Museum Shakeups and Culture Wars Escalate

A major leadership change is unfolding at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (Mambo), which has announced it will replace its artistic director, Eugenio Viola. The Italian curator and critic has led the museum since 2019, and a museum spokesperson confirmed to The Art Newspaper that a search for his successor has already begun. Viola says the board ended his contract early after he raised concerns in September 2025 about what he described as the “progressive deterioration of working conditions,” concerns he said were shared by several team members. The museum’s statement said the move followed a “comprehensive and ongoing review,” adding that Viola will remain until May 2026 and thanking him for helping consolidate Mambo as a leading Latin American institution.

Staying in the museum world, London’s National Gallery is preparing what Artnet News describes as a “strategic reset” as it confronts an eleven dollars million deficit. The museum has launched a voluntary exit scheme and has signaled that staff cuts and program changes are on the table as it tries to secure its long-term future. While the coverage points to reductions ahead, the specifics of how many roles may be affected—and which areas—aren’t spelled out in the article summary provided. Still, the direction is clear: the museum is using voluntary exits as an opening move, alongside broader restructuring and programming adjustments. For a major national collection, that kind of shift can touch everything from day-to-day operations to the pace and scope of public-facing activity.

Across the Channel, the Louvre is dealing with two problems at once. Artnet News reports arrests connected to an eleven dollars million ticket fraud investigation, a development that has rattled the famed Paris museum. At the same time, the institution faced a more immediate disruption: rooms in the Denon Wing were closed on Friday due to a water leak. The overlap of an alleged ticketing scheme and a physical facilities issue makes for a rough moment for a museum built around managing enormous visitor demand. The fraud investigation raises questions about how ticketing systems are overseen and safeguarded, while the leak underscores how even the most famous institutions can be vulnerable to unglamorous infrastructure failures that quickly affect public access.

Back in London—this time on the art, not the balance sheets—Tracey Emin is in focus as Tate Modern hosts the largest retrospective to date of the artist. In an interview with The Art Newspaper, Emin reflects on her recent surge of activity, saying, “I’ve done more in my last five years than in the whole rest of my life.” She connects the exhibition’s title, A Second Life, to a personal “before and after”: her 2020 bladder cancer diagnosis and subsequent invasive surgery. The show spans from her first solo exhibition at White Cube in 1993 to recent paintings, and it will premiere a documentary featuring the stoma bag she lives with. Emin also discusses how the retrospective groups work by themes—like Margate, Cyprus, Youth, Rape, and Abortion—rather than strict chronology.

Still in Britain, a notable chapter in arts journalism is closing: Adrian Searle, The Guardian’s chief art critic, is stepping down after more than 30 years, The Art Newspaper reports. Searle described writing for the paper as “an exhilarating ride,” and the article highlights his influential, sometimes acerbic voice—citing, for instance, his 1999 Turner Prize comments on Tracey Emin and his response to Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth at Tate Modern in 2007. His final article will be a look back over the past three decades and what he’s learned, scheduled to appear on 1 April. The Guardian’s art coverage will continue with Jonathan Jones and other regular critics named in the piece: Charlotte Jansen, Chloë Ashby, and Eddy Frankel.

Across the Atlantic, Artnet News reports that the College of Visual Arts and Design Galleries at the University of North Texas (UNT) in Denton canceled a solo exhibition by Brooklyn artist Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez—after installation was complete—and the school has not said why. The show, “Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá (Not From Here, Not From There),” originated at Boston University College of Fine Arts and was curated by Kate Fowle. It included works from Quiñonez’s Frieze Impact Award-winning “I.C.E. Scream” series, which criticizes Immigration Customs and Enforcement by rebranding it as “Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement.” Quiñonez said the exhibition wasn’t only about ICE, and noted it celebrated immigrant communities. He was “ghosted,” he said, and on February 11 students sent photos showing the gallery closed and papered over.

Zooming out to cultural policy, Artnet News reports that new grant guidelines from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) echo President Donald Trump’s vision for American culture. The piece frames the guidelines as a shift in how federal cultural support is positioned, with compliance language that could shape what kinds of programs and priorities institutions pursue. The article’s thrust is less about a single grant or museum and more about the direction of travel: how guidelines, even without overt bans, can influence decision-making across museums and libraries that rely on federal funding. In that environment, institutions may have to weigh the practical need for support against how the new rules could affect planning, language, and program design—especially for organizations serving wide-ranging communities.

The script also flags another Trump-related museum development: Trump wants the National Portrait Gallery to commission a new portrait. However, the article text for that ARTnews story wasn’t actually provided here—only a truncated technical snippet—so any details beyond the headline can’t be verified against source text. Based strictly on the title supplied, the only supported claim is that Trump wants the National Portrait Gallery to commission a new portrait. Without the full article, we can’t confirm the stated rationale, phrasing, process, or any “two terms” framing. What we can say is that such a request, as described by the headline, centers on an attempt to shape representation within a major portrait institution. Any additional specifics—timelines, decision-makers, or quoted language—would need the complete article text to fact-check accurately.

Shifting to Los Angeles, The Art Newspaper gives a five-star review to Monuments, staged across The Geffen Contemporary at Moca and The Brick. The exhibition places nine Confederate monuments into dialogue with 19 artists, and the reviewer says the show avoids preachiness by not taking the most obvious approach. A key work is Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone (2023), so central that Walker is credited as a co-curator. That sculpture occupies The Brick, while other works are at Moca’s Geffen branch. The review explains that Walker transformed a monument of Stonewall Jackson on horseback—beheading Jackson and severing limbs, using butcher-diagram logic—after the original Charlottesville statue was removed following a 2017 city council vote and subsequent lawsuits. Co-curators are Hamza Walker and Bennett Simpson.

And finally, Hyperallergic reports on a Manhattan two-gallery presentation centering queer Arab artists “on their own terms.” Across two galleries in Manhattan, the feature says, eight artists and collectives push back against the weaponization of their identities to justify violence. Rather than allowing queerness and Arabness to be framed only through surveillance, suspicion, or moral panic, the article emphasizes a curatorial vision focused on belonging and reclaimed lineages. The point, as described, is not to reduce the work to a single crisis narrative, but to foreground self-definition—artists shaping their own genealogies and cultural positioning. The story’s throughline is that the exhibition refuses externally imposed scripts, offering viewers an encounter with art that asserts community and continuity instead of being boxed into explanations meant to satisfy outsiders.

That’s today’s download—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more art-world intel, and until then.

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