Repatriation Pride, Museum Scandals, and Heat Strikes

Bolivia’s Museo Nacional de Arqueología (Munarq) has reopened in La Paz after a year-long renovation, and its new permanent show puts repatriated objects right up front. The Art Newspaper says the exhibition, Raíces eternas, legados vivos (Eternal Roots, Living Legacies), brings together 395 artefacts spanning more than eleven thousand years, organised into five thematic galleries and two chronological ones. A central focus is Saphi, the mummy of a young girl believed to have lived in the 15th century in the Pacajes region, returned by the University of Michigan in 2019 and shown with grave goods like small shoes, bracelets, and pouches of coca leaves and foods. Another highlight is a small black stone illa stolen in 1858 and returned by a Swiss museum in 2014.

Staying with museum governance, a resignation at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has been tied to allegations about workplace culture. The Art Newspaper reports that Yuko Kikuchi, the former head of academic programmes, stepped down at the end of January and wrote a letter dated 26 January to V&A director Tristram Hunt and trustees of the research committee. In it, she said “racist” and “culturally insensitive” behaviours by staff toward her and her students contributed to her resignation, and that it suggested “a culture of systemic racism within the organisation.” The letter was supported by 12 academics, including artist Sonia Boyce and Sarah Teasley of RMIT University. Kikuchi, who began leading the department in October 2023, also described microaggressions, exclusion from meetings, and pushback around her decolonisation-focused teaching.

Still in Europe, heat is turning into a labour dispute inside Venice’s museums. The Art Newspaper says the Unione Sindacale di Base, or USB, has formally signalled a labour dispute after temperatures in some museums stayed above 30°C for weeks, with humidity pushing “perceived temperatures” to 40°C. USB says conditions risk “exhaustion, cramps and heatstroke,” and complained about a lack of maintenance to fan coils and windows at the National Archaeological Museum of Venice, plus a failure to provide water or heatstroke training. The museums involved fall under two clusters, MAN-VE-LAG and DRMNV. Those organisations say they’ve shared operational guidelines and added flexibility so staff can access ventilated or air-conditioned areas, while working with the culture ministry on longer-term fixes.

Across the Atlantic, a mural erased under Chile’s military dictatorship is slowly coming back into view. A report says a historic work by Chilean artist Julio Escámez—covered over during Augusto Pinochet’s regime in 1973—is being uncovered and restored in the Salon de Honor of Chillán’s city hall. The Heritage Unit of the Municipality of Chillán is in a third phase of work that began in 2021, removing 12 layers of white paint millimeter by millimeter, in grids, with daily manual stripping. The restoration is expected to be finished in December 2027. The mural was commissioned in 1969 by Mayor Eduardo Contreras Mella, created over two years, and unveiled in 1972 by Mayor Ricardo Lagos Reyes. Researchers later confirmed it had been painted over, not destroyed, though construction reduced its height and cut through it.

Continuing in the Americas, Mexico’s cultural property rules are at the center of new lawsuits connected to Frida Kahlo. Hyperallergic reports that Defendamos la Colección Gelman filed three lawsuits on June 29 and July 1 against Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL), which issues export permits for protected works. The case concerns the Gelman Santander Collection, renamed after a new management agreement with the Santander Bank Foundation. The collection totals 161 works by figures including Kahlo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and María Izquierdo, and is set to begin a tour in northern Spain this fall at Faro Santander, opening September 8. About 30 works are designated “artistic monuments” and may only travel temporarily with INBAL’s permission.

Now to the United States, where extreme weather tested a newly expanded museum building. Hyperallergic reports the New Museum in Lower Manhattan shut for a full weekend after a “significant” leak during flash floods on July 18. Artnews described staff using buckets to catch water streaming into a gallery that houses WangShui’s work “oppose the serpent” (2024). The museum said in an email that immediate steps were taken and no artwork was harmed, and it announced on Instagram it would close due to “extreme weather in New York City.” The New Museum unveiled its eighty two dollars million OMA-designed expansion in March after two years of closure. The sixty thousand-square-foot addition doubled its exhibition space, and WangShui’s piece appears in the inaugural exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future.

Also in New York, ARTnews reports that two artists are suing the Manhattan gallery The Hole over nearly fifty thousand dollars they say is still unpaid from consignment sales. In a lawsuit filed in Manhattan Supreme Court on July 16, Daniel Um and Nastaran Shahbazi allege they consigned multiple paintings and other works to the gallery for display and sale between 2024 and 2026. They say they received partial payments but are still owed twenty eight thousand nine hundred seventy five dollars to Um and twenty one thousand dollars to Shahbazi. The suit claims that when they sought payment, they were told the gallery was financially strained. It also cites New York law requiring consignment proceeds to remain the artist’s property and not be used for operating expenses, and alleges unjust enrichment, breach of contract, and violations of the Arts and Cultural Affairs Law.

From market disputes to a major loss: Scottish artist Christine Borland has died at 60. ARTnews reports her death was confirmed by Patricia Fleming Gallery in Glasgow, and followed a battle with cancer. Borland was known for research-intensive work engaging forensic science, the history of medicine, and human genetics, and she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997. Her 1994 Tramway exhibition From Life began with the purchase of a female skeleton from a medical educational supplier and traced negotiations with forensic and reconstruction specialists toward a bronze portrait. Born in 1965 in Darvel, Ayrshire, she studied environmental art at the Glasgow School of Art and earned an MA from the University of Ulster in 1988. She helped found Cultural Negotiation of Science at Northumbria University, where she taught, and spoke in 2022 about research built through questions, relationships, and wrong turns.

Staying with political pressure on artists, Hyperallergic reports that Cuban performance artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara arrived in Miami on Saturday, July 18, after serving five years in a maximum-security prison outside Havana. His scheduled release had been followed by more than a week of uncertainty about his whereabouts. Otero Alcántara is a self-taught artist and co-founder of the San Isidro Movement, formed in 2018 in opposition to Decree 349, a law requiring state approval for performances and exhibitions. SIM member Coco Fusco said his team requested humanitarian parole from the US Embassy in Havana, and that after the State Department approved it on July 17, the Cuban Foreign Ministry put him on a flight the next day. Otero Alcántara was arrested in July 2021 and sentenced in June 2022.

Finally, a story about who gets to frame national history at a major public site. Hyperallergic reports that federal officials replaced exhibits about slavery at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia after a legal fight between the city and the Trump administration. On Wednesday, July 15, the administration complied with a court order to restore exhibits it had removed in January, when it moved to ensure displays did not “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” But local activists say the newly installed panels minimize the Founding Fathers’ participation in slavery. Trial attorney Michael Coard, founder of the Avenging The Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), called the panels “sanitized, whitewashed, and censored,” saying they overemphasize Washington’s Fairfax Resolves role and omit mention of the hundreds he enslaved. The Department of the Interior said the panels acknowledge slavery’s evils and tell stories of nine enslaved people Washington kept in the President’s House.

That’s the Daily Art Download for today—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more, and until then: Chinga la migra

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