022, the museum had tried and failed to acquire Chardin’s Basket of Wild Strawberries (1761), after France declared the work a national treasure, allowing the Louvre to step in to purchase the work for its collection.

But then, this past December, the Art Newspaper revealed that not only had Antivari not paid for The Cut Melon, but that Christie’s was suing him for non-payment. While that case has not yet been settled, the future of The Cut Melon has.

On Wednesday, the Kimbell announced that it had acquired the work directly from the painting’s owners, the descendants of Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild, an arts patron who acquired the work in 1876.

In an interview with ARTnews, museum director Eric Lee called the painting and Basket of Wild Strawberries the “two most important Chardin still lifes that were still in private hands.”

“In my opinion, The Cut Melon is absolutely as wonderful as [Basket of Wild Strawberries]. I just could not be more thrilled to be able to acquire it,” Lee said. “I was so sad when we lost the painting at auction and when this came back around it was almot like a miracle. The painting is so right for the collection. It looks like it’s always been here and it seems impossible to think of the Kimbell without this painting.”

Painted on a rare oval canvas nearly two feet wide, the still life features, in Lee’s estimation, a “complex composition” of rounded forms anchored by a vivid orange wedge of cantaloupe poised atop the exposed core of a sliced melon. The painting goes on view Thursday in the museum’s Louis I. Kahn building.

“You don’t see orange that often in Old Master painting paintings, and I know Kahn was very keen on the color, so it’s nice to be able to bring orange back into the galleries,” Lee said. “This is the only painting there where orange is very prominent.”

Lee said that the museum doesn’t typically make acquisitions to “fill gaps” in its collection, but it had to, in the case of The Cut Melon, because still lifes are a weakness at the Kimbell. Prior to the Chardin acquisition, the museum had still lifes by Jacques de Gheyn and Luis Egidio Meléndez, though it recently acquired one by Anne Vallayer-Coster and another by Louise Moillon.. The museum currently has just one other Chardin work, Young Student Drawing (ca. 1738).

“We’ve been strengthening the collection, but then with these other still lifes, the glaring absence was a major Chardin,” Lee said. “The quiet stillness of the painting just resonates with the quiet stillness of Louis Kahn’s galleries. The architecture and the painting complement each other so well.”