Museums for Sale, War Shadows the Art World

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden says its revitalised 1.4-acre sculpture garden on the National Mall is on track to reopen in October 2026, with eight newly acquired works planned for the grounds. The Art Newspaper reports the new group includes sculptures by Mark Grotjahn, Raven Halfmoon, Lauren Halsey, Izumi Kato, Liz Larner, Woody De Othello, Chatchai Puipia, and Pedro Reyes. Halfmoon’s Dancing at Dusk (2024) stacks carved stone figures and echoes regalia worn by female Caddo dancers. Puipia’s bronze Wish You Were Here (2008) shows the lower half of a reclining figure. Othello’s Cool Composition (2026), a drooping box fan in green automotive paint, will sit in the east overlook to offer a pause for shade.

In San Francisco, the Contemporary Jewish Museum is putting its Daniel Libeskind–designed building up for sale. The Art Newspaper reports the museum has been closed since December 2024, when it shut down and laid off 80% of its staff, citing low attendance and limited support since the Covid-19 pandemic. Executive director Kerry King said the sale is intended to “ensure a sustainable and impactful future” for the museum, adding that while the physical home may change, the commitment to art, culture, and Jewish life remains. Founded in 1984, the CJM is a non-collecting institution that opened its sixty three thousand-square-foot home in 2008 after spending forty seven dollarsm to transform a landmark 1907 power substation. Newmark is handling the marketing and sale, and the museum’s spaces can be rented through January 2027.

Across the Pacific, Shahzia Sikander’s animated film 3 to 12 Nautical Miles is screening on the digital façade of the M+ museum in Hong Kong until 21 June. The Art Newspaper says the work starts from the historic idea that territorial sovereignty extended three nautical miles from shore—the range of a cannonball—before expanding to 12 miles, a shift Sikander links to dominion, surveillance, and access. Using the Opium Wars as a point of departure, Sikander explores intertwined histories of China, South Asia, and the British East India Company. The film is built from hand-drawn ink and gouache imagery, layered and scanned, and it threads motifs like poppies and cartographic symbols through scenes that also reference figures such as Lin Zexu and Queen Victoria.

Artnet News reports that Pat Steir, the New York-based printmaker and painter known for her “Waterfall” canvases, has died at age 87. Her husband, Joost Elffers, and her niece Lily Sukoneck-Cohen confirmed she died of natural causes in Manhattan on the morning of March 25. Steir was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1938 and began her BFA at Pratt Institute in 1956, studying under Philip Guston and Richard Lindner, finishing in 1962. After illustrating for Doubleday and Harper & Row, she later taught at Parsons and the California Institute of the Arts, then returned to New York in 1975. She co-founded Printed Matter in 1976 and helped form the feminist art journal Heresies. Her “Waterfalls” involved pouring or throwing paint over upright canvases, letting gravity and time shape the image.

A marble statue of Christopher Columbus has been installed on the White House grounds, near the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and facing Pennsylvania Avenue, with a fence keeping the public back. The Art Newspaper says it’s a replica of a monument protesters dismantled in Baltimore in 2020 and threw into the Inner Harbor; divers later recovered fragments that were scanned to create the full-scale reproduction now at the White House. The installation ties to the Trump administration’s effort to reposition Columbus as a symbol of national pride, including plans for a “National Garden of American Heroes.” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement quoted by NPR that the statue honors Columbus’s “legendary life and legacy.” Edward Lengel, a former chief historian of the White House Historical Association, told The New York Times the installation fits other campus changes that are “turning it into a partisan battleground.”

South African artist Gabrielle Goliath is preparing to stage the project that was meant for her country’s pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, after the pavilion was left empty when plans were cancelled in January by South Africa’s sports, arts and culture minister, Gayton McKenzie. The Art Newspaper reports Goliath had been selected to present a new iteration of Elegy, her decade-long project centered on femicide and the murder of LGBTQI+ people in South Africa. The new version also addresses the Ovaherero and Nama genocide in Namibia and the death of Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, killed in an Israeli airstrike in October 2023. Goliath will show Elegy independently from 5 May to 31 July at Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in Castello. She called the empty pavilion a marker of “gross disavowal,” and her team is appealing a court decision dismissing an urgent application.

ARTnews reports renewed pressure on the Venice Biennale after a March 24 Russian drone strike damaged a 17th-century Bernardine monastery in the historic center of Lviv, including a church devoted to St. Andrew designed by Italian architects in a Mannerist style. Lviv’s historic center became a World Heritage Site in 1998 and was added to UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger in 2023. UNESCO said it is “deeply alarmed,” noting cultural property protections under the 1954 Hague Convention and the 1972 World Heritage Convention. Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs, Andrii Sybiha, urged the Biennale’s organizers to act as Russia is set to have a pavilion for the first time since the war began. “Don’t look away, @la_Biennale,” he wrote on X, ending with: “Get real!”

A Paul Klee painting once owned by Walter Benjamin didn’t make its planned US debut this month because it’s currently stuck in Israel amid the war waged by Israel and the United States in Iran. ARTnews reports Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) was supposed to appear at the Jewish Museum in New York in “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds,” which opened last week, but the show is displaying an authorized facsimile instead. The wall text notes that “current conditions affecting international transport” have temporarily delayed shipment of the original. Jewish Museum director James S. Snyder told The New York Times that the Israel Museum loan “remains operative” and will happen “when the time is right.” The facsimile had already been planned for later in the run because the original is an “extremely light-sensitive” oil transfer and watercolor on paper.

ARTnews reports that Tad Smith—chairman of Doodles and former CEO of Sotheby’s—has agreed to buy most of the assets of digital collectibles platform Candy Digital. Smith wrote on X that he’s “doubling down” on his “commitment to digital collectibles,” and said that when the transaction closes in a week or two, he will also serve as CEO. Candy Digital launched in 2021 and secured partnerships including Major League Baseball, DC Comics, and Netflix, with investors including Michael Rubin, Mike Novogratz, and Gary Vaynerchuk. At its peak it reported around 1.5 million users, then shifted as the NFT bubble burst in 2022 and entered a maintenance phase in 2024. Smith told ARTnews, “Nothing to say until the deal is closed.” Candy Digital also holds licensed collectibles tied to NASCAR and WWE, plus digital editions of early Superman and Batman issues.

OpenAI is shutting down its Sora AI video app just months after launch, and The Hollywood Reporter reports Disney is also exiting the deal it signed with OpenAI last year. OpenAI said, “We’re saying goodbye to Sora,” and promised more information about timelines for the app and API and details on preserving users’ work. A source familiar with the matter told The Hollywood Reporter that Disney is pulling out of the one dollars billion investment it pledged last December, and the agreement to license some Disney characters for use in Sora. Sora launched last fall and, according to the report, stunned Hollywood with free use of established intellectual property and known actors, then backtracked a few days after launch to give studios and talent more control over IP and likenesses. A Disney spokesperson said the company respects the decision and will continue engaging AI platforms while embracing technologies that respect IP and creators’ rights.

That’s today’s Daily Art Download—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for the next briefing, and until then: Chinga la migra.

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