AI Museums, Restitution Heat, and History Wars

The Obama Presidential Center opens today in Hyde Park, eight miles south of downtown Chicago, and The Art Newspaper says the timing is deliberate: it opens on Juneteenth, now a federal holiday marking the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. The eight hundred fifty dollarsm, 19.3-acre campus is anchored by a towering granite-clad museum designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, with art embedded throughout. In the courtyard of the new public library branch, Richard Hunt’s bronze Book Bird is already in place. Maya Lin’s stone-and-water work Seeing Through the Universe sits on an outdoor terrace named for Ann Dunham. And a newly revealed commission, Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s The Obamas: Springing Forth, portrays Michelle and Barack Obama through layered archival imagery.

Mexico City has a new textile museum steps from the Templo Mayor, and The Art Newspaper reports it’s designed to present textile traditions as living practice, not static “craft.” The Museo de Arte Textil de los Pueblos Indígenas y Afromexicanos opened earlier this month inside a 19th-century palace built between 1795 and 1805 by Manuel Tolsá for Francisco Manuel Cayetano de Fagoaga y Arozqueta—where Aztec vestiges, including a courtyard staircase tied to Templo Mayor’s sixth construction phase, remain visible. The 80m-peso project is managed by Fonart, which is overseeing a museum for the first time. Across 16 galleries are 210 textiles, with curator Alejandro de Ávila emphasizing women’s authorship, techniques like backstrap looms, natural dyes, and the ethics of collaboration through a workshop called Taller Original.

In Downtown Los Angeles, The Art Newspaper goes inside Refik Anadol’s Dataland, which it describes as the world’s first AI art museum—part science experiment, part immersive theme park, and part reverent art space. It takes over twenty five thousand square feet in the Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA development, across from Walt Disney Concert Hall, where Anadol projected an early data piece in 2018. The museum uses more than half a billion pixels, drawing on datasets from collaborations with institutions including the Smithsonian Institution and the Getty. Visitors wear a wristband that tracks heartbeats and physical responses and feeds that biodata into the work, and a neck ring delivers 12 rotating scents designed with L’Oreal Luxe. It’s also explicitly for-profit, with tickets starting at forty nine dollars.

Over in Switzerland, The Art Newspaper spotlights Pierre Huyghe’s first solo exhibition in a Swiss museum, billed as “a site-specific experience,” at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen. Huyghe—known for mixing technologies with organic forms—has a history of works that feel like unstable ecosystems; the article recalls his Documenta 13 project in 2012, including a white dog called Human with one leg painted pink. At Beyeler, visitors move through mostly recent works arranged as “a set of relations that continually reconfigure themselves.” A highlight is Apnea (2026), described as an “artificial breathing organ” submerged in a glass water tank. The show also includes Huyghe’s film Liminals (2025), with a faceless figure shifting states, and Camata (2024), where machines appear to perform a ritual on a skeleton in Chile’s Atacama Desert—continuously re-edited in real time through sensors in the space.

Art Basel Qatar is heading toward a new, purpose-built home on Al Maha Island in Lusail, and The Art Newspaper says the plan was confirmed by Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani at a roundtable meeting yesterday. The target for breaking ground is 2028. The inaugural Art Basel Qatar fair launched in February at two sites, the M7 culture hub and the Doha Design District, but the fair is now being positioned as part of a larger mixed-use development meant to host exhibitions and events year-round. More than 150 houses are planned for the island, some designed by Herzog & de Meuron, who are also developing the masterplan. The Lusail Museum—also by Herzog & de Meuron—will house what’s described as the world’s biggest collection of Orientalist painting and photography.

On the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum has launched an augmented reality project called Unhidden Heroines, ARTnews reports. Starting June 18, anyone with a smartphone—or even a computer—can summon five virtual monuments honoring Julia Ward Howe, Polly Cooper, Mary Katharine Goddard, Elizebeth Smith Friedman, and Dorothy Height. Each figure is paired with a pre-existing monument; Height appears adjacent to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, while Howe is placed within the Lincoln Memorial. Visitors scan QR codes and get an experience that differs slightly depending on whether they’re on site. The project also draws connections between each woman and the better-known figure they’re paired with—like Goddard, who published the first official signed copy of the Declaration of Independence. Access runs through Dec. 31.

A long-running restitution fight took a sharp turn in New York this week. ARTnews reports that New York Supreme Court ruled Tuesday, June 16, that dealer David Nahmad has 30 days to return Amedeo Modigliani’s Seated Man With a Cane (1918), valued at upward of twenty five dollars million. The case ended in April after 11 years, when the court decided the painting belonged to the estate of Jewish art dealer Oscar Stettiner, who left it behind when he fled Paris ahead of the Nazi occupation. The Nahmads—who bought the painting at auction in 1996 for three dollars million—argued the provenance was unclear and that it might not be Stettiner’s painting, but the court rejected that. Nahmad’s lawyers told The Art Newspaper they will appeal, citing two eyewitnesses and other research they say supports their position.

In London, ARTnews reports a controversy surrounding Helen Cammock’s 40-minute video Persistence (2025), which has been on view at the National Portrait Gallery for nine months. According to the Guardian, Cammock’s narration compares Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland to what she calls “the wilful starvation of the Indian population by Winston Churchill,” referring to the 1943 Bengal famine. The Telegraph’s arts correspondent Craig Simpson criticized the work and reported that Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia—who wrote a 2018 Churchill biography—called the claim a “barefaced lie,” and that he wrote to the NPG board with 50 signatories including Churchill’s grandson. The NPG responded that the piece is “created and narrated by the artist” and includes her personal reflections; it supports freedom of expression without necessarily endorsing artists’ opinions. The work was commissioned in 2023.

In New York, ARTnews says Brooklyn-based artist and designer Gavin Snider is accusing Devon Rodriguez—known for viral subway drawings on TikTok—of copying two Knicks-related paintings. Snider wrote on Instagram Tuesday that he was hired in May by the team’s marketing agency to paint a scene outside Madison Square Garden celebrating the Knicks’ first NBA Finals appearance in 25 years, and that the work was shared on the Knicks’ social channels before Game 1 and again after the team won. Snider says a friend flagged Rodriguez’s Instagram, where Rodriguez was selling a piece Snider described as “identical,” and another post that Snider said “matched” a different Knicks work he’d done. Artnet News published a screenshot of Rodriguez’s June 13 post and noted Rodriguez has since deleted it. Rodriguez did not respond to ARTnews at press time.

Back in Washington, Hyperallergic reports six heritage preservation groups are suing the Trump administration over plans to build a 250-statue “National Garden of American Heroes” in West Potomac Park, on National Park Service-controlled land along the Potomac River. The lawsuit—filed Monday, June 15, against the Department of the Interior—argues the proposal violates congressional restrictions and preservation laws, and insists the National Mall is “not a personal sandbox for each President to renovate however he likes.” The filings raise concerns that renderings appear to reduce open grassy areas and remove recreational sports fields in a park that includes the Jefferson Memorial. The plan was first announced in May, and the selection of honorees includes figures like Martin Luther King, Hannah Arendt, and Frederick Douglass, alongside controversial choices such as Christopher Columbus and Junípero Serra. The Interior Department criticized the groups in a statement.

That’s today’s download—links to all ten stories are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more art world news you can actually use… Chinga la migra

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