President Trump’s planned National Garden of American Heroes is one step closer to construction, as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has reportedly re-dedicated a portion of its funding to the president’s campaign to align arts and culture in the United States with his interpretation of patriotism.

According to a report Friday in the New York Times, the agency, which is the foremost federal funder of creative endeavors in the country, disclosed the decision in a Wednesday meeting, one week after cancelling most of its existing grant programs. Grant recipients received a “Notice of Grant Termination” that bore the signature of Michael McDonald, acting director of the N.E.H. as of March, informing them the “immediate termination” of their funding, which, the letter added, was “necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities.”

Only days prior to receiving the notice, agency employees were reportedly told that the Department of Government Efficiency, the budget-slashing group overseen by Elon Musk, was moving to cut upwards of 80 percent of their 180-person workforce. The legality of such cuts is unclear as Congress controls the flow of funds to the humanities per the established legislative process.

The NEH was created in 1965 and has since then distributed more than $6.4 billion in funding to museums, monuments, and educational programs in all 50 states and U.S. territories, according to its website. Among the diverse projects it has supported are the publication of the accounts of Lewis and Clark, Ken Burn’s seminal 1990 documentary The Civil War, as well as the publication of several books that later won the Pulitzer Prize, including The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s co-authored biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The NEH also offers critical support for cultural organizations in states that lack an active philanthropic community or arts infrastructure; funding in such cases is allocated according to state population.  

Representative Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), the ranking minority member on the House Appropriations subcommittee that manages the endowment, said in a statement first quoted by the Times, “Let’s be clear: These grants were already awarded and use funds already appropriated by Congress on a bipartisan basis.”

Qatar has selected Lina Ghotmeh as the architect to create the permanent Qatar Pavilion for the Venice Biennale.

To be located in the Giardini, where France, Great Britain, the United States, and some other 30 countries have their pavilions, it will be only the third such structure to open in the Giardini in the past 50 years, after Australia and South Korea.

Principal of the Paris-based firm Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture, Ghotmeh has described her design philosophy as presenting an “Archeology of the Future,” which she “envisions [as] a research-driven approach, where innovative and sensitive designs are deeply rooted in history and materiality. Each project acts as a living palimpsest—where the past, present, and future coexist—promoting resilience, sustainability, and fostering a deeper connection between architecture, nature, and communities,” according to a release.

In a statement, Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the chairperson of the Qatar Museums, which will manage the pavilion, said of Ghotmeh, “Her work is inspiring new and traditional audiences with its sensitivity to the human condition and its confident, innovative flair. Lina has a worldview and sensibility that has grown from her native Lebanon to reach across cultures. She has wholeheartedly embraced our vision for the Qatar Pavilion as a platform for the artistic, architectural, and cultural creativity of our nation and the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.”

Last July, Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco announced a proposal for the pavilion as part of a deal between the city of Venice and the Qatar Museums. The Qatar Pavilion was confirmed earlier this year, though a date of completion has not yet been set. (The Pavilion will open a temporary structure on the site of the permanent pavilion next month as part of the Architecture Biennale.)

The ruins of a possible water palace from the Konbaung Dynasty era have emerged following the massive 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck Myanmar late last month.

The earthquake that killed thousands of people and damaged infrastructure and structures across the country, including heritage sites, also unearthed long-forgotten monuments and ancient ruins.

Ruins that archaeologists believe may have once been a water palace or water-related structure for royal ceremonies held by ancient Myanmar kings from the Konbaung Dynasty era were found in Inwa near Tada-U, a town in central Myanmar about 6.2 miles from the provincial capital Mandalay.

Though some of parts of the southern Thayetkin staircase of the structure were first discovered by local residence in 2009 and subsequently cared for by the Department of Archaeology and National Museum, additional parts of the structure have now been revealed.

The ruins reportedly include foundational structures, stairways, and traces of pavilions that match illustrations recorded in ancient palm-leaf manuscripts. The site was likely used in service of the royal city of Ratnapura Ava (or “City of Gems”), which was an imperial capital for successive Burmese kingdoms between the 14th and 19th centuries.

​Amid a drop in high-end art sales, Christie’s plans to auction Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair (1967–68) during its May evening sale in New York from the the collection of Belgian patrons Roger Matthys and Hilda Colle.

The painting, measuring six feet in width and featuring as its central subject a midcentury executioner’s chair, is estimated around $30 million. Matthys and Colle, both deceased, were known figures in the contemporary art scene in Ghent as benefactors to the SMAK contemporary art museum.​

This sale comes amid a slowdown in art sales across the world. According to the 2025 Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, global art sales declined by 12 percent in 2024, falling to $57.5 billion. The downturn is attributed to a decrease in transactions at the high end, with sales of artworks priced above $10 million dropping by 45 percent.

Despite these difficulties, Christie’s is promoting the provenance of Big Electric Chair to attract bidders. If the painting achieves its estimate, it could set a new auction record for the series, surpassing the $20.4 million achieved by a similar work in 2014.

Alex Rotter, the auction house’s chairman of 20th and 21st century art, told ARTnews in an email that he has long considered the painting “one of the ultimate Warhols.”

A little dust never hurt anyone—unless, perhaps, you’re trying to date a Vermeer.

Conservation work on Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, the only Vermeer still in private hands, has uncovered a layer of 17th-century air pollution between layers of paint that helped date the rare Old Master picture, according to The Art Newspaper.

Specifically, feldspar particles—byproducts of the booming Delftware ceramics industry in Vermeer’s hometown—were trapped in the composition, likely after it was first set aside. Their presence suggests Vermeer returned to the canvas years later to add the yellow shawl draped over the sitter’s bodice. That final touch may make Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, his last painting.

Now on view in Amsterdam’s H’ART Museum as part of From Rembrandt to Vermeer, the painting sits in the collection of Thomas Kaplan, the American billionaire and self-styled custodian of Dutch Golden Age masterpieces. His Leiden Collection exhibition includes 75 works, 18 of which are Rembrandts. The Vermeer is the showstopper—and for good reason.

The painting has had a tangled provenance. Its attribution was in doubt for decades, but by the time it re-emerged at Sotheby’s in 2004, expert consensus had tilted in its favor. 

“Do Remember They Can’t Cancel the Spring,” artist David Hockney told the world in March 2020, just as lockdown for the Covid-19 pandemic began. That sentiment was in full swing, in the early days of spring now five years later, throughout the artist’s just-opened survey at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (on view through August 31). Spanning all four floors of the museum, the current exhibition is the largest ever devoted to the British artist, whose work was last surveyed in Paris at the Centre Pompidou eight years ago. The eleven-room presentation consists of over 400 objects, from paintings and drawings to digital works (made via both computer and iPad) and even immersive video installations. Titled “David Hockney 25,” the show focuses on the last 25 years of his career, but also includes pieces from throughout his seven-decade career.

Upon entering, the exhibition you immediately notice its colorful display, full of brilliant greens, deep blues, and blazing yellows that suffuse the institution’s usually immaculate white walls. The Fondation Louis Vuitton’s artistic director Suzanne Pagé attributed this sensibility to Hockney himself. “He is the true curator of the exhibition. He called all the shots,” she said, adding that the artist worked closely with his partner and studio manager Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima and assistant Jonathan Wilkinson.

The exhibition begins on the lower level, opening with his emblematic works from the 1950s to the ’70s, including Portrait of My Father (1955), the first painting Hockney ever sold and which he recently bought back. “When he visited the exhibition, you could tell he was not looking at the painting per se, but rather at his beloved father,” Pagé told ARTnews ahead of the show’s opening.

The adjacent gallery is home to 1967’s A Bigger Splash, Hockney’s iconic depiction of a Californian swimming pool just after an unseen figure has dived in, and his 1972 Portrait of An Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which sold to top collector Pierre Chen for $90.3 million at Christie’s in 2018. On either side of a door leading to a series of Yorkshire landscapes, from the ’90s to the early 2000s, hang two of his most famous double portraits: Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968) and Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–71). (Mrs. Clark, or Celia Birtwell, is a frequent model of Hockney’s, appearing in a handful of paintings throughout the exhibition.)  

These double portraits hint at what’s upstairs, where the Fondation Louis Vuitton has assembled around 60 such works. Hockney is known for only painting people he knows: his assistants, his cook, his gardener, his siblings, and his friends, like Frank Gehry, the building’s architect. Hockney’s approach to portraiture speak to his painterly affection for his models, as seen in his depiction of Gonçalves de Lima with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees, a pose he borrowed from van Gogh’s 1882 Sad Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate).

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, generally considered the top art museum in that city, named its new director and CEO on Thursday, the museum announced in a press statement.

Pierre Terjanian, 56, the museum’s current chief of curatorial affairs and conservation, will take up the role starting in July. Terjanian was picked after a seven-month search and succeeds Matthew Teitelbaum, who has been the director since 2015.

“The predominant feeling is the excitement,” Terjanian told the New York Times. “This is a great institution, and it has a big part to play in Boston, in New England and beyond.”

Terjanian joined the museum in 2024 in a role overseeing the conservation of the museum’s vast collection of over 500,000 objects. He also has directed the development of the MFA’s exhibition program, according to the museum, both in Boston and globally.

Previously, he worked for ten years as the Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Curator in Charge of Arms and Armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Terjanian co-chaired the Met’s reoening task force, and, during his tenure at the museum, he secured $100 million in fundraising, including a major gift from ARTnews Top 200 Collector Ronald S. Lauder.

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The Headlines

NEH FUNDS TRUMP PROJECT. The National Endowment for the Humanities will redirect its funding towards President Trump’s proposal for a “National Garden of American Heroes” sculpture garden, reports the New York Times. The news comes after Trump’s administration ordered the NEH to cancel over 85 percent of existing grants to museums and historical sites across the US, and to make massive staff cuts, which the Washington Post reports effectively began yesterday. The number of layoffs wasn’t immediately clear, but an NEH union representative said “almost 75 percent of the staff should prepare” for it. As for Trump’s sculpture park, people who attended a meeting about plans for the project on Wednesday reportedly said it is supposed to celebrate Trump’s interpretation of patriotism. This, as the endowment shifts to championing the White House’s agenda, including the celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence on July 4, 2026.

FRANCE, INDIA, MUSEUMS. France Muséums, the Paris-based company that stewarded the creation of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, has been tapped to help build a new national museum in Delhi, reports Le Monde. The museum project spearheaded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is meant as a major upgrade to India’s existing, smaller national museum, but the new institution, called the Yuga Yugeen Bharat, is already subject to a heated debate on how it will portray the country’s history. Modi has been criticized as wielding archeology as a political weapon, notably by building a Hindu temple in the northern city of Ayodhya, on a site over which Muslim and Hindus have been battling for decades, as ARTnews reported. Additionally, little information about the project’s budget or planned programming have been made public. France’s involvement had, until now, escaped public’s notice, but scrutiny has begun in earnest: “By aiding a future national museum conceived by Hindu nationalists, France will contribute to the rewriting of history,” said Christophe Jaffrelot, a French political scientists specializing on the area.

The Digest

CASETiFY, a leading developer of tech accessories for more than a decade, has announced the details for its much-anticipated partnership with Japanese artist and cultural icon Takashi Murakami.

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Murakami and CASETiFY teased “TAKASHI MURAKAMI x CASETiFY: MR. DOB” at ComplexCon in Hong Kong in March, billing it as CASETiFY’s most ambitious collaboration with an artist to date. The complete collection officially launches worldwide on April 11, 2025.

“When Takashi-san and I first met, we talked for hours about making art part of everyone’s daily digital life,” says CASETiFY CEO and co-founder Wes Ng. “What followed was months of close collaboration, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible when you merge iconic art with everyday tech. This collection is the result of that shared vision.”

The drop highlights the launch of CASETiFY Travel in December 2024, marking the brand’s expansion into lifestyle accessories beyond the world of tech. Murakami x CASETiFY is the first artist collaboration to feature the new travel line’s flagship offering, the Bounce Carry-On suitcase, which adapts CASETiFY’s proprietary shock-absorbing technology to full-sized cargo.

The Murakami x CASETiFY partnership is also the inaugural installment in the Hong Kong-based company’s new CASETiFY iCONS series, which invites premier brands and creative luminaries to develop limited-edition pieces complete with experiential moments and unexpected product innovations unique to each collaboration.

To paint a glamorous woman, naked but for a loosely hung fur coat and a long drape of pearls, and have her not be the focal point of an image is just one of the striking aspects of Walton Ford’s new series of paintings, on view at Gagosian in New York through April 19. Based on the artist’s research into the Marchesa Luisa Casati, the paintings are far more interested in the experience of her feline companions: two dazzling cheetahs she reportedly paraded along the canals of Venice. One of the cats fiercely occupies the center of La levata del sole (2025), backlit by the rising sun. The other is poised in the midground, a pigeon snapped in its maw. Standing off to the side with a defiant pose and provocative gaze, Casati is alluring but hardly the painting’s most compelling feature.

Ford is well-known for his work appropriating—and subverting—the conventions of natural history illustrations. He has perfected an aesthetic of animal liveliness, one that trades in the genteel authority of 18th- and 19th-century science but smuggles in some contemporary humor and critique. Prints done in the style of famed ornithologist John James Audubon, for example, appear to replicate Audubon’s life-sized depictions of American birds. But Ford’s versions are often riven with barely suppressed psychological tension, channeling the violence behind Audubon’s representations. Audubon both loved his birds, rendering them with ardent vivacity, and ultimately killed them in pursuit of his image.

Ford has found in the animal world a rich source of narrative ironies, with animals both mirroring human dramas and revealing the animality of human society. In these new works, he brings a human actor into the scene in more explicit ways. Casati was a Milanese heiress living large in early 20th-century Venice; she became involved with the Futurists and sought to make her life a work of art. In addition to the cheetahs, she allegedly wore snakes as necklaces and cultivated a menagerie of lion cubs, panthers, monkeys, peacocks, and other exotic species. Her wild parties and exuberant lifestyle, combined with the eternal beauty of Venice, provide captivating content for Ford’s images.

The paintings are themselves exquisite objects. Ford’s dexterity with watercolor balances trompe-l’oeil illusionism, particularly in the cheetah’s mesmerizing coats, with painterly abandon, as in the pooling reflections on the surface of the Grand Canal. Ford, the gallery reports, initially intended to make just one painting on the subject: the golden, glowing, La levata del sole (2025). But he was so taken with the result that he carried on, and one of the most rewarding parts of the show is seeing the characters develop across the series. Each work takes an Italian title, often referring to literature published by Casati’s lover, the military officer and decadent poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Decadence, a literary and artistic movement that emerged in the 19th century and was popular in Casati’s time, dwelled in hedonism as an antidote to bourgeois mores, and the decadence here is truly ravishing. The cheetahs’ jeweled collars sparkle, the Marchesa’s lithe body shimmers in the moonlight. And then, like any good thing, there starts to be too much of it. The golden glow of La levata del sole becomes the sickly-sweet, bubble-gum pink of La Marchesa (2024). The latter work depicts the aftermath of a fête. Revelers in the background drape themselves among ruins, their bodies seemingly turned to stone. There may be some vanitas in this image, with scattered carnival masks and overturned wine jugs nodding at symbolic resonance. But the cheetahs, licking the leavings clean, seem unbothered by any metaphoric significance.