Museums Under Fire, Identities in Flux

Museum Rietberg in Zurich is hosting a group exhibition that takes colonial-era photography head-on: *A Kind of Paradise: Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art*, on view through September 6. The show brings together twenty artists representing diasporas of Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Oceania, asking viewers to look past colonial mythmaking and toward the stories these images muted. Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino puts it bluntly: “Photography shapes memory by fixing what is seen and what is silenced,” and when images are missing, that absence becomes evidence of erasure. The exhibition unfolds across four sections—“Shapeshifters,” “Confrontation,” “Care,” and “In the Photo Fantastic”—and also weaves in Museum Rietberg’s own 19th- and 20th-century photographs from Asia and Africa.

A Dutch court case has brought a major development in the theft of ancient Romanian gold from the Drents Museum in Assen. Three men were sentenced to 47 months in prison each after a pre-dawn robbery on January 25, 2025, when thieves blasted open several windows and stole Iron Age artifacts from the exhibition “Dacia—Empire of Gold and Silver.” Among the stolen works were the golden helmet of Cotofenesti, dated to the 5th century B.C., and Dacian gold spiral bracelets. Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu accused the museum of security failings, a claim the Drents Museum rejected, and Romania sent experts—including forensic police—to assist. In April, two suspects surrendered the helmet, slightly dented, and two bracelets as part of a plea agreement; 35-year-old Bernhard Z. rejected that deal.

Artists in the United States are responding to the 2026 Fifa World Cup with posters aimed at keeping US Immigration and Customs Enforcement away from matches. The tournament runs June 11 to July 19, 2026, across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and the initiative—No Ice in the Cup—launched May 6 by the Horizons Project. Lead organiser Paola Mendoza said the goal is to “motivate people through art,” centring immigrant communities and “the love of the game.” Artists from ten of the 11 US host cities contributed downloadable posters, encouraging people to “download, remix, adapt” them. Cristy Road Carrera made New York’s poster showing soccer players facing off against Ice agents in tactical gear, while other designs nod to local references, from Seattle coffee to Miami’s alligator imagery.

Los Angeles is getting what’s billed as “the world’s first museum of AI Arts,” and one writer’s first walk through it was equal parts awe and nausea. Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç co-founded Dataland, opening to the public June 20, with an inaugural show titled *Machine Dreams: Rainforest*. The experience synthesizes 1.2 billion data points into a booming, mirrored, hyper-stimulating environment—projections across walls, floor, and ceiling, a thunderous soundtrack, and a damp forest-floor scent delivered by a device worn around the neck. Dataland occupies twenty five thousand square feet in the Grand LA, a Frank Gehry-designed luxury apartment tower downtown. Tickets are priced from forty nine dollars to seventy nine dollars with priority access passes from eighty nine dollars to one hundred twenty nine dollars. The museum’s “Large Nature Model” draws on permission-based datasets and partners including the Smithsonian and Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago has placed Savneet Talwar, director of its graduate art therapy program, on leave after a classroom assignment became the subject of an investigation. On April 17, Talwar received notice that SAIC had opened an investigation into allegations of “discrimination, harassment and/or retaliation.” The day before, she assigned students in “Cultural Dimensions in Art Therapy” a case study: a hypothetical queer Arab woman, “Bela,” an “immigrant student” in the United States, who sympathized with pro-Palestinian protests and feared retaliation under the Trump administration. The assignment described Bela as “deeply affected by the violence against Palestinian civilians.” On April 20, Provost Martin Berger told Talwar she would be placed on leave, citing claimed immediate harm to the community. Talwar filed a complaint with the Illinois Department of Human Rights on June 9.

The 16th Gwangju Biennial has announced its artist list for the edition opening in South Korea from September 5 to November 15, 2026. Curated by Singaporean artist and filmmaker Ho Tzu Nyen—announced in April 2025—the exhibition is titled “You Must Change Your Life,” drawn from the last line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Ho is working with assistant curators Che Kyongfa, Park Gahee, Brian Kuan Wood, Lee Yein, and Koyuri Sato. The artist roster spans figures and groups including Matthew Barney, Rossella Biscotti, Nina Canell, Lygia Clark, Tehching Hsieh, Saodat Ismailova, Jeong Geumhyung, Lu Yang, Christian Nyampeta, Bhenji Ra, and Maya Watanabe, alongside regionally grounded entries like Volcanoes of Jeju (Jeju Stone Park) and Heo Baekryeon (Gwangju Agricultural Technical High School).

Inside Pace Gallery, the layoffs unfolded in a way that left staff reeling long before anyone had clarity. Just after midnight, the New York Times reported Pace was preparing to lay off roughly 50 employees and cut about 50 artists—news many staffers learned at the same time as everyone else, right before a scheduled 9 a.m. town hall. The in-person meeting at Pace’s Chelsea headquarters was abruptly switched to Zoom, the usual question form never arrived, and the call lasted under 30 minutes. CEO Marc Glimcher told staff the gallery had grown too large and costs too high—and, according to multiple people familiar with the call, he largely blamed himself for decisions that pushed Pace into perpetual expansion. Cuts hit departments across the board, and a spokesperson later described layoffs as “an ongoing process,” adding that staff in Europe “were notified this week.”

MoMA is preparing an exhibition focused on Piet Mondrian’s New York years, tracing how the city’s music and energy reshaped his painting. “Mondrian Boogie Woogie” will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from March 21 through July 31, 2027, and it will reunite 30 works made or completed after Mondrian moved to New York in 1940 and before his death there in 1944. The show spotlights his fascination with jazz and, especially, boogie-woogie, and how that syncopation fed a shift away from his signature black grid into smaller blocks of primary color that read like vibrating street maps. Two anchors are *Broadway Boogie Woogie* (1942–43), in MoMA’s collection, and *Victory Boogie Woogie* (1942–44), usually at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag.

Templon Gallery is closing its New York outpost after a rent shock in Chelsea, and it’s planning a smaller footprint elsewhere in Manhattan. The Paris-founded gallery, established in 1966 by dealer Daniel Templon, opened its six thousand five hundred-square-foot Chelsea space in 2022. But when the landlord asked for a major increase from the previous fifty five thousand dollars monthly rent, the gallery decided to leave, according to Daniel Templon’s son, Mathieu Templon, who ran the New York gallery. “It was way too, too much,” he said. Mathieu Templon added he’s looking for a smaller space in Tribeca or the Upper East Side, arguing it’s still “important for the gallery to have a space in New York,” but “not at any cost.” The closure lands amid broader contraction, with other galleries also recently shutting New York locations.

Hyperallergic’s Pride Month series spotlights Nayland Blake, an artist who talks about identity as something continually made and remade rather than fixed in place. Blake, who is nonbinary and pansexual, is currently a co-director of the Studio Art program at Bard College, where they also earned their bachelor’s degree. Their work ranges from the video *Negative Bunny* (1994) to the installation *Mirror Restraint* (1988–89), and they’ve had solo exhibitions at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. In conversation, Blake emphasized community as a condition for legibility: “You have to be a person who champions other work,” they said, “so that you build the context within which your work can be legible.” They also recalled advocating for Bard’s first gay history/culture course with fellow student Gerry Gomez Pearlberg.

That’s today’s download—links are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for another round of art world headlines and the context that actually makes them make sense.

Today's Stories