Restitution Returns, Museums Face the Axe

A major act of repatriation is underway as the Australian Museum in Sydney has returned the remains of Rapa Nui ancestors to Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. The Art Newspaper reports the museum purchased 17 skulls and one sample of human hair in 1883, after a German naval expedition led by Captain Wilhelm Geiseler of the SMS Hyäne removed the remains and objects from the island in 1882. Carlos Edmunds Paoa, president of the Council of the Elders of Rapa Nui, said, “For us, they are our ancestors,” adding that each bone will return to its original place, the ahu—ceremonial platforms tied to moai. The remains arrived in Santiago on 17 July, with a ceremony led by Chilean undersecretary Emilio De la Cerda, before they were flown onward to Rapa Nui.

Staying with museum politics, London’s mayor Sadiq Khan has made a public case for keeping the city’s public museums free to enter. Writing in an op-ed for LBC, and reported by The Art Newspaper, Khan argued that “art and culture are for everyone—no matter where they’re from, or how much money they earn,” and called free museums and galleries “a fundamental part of London life.” He pointed out that until 2001 many institutions charged admission, and said visits to formerly pay-to-enter museums increased by about 151% in the decade after free entry was introduced. Khan also wrote that free admission generates about £1 billion every year in overseas tourism revenue, calling the British model unique compared with cities like Paris, Rome, and New York. His intervention comes amid debate sparked by the UK government “explor[ing] options” around charging overseas visitors.

In Abu Dhabi, a major leadership announcement signals the Guggenheim’s next chapter. Valerie Hillings has been named the inaugural director of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, shortly after the museum confirmed an opening date for this coming December. Hillings returns to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation after leading the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh for nearly eight years. Before that, she worked for the Guggenheim from 2004 to 2018 and served as associate director of curatorial affairs for the Abu Dhabi project from 2009 to 2018. The museum noted that the growing collection and forthcoming exhibitions center art and movements from 1960 onward that “reflect and advance Abu Dhabi’s role as a catalyst for creative production and innovation in the arts.” Her appointment also arrives amid long-running controversy over migrant labor conditions tied to construction on Saadiyat Island.

In Toronto, a review traces an artist’s return and a consistent set of ideas. Nearly 30 years after her first North American solo exhibition at Oakville Galleries, Kimsooja is back in the city with Kimsooja: Dimensions of a Needle at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto. The survey focuses on work from the past 20 years and highlights her video performance, architectural installation, and ceramics, alongside her sustained attention to the needle as a metaphor for folding and unfolding, memory and displacement. The review notes how her earlier show filled a gallery with colorful, used Korean bedcovers hung from clotheslines, creating pathways animated by overhead fans—an installation that made visible the bedcovers’ intimate relationship with women’s lives and labor. At MOCA, the presentation begins on the main floor with “To Breathe—Mokum” (2025–26), a new work that intentionally recalls that clothesline installation.

An Art in America profile digs into how documents of conquest can become raw material for art. Terran Last Gun (Piikani), who grew up on Montana’s Blackfeet Indian Reservation, works with antique accounting ledgers—many from Montana—that record the imposition of a settler colonial grid over the Great Plains and its micro-histories. In his Santa Fe studio, he uses ink and colored pencils to apply crisp geometric forms to pages excised from the tomes, sometimes building fields that are Ellsworth Kelly–flat and other times overtaking tidy ledger cells with thousands of strokes. The article describes how the US-Canada border—what Blackfoot people once called the Medicine Line—eventually divided ancestral rangelands, turning movement through the same territory into “a lot of showing your papers,” as Last Gun said he has heard from friends. He incorporates motifs tied to Blackfoot lodges and war shirts, stylizing them to avoid revealing sacred contexts.

In Washington, a funding proposal points toward leaner years for a sprawling cultural network. A House subcommittee appropriations bill approved in June outlines the President’s budget for Fiscal Year 2027, proposing nine hundred sixty one dollars million in federal funds for the Smithsonian—about 11% below FY26’s one dollars billion budget. The proposal breaks out eight hundred forty one dollars million for salaries and expenses, and one hundred twenty dollars million for facilities maintenance and capital projects, the same as the year before. It also projects a 6% reduction in full-time staff, from an estimated four thousand forty seven employees to three thousand eight hundred four. The report says the pared resources align with the Trump administration’s repeated accusations that the Smithsonian pushes a so-called “woke” agenda across its 21 museums and the national zoo. Mark B. Harkins, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, emphasized that the figures are far from final at this stage.

In western Turkey, archaeologists have uncovered a monumental sculpture in an unexpected spot. A seven-foot-tall marble statue dating to between 470 and 450 BCE has emerged from beneath what used to be a Roman roadway in the ancient city of Sardis, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Manisa Province’s Salihli district. Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, posted that it is among the rare surviving examples of monumental marble statuary from the period, and officials said it will go on view at Turkey’s Manisa Museum after conservation. Found in two large parts and missing its feet and some fragments, the statue was repurposed in the Roman period and placed under paving material, which helped preserve facial features and other details. Experts describe it as stylistically hybrid and note its distinctive striped garment, reflecting a local Lydian tradition, and a possible quince in its right hand.

In Glasgow, an archive has become the center of a fierce public debate after the Centre for Contemporary Arts was deemed insolvent. Campaigners, politicians, and arts figures are calling on the Scottish government to intervene over the possible sale of the CCA archive, which includes material from the CCA’s predecessor, the Third Eye Centre. The collection holds more than 50 years of cultural activity in Glasgow, including exhibition records, photographs, posters, films, flyers, and other ephemera. The organization entered liquidation in January, losing all its staff, and Creative Scotland later announced plans to sell the building. Creative Scotland, which owns the building, said it is working with Glasgow Life and the Ballast Trust to preserve the collection and keep it publicly accessible in Glasgow. Amanda Catto, a former portfolio manager at Creative Scotland, called the archive “part of Scotland’s cultural memory,” warning that breaking it up or selling it would be “an irreversible loss.”

A sharp culture-and-tech flashpoint lands this week with a claim about what happened to books used for AI training. A column titled “AI Is the New Book Burning” centers on author and bibliophile Ed Simon’s argument that Anthropic scanned and then shredded out-of-print books in order to train large language models. The piece frames that action as part of a “long, tyrannical tradition of book burning,” and urges readers to support local libraries. It also rounds up other culture news in the same breath: three of Pittsburgh’s pickleball courts transformed into vivid artworks as part of Sharmistha Ray’s “Geometry of Play,” a tribute to Francisco Correa Cordero, the founder of the downtown New York gallery Lubov, who died at age 37, and additional items including unionization efforts by staff at the Eric Carle Museum. The throughline is a warning about cultural loss—whether through destruction, neglect, or repackaging.

And in Spain, police have closed the loop on a long-missing piece of religious art. Spanish National Police and the Mossos d’Esquadra announced they recovered a 16th-century carved wooden relief stolen 16 years ago from the Monastery of Santa Clara de Fitero in Navarre. According to the National Police, it passed through multiple buyers before being located at an auction house in Barcelona, where it was recovered before it could be sold again. El País described it as a gilded and polychromed wooden carving, linked to the school of Renaissance-era artist Juan de Anchieta, depicting Saint Bonaventure, the medieval Italian theologian and Franciscan leader. The recovery followed a months-long investigation called Operation Salvatierra; police seized the work from the auction house in April after tracing it through several buyers. The relief was returned through the Archdiocese of Pamplona and Tudela to a church in Fitero, considered its rightful owner.

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

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