Museums & Heritage

Metropolitan Museum to exhibit masterpieces from Puerto Rican museum struck by earthquake

The pieces include paintings by Frederic Leighton, John Everett Millais and Sir Edward Burne-Jones

Tatecomment

Fair or not, Tate's discrimination row has damaged its reputation among the very artists it needs to attract

The institution denies claims that it refused to allow the increasingly prominent Black performance artist Jade Montserrat to participate in a project for Tate Exchange

Unionised workers file unfair labour charges against the Philadelphia Museum of Art

With contract negotiations well into their second year, the union claims the museum’s leadership has been “repeatedly interfering with employees’ rights”

Exclusive: German museums latest to be implicated in far-reaching criminal investigation into antiquities trafficking

Case has so far seen Middle Eastern works seized from New York's Met and the indictment of a former Louvre director

Shipwrecks ahoy? Unesco's underwater mission scours sea bed off Italy for archaeological treasures

A dozen marine archaeologists are currently searching in an area that was once one of the busiest maritime routes in the world

Sticky fingers: German climate activists strike museums four times in past week

Protestors from the Letzte Generation group have glued themselves to works by Rubens, Poussin and Cranach

Russian guard who doodled eyes on $1m painting sentenced as scrutiny of museum intensifies

Aleksandr Vasiliev had used a ballpoint pen to draw eyes on the stylised figures in a painting by avant-garde artist Anna Leporskaya

Orlando Museum of Art leaders resign amid scandal over allegedly fake Basquiats

The museum's board chair and its recently appointed interim director have both resigned as the fallout from an FBI raid in June continues

Icom condemns Russia's 'deliberate destruction' of Ukrainian heritage and plans stricter code of ethics

The International Council of Museums says revised protocol will allow it to more readily “address conflicts”—and could lead to the expulsion of Russia from the organisation

Aboriginal art to take centre stage at $225m expansion of Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales

The Sydney Modern Project—due to open in December—is the Australian city’s largest cultural development since the creation of its opera house

What is a museum? Icom finally decides on a new definition

The 50-year-old statement has been overhauled at the International Council of Museums conference in Prague today

Once the US’s largest slave port, Charleston will open African American museum next year

Opening on 21 January 2023, the new International African American Museum will include ways for Black Americans to research their ancestry

War-ravaged Ukrainian mosaics digitally recreated in London show

Exhibition builds on a project to document Ukraine's monumental and contested public art created during Soviet era

Seven dead after landslide strikes Iraqi Shia shrine

The Qattarat al-Imam Ali shrine, a popular pilgrimage destination, collapsed on 20 August after rubble from a landslide struck its roof

Biden appoints archaeologists, museum leaders and Acquavella Galleries director to US committee advising on imports of cultural property

The Cultural Property Advisory Committee guides the US Department of State on import restrictions for artefacts and emergency actions related to cultural property

In with the cuffs, out with the glue: Italian climate change protestors chain themselves to chapel banister

The Scrovegni Chapel in Padua is home to masterpieces by the Italian Medieval painter Giotto

‘Return Rosetta Stone to Egypt’ demands country’s leading archaeologist Zahi Hawass

The former Egyptian antiquities minister leans into the current restitution conversation, calling again for the return of three prized antiquities from European museums

Labournews

Mass Moca workers walk off the job for one-day strike

Unionised employees of the North Adams, Massachusetts museum sought to pressure the institution’s administration amid ongoing contract negotiations

With $4.5m funding boost, the Noguchi Museum will open the artist’s home and studio to the public

Isamu Noguchi’s live-work space, located across the street from his namesake museum, will undergo much-needed renovations to become accessible for public tours

Vast megalithic site discovered in southern Spain on land earmarked for an avocado plantation

More than 500 standing stones were catalogued by archaeologists working on the 7,000-year-old site

Museumsanalysis

Leading museum directors to debate whether institutions can remain objective in a politically volatile world

At the ICOM conference in Prague, leaders will be told traditional planning could be a liability when addressing modern human rights issues

One of China’s oldest private art museums to close as Covid lockdowns lead to economic slump

The Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou will shut its exhibition space on 9 October

Historic Baltimore museum reopens after $5.5m renovation

The Peale Museum, considered the first “purpose-built” museum in North America, reopens with a contemporary and local focus

Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture receives $8m in state funding for major renovation

The centre, whose art collection is one of the richest in historic and Modern Black art, will put the state funds toward major improvements to its building

An historic appointment: Lynette L. Allston is the first Indigenous person to serve as board president of a major US museum

Allston had previously advised the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in devising its land acknowledgement agreement

The Metropolitan Museum returns two looted artefacts to Nepal

The two works, given to the museum in the 1990s, were looted from temples in Kathmandu according to recent internal provenance research

National Museum of Scotland urged to return First Nations totem pole stolen by Canadian anthropologist

The pole was stolen in 1929 and, if returned, would be only the second totem pole to be repatriated to a First Nation by a European institution