Strikes, Restitution, and AI Unlocking the Past

Workers at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike if negotiations over a new contract drag on. The Art Newspaper reports that 93% of affected workers represented by UAW Local 2110 backed the authorization. Talks have been ongoing since December 2025, after the previous collective bargaining agreement expired at the end of that month. Union chair Drew Reynolds, an educator at the museum, pointed to last year’s layoffs of 20 employees—about 7% of the workforce—saying they were implemented chaotically and left remaining staff with extra work. The union says entry-level pay is forty nine thousand nine hundred twenty dollars and about half of staff earn under seventy one thousand dollars. A strike isn’t scheduled yet.

Staying in Germany, Skulptur Projekte Münster has named the first five artists for its next edition, opening in June 2027. Artnet News reports the announcement came from curatorial collective What, How & for Whom (WHW)—Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović—who stressed a “grimmer global context” than in 2017 and argued for art’s power to create dialogue. The initial artist list includes Hew Locke, Oscar Murillo, Selma Selman, Iza Tarasewicz, and Róza El-Hassan. Locke is planning a major installation at the Haus der Niederlande, a late-16th-century building originally used by local merchants. WHW said roughly 30 artists will be invited overall for site-specific projects across Münster. The exhibition runs June 13 through October 3, 2027.

Across Switzerland, the country returned 23 artifacts to Nigeria this week, including 18 Benin Bronzes. Artnet News says the bronzes were formerly held by three Swiss museums: the Geneva Ethnography Museum, the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, and the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich. Five additional objects—a bracelet and four monoliths from Nigeria’s Niger Delta region—were tied to separate criminal proceedings and had been illegally imported into Switzerland before being confiscated. The repatriation followed years of provenance research under the Benin Initiative Switzerland, which indicated the objects were most likely looted during the British attack on the Kingdom of Benin in 1897. Some objects will be shown at the National Museum in Lagos, with others going to Benin City.

Shifting to South Korea, the Gwangju Biennale says it will select its artistic director for 2028 through an open call, a change from its recommendation-based process. An announcement published via e-flux says the application window opened June 8 and runs through August 3. The call is open to exhibition professionals and curators worldwide, and proposals can come from individuals or teams of two or more co-artistic directors; collaborations between domestic and international professionals are encouraged. After an initial review in August, shortlisted candidates will be interviewed in September, with the final selection announced in October. The current edition, scheduled to open in September, is led by Ho Tzu Nyen, an artist who organized the Asian Art Biennale in 2019—an unusual choice for a biennale often led by prominent curators.

Back to the Black Sea region, Russia’s State Hermitage Museum has suspended all archaeological expeditions in annexed Crimea, citing a severe fuel shortage as Russia declares a state of emergency. According to the Moscow Times, Alexander Butyagin, head of the Hermitage archaeology department, told TASS on Monday that expeditions are postponed “until the situation improves,” adding it’s currently too difficult to organize normal operations. Local media reports say Butyagin was set to lead a Crimea expedition last month that was relocated to Russia’s southern Krasnodar region. Butyagin remains controversial: Ukrainian prosecutors accused him last year of unauthorized excavation at the ancient site of Myrmekion after Russia’s 2014 annexation. He was detained in Poland in December 2025, later released in a US-brokered prisoner exchange, and returned to Russia.

In Germany, the self-taught conceptual artist Rune Mields died on June 27 in Cologne at age 91, with her death first reported by the German Press Agency. ARTnews notes she was born in Münster in 1935 and began making art in her 30s after an apprenticeship as a bookseller. She gained attention for her late-1960s and early ’70s “Röhrenbilder” (Pipe Paintings), monochrome canvases with hyperreal geometric forms. In 2025, she told Monopol, “To understand life, you have to understand mathematics.” After moving to Cologne in the 1970s, she explored ordering systems across cultures, drawing from sources including ancient geometry, Baroque music, Paleolithic fertility symbols, and Arabic and Persian ornamentation. She participated in Documenta 6 in 1977 and won the Gabriele Münter Prize in 2000.

Turning to the U.S., a new look at Philip Guston highlights how deeply poetry threaded through his work during a period of major change. The article focuses on “Life With P. - Philip Guston: Paintings and Drawings 1964–1978” at Hauser and Wirth, and it underscores the role of Guston’s wife, the artist and poet Musa McKim, as a principal supporter and source of inspiration. After moving in 1968 to Woodstock, New York, with McKim and their teenage daughter, Guston began shifting from abstraction toward a cartoonish world of people and things. He also collaborated with poets, especially Clark Coolidge, and made drawings for poems by Coolidge, Bill Berkson, and William Corbett, along with covers for mimeographed little magazines. The show includes paintings like “Untitled” (1976), “Blue Cover” (1977), and “Two Hearts” (1978).

Over to the London market, Christie’s Old Masters Evening Sale brought in £38.9 million (fifty one dollars million) on Tuesday, exceeding its pre-sale high estimate range of roughly £25 million to £37.5 million, excluding fees. The report notes the 40-lot sale was 96% sold by value and 90% by lot, with three works passing and one withdrawn. Jan van Huysum was the night’s biggest winner: a still life of peaches and grapes sold for £6.52 million (eight dollars million), and a companion floral bouquet sold for £5.54 million (seven dollars million); both set artist records. The most valuable lot, Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington, realized £9.67 million (twelve dollars million), within estimate and a new world auction record for Lawrence. A “Dutch School” vanitas with two skulls surged to £four hundred thirty one thousand eight hundred from an £eighty thousand–£one hundred twenty thousand estimate.

From the market to the lab, researchers working with the Vesuvius Challenge used machine learning and X-ray technology to make major progress on carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum’s Villa of the Papyri, preserved by Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 CE. The project, launched by the University of Kentucky in 2023, aims to read scrolls too fragile to unroll. Last week, the university announced a breakthrough at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli: the team virtually “unwrapped” a scroll known as PHerc. 1667, allowing scholars to read 20 surviving columns of text, and recovered 70 columns from another scroll at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, PHerc. 172, while identifying new books by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. Cofounder Brent Seales said high-resolution scans were made using a synchrotron at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble.

Wrapping up in Brooklyn, “The Late,” IM Youngzoo’s solo show at Space ZeroOne, is on view until July 25 and builds an immersive, disorienting meditation on belief and technology. The article describes a seven-channel video work paired with a one thousand two hundred fifty four-page book—the culmination of 10 years of research and experimentation on ritual and technological belief. Visitors encounter screens in multiple directions, some tucked into nooks you have to crawl into, with “viewing instructions” that address different kinds of beings, from “Gwisin” to birds to a “camera with six eyes.” The work connects Korean folk ritual, including empty graves known as gamyo, to virtual cemeteries and emergent technologies like NFTs, VR, and AI. Sculptural pieces ground the installation, including “Orientation (2025/2026),” a Go board block with a compass that appears to float above it.

That’s the download for today—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for your next hit of art-world reality; until then, Chinga la migra.

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