Auction Fever, Art’s Lost-and-Found Reckoning

New York’s marquee spring auction week just posted a massive headline number: about two dollars billion in sales. In Art Market Minute, host Margaret Carrigan takes a high-level look at the week as a bellwether for the art market, sorting through the winners and losers across the major houses. The big theme is a sharp rebound from last spring, driven by trophy works, major collections, and what the piece describes as a renewed willingness among collectors to spend at the highest level. The question now is what that confidence signals going forward. If top-end buyers are back in force, it can reshape expectations for the next stretch of sales—and it puts pressure on what comes to market next.

A summer preview round-up is making the rounds with a list of “46 Museum Shows and Biennials to See This Summer,” and it’s framed around spectacle in its many forms. The selection points to Laure Prouvost’s wide-ranging project about quantum physics at Paris’s Grand Palais and Carsten Höller’s vast upcoming show at Beijing’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, with details largely kept secret. It also highlights Tomás Saraceno bringing monumental sculptures to Munich’s Haus der Kunst, alongside a permanent land artwork going on view in Argentina. Land and its histories is a recurring thread, with Carolina Caycedo at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the National Gallery of Canada surveying contemporary Indigenous artists from Inuit Nunaat, Sápmi, and Denendeh. Tate Modern’s Ana Mendieta retrospective is singled out as a major event.

In Vancouver, a solo exhibition brings Edward Burtynsky’s long-running project into focus. “Burtynsky: Human/Nature,” on view at Paul Kyle Gallery from May 30 through August 1, 2026, spans works from the early 1990s to the present, emphasizing how his photographs hover between the natural world and industrialization. The gallery’s catalogue includes an essay by assistant director Diamond Zhou describing how the title “Human/Nature” doesn’t reconcile the two terms—it underscores a strained relationship, where the slash suggests contact, dependence, division, and injury. The show’s images range widely: a stepwell in India, a granite quarry in Barre, Vermont, railcars cutting through British Columbia, and magma against blackened earth in Ontario. Gallerist Paul Kyle calls Burtynsky’s work visually powerful and a moral reckoning.

Betye Saar’s collection of Black dolls has traveled to New York City for an exhibition at the New York Historical, on view through October 4, timed to Saar nearing her 100th birthday. The show celebrates her promised gift of more than 100 dolls to the institution, and it places the dolls alongside paintings, prints, and sculptures featuring figurines. Saar, born in 1926, found her first Black doll as a college student in 1949—an Amosandra doll—and began incorporating such figures into her art in the 1970s, including works like “Indigo Mercy” (1975) and “Aunt Jemima and Hoo Doo Doll” (1972). During the COVID-19 pandemic, she began painting the dolls into watercolor scenes, finding solace in imagining their “mystical adventures.” The collection includes minstrel, mammy, golliwog, and “topsy-turvy” dolls, reframed through Saar’s transformative lens.

A federal jury has found Daniel Sikkema guilty of arranging the murder-for-hire of his estranged husband, the New York art dealer Brent Sikkema. The report describes how the 75-year-old gallerist was stabbed 18 times in his Rio de Janeiro townhouse in the early hours of January 14, 2024, a brutal crime that shocked the art world. The conviction lands amid other art headlines, including unionized staff at the Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts officially calling for renaming due to Les Wexner’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. There’s also a note on Columbia University’s MFA show, where artist Alejandro Valencia’s work is described as an indictment of the school’s crackdown on pro-Palestine activists, including a student who says she has been denied her degree.

Two long-missing 17th-century altarpiece paintings have been recovered and returned to a church in Seville after being gone for more than a century. The works, by Baroque painter Lucas Valdés, were seized by Spanish police just days before they were due to be auctioned. Spanish police were alerted in September 2025 by the Archdiocese of Seville after the paintings appeared in an auction house catalog, thought to be from the church of the Hospital of the Venerable Priests. Investigators from the Spanish Historical Heritage Brigade determined the oval pine-board oil paintings were indeed by Valdés. On May 20, the paintings were handed back in a ceremony attended by senior figures from the Archdiocese and brigade staff. The scenes depict Samson taking honey from a lion, and David receiving sacred loaves from Ahimelech, and they once formed part of a main altarpiece by Francisco de Barahona.

A rare, double-sided sheet pulled from Peter Paul Rubens’s Roman notebook is now on public view in Antwerp for the first time. Dated September 1607, it shows wavy brown-ink lines at the top—likely Rubens testing his quill—above a swift sketch of three men in classical robes. On the reverse is a draft letter to the artist Cristoforo Roncalli, in which Rubens inquires about the progress of a painting for their shared patron, Eleonora de’ Medici. The sheet was acquired at TEFAF Maastricht by the King Baudouin Foundation for €one hundred ten thousand and debuted on May 19 at the Rubens Experience. It will remain on view until renovations on the Rubenshuis—Rubens’s historic home—are completed, not before 2030. Curator An Van Camp describes the letter as revealing Rubens’s careful diplomacy and early role as a negotiator.

A major Russian strike on Kyiv and the surrounding region damaged museums and cultural sites over the weekend, alongside widespread civilian infrastructure. The attack, launched in the early hours of Sunday, May 24, killed four people and injured about 100, according to the BBC. Among the affected institutions were the National Art Museum of Ukraine and the Ukrainian National Chernobyl Museum, both recently renovated. The Ukrainian air force reported 90 missiles and 600 drones were launched against the region, with Ukrainian forces intercepting 549 drones and 55 missiles, and 19 additional missiles failing to reach targets. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the strike “effectively destroyed” the Chernobyl Museum; its historic building and the approximately one thousand three hundred fifty-piece collection inside sustained significant damage, though crews rescued about 40 percent of the collection from storage, including a painting by Maria Prymachenko and a Ukrainian flag from 2022. NAMU’s collection stayed safe, but the building suffered critical damage and has closed indefinitely.

A major retrospective at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is giving Edmonia Lewis a long-overdue, expansive frame. “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone,” co-organized by the Peabody Essex Museum and the Georgia Museum of Art, presents 30 of Lewis’s Neoclassical white marble sculptures alongside archival materials and works by other artists. The exhibition is structured across four thematic rooms—“Antislavery and Emancipation,” “Indigenous Artistic Worlds,” “the Studios of Rome,” and “Religion, Mythology, Transcendence”—and it’s grounded in collaboration with Black and Native scholars, presenting Lewis in dialogue with both her Black and Indigenous ancestries. Lewis was born in Greenbush, New York, in 1844 and died in London in 1907. The show highlights her move from Boston to Rome in 1865 and her statement that she was “practically driven to Rome” because “the land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor,” while placing key works like “Forever Free” (1867) in political context.

At the Drawing Center, “Ceija Stojka: Making Visible” brings forward over 50 paintings and drawings by the self-taught Romani artist and Holocaust survivor, foregrounding how memory functions as survival. Stojka, who died in 2013 at age 79, worked across media including poetry, painting, writing, performance, and music, and she became the first Romani-Austrian woman to recount her Holocaust experience in the late 1980s. The exhibition holds space for both atrocity and tenderness: idyllic scenes of Romani life—like an untitled 1995 landscape of an Austrian lake with a traveling wagon—alongside harrowing works shaped by her imprisonment across Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen. Pieces like “They Devoured Us” (1995) visualize the violence of porajmos, while other images insist on cultural continuity and the everyday richness that stereotypes have long tried to erase.

That’s today’s download—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for another fast, opinionated scan of the art world’s biggest headlines.

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