Museums & Heritage

Inside New York's museum-building boom

A wave of construction projects is updating and expanding the city’s art and cultural institutions, indicating a trend toward modernisation and growth

Public artcomment

Bizarre optics at Cai Guo-Qiang’s fiery kick-off event for Getty’s PST Art initiative

Fireworks by the Chinese artist ran counter to the point of many PST Art projects

How to make Florence’s 'Museum of Tourism', the Uffizi, enjoyable again, according to its new director

Simone Verde cannot reduce visitor numbers, so he means to spread them out over new delights

A new online museum is sharing the histories of repatriated objects

The digital Museum of Looted Antiquities aspires to be an encyclopaedic repository on returned cultural artefacts—and to expose smuggling networks

‘Will it cause reputational damage?’: British Museum director discusses controversial BP donation

In a recent interview with The Sunday Times, Nicholas Cullinan also mulls over the Parthenon Marbles and recent thefts scandal

Dulwich Picture Gallery makes first acquisition in 12 years—purchasing bronze installation for £176,500

The artists Rob and Nick Carter sold Bronze Oak Grove to the London institution for just the price of the materials they used to make it

Noguchi Museum fires three employees for failing to comply with ban on overtly political dress

The firings come after museum leaders disciplined several employees who refused to remove their keffiyehs, traditional scarves often worn as a sign of support for Palestinians

Bellevue Arts Museum closes

The Washington state institution’s optimistic director hopes a larger museum will step in as a partner

MoMA’s longtime director Glenn Lowry will step down in 2025

Lowry’s 30-year tenure at the museum included many milestones, from the merger that created MoMA PS1 to multiple renovations and expansions

Art Institute of Chicago receives $75m gift to support campus overhaul

The collectors and philanthropists Aaron Fleischman and Lin Lougheed will one day have a building named in honour of their donation, one of the largest in the museum’s history

Long-planned Las Vegas art museum given plot of land downtown

After decades of efforts to build an art museum in the city, a plan led by collector and philanthropist Elaine Wynn has real momentum—and, now, real estate

Omaha's Joslyn Art Museum reopens after $100m expansion

The museum expanded its exhibition space and reorganised its permanent collection for the first time in almost 100 years—with a special focus on Native American art

Julie Mehretu creates towering glass mural for Obama Presidential Center in Chicago

The artist's 83ft-tall work, “Uprising of the Sun”, is the most prominent of many art commissions for the centre

‘A driving force’: show at London’s Freud Museum to celebrate the women central to psychoanalyst’s world

The exhibition opening in October will bring together works by artists including Paula Rego, Cornelia Parker, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas

Stairway to Rococo heaven reopens as Jacquemart-André restoration completes

Masterpieces from Rome’s Galleria Borghese will be on show alongside the built-in Tiepolo frescos of the Jacquemart-André museum, a Belle Epoque mansion originally built for a wealthy banker and his portrait-painting wife

Ready for the art-world reckoning?

The Readying the Museum group has created a blueprint to help institutions address inequity within their own walls—and to make the public, rather than trustees, their key priority

MFA Boston returns necklace that was likely looted from a tomb to Turkey

Investigations by both the museum's internal team and experts from Turkey's Ministry of Culture suggested the gold and carnelian artefact was exported illegally

Animal rights protestors stage die-in at London’s Courtauld Gallery

Members of the activist group Peta occupied the institution‘s LVMH Great Room

New London Museum gets £50m cash boost in face of rising costs

The original budget for the museum has so far been surpassed by £100m

‘At Tate Modern, I want us to take real risks’: director outlines her plans to borrow rather than buy some works of Indigenous art

Karin Hindsbo, director of the London gallery for the past year, wants it to be a ground-breaking institution. She discusses plans to raise annual visitor numbers to six million and for a free festival to mark next year’s 25th birthday

Art Gallery of Ontario receives 37 works from late telecoms executive's estate

Philip B. Lind left the Toronto museum a trove of works by Stan Douglas, Jeff Wall, Ai Weiwei, William Kentridge, Laurie Simmons and others

Hirshhorn Museum hires its first curator of Latin American and Latin diasporic art

The Colombian curator José Roca has curated several major international biennials and was previously the adjunct curator of Latin American art at Tate

Cost of Vancouver Art Gallery's new building balloons by 50%, reaching $444m

The museum’s director claimed the sharp increase was due to a precipitous rise in construction costs in recent years, though a prominent collector called this explanation “preposterous”

Former university museum director drops lawsuit seeking to block sale of works to fund dormitory repairs

The deaccessioning dispute at Valparaiso University’s Brauer Museum of Art centres on works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Frederic Church and Childe Hassam collectively valued at up to $15m

Revamped Wiener Holocaust Library to reopen with exhibition on celebrated Jewish sculptor

The library, which houses the world’s oldest collection of archival material on the Nazi era, will present works by Fred Kormis in a newly renovated exhibition space

Miami’s Vizcaya Museum will save century-old pool-grotto mural with National Park Service grant

The rare work by the Gilded Age artist Robert Winthrop Chanler is endangered by the surrounding water and Miami's humid conditions

World’s first museum of Sufi art to debut in Paris

The Musée d’Art et de Culture Soufis MTO opens at challenging moment for France’s Muslim community

Three looted objects from ancient Egyptian graves returned by the Netherlands

The restitutions are seen as reflective of the way museums are paying closer attention to the provenance of works in their collections