Restitution Reckonings and Museums Under Pressure

New York’s New Museum has named Massimiliano Gioni its new director, The Art Newspaper reports, promoting the institution’s longtime artistic director. Gioni joined the museum in 2006 as a curator, later serving as associate director and director of exhibitions, and he succeeds Lisa Phillips, who announced her retirement last year after leading the museum since 1999. In a statement to The Art Newspaper, Gioni noted that Phillips and the museum’s founder, Marcia Tucker—who opened the New Museum in 1977—were also curators, calling that continuity a “house tradition.” His tenure includes solo shows for artists from Faith Ringgold to Tacita Dean, and thematic projects like Grief and Grievance. Gioni begins the new role on 1 August.

The Art Newspaper also digs into a 162-page White House report on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, released on 4 July as the US marked the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Authored by the Domestic Policy Council, the report argues the museum was meant to be “proudly patriotic” but claims it has become an instrument of “radical, activist ideology” by foregrounding the experiences of Indigenous and Black people, immigrants, and women. It complains the museum lacks exhibits about the Founding Fathers and doesn’t adequately acknowledge Christianity’s “central and positive role” in US history. The report targets the 2020–23 exhibition Girlhood (It’s Complicated), including its treatment of immigration and transgender stories. A Smithsonian spokesperson told The Art Newspaper it remains committed to “nonpartisan and independent scholarship.”

Outside the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hyperallergic reports that anti-genocide messages about Gaza briefly appeared across the museum’s exterior advertising screens in an action by New York City-based artist Jonathan Allen. Around 10:30pm on July 2, Allen painted over two screens with paint and plastic atop the moving digital displays—his 438th and 439th “Interruptions” (2017–present). One screen paraphrased an allegation from a June 2026 United Nations report: “The Israeli forces have deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children.” The other quoted Ta-Nehisi Coates from a 2025 University of Michigan conversation with Angela Davis: “If you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.” The Whitney said it removed the installations after learning of vandalism on July 3.

From public protest to public input: ARTnews says High Line Art is asking people to comment on 62 proposals for its Plinth commissions slated for 2029 and 2030, above 30th Street and 10th Avenue in Manhattan. Comments are open until September 8, with prompts like whether you can imagine a work on the Plinth and if it fits New York City “for our time.” The nominees include Nina Chanel Abney, Kelly Akashi, Kevin Beasley, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Anthea Hamilton, Michael Rakowitz, and Anicka Yi, among others, selected by nine international curators. High Line Art director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani told ARTnews the organization is eager to hear from the public after strong responses to Iván Argote’s Dinosaur and Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s The Light That Shines Through the Universe, which is currently on view. A sixth commission from the 2023 cohort will be announced next year.

ARTnews also reports on a new lawsuit involving Mickalene Thomas. Photographer Barbara Karant alleges Thomas used Karant’s pictures without attribution or permission in works shown at museums and blue-chip galleries. Filed last month in Illinois’s North District Court, the suit centers on Karant’s series “820 Ebony/Jet,” made from 250 photographs taken between 2013 and 2015 inside the former Johnson Publishing Company headquarters in Chicago. Karant is preparing a book of the photographs due in September, with writings by Cheryl Finley and Deborah Willis. The suit points to a 2021 show at New York’s Lévy Gorvy Dayan that included pixelated versions of the images, and to the touring survey “Mickalene Thomas: All About Love,” which opened at the Broad in 2024 and traveled to the Barnes Foundation, the Hayward Gallery, and Les Abattoirs. Thomas declined to comment.

In Italy, ARTnews reports the parliament is advancing legislation to create a formal process for restituting art and cultural property looted by the Nazis under Italian Fascist racial laws. The Jewish News Syndicate reported the news following a statement by the World Jewish Restitution Organization. WJRO president Gideon Taylor called the bill a “historic opportunity” to deliver justice, while noting that operational and legal details remain to be resolved as it moves forward. The article also cites a 2024 study by the WJRO and the Claims Conference surveying 47 countries: only seven—Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US—made “major progress” since the 1998 Washington Conference Principles, while Italy made only “some progress.” At a June 24 parliamentary meeting, UCEI president Livia Ottolenghi said the bill aims to fill a gap in establishing a right to redress for dispossessed artistic heritage.

The Art Newspaper heads to southern France for a major presentation by Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective at Luma Arles. Their multimedia project, Correspondences (until 8 November), brings together all eight films created between 2023 and 2026, plus two new commissions, along with Smith’s drawings, photographs, handwritten texts, and archival installations made for the show. It’s installed across intersecting screens inside La Grande Halle, a five thousand sq. m former railway engineering workshop built in 1894. Smith, collaborating with Soundwalk Collective since 2016, said she produced new on-site works as “interpretations or expansions of ghost images.” Across ten multi-channel films, the project moves through places including Chernobyl, Greenland, the Black Sea, Siberia, and the Camargue. Soundwalk Collective founder Stephan Crasneanscki describes a process where recorded soundscapes come first, then Smith’s poetry, then the films.

The Art Newspaper reports that Ukraine’s military has published a new handbook on “protection of cultural values in the event of armed conflict,” posted on 23 June on the Na Zviazku military organization’s website. The handbook outlines soldiers’ obligations under international humanitarian law, levels of protection for cultural property, precautions for operational planning, and procedures for identifying and documenting attacks on heritage. It was created with experts from the Regional Center for Human Rights, including co-authors Andrii Lutsyk and Yaroslava Sementsova, and lead author Denys Grechko, a researcher at the National Institute of Archaeology and a major in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Grechko says the army’s Cultural Property Protection unit marked 58 items with 184 “Blue Shield” emblems and helped evacuate 44 Polovtsian statues to a museum in Dnipro. The handbook is illustrated with examples of seized objects and damaged sites.

ARTnews reports that Germany and the Netherlands have agreed to return two thousand culturally significant artifacts to Ghana that were taken during the colonial era. The announcement came at Next Steps, a conference held last week in Accra and hosted by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama. The conference followed a March 25, 2026 United Nations declaration describing the trafficking of enslaved Africans and subsequent racialized chattel enslavement as the “gravest crime against humanity,” with Next Steps aiming to translate that into actionable commitments. In a June 20 Facebook post, Ghana’s foreign minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, wrote that ambassadors from the Netherlands and Germany presented a catalogue of items to President Mahama. A July 8 update, citing Radio France, says the treasures include ceremonial objects and traditional regalia held in German and Dutch museums and private collections, to be returned in phases after further consultations.

Hyperallergic looks at stock imagery through the lens of scholar Simona Supekar’s first book, Stock Photo (2026), the latest in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. The piece traces how stock photos—often dismissed as cliché or “mass produced”—can function as a visual baseline that shapes expectations in the real world, especially around race and gender. Supekar argues that popular racial hierarchies are unwittingly perpetuated by online stock photography and that these patterns now inform AI-generated representations of marginalized communities. One example she gives: searching “maternity” and “Indian” on a stock site yields mostly AI-generated results, suggesting a gap in what existed before. She also notes that light-skinned Indian people are vastly over-represented in Getty’s collection, and describes how searching “Black businessman” could, for years, return a deeply troubling result: a Black man at a bar beside lines of cocaine.

That’s today’s download—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more, and until then, I’m Beauregard Snickerdoodle signing off.

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