Museums on the Move, Dissent on Trial

A major leadership move is setting the tone for the United Arab Emirates’ biggest museum project on the horizon. Valerie Hillings, the director of the North Carolina Museum of Art, has been appointed the inaugural director of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi ahead of the museum’s opening later this year. The long-awaited museum, on Saadiyat Island, is set to open on 11 December, according to the Department of Culture and Tourism–Abu Dhabi. Hillings isn’t new to the project: from 2009 to 2018 she served as a curator and associate director of curatorial affairs for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project, overseeing collection strategy and acquisitions, and organising exhibitions like The Creative Act at Manarat Al Saadiyat in 2017.

Staying with museum diplomacy—this time through loans rather than leadership—the Louvre is sending Islamic art treasures to the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC will present From the Louvre: Masterpieces of Islamic Art from 26 September through 18 January 2027, featuring 26 works from the Louvre’s Islamic art collection. The show spans the 7th century to the 19th century and territory from present-day Spain to India, across paintings, ceramics, metalwork, jade, glass objects, and architectural elements. Chase F. Robinson, the museum’s director, says some are among the most iconic in the Louvre’s Islamic collection, and Washington will be the exhibition’s only stop. Co-curator Simon Rettig points to the concept of tuhfa—objects prized for extraordinary craftsmanship and worthy of being gifts.

Also from The Art Newspaper, a troubling case in India is drawing attention after a workers’ protest in Noida. Srishti Gupta, a 28-year-old visual artist, was detained on the evening of 11 April after attending a protest by thousands of factory workers demanding fair wages and improved working conditions. She went live on Instagram from the Mazdoor Bigul account as a plainclothes policeman and other personnel detained her and three companions at a metro station. Her lawyer, Ali Zia Kabir Choudhary, argued the arrest was illegal, citing the lack of an arrest memo or warrant and the absence of women police personnel. Gupta has remained in jail, and artist Shuddhabrata Sengupta has publicly urged Delhi’s art community to take a concerted stand.

Across the border in Ukraine, a Russian drone strike destroyed an 18th-century church that officials describe as a unique monument of national significance. The Holy Vvedenska (Presentation) Church in Beryslav, in the Kherson region, was hit over the weekend of 1–2 August, with photos showing burned remains. Oleksandr Alchiev, head of the Beryslav City Military Administration, wrote on 3 August that the church had been part of the city’s history for almost three centuries. He said it was built in 1725 of oak from the Perevolochna fortress of the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, without a single nail, and transported along the Dnipro to Beryslav in 1784. The heritage group Skeiron has appealed for images to create a 3D digital version.

Shifting to repatriation in the Pacific, the Australian Museum has returned 18 ancestral remains to the people of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. Reported following a July 27 announcement by Chile’s National Cultural Heritage Service, the return includes 17 skulls and one sample of hair, known locally as Ivi Tupuna. The remains were in the museum’s collection since the late 19th century, removed from Rapa Nui by an 1882 German naval expedition and acquired by the Australian Museum in 1883. A ceremony took place at Arturo Merino Benitez International Airport in Santiago, Chile, with Chilean undersecretary of cultural heritage Emilio De la Cerda and representatives including the Rapa Nui Council of Elders and CODEIPA. Council president Carlos Edmuns Paoa called it a step toward repairing dispossession.

From a packed set of art-world headlines, one thread is how museums and collectors are adapting to pressure. As budgets tighten, museums are increasingly joining forces to buy expensive artworks they couldn’t afford alone, splitting costs and rotating works between venues, while navigating complex agreements around conservation, display schedules, insurance, and governance. Another development comes from a UK-focused tech report: QuantumSpace, a New York technology company, says it uses AI-powered provenance and authentication tools built on knowledge graphs that connect provenance records, conservation reports, scientific analysis, and visual data into a searchable network. The company says its platform identified previously undocumented restoration work on a painting attributed to Caravaggio, arguing the tech complements connoisseurship by strengthening evidence used in attribution decisions and high-value transactions.

Over to Scotland, advocates, politicians, and artists are campaigning against the sale of Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts building and archive. The CCA permanently closed in January due to financial troubles, and its Sauchiehall Street headquarters had previously housed the Third Eye Centre, founded in 1974 by Scottish playwright Tom McGrath. The Third Eye Centre welcomed figures including Whoopi Goldberg and Allen Ginsberg, and artists like Steven Campbell and Ken Currie; the CCA later hosted programming including Janine Antoni’s first solo show there. The archives—papers, films, photographs, brochures, and publications—were listed as an asset by MB (Middleton Barton) Valuation, with offers welcomed until August 14. Creative Scotland, which owns the building, says it will work with Glasgow Life and the Ballast Trust to keep the archives complete and accessible.

Back in the United States, the Wyoming Association of Professional Archaeologists filed a complaint on July 24 in US District Court for the District of Wyoming against Douglas J. Burgum, the US Secretary of the Interior, and the Bureau of Land Management. The suit challenges the Interior Department’s NAGPRA regulatory scheme developed “between 2010 and 2024,” including updates issued in January 2024 designed to speed repatriation, close loopholes, strengthen tribal authority, and set a five-year window for institutions to inventory and prepare ancestors and related funerary objects for return. WAPA argues the rules exceed the 1990 statute and interfere with research access and curation. It seeks to block six pending transfers, disputing BLM claims that entire collections from several sites are “associated funerary objects” subject to repatriation.

Another report out of Chicago focuses on a faculty dispute at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. With less than three weeks until the start of the fall semester, over 400 members of SAIC’s community have renewed calls for the reinstatement of Savneet Talwar, chair and tenured professor of the graduate art therapy and counseling program. Talwar was put on leave last spring after an assignment included a hypothetical case study that mentioned violence against Palestinian civilians. The administration informed her in April that a student had accused her of discrimination, prompting an ongoing investigation. A petition released on July 20 by SAIC performance alumni Mary Zerkel and Michael Thomas, and co-signed by artist and alum Dread Scott, argues she should not be suspended or investigated for mentioning Palestinians in the case study.

And finally, a gut-punch of a story from South Texas: drawings and messages made by children detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized 91 pages in February, including a letter spelling “AYUDA POR FAVOR” and another that reads, in translation, “I am nine years old. Can you help me get out of this jail? We are children, not criminals.” Almost six months later, ICE released scans of nine of those pages to podcast host Allison Gill after she filed a lawsuit in March. The report centers the children’s words as a direct cry for help and documents the path from detention, to seizure, to the partial release of scans through litigation.

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