Museums & Heritage

British Museum returns Oceanic sculpture to Polynesia—for three years

Admired by Henry Moore and Picasso, A'a has just gone on show at Tahiti's main museum

The Metropolitan Museum’s great hall to be transformed by kaleidoscopic Jacolby Satterwhite video installation

The artist has been commissioned to create a work for the museum’s main entryway that will incorporate 3D scans of more than 100 objects in the Met’s collection

Pro-Putin Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky speaks out again in support of war in Ukraine

The veteran Russian museum chief tells Kremlin newspaper that war is “a means of cultural exchange”

'We need to act fast': experts race to preserve Afghanistan's ancient Buddhist heritage site Mes Aynak from copper mining

Taliban government has backed a new conservation project led by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and Aliph

Arthur Jafa creating permanent work for Glenstone

The US artist best known for his powerful moving image works has “something very special” in store for the Maryland museum, its co-founder revealed on a recent podcast

Important portrait painting missing for more than 60 years is returned to Montana university

The Montana Museum of Art and Culture has been reunited with an important Impressionist portrait

Unesco chief vows to help rebuild Ukraine’s heritage and culture—but $6.9bn investment is needed

Audrey Azoulay met President Zelensky and toured sites in Kyiv, Chernihiv and Odesa during an official visit to the country this week

Strike at New York’s Hispanic Society enters second week as museum pushes back long-planned reopening

Unionised workers at the institution in Upper Manhattan have been on strike since 27 March as negotiations over their first contract have stalled

A series of recent lawsuits could change the way UK museums acquire works for their collections

Disputed attribution claims rarely play out in court, but two recent legal cases could provide valuable lessons for acquisitions teams at cultural institutions across the UK

Seattle Art Museum receives 48 Calder works and $10m from former Microsoft president and his wife

The trove of works from Jon and Kim Shirley includes many mobiles and stabiles, and comes with a commitment to fund ongoing programming on the artist

Brutal demand for change: Steve McQueen's Grenfell Tower film at the Serpentine

Weeks after a fire took the lives of 72 people, the British artist, who was born nearby, shot the ruin of the 24-storey tower from a circling helicopter

Bonhams closes gender pay gap by 39%, but Sotheby’s and Christie’s lag behind

UK’s public institutions continue to provide a greater degree of equity—though this is not even across all pay brackets

Italy to open new mafia museum—complete with smells and sounds

The first site in Palermo is scheduled to open this spring

Italynews

Italy plans high-speed train between Pompeii and Rome to increase tourism to heritage sites

The €35m development will include a new train station adjacent to the Pompeii archaeological site

Antiquities trafficking investigator appointed president of Harvard Law Review—a position once held by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Barack Obama

Apsara Iyer says looting of Indian temples was a "wake-up call" to understanding how cultural heritage and crime intersect

The late conceptual artist Stanley Brouwn would not want you to read this article

The curators of his first US museum survey will not talk about the show, honouring his wishes not to interpret his artwork

Unionsnews

‘You can’t pay rent with prestige’: as contract negotiations drag on, unionised Guggenheim workers rally at exhibition openings

As museum members and supporters waited to enter opening celebrations for Gego and Sarah Sze shows, they were greeted by members of UAW Local 2110

The Metropolitan Museum will return 15 sculptures sold by trafficker Subhash Kapoor to India

The repatriation comes after a report found more than 1,000 works linked to suspected or convicted traffickers in the museum’s collection

Munich museum takes down Picasso portrait amid restitution dispute

The painting, Madame Soler, was previously owned by the prominent collector Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in the 1930s

Questions remain about the fate of Wounded Knee Massacre objects repatriated to Lakota and Sioux nations

After a repatriation ceremony last November, members of Indigenous communities debate what to do with objects long held at the Founders Museum

'A new model for cash-strapped public galleries? How England's Baltic filled its empty halls with Hew Locke's Procession'

To survive this economic crisis, we must build new networks between public and commercial galleries

Hic! Row erupts over loan of Caravaggio’s Bacchus to wine festival

Uffizi's plan to show the painting at Vinitaly has been described as “absurd” and “unacceptable”

MoMA apologises to artist Heather Agyepong, who was ejected from exhibit intended as safe space for Black visitors

New York museum pledges to “protect the experience” of Black visitors after leading British Ghanaian artist is asked to leave Black Power Naps installation following another visitor’s complaint

The Met down 1.7 million visitors compared to pre-pandemic level—the biggest drop of any US art museum

The New York institution, usually the most popular art museum in the US, was overtaken in 2022 by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC

New York’s Guggenheim Museum hires curator of art and technology

Noam Segal is the institution's first LG Electronics Associate Curator, a new position in partnership with the Korean electronics giant

Covid-era booking systems may be putting off visitors to UK museums

Mixed messages and time slotted tickets could be deterring some people

Turmoil at First Republic could jeopardise the bank’s art world sponsorships

The San Francisco-based bank is a corporate partner at museums across the US