Museum Shakeups, Auction Fever, and Digital Deluges

A tough staffing story to start: On 5 August, the San Diego Museum of Art laid off 11 employees, The Art Newspaper reports. The layoffs included at least one museum guard, two registrars, two preparators, an exhibition manager, a development director, and a member of the membership staff. A source with knowledge of the situation told The Art Newspaper—on condition of anonymity—that at least two of the laid-off employees had worked at the museum for more than 14 years. In a statement, SDMA chief operating officer Kari Kovach said the board of trustees made the decision after cost-saving steps, citing an ongoing funding downturn from federal grants, overall budget reductions, increased operational costs, and an organisational restructure aimed at long-term sustainability.

Staying in New York City, a nearly decade-long legal battle over one of Soho’s strangest little sanctuaries may be nearing an inflection point. Gothamist and The New York Times report that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration is expected to step back from plans to raze Elizabeth Street Garden for an affordable housing development. The one-acre garden is city-owned but operated by a non-profit led by Joseph Reiver, and it’s open to the public nearly every day of the year with programming like yoga classes, outdoor films, and art contests. The garden’s supporters include Patti Smith, Martin Scorsese, and Robert De Niro. A mayoral spokesperson, Matt Rauschenbach, told The Art Newspaper the city is working toward a resolution of a lawsuit tied to the site.

The backstory on Elizabeth Street Garden is as layered as the politics around it. Allan Reiver, a gallerist and Joseph Reiver’s father, started the garden in the early 1990s after leasing an abandoned city lot to store statues, eventually allowing public visits. In 2012, the city transferred the lot to the New York City Housing Authority, which announced plans to build affordable housing there. The garden was slated to be razed for Haven Green, a senior housing project with 123 units plus ground-floor retail and offices for Habitat for Humanity, alongside developer Pennrose and the non-profit RiseBoro. Under Eric Adams, the city first backed development, later reversed, and designated the garden as parkland—prompting the project’s developers to sue.

Now to the auction world, where another heavyweight trove is headed to the block. Sotheby’s has secured the collection of the late Argentine collectors Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier and Carlos Pedro Blaquier—Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works said to be worth around four hundred fifty dollars million, according to Artnet News. The group includes paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier died in 2020, and Carlos Pedro Blaquier died three years later. A Van Gogh, Châtaignier en fleurs roses et blanches (1890), could bring one hundred fifty dollars million to two hundred dollars million, one adviser said. A Cézanne from the Harlequin series is expected to exceed one hundred twenty dollars million, with other works projected above twenty five dollars million.

That Sotheby’s win follows earlier activity—and a customs dispute that appears to have cleared. Artnet News reports Christie’s privately sold the family’s Van Gogh Zouave (1888) for roughly one hundred ninety dollars million, and offered two Paul Signac paintings from the collection last November. Christie’s also won the consignment of the family’s silver collection, estimated at fifteen dollars million to twenty dollars million, slated for auction in London later this year. In 2023, Argentine customs officials fined the Blaquier family over exporting about a dozen paintings to Luxembourg, including works by Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, and Cézanne. The matter was resolved last month when authorities waived the proposed penalty, clearing the way for several of those works to appear in the Sotheby’s sale.

From the market to mass browsing: an online search engine called The Last Museum is now serving up images of some 6.3 million artworks from museum collections worldwide, Colossal reports. The site says it draws from three thousand six hundred seventy nine museums and includes works dating from three thousand BCE to the present, with examples from institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Rijksmuseum. Users can search by “theme, style, subject, vibes, or any description you can imagine,” with suggested prompts like “propaganda poster” or “surrealist dreams.” The “About” page says the website is free, not affiliated with museums or galleries, and doesn’t own the images, and that each image links back to its original source.

The Last Museum also stakes out a particular approach to copyright and access. Colossal reports that many of the works are in the public domain, and that when copyright is attached, images are available under fair use at low resolution for browsing online, not reproducing, and shared strictly for educational and non-commercial purposes. The site is reachable only via an encrypted Proton e-mail address and invites contact if someone believes there are copyright issues. At the top of its “About” page is an image of Thomas Cole’s 1842 painting The Voyage of Life: Youth, sourced from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Whatever people make of its anonymity, the tool is positioning itself as a giant cross-collection portal built around how people actually search.

A very different kind of collecting story is stirring controversy in the UK. The Guardian reports that a “stunning” British collection of 318 Jurassic fossils has been sold to the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi, and some have described the sale as a loss to the nation. The fossils were collected by UK fossil hunter Chris Moore on the Jurassic Coast, a UNESCO world heritage site in southwest England, and include fossilized ichthyosaurs, fish, and crustaceans—some of which could be new species. The collection was first offered to the Natural History Museum in London and to Amgueddfa Cymru for what was said to have been an eight-figure sum, but both declined due to lack of funds, following local fossil-collecting codes.

That debate sits inside a much bigger fossil economy. The Guardian notes that prices for pristine specimens have soared, citing a T. rex skeleton sold to the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi for thirty two dollars million in 2020 and another T. rex that fetched fifty dollars million at Sotheby’s this year. In the UK, fossils are not property of the state, unlike places such as Mongolia and Brazil, and that fuels conflicting views. Erin Maxwell, at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, told the Guardian that fossils are part of a region’s natural or cultural heritage, while also noting the loss is somewhat offset by the fact the fossils went to a museum rather than a wealthy individual.

Across the Gulf, Sharjah is planning a new institution focused on living skills and contemporary practice. The National reports that the Irthi Museum will open in Sharjah’s Creative Quarter sometime in 2029 and is described as the region’s first contemporary crafts museum. Announced by the Irthi Contemporary Crafts Council, the museum will house a permanent collection of contemporary crafts from across the Gulf and aims to preserve and document traditional skills—like weaving, woodworking, and glassmaking—while supporting research and the development of new craft practices. Reem BinKaram, director-general of the council, told The National the museum would be “a living bridge between heritage techniques and contemporary expressions.”

The Irthi Contemporary Crafts Council itself was established in 2016 by Sheikha Jawaher bint Mohammed Al Qasimi, and by 2019—after Sharjah was named a UNESCO Creative City of Crafts and Folk Art—it was providing vocational training for Emirati craftswomen through its Bidwa Social Development Program, The National reports. Participants practice local art forms including safeefah (palm-frond weaving), faroukha (a hand-woven tassel), and talli embroidery, and collaborate with international designers such as Murano. The Creative Quarter is under construction by Taller de Arquitectura – Mauricio Rocha with Daniel Rossello, near the American University of Sharjah, with other planned institutions including Qasimi Archives and Sharjah Fashion Lab.

Now to Washington, D.C., where a former National Gallery of Art executive has accused the institution of “soft censorship.” A symposium titled “Color Lines Across the United States and Mexico” had been scheduled for May 2025 at the museum’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), but later the virtual option was canceled, the program disappeared from the museum website, and the event was relocated to Dumbarton Oaks, a smaller research center in Georgetown affiliated with Harvard University. In an essay in the journal October, Steven Nelson, former dean of CASVA, tied the changes to a meeting between museum leadership and representatives of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), as reported via the New York Times.

Nelson wrote that the symposium was planned in conjunction with the National Gallery’s exhibition on Elizabeth Catlett, the Black sculptor and printmaker who moved from the US to Mexico in 1946. He said the DOGE meeting—between representatives and director Kaywin Feldman and Secretary and General Counsel Luis Baquedano—happened weeks before the symposium, and he argued leadership feared the event would “provoke the administration.” The symposium moved from a 400-seat National Gallery auditorium to an 80-seat Dumbarton Oaks room, was no longer advertised, and became in-person only. The National Gallery had also shuttered its Office of Belonging and Inclusion in January 2025 to comply with an executive order.

Across to San Francisco, a long-running photography organization is shutting down. Hyperallergic reports SF Camerawork will close after 52 years, announcing the decision on Instagram. Its last day of operations is set for August 16, which coincides with the closing of John Chiara’s solo show Bay Panel at its Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture gallery. In the announcement, the nonprofit cited “rising operating costs, declining public funding, and a changing philanthropic landscape.” Co-founder Hal Fischer told Hyperallergic that neither he nor anyone he knew “got advance warning that this was in the wind.” For a city’s art ecosystem, closures like this don’t just remove a venue—they sever networks built over decades.

In Cape Town, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa has named its next artistic director. Hyperallergic reports Elvira Dyangani Ose has been appointed artistic director effective October 1, following a 15-month search. The appointment comes after the sudden and untimely loss of the museum’s late Executive Director and Chief Curator of six years, Koyo Kouoh, who died in May 2025. Dyangani Ose was among the five women jurors that Kouoh—who had been named chief curator of the 61st Venice Biennale before her death—appointed for the Golden Lion awards. Leadership transitions at a high-profile institution like Zeitz MOCAA are closely watched, and this one arrives in a moment of both grief and recalibration.

Back to Los Angeles, and a review that starts with a physical jolt. At the Hammer Museum, Hyperallergic describes entering a foyer with rumbling overhead track lights and wondering if it was an earthquake, before wall text clarified it was Raven Chacon’s sound piece Study for Vertical Earth (2026), which translocated underground audio recordings to animate the gallery space. The review discusses Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials, noting that the unsettling beginning creates immersion in a specific place, distinct from the show’s many standalone works of sculpture and painting. Signage, the reviewer writes, reminds visitors of not-always-visible spirits inhabiting the world around us—a key principle the exhibition builds on.

That’s today’s download. Links to every story are in the show notes—meet me back here tomorrow for more art world turbulence and triumphs. Chinga la migra

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