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      A Gala Celebrates the Met’s Reopening of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing

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      Round tables covered in white cloths surrounded the Temple of Dendur. Women wore fascinators, Nigerian geles and Hawaiian lei po’o, while men wore Yoruba agbadas, Hawaiian kāʻei and the occasional tuxedo, all in sartorial attempts to honor the lineage that brought them to the event.Curators, artists and archaeologists gathered for dinner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to celebrate the culmination of four years of work — and the legacy of a historied American family — on Friday night. They were toasting the reopening of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing and its collection of work from Africa, the ancient Americas and Oceania.Attendees got a chance to explore the wing’s 1,726 objects from Africa, the ancient Americas and Oceania.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesOver lobster, foie gras, wine and champagne, friends of the Met and members of the Rockefeller family mingled among the 1,726 objects in the new gallery, which cost $70 million to complete and has 40,000 square feet dedicated to the arts of those regions.The wing went through four years of work before its reopening.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times“It is a coming together of a very global community,” said Max Hollein, the chief executive and director of the Met. “And in this time, it’s so much about respecting cultural heritage in many different ways but also making sure that there’s a deep understanding, a deeper appreciation.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Skulls of 19 Black Americans Return to New Orleans After 150 Years in Germany

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      The remains, used in the 19th century as part of now discredited racial science, are being laid to rest on Saturday in a traditional jazz funeral.Sometime before Jan. 10, 1872, a young Black laborer named William Roberts checked himself into Charity Hospital in New Orleans. Just 23 years old, he was from Georgia and had a strong build, according to hospital records. His only recorded sickness was diarrhea.He was one of 19 Black patients who died at the hospital in December 1871 and January 1872, and whose skulls were sent to Germany to be studied by a doctor researching a now wholly discredited science that purported a correlation between the shape and size of a skull and a person’s intellect and character.The skulls languished in Germany for about 150 years until Leipzig University contacted the city of New Orleans two years ago to repatriate them.They were returned to New Orleans this month, and on Saturday morning those 19 people who died in the 1800s are being honored with a jazz funeral before their skulls are interred.A staff member at Rhodes Funeral Home removes the remains of one person from the shipping crate that arrived from Germany.Jacob Cochran/Dillard UniversityWhile the return of human remains from museum collections has become more common, the repatriation of these 19 Black cranial remains to New Orleans is believed to be the first major international restitution of the remains of Black Americans from Europe, according to Paul Wolff Mitchell, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam who studies the 19th century history of race and science in the United States and Europe.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ben Shahn’s Social Realist Art Feels Relevant Again in Landmark Survey

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      An old master of the Great Depression painted a portrait of America as it still may be.With some artists, there’s one work that seems to capture their essential achievement.In the long-overdue retrospective now at the Jewish Museum in New York, the entire artistic project of the American painter Ben Shahn comes clear in a single fascinating painting from 1940 called “Contemporary American Sculpture.” It depicts a gallery at the Whitney Museum hosting sculptures from that year’s survey of the nation’s artists — except that Shahn, left out of the Annual, reimagines the walls surrounding those stylized modern works as covered in his own realist paintings.Those show scenes of everyday life during the Great Depression — decrepit workers’ housing; a farmer by his shack; poor Black women at a welfare hospital — depicted as though the Whitney’s walls have been pierced to reveal the all-too-real world out beyond. It recalls how Renaissance murals pierced church walls to let in the more-real world of the Bible.“Contemporary American Sculpture” captures what’s at stake in the most potent works in “Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity,” as this revelatory survey is called. Those works use the time-honored art of painting to make the modern world, and its signature troubles, as present as Shahn can manage. The effect is gripping, and feels utterly relevant for the troubled moment we are living in now.For a decade or so on either side of World War II, Shahn’s achievements made him an art star, earning him a major show at the Museum of Modern Art and honors including a place in the American Pavilion of the 1954 Venice Biennale, shared with the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning.Ben Shahn, “Scotts Run, West Virginia,” 1937. During the Great Depression, Shahn felt sympathy for Americans suffering the deprivations he grew up with. (This painting was based on a photograph he took.)Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; via The Jewish MuseumBut it was de Kooning and his ilk who went on to dominate the art world; as Cold War reaction took hold, Shahn, a dedicated leftist, saw a slow but unbroken decline in his critical fortunes. There has barely been an uptick since. The Jewish Museum show is Shahn’s first notable survey in the United States since one at the same museum in 1976. Featuring 175 artworks and objects, photos by Shahn and his peers as well as illuminating ephemera, it was organized abroad, at the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, where it was a big hit in 2023; the curator Laura Katzman had to work hard to find an American museum to take it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Building a Home From 100 Miles of Cord

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      Chiharu Shiota, a Berlin-based artist, has conjured a multitude of immigrant stories in “Home Less Home,” her largest museum show in the U.S.The artist Chiharu Shiota has drawn a simple shape in thin air and at monumental scale — a rectangle with a pitched roof, instantly recognizable as the universal symbol of home.This ethereal installation is made of polyester cord — some 21,000 lengths of it, streaming down 23 feet from the ceiling of the ICA Watershed, a massive exhibition space at an active shipyard in East Boston.A rectangular forest of blood-red cords hangs nearly to the floor of this former factory space. Inside, the cords shift to lengths of black that form a dark silhouette of a house.Visible within this mirage-like structure are antique furnishings — a four-poster bed, rocking chair, dinette set, sewing table and chair — with a spectacular flock of paper, some 6,000 sheets, fluttering above the domestic tableau. Shiota’s new commission, titled “Home Less Home,” opened Thursday under the banner of the inaugural citywide Boston Public Art Triennial and will remain on view through Sept. 1.This ethereal installation is made of polyester cord — some 21,000 lengths of it.“The house shape looks like a shadow because home does not exist,” Shiota said in a recent interview at the Watershed, as she reached among the cords to affix the final pieces of paper with a stapler. “Home is like something in your heart, inside,” added the soft-spoken artist, 53, who grew up in Osaka and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1997.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tony Bechara, Painter Who Championed Latino Artists, Dies at 83

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      He turned away from a potential career in the law or international relations to produce abstract paintings, and he headed El Museo del Barrio.Tony Bechara’s parents didn’t believe he could make a living as an artist. So he majored in philosophy and economics in college and earned a master’s degree in international relations. He started law school, too, but in his mid-20s he found his true passion as a painter.Returning to New York from Paris, where he studied history at the Sorbonne, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in 1967, where he began painting black-and-white figurative imagery.Animated by the chaos of the city’s streets, he graduated to painting kaleidoscopic grids that he meticulously mapped, and he was embraced by critics and invited to exhibit in museums. He became a patron of the arts and of fledgling Latino artists and, for 15 years, led El Museo del Barrio, a showcase of Puerto Rican art that he expanded to encompass works from all over Latin America.Mr. Bechara died in a Manhattan hospital on April 23, his 83rd birthday. The cause was heart failure, a spokeswoman for El Museo del Barrio said.From 2000 to 2015, he served as chairman of the board of the museum, on Fifth Avenue and 104th Street on the edge of East Harlem, where many newcomers from Puerto Rico originally settled (barrio is Spanish for neighborhood).His mandate was to broaden the museum’s collection and exhibits beyond the Barrio to include art from Latin America and the Caribbean. That expanded purview prompted some local critics to complain that the museum was neglecting its primary focus on Puerto Rican culture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Casualties in Trump’s war on the arts: the small museums keeping local history alive

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      For the past two years, a small arts non-profit has been telling stories about the communities living alongside the Los Angeles river, one voice at a time.The organization, called Clockshop, has collected the oral histories of nearly 70 local residents, activists and elected officials. Their knowledge is compiled in a vast cultural atlas – which contains videos, an interactive map and a self-guided tour exploring the waterway and its transformation from a home for the Indigenous Tongva people to a popular, rapidly gentrifying urban space.But in April, the future of the ever-growing atlas was thrown in uncertainty, when a three-year federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the agency that supports libraries, archives and museums, was terminated 17 months early. The grant, originally for $150,000, still had $20,000 left to pay out. “There is no recourse to recover the funds still in the grant project activities,” the organization said in a post on Instagram.Now, executive director Sue Bell Yank says their mission to preserve the stories of residents ousted by gentrification could lead to “erasure of the past, of cultural self-determination, and a lack of understanding about how communities can successfully advocate for the kinds of neighborhoods we deserve”.Clockshop’s post foreshadowed an alarming message that would eventually be delivered to hundreds of other arts and cultural institutions across the US. As the Trump administration directed federal agencies to cancel grants that did not support the president’s new priorities, which focused on funding “projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity” and targeted anything broadly deemed “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion), millions of dollars dedicated to preserving local history and culture suddenly disappeared.Shortly after IMLS grants were terminated, so too were those awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). By Friday 2 May, a spreadsheet created by writer and theater director Annie Doren was being passed around the internet, aiming to catalog every organization that had lost their NEA funding. With more than 500 organizations on the list, the question shifted from who lost their funding to who didn’t.View image in fullscreenWhile organizations of all kinds were impacted, it is the small and midsized institutions that lack endowments, prominent donors, and broad outreach whose futures are particularly in jeopardy. The cuts have affected a broad swath of projects – from a documentary film-maker in Fresno making a film about a woman who has played Harriet Tubman in civil war reenactments for 30 years; to a dance performance about south-east Asian mothers in New York City, to an organization that brings films, book clubs and other cultural events to rural Montana.Rick Noguchi who runs a non-profit called California Humanities, said he has seen the 112 NEH grants it awarded across the state suspended indefinitely by the Trump administration. “There are many newer immigrant communities that don’t have deep donors and struggle with being able to find individual donors that step in to tell their stories.”‘The country is abandoning its citizens’Back in Los Angeles, the cuts have blanketed cultural institutions with feelings of anxiety and urgency. But their leaders are also fighting back, vowing to continue the work of preserving local history in spite of the administration’s threats to revoke non-profit status if they continue to champion DEI programs.The Japanese American National Museum (JANM), an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution in LA’s Little Tokyo neighborhood that focuses on the history, culture and legacy of Japanese immigrants, initially lost grants that amounted to roughly $1.45m – though some have since been temporarily restored after a court order. Among those cut was a NEH landmarks of American history and culture grant, which funded a workshop helping teachers build a curriculum about the history of Japanese incarceration during the second world war. JANM CEO Ann Burroughs said that the program benefits approximately 20,000 students a year.“It was very much to ensure that the history was never forgotten,” Burroughs said about the museum’s mission and outreach. “It was also to ensure that what happened to Japanese Americans never happened to anybody else.”View image in fullscreenLos Angeles’s One Institute, which houses the largest queer archive in the world, also uses their collection to help educate others on queer history and marginalization. They lost a $15,000 NEA grant to support their upcoming annual festival in October, and now they are scrambling to hold fundraisers to keep the festival on track.Tony Valenzuela, the organization’s executive director, said that their event is important because it covers a gap in education. “Even in liberal states like California, only a fraction of students learn about the contributions of queer people to society,” Valenzuela said. “If the government abandons funding non-profits and other individuals and organizations providing a social good, this country will also be abandoning whole swaths of its citizens who greatly benefit from this work.”Another organization that was hit hard was the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), which operates the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, located just a few blocks north of the neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles. They lost four grants administered by IMLS, NEH, and California Humanities, and are unlikely to receive an NEA grant that normally keeps the organization running – a total value of nearly $144,000 dollars, or 22% of the organization’s annual budget.Like Clockshop, the LAPD’s exhibitions, public programs and archives chart the ways Skid Row has been transformed – and nearly erased – due to development and gentrification. “Not everyone sees Skid Row as a community, let alone a thriving arts community,” said Henry Apodaca, LAPD’s media archivist. “This is a critical counter narrative to popular narratives that we’ve all been inundated with when talking about Skid Row.”View image in fullscreenOne of the terminated grants was an IMLS grant for small museums, which was being used to support a project called Welcome to the Covid Hotel. The project, named for the temporary medical treatment centers that popped up in vacant hotels during the pandemic to care for unhoused people, culminated in an exhibition and a series of theatrical performances based on interviews with patients, nurses and social workers.“There’s stories of people coming in blind and getting cataract surgeries,” explains LAPD’s co-founder and artistic director, John Malpede. “Someone with gangrene needed to have his legs amputated, and it saved his life. And most people got and accepted some form of next-step housing.”Malpede’s performance is a creative way for policymakers to notice the Covid Hotels’ impact and potentially make the sites into permanent fixtures. When the grants were canceled, LAPD was still waiting on more than $38,000 to come through: money that was supposed to pay venues, crew and performers for events that took place in April, as well as upcoming performances in May and June, and a forthcoming publication. While LAPD aims to move forward with their plans, they are uncertain on how to fund it.After going public on social media, private donors have since stepped up to help the JANM and Clockshop recoup their losses. LAPD and the One Institute, however, are still looking for support. Without this funding, not only could the non-profits disband, but also the communities that have flourished as a result of their work.As Malpede warns: “It’s only because of the neighborhood standing up and using its own history that it continues to be present.” More

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      Breuer Building Gets Landmark Status Before Sotheby’s Moves In

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      The modernist former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art had its interior designated for protection by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.The modernist Breuer building, formerly home to the Whitney Museum of American Art and purchased by Sotheby’s auction house in 2023, on Tuesday had much of its interior designated as a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.The designation, which was voted on Tuesday morning, will protect much of the building on Madison Avenue from any changes that had concerned preservationists as the building undergoes a renovation by the Pritzker-winning architects Herzog & de Meuron. The museum’s galleries were not included as part of the designation. The designation protects parts of the lower level facing Madison Avenue, as well as the first-floor lobby, coat check, vestibules and the main stairwell from the lower level through the fifth floor.“We would have preferred the galleries were included in the designation,” said Liz Waytkus, the executive director of Docomomo US, an organization dedicated to preserving modern architecture which filed the request with the Preservation Commission seeking interior landmark status for the Breuer. “But we’ve spoken to Sotheby’s and they have assured us they are treating all gallery surfaces as if they are designated and using a light hand in their restoration.”The 1966 building by Marcel Breuer has become an important symbol of Brutalist architecture, with its concrete grid ceilings and its inverted stepped pyramid exterior.The structure most recently housed the Frick Collection and served as an exhibition space for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s modern and contemporary collection. The renovated building will contain Sotheby’s sales room, as well as exhibition and dining spaces. Work is expected to be completed by this fall.Herzog & de Meuron — known for projects such as Tate Modern in London, the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Park Avenue Armory in New York — has made a specialty of adaptive reuse, or transforming existing structures. The firm, based in Basel, Switzerland, is working with PBDW Architects, a New York firm, on the design.“We fully endorse the landmark designation, as reflected in our initial plans for the building,” said Steve Wrightson, Sotheby’s global head of real estate, in a statement. “We look forward to welcoming the public back and honoring the Breuer’s enduring legacy as we usher in a new chapter.” More

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      Met Museum Surrenders Artifacts Thought Looted From Iraq

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      The Manhattan district attorney’s office said the objects had been identified as illicit during an investigation of an art dealer suspected of having trafficked in stolen antiquities.Three ancient artworks that for years had been part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are now thought to have been looted were returned on Monday to the Republic of Iraq, the Met and the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in statements.The artworks were recovered following criminal investigations into looted art, including one into the British antiquities dealer Robin Symes, the district attorney’s office said. Mr. Symes, who died in 2023, was long suspected by investigators to have been a trafficker.The artifacts were returned in an official ceremony at the district attorney’s office in Lower Manhattan that was attended by Met officials and representatives from Iraq.“Through the Museum’s cooperation with the Manhattan DA’s office, and as a result of its investigation into Robin Symes, the museum recently received new information that made it clear that the works should be repatriated, resulting in a constructive resolution,” the Met said in a statement.The artifacts include a Sumerian vessel made of gypsum alabaster dating to around 2600 to 2500 B.C., which passed through Symes’s hands and was given to the museum in 1989 by a private collection; and two Babylonian ceramic sculptures, a head of a male and a head of a female, dating to around 2000 to 1600 B.C.The head of a male was sold by Symes to the Met in 1972; the head of a female was a gift from the same private collection in 1989. All three were seized by the district attorney’s antiquities trafficking unit earlier this year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More