Markets Ablaze, Museums Under Fire

Roy Lichtenstein’s market has been heating up, and Artnet says the Whitney Museum of American Art is finally ready to open its long-delayed Lichtenstein show to the public on October 11. The exhibition, “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” is organized by Whitney curator Meg Onli and artist Alex Da Corte and will bring together about 130 works across five decades. Artnet also notes a striking loan list, including billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, identified in the catalog as the owner of the 1964 painting Ohhh . . . Alright . . ., which last appeared at auction in 2010, selling for forty two dollars million at Christie’s. Other lenders include Ronnie F. Heyman, Peter M. Brant, and Martin Margulies.

Staying in the United States, federal cultural politics just got a new, very literal sign. The report says President Donald Trump ordered signage outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History warning the public about what the executive order calls “inaccurate information” in exhibits. The directive follows intensifying Republican scrutiny and a recent 162-page report accusing the museum’s director, Anthea M. Hartig, of replacing “historical education” with “extreme political activism.” The order says the signs will tell visitors the exhibits “should be renovated” to align with the report and will direct visitors to locations the administration views as more accurate, though it doesn’t specify which. Hartig has defended the museum’s work as “rigorous” and “fact-based,” aimed at presenting evidence, competing perspectives, and enduring debates.

Across the Pacific coast art world, a big philanthropy-and-real-estate shift is underway in San Francisco. Vanderbilt University announced that Nvidia co-founder Jensen (Jen-Hsun) Huang and his wife, Lori Huang, gifted seventy five dollars million to establish the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design. The new arts and design campus will replace the nearly 120-year-old California College of the Arts, San Francisco’s last remaining private art school, which Vanderbilt purchased amid financial struggles tied to declining enrollment and a growing budget deficit. The Huangs had previously made a twenty two dollars million matching gift to CCA in February 2025, but CCA later announced it would cease operating after the 2026–2027 academic year, with the Potrero Hill campus subsumed by Vanderbilt.

In Austin, Sable Elyse Smith is getting a major spotlight for work that critiques the United States carceral system through both image and structure. Clockwork at the Contemporary Austin—presented as the culmination of her winning the 2026 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize—includes paintings adapting prison coloring books for visiting children, plus large-scale sculptures and installations. The review describes how Smith co-opts Minimalism’s repetition and seriality as a metaphor for structural injustice, and how she transforms the coloring-book imagery to critique power and belonging. Two videos are paired: LAUGH TRACK, OR WHO’S THAT PEEKING IN MY WINDOW (2021), built from manipulated police reality TV footage, and skin suit (2025), which juxtaposes how law enforcement treats young White men versus a young Black man held against his will for marijuana possession.

Over in San Francisco, a survey exhibition argues that political art isn’t a phase—it’s a lifetime practice. Emory Douglas: In Our Lifetime at the African American Art and Culture Complex traces decades of work by Douglas, now 83, who learned commercial printing while serving a 15-month sentence in a juvenile correctional facility at age 13 and later became minister of culture for the Black Panther Party. The show spans paintings, prints, and political cartoons, and it opens with Douglas’s “Political Artist Manifesto,” framed as 12 commandments for effective political art. Highlights include Black Panther-era posters and cartoons, like “38th Puppet of the United States” (1974) and “Cointelpro” (1978), along with later “remixes” in digital work that update older motifs to address present-day issues and global solidarity.

Crossing the Atlantic, a major heritage decision is unfolding in Crimea. Tauric Chersonese—a 5th century BC Greek city in Russian-occupied Crimea—has been added to Unesco’s World Heritage in Danger list, a decision made on 22 July during the 48th Session of the World Heritage Committee in Busan, South Korea. The Ancient City of Tauric Chersonese and its Chora was originally inscribed as a Ukrainian site in 2013, shortly before Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in March 2014. Ukraine’s culture minister, Tetyana Berezhna, said the decision confirms threats tied to occupation, including illegal excavations, construction, destruction of archaeological context, and removal of cultural values. Russia’s permanent delegate to Unesco, Rinat Alyautdinov, called the move politicized and said Russia does not recognize it.

From heritage to contemporary mega-events, the Venice Biennale is facing a funding rupture tied directly to Russia’s participation. The European Union is suspending a €2 million grant after a legal review by the European Education and Culture Executive Agency concluded EU taxpayers’ money should support initiatives aligned with democratic values, which it said Russia does not uphold. During the opening of the 2026 Venice Film Festival, Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco criticized the decision, saying the EU was leaving for reasons “entirely political, certainly not legal.” The Biennale has said it cannot exclude Russia, arguing that doing so would be censorship, a stance that has fueled debate given the institution’s statements in 2022 after Russia’s representatives withdrew in protest of the war. Protests also greeted the Biennale’s opening, including activists outside the Russian pavilion.

Staying with programming but shifting to Los Angeles, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has unveiled an inaugural film lineup designed to run like an open-door gallery. The museum—conceived by George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson—opens September 22, and the film program was announced at San Diego Comic Con. Senior curator and head of film programs Ryan Linkof outlined two theaters with films screened “on a non-stop basis throughout the day.” The Robert Flaherty Theater will include the newly commissioned Seeing is Believing: The Story of Narrative Art, episodes of the 2024 TV series The Power of Film, and documentaries connected to artists shown at the museum, including Norman Rockwell, Jim Lee, Charles Schulz, Maurice Sendak, Diego Rivera, J.C. Leyendecker, and Weegee.

The second Lucas Museum theater is built around motion, rhythm, and experiment, and its lineup goes hard in that direction. Named the Slavko Vorkapich Theater, it’s dedicated to “the emotion of motion” and will screen avant-garde films by artists including Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Mary Ellen Bute, and Jordan Belson. It will also feature clips of Vorkapich’s work on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, silent films associated with Georges Méliès, musical interludes by Busby Berkeley, Looney Tunes cartoons, early animations by Winsor McCay, and sound animations by Walt Disney Studios and Fleischer Studios. The schedule also includes an episode of Star Wars: Visions and student films by George Lucas dating from 1965 to 1969.

Now a major identity reveal from inside feminist art history: Joyce Kozloff has disclosed she was a founding Guerrilla Girl, using the alias Liubov Popova. She made the announcement in an interview published July 22 in Art Journal Open with curators Helena Reckett and Maura Reilly. Kozloff described how the group formed in 1984 in response to MoMA’s “International Survey of Painting and Sculpture,” where fewer than 10 percent of the 169 artists were women. She recalled the moment a new member misunderstood “Guerrilla Girls,” brought a gorilla mask, and “voila!”—the public-facing look was set, with masks and aliases drawn from dead women artists. Kozloff also said anonymity kept focus on issues, not individuals.

Kozloff also tied her Guerrilla Girls work to one of the collective’s most famous posters: The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist (1988), which she said she helped create. In the interview, she traced the idea back to the 1985–86 Kohler Arts/Industry Residency in Wisconsin, where she shared a house with three male artists—married college ceramics professors—each accompanied by an undergrad woman student who, Kozloff said, did housework and served as an unpaid studio assistant at the factory. Kozloff drafted “The Disadvantages of Being a Woman Artist,” then the group flipped it into “Advantages.” She told Ocula she chose to come forward now after realizing she wanted to tell the story “my way,” and said she sought and received permission from others before unmasking.

Finally, Spain is preparing to open a new art center with a lineup built to draw both crowds and scrutiny. The Banco Santander Foundation set September 8 as the opening date for Faro Santander, housed in the bank’s former one hundred eight thousand-square-foot headquarters renovated by Pritzker Prize–winning architect David Chipperfield. The inaugural exhibitions include “Modern Mexico in the Gelman Santander Collection,” curated by Marisol Argüelles, featuring works by artists including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo. The foundation says the show will run until January 10, 2027, and will be accompanied by programs like film screenings, music, talks, and guided tours, with special focus on Día de Muertos, in collaboration with Fundación Casa de México and the Cultural Institute of México in Spain.

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

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