Museum Power Plays, Union Strikes, and Sacred Heists

The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted a groundbreaking ceremony Tuesday, September 15, for its Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art, scheduled to open in 2030. The Art Newspaper reports the five-storey, one hundred twenty six thousand-square-foot wing is designed by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo—the first woman to create a wing for the museum in its 156-year history. The Met says it has already raised six hundred seventy dollarsm to fund construction and operations, and the wing is named for Oscar Tang, a longtime Met trustee, and his wife Agnes Hsu-Tang, an archaeologist and art historian. The couple donated one hundred twenty five dollarsm, the largest cash gift in the museum’s history. Max Hollein called the start of construction “the next grand chapter” for the institution.

Hyperallergic captures another layer of the Met’s ceremony: Frida Escobedo framing the groundbreaking as “la primera piedra,” or “the first stone,” during remarks at the European Sculpture Court alongside Met Director Max Hollein and elected officials. The piece notes Escobedo’s reflection on the four piles of uncarved stone blocks atop the columns on the Met’s Fifth Avenue facade—left over from Richard Morris Hunt’s 1894 expansion plan for statues that were never made. Escobedo described the idea of institutions, like architecture, as never entirely finished—always changing and accumulating meaning. Hyperallergic also reports that the Tang Wing will replace the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing at the southwest corner of the Met, add sixty nine thousand five hundred square feet of exhibition space, expand the museum’s 20th- and 21st-century galleries by nearly 50%, improve accessibility, and reduce energy consumption, with a 2030 opening planned.

At the Toronto International Film Festival, In the Heart of the South is taking a sharp look at the art world’s language and incentives. The Art Newspaper describes the film—co-written and directed by Nyla Innuksuk—as a satire of what it calls the publicly and philanthropically funded arts world’s “transactional wokeness.” The story follows Yura, played by Anna Lambe, an award-winning Inuk artist making a leap toward feature films while her big site-specific VR work leads gallerygoers through a historic residential school. Yura is courted by production companies and takes meetings, including with Canada’s national film board, but her relationship to trauma-as-narrative grows complicated when Sesi, played by Zorga Qaunaq, reappears and challenges Yura’s claims to the past. The film had its world premiere on 10 September and plays again on 18 September.

Labor tension is building at three New York City cultural institutions. ARTnews reports that unionized staff at the Brooklyn Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art voted in favor of strike action if they don’t receive satisfactory contract offers, according to Local 2110 UAW. The union says members voted overwhelmingly to authorize the elected bargaining committee to call a strike, though no strike deadline has been set and negotiations are ongoing. Derrick Charles, a Whitney membership associate and union chairperson, said, “It’s not that we want to strike,” but that wages are “untenable for making ends meet in New York City.” ARTnews notes Charles has worked at the Whitney since 2018 and earns twenty four dollars an hour, while the 2026 NYC True Cost of Living Measure Annual Report estimates a single New Yorker without children must earn thirty four dollars an hour to meet the city’s cost of living.

Painter Lucy Bull is making a major gallery move as her market remains closely watched. ARTnews reports Bull has joined Hauser & Wirth, which has 16 spaces across three continents, while continuing to be represented by David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles and New York, which has shown her since 2021. The article describes her vibrantly colored abstractions, sometimes resembling fantastical beings in voids, often made using frottage and automatic techniques associated with Surrealism. Some works are monumentally scaled, including a 39-foot-long painting made for the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, which presented an exhibition of her work in 2024. Her auction record was set in 2024 at two dollars million; in 2025, a work sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for one dollars million, more than three times its estimate. Hauser & Wirth will show a new painting by Bull at Art Basel Paris next month, with a Zurich solo show planned for June 2027.

William T. Williams is still treating the studio like a place to begin again. In an ARTnews profile, Williams says, “There’s something to learn every time I go in the studio,” describing a process where he forgets what he did yesterday and enters each painting as if for the first time. The piece is set in his sunlit studio behind his home in Connecticut, where he and his wife, Pat, have split time with New York for the past 15 years—quite different from the New York studio he’s maintained since 1968, where he boarded up windows to control the light. That shift in light, he says, has influenced the work, making the paintings more vertical. The article details his methods: thin layers, carefully managed drying times, paint mixtures in plastic cups, blue painter’s tape and cut-up Post-its to map possibilities, and the cracked surfaces created by leaving gaps between layers. Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, describes a decades-long practice of “asking and answering questions in the space of the work.”

Over in Oakland, Mildred Howard’s first museum survey is mapping more than five decades of work through intimate objects and expansive history. Hyperallergic reports that Poetics of Memory, on view through October 18 at the Oakland Museum of California, spans Howard’s practice from early copy-machine collages to multimedia assemblages and large-scale installations. Visitors enter to large-scale bronze keys and a padlock commemorating Longshoremen's union leader Harry Bridges; a version of that sculpture was installed publicly in San Francisco in 2001. The review notes Howard’s public commissions across the Bay Area, including a giant golden frame in San Francisco’s shipyard and blue glass etched with poetry on the Fillmore Street Bridge. It highlights recurring motifs like shrouds and veils, and points to “Moving Stills” (2026), an installation projecting rediscovered film stills—shot when Howard was 14 on her first trip South to meet extended family—through layers of lace that soften and fragment the images into something like distant memory.

A roundup titled “Barbara Hammer Gets Her Due” gathers several film and culture threads in one place. The piece highlights “Barbara Forever,” described as a Barbara Hammer biopic that functions as both a biography and a conversation the late filmmaker has with herself. It also points to coverage of the 15th edition of the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, including an interview with founder Maori Karmael Holmes reflecting on how the festival has evolved into a hub for experimental, polyphonic storytelling. The roundup includes a critics’ take on a documentary about activist and photographer Misan Harriman that raises concerns about overly aestheticizing the movements he captures, and it spotlights “American Doctor,” a documentary following three humanitarian physicians as they grapple with the horrors of the US-funded genocide in Gaza. The overall picture is of film as record, critique, and community memory—especially when artists and organizers are building their own platforms.

In Spain, a string of thefts has hit churches in Valladolid. According to ARTnews, three works of religious art were stolen from two churches: from the Church of San Pablo, a small Station of the Cross depicting Jesus falling for the second time with a silver relief, and a 17th-century copy of an Ecce Homo by Spanish Renaissance painter Luis de Morales; from the nearby church Vera Cruz, a roughly two-foot-tall polychrome wooden carving of an angel carrying a torch. The thefts happened only days apart, and authorities are investigating whether the same person was responsible. The prior of San Pablo suspects the two works there were taken during an evening Mass on September 10 while parishioners faced the altar. The Archbishopric of Valladolid has asked churches to take “extreme precautions and surveillance” and to maintain updated inventories, preferably with photographs. Europol’s organized crime unit head Jean-Yves Goriou told El País there’s been “a clear and pronounced increase” in museum robberies, with gold objects especially attractive due to high market prices.

At the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, an exhibition is asking viewers to rethink what “America” means when seen from islands and diaspora. Hyperallergic reviews Imagining an Archipelago: Art from Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Their Diasporas, describing an entry grouping that sets the tone: a painting by Cuban-born Zilia Sánchez; Félix González-Torres’s “Untitled (USA Today)” (1990), where red, white, and blue candies are offered for viewers to consume; a 2023 concrete poem by CHamoru scholar and poet Craig Santos Perez spelling out “Archipelagoes resemble constellations”; and Juana Valdés’s photo series “On the Malecón” (2000), documenting a Havana performance with paper boats made from torn pages of a 19th-century novel. The show includes more than 40 contemporary artists and collectives and is curated by Jessamine Batario, who emphasizes “archipelagic thinking”—a way to hold distinct histories together without flattening them into sameness.

That’s it for today’s Daily Art Download—links to every story are waiting for you in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for another hit of art-world reality.

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