Repatriation Reckonings and High-Stakes Art Heists

A new exhibition in Chicago asks a wrenching counterfactual: what if Emmett Till had lived. “If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground,” at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, draws from the museum’s collection and features work by more than 110 artists, including Dawoud Bey, Christian Boltanski, Todd Hido, Sally Mann, and Carrie Mae Weems. Chief curator Karen Irvine says the show “shifts away from the violence that ended his life to the possibilities that were taken from him.” Curator Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, a Harvard cultural and art historian, built a narrative arc with Till’s cousin Wheeler Parker Jr., imagining an unlived life—from baseball to prom—using uncaptioned images. The exhibition caps a year of programming for MoCP’s 50th anniversary.

A brazen theft hit the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer, near Nice, in south-east France. Two Pierre-Auguste Renoir paintings are reportedly missing: Madame Colonna Romano (1910) and Jeune femme au puits (Young woman at the well, 1886). The mayor’s office put the estimated value of the stolen art at €9m. Mayor Bryan Masson said the museum’s alarm was triggered at 5.48am and municipal police arrived five minutes later, with the perpetrators “actively sought.” Reports say thieves took four paintings but dropped two as they fled—Portrait of Madame Stephen Pichon (1895) and Coco Lisant (1905). France’s culture minister Catherine Pégard said the works were part of the Musée d’Orsay collection, on loan since 1995.

Across central Europe, Hungary’s new government has officially ended construction work on the Liget project in Budapest’s City Park, a years-long cultural development. The centerpiece that won’t happen there is the planned New National Gallery, designed by Japan’s SANAA architects—a fifty thousand-square-meter museum whose construction had effectively stalled since 2019 amid opposition. A decree published 18 June brought remaining work to an end, and minister of transport and public works Dávid Vitézy said the gallery “will not be constructed” in the park; remaining sites will be reinstated as public parkland. The National Gallery has been in Buda Castle since 1975, but Vitézy argues the castle isn’t a viable long-term solution. No alternative location has been decided.

Over in England, the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford has agreed to return 39 pieces of human remains—primarily skulls—to the Indigenous Naga people of the Indian subcontinent, with the transfer to Nagaland expected by the end of the year. Director Laura Van Broekhoven described the handover, scheduled for November, as the museum’s largest repatriation of human remains and called it a “Naga-wide movement of healing and unification.” The claim came in February from the Forum for Naga Reconciliation, representing 39 Naga organisations, seeking 40 ancestral remains; Oxford University Council agreed in July to return 39, declining one without clear Naga provenance. The museum removed human remains from display in 2020 and has collaborated with Naga partners, including tribal Hohos, elders, churches, and communities.

In Washington, the Smithsonian Institution says Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III will retire after seven years in the top role. Bunch, 73, is the first African American and the first historian to serve as secretary, and he will have spent 38 years at the Smithsonian in total. He began there in 1978 at the National Air and Space Museum, later worked at the National Museum of American History, led the Chicago Historical Society for four years, then returned in 2005 to lead the National Museum of African American History and Culture as its founding director. He became secretary in 2019. Franklin D. Raines, chair of the board of regents, said an acting secretary will be named and a national search launched. Bunch said his retirement is not due to political clashes.

Still in the United States, David Rubenstein has purchased Joel Shapiro’s Blue (2019) just days after the National Park Service deinstalled the 24-foot-tall sculpture from the Kennedy Center’s REACH campus on September 2. Rubenstein, a billionaire philanthropist and former Kennedy Center board chairman, reportedly bought the work for two dollars million and plans to move it to the sculpture garden at the National Gallery of Art, according to the New York Times. Rubenstein had pledged fifty dollars million to the REACH expansion, which opened in 2019—when Shapiro, who died in 2025, gifted Blue as an inaugural landmark visible from major Washington, DC, routes. Rubenstein was among Biden appointees ousted from the Kennedy Center board by President Donald Trump in February 2025, after Trump replaced the board and made himself chairman.

Switching to the market circuit in New York, Philippe Parreno’s Iceman in Reality Park (1995–2023) will make its New York debut at Independent 20th Century, presented by Esther Schipper at the Breuer building. The work is designed to melt: each day of the fair, a new ice sculpture will arrive, realized in white or clear ice at a size similar to a version shown at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul in 2024. Independent founder Elizabeth Dee said the fair embraced the challenge of showing a work “that’s melting,” and positioned it on the fourth floor, where a large Breuer window will let natural light hit the sculpture over four days. Parreno first made the piece for Jan Hoet’s 1995 outdoor exhibition “Ripple Across the Water” in Tokyo’s Aoyama neighborhood.

ARTnews also brings difficult news: Lucien Smith has died at 37. The news was confirmed to ARTnews by dealer Bill Powers; no cause or place of death has been released. Born in 1989, Smith earned his BFA at Cooper Union in 2011, and was shown early by Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn at Salon 94 and by Powers at Half Gallery, where his first solo show, “Good Vibrations,” opened in 2012. Smith became known for his “Rain” paintings, made by spraying canvases with a fire extinguisher, and his auction record stands at three hundred eighty nine thousand dollars for a 2011 work sold at Phillips New York in 2013. Later, he founded the nonprofit Serving the People in 2015 and had a museum solo show at the Parrish Museum in 2020.

Staying with ARTnews, Portland’s Converge 45 triennial gets a roundup framed around the latest edition, “Here, To you, Now,” overseen by New York–based independent curator Lumi Tan. The title draws on Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1985 novel Always Coming Home and Tan’s idea—outlined in an accompanying broadsheet—of language that is “here, to you, now.” Converge 45, founded in 2016 by Portland dealer Elizabeth Leach, spans 16 sites around the city, with 28 artists, more than half Portland-based, and some connected to studios supporting artists with intellectual disabilities. The article notes local pressures—skyrocketing rents and limited arts funding—and cites Tan’s informal survey reflecting a refrain that “The city needs a comeback.” Shows run to various dates, some into 2027.

Finally, the auction spotlight: eight paintings from the collection of record producer Clive Davis, who died this past June, will head to Christie’s during the November sales in New York, with a combined value of more than thirty five dollars million. The group includes a circa 1986 Andy Warhol painting of Aretha Franklin, a 2009 landscape by David Hockney, and a 1992 abstraction by Joan Mitchell, along with works by Frank Stella, George Condo, and Robert Motherwell. Christie’s has not released individual estimates. Sara Friedlander, Christie’s chairman of postwar and contemporary art, said Davis recognized talent “in its most nascent phase.” Christie’s release also quoted Davis saying he was “extraordinarily passionate about art,” spending hours with auction catalogs and guided by what moved him.

That’s today’s download—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for another brisk lap around the art world. Chinga la migra

Today's Stories