Understated, non-judgemental portrait of Elvis's wife

A judge recently signed a warrant ordering the seizure of a headless bronze statue from Ohio’s Cleveland Museum of Art as part of an investigation into antiquities trafficked from Turkey.

The 76-inch-tall statue portrays a man in flowing robes and is estimated to be worth $20 million. The warrant was signed by New York County Supreme Court Judge Ruth Pickholz on August 14 as part of a larger, ongoing investigation into looted items brought to New York by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, according to the Associated Press.

The Cleveland Museum of Art acquired the statue, thought to have been produced between 150 BCE and 200 CE, in 1986.

The statue was believed to represent the great Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and “held pride of place in the Greek and Roman galleries” at the museum, according to the New York Times.

The Plain Dealer of Cleveland first reported that the statue was removed from public view at the museum more than two months ago and that the institution’s website changed the description of the work from “The Emperor as Philosopher, probably Marcus Aurelius (reigned AD 161-180),” to “Draped Male Figure“

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Starting a new hobby is exciting, especially when that means buying new gadgets and tools! However, when you are new to sewing, searching for a beginner machine can be a bit overwhelming. A few helpful questions to ask yourself: What is my budget? How likely am I to stick to sewing? What kind of fabrics will I be sewing with? Will I need to move my machine around? And who will be using it? Our suggestions below are suitable for complete beginners and include both manual and computerized machines, at a range of price points. 

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Note that when buying a machine, you can buy online or through a dealer. Online you should be able to find better deals, which is great if you don’t mind learning new skills on your own through blogs, YouTube, and books. If you prefer to learn things in person, a dealer could be the way to go. Dealers usually offer classes, will help you set up your machine, and can troubleshoot any issues that come up along the way.

How we pick each product:
Our mission is to recommend the most appropriate artists’ tool or supply for your needs. Whether you are looking for top-of-the line equipment or beginners’ basics, we’ll make sure that you get good value for your money by doing the research for you. We scour the Internet for information on how art supplies are used and read customer reviews by real users; we ask experts for their advice; and of course, we rely on our own accumulated expertise as artists, teachers, and craftspeople.

If you’re looking for a very affordable and cute sewing machine, the Janome New Home is for you. As a beginner, you’ll want to start with a machine that sews smoothly and doesn’t leave you frustrated, and this adorable little machine fits the bill. It is compact and light—weighing only five pounds—so you can easily carry it around, and it sews well for its size. You can pick from a variety of bright color combinations too. It has 11 built-in stitches, but no buttonhole stitch. You wouldn’t want to start with a smaller machine than the New Home because the smaller or toy machines are actually harder to use.

The ruins of an Ancient Roman temple dating to the 1st century BCE have been discovered on the outskirts of Sarsina, an Italian rural town. Under Roman rule, the area was a strategic defensive outpost. It was also the birthplace of playwright Plautus.

Workers first stumbled upon the ruins in December 2022 during the construction of a development project that was intended to bring a new supermarket, a fitness center, and a playground to the town.

There, they found a sandstone block structure and marble slabs that measured 6,211 square feet wide. Researchers have identified this as the podium on which the temple was constructed.

“We have unearthed three separate rooms, likely dedicated to the triad of gods Jupiter, Juno and Minerva,” lead archaeologist Romina Pirraglia told CNN. 

“The excavations are still underway,” she continued, “and we have already identified an older, deeper layer of ruins dating back to the 4th century BC, when the Umbrian people (an ancient Italic tribe who predated the Romans) lived in the area. The entire temple could be even larger than what we now see.”

A pickup truck careened off a road in Chicago, slamming into the facade of Andrew Rafacz Gallery in West Town, destroying a large-scale ceramic work by the artist Roxanne Jackson, and damaging the building, according to a report from Block Club Chicago.

The collision happened at 2:45 a.m. on Sunday. Video from the time of the incident shows the truck charging down Chicago Avenue toward the gallery before crashing through the gallery’s glass windows. When police arrived a few hours later, half of the vehicle was still inside the gallery.

Rafacz told ARTnews the gallery was presenting a solo show of Jackson’s work called Candleholders for the Underworld, much of which had been made during her residency at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at California State University Long Beach. 

“It’s still not settling in. We are all in shock. And there is no easy way to tell an artist you admire that their work has been destroyed,” Rafacz told ARTnews.

Jackson’s sculpture, Sweet Leaf Twilight (2023), a 94-inch-tall work comprised of six pieces stacked on top of one another to form a modern, totem pole-like figure, was her largest work to date. The work, which was for sale for $22,500, has been completely destroyed. Multiple other works were damaged because of the incident.

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A leather cover on your notebook makes what is otherwise an everyday object luxurious, a big boost on your first day of fall classes. And high-quality leather will weather over time to show off just how much you’ve loved it. These days, it’s easy to find a range of designs and price points, as well as vegan options. Whether you are using your notebook as a diary, for jotting down notes, or for sketching, our picks below will make the task more enjoyable. A note: The nicest notebooks and covers usually come in European sizes, like the useful A5, which is 5 7/8 by 8 1/4 inches. A4 (8 1/4 by 11 3/4 inches) is also handy if you are looking for a larger size.

How we pick each product:
Our mission is to recommend the most appropriate artists’ tool or supply for your needs. Whether you are looking for top-of-the line equipment or beginners’ basics, we’ll make sure that you get good value for your money by doing the research for you. We scour the Internet for information on how art supplies are used and read customer reviews by real users; we ask experts for their advice; and of course, we rely on our own accumulated expertise as artists, teachers, and craftspeople.

ARTnews RECOMMENDS
Traveler’s Company Traveler’s Notebook Starter Kit

Traveler’s Company, formerly a division of Japanese brand Midori and now an independent entity, makes a sumptuous and superslim leather notebook cover. It comes in several colors, including camel and blue, and in two sizes: a regular size, which measures about 4 3/4 by 8 3/4 inches, and a smaller passport size. Covers come prefilled with a notebook featuring blank Midori MD paper that is satisfyingly smooth and bleed-resistant (even with fountain pens), and refills are available for both sizes in a range of sheet styles, including lined, graph, and calendar. The notebook is held in place with a simple yet sturdy elastic band; another band goes around the cover horizontally to keep it closed. Each cover is handmade and develops a beautiful patina as you use it, making this a lightweight, indulgent option that still lands on the lower price of the leather notebook price spectrum. 

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The Headlines

NOT FOR SALE. After facing intense pressure in some corners, Christie’s is canceling its planned sales of late collector Heidi Horten’s jewelry, Artnet News’s Katya Kazakina reports. Some Jewish groups claimed that Christie’s had tried to hide information about Horten’s husband, Helmut Horten, who was a member of the Nazi Party during World War II. The controversy mounted and mounted over the past few months. Christie’s moved forward with one sale in May, netting $200 million in the process; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art called off a conference hosted by the house amid the fallout. Now, there will be no more auctions of the sort. “The sale of the Heidi Horten jewelry collection has provoked intense scrutiny, and the reaction to it has deeply affected us and many others, and we will continue to reflect on it,” Anthea Peers, President of Christie’s EMEA.

MAKING RETURNS. The lawyer David Rowland, who worked to bring Nazi-looted artworks back to their Jewish heirs, has died at 67, according to the New York Times. One of the many cases he worked involved an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting held by New York’s Museum of Modern Art; it was returned after a decade-long period to the heirs of collector Max Fischer in 2015. Meanwhile, a New York judge has ordered the seizure of an ancient Roman sculpture from Ohio’s Cleveland Museum of Art, per Cleveland.com. The judge said the work may be related to an investigation into the trafficking of antiquities in Turkey. The sculpture is said to be worth $20 million.

The Digest

The California African American Museum in Los Angeles said on Thursday that it could not reopen for the time being due to heavy rains that struck the city earlier this month.

“As we survey and repair the damage to our building, we now know we must remain closed at least through October,” the museum wrote in a statement. “Public programs slated to happen at CAAM in September and October are postponed.”

No other major Los Angeles museums have been quite as severely impacted by Tropical Storm Hilary, which hit California on August 21. By some estimates, it was the first time that a tropical storm had made landfall in the region since 1939.

Although the storm’s damage was expected to much more severe—it was called a hurricane at first, and then was downgraded—it still brought around 5 inches of rain to some coastal areas and more than double that to ones in the mountains. There were no fatalities in California as a result of the storm.

A spokesperson for CAAM told the Los Angeles Times that “water intrusion occurred in some areas of our building.”

Tremaine Emory, the creative director of the clothing company Supreme, has left the post, claiming that he faced “systemic racism” at the company. In Instagram posts detailing his departure, Emory stated that he left over how Supreme handled a collaboration with the artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa.

It wasn’t entirely clear what Jafa, who is best known for his 2016 film Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, was to produce for Supreme. It also wasn’t clear whether the Jafa project was moving forward or not.

Emory said on Instagram that “one of the few black employees” at Supreme had prevented the project from moving forward “because of the depiction of black men being hung and the freed slave gordon pictured with his whip lashes on his back.” This seems to be a reference to a photograph of an enslaved person that Jafa has periodically appropriated for his art. That image is owned by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the museum has retitled the work Peter (formerly identified as “Gordon”) to account for the subject’s historical misidentification. Emory’s Instagram stated the Jafa project had been “secretly shutdown without anyone talking to me.”

In a statement to Business of Fashion, Supreme said that the Jafa project “has not been canceled.” The company explained that it “strongly” disagreed with what it called “Tremaine’s characterization” of the events preceding his departure. Emory said in his Instagram that this statement was a “lie to hide the systemic racism that lies deep within supreme and almost all white Owned corporations.”

Through a representative, Jafa declined to comment to ARTnews. Supreme did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The British Museum in London has appointed Carl Heron as its interim deputy editor after Jonathan Williams “stepped back” from the position after reports that the institution’s management ignored warnings about stolen and missing items from its collection.

The museum’s chairman, George Osborne, informed the institution’s staff about the appointment in an email, according to the Daily Telegraph, which first reported the news. Osborne said Heron would be in the position on a temporary basis, and called him a “highly-respected authority within the museum.”

Heron has worked at the museum since 2016 as its director of scientific research, a role funded by the London-based health research foundation the Wellcome Trust. Prior to the British Museum, Heron was the head of archaeological sciences at the University of Bradford, where his work focused on identifying ancient organic matter preserved in association with archaeological materials.

The announcement from Osborne means Heron is effectively the interim leader of the British Museum after Hartwig Fischer resigned as director on August 25. Fischer had previously announced in July he would be stepping away from the position in 2024.

Three hours after Fischer’s resignation, the British Museum also announced that Williams would be voluntarily stepping back from his position. The press statement followed several news reports that Dutch art dealer and art historian Ittai Gradel had tried to contact Fischer, Williams, and Osborne about his concerns that the institution’s artifacts were appearing on eBay in 2021.

A spate of cultural vandalism continued earlier this year when part of a buried Stone Age monument in Wales was crudely excavated and left to the elements.  

Julian Baker, a 52-year-old man from Abertridwr, Caerphilly, filmed himself unearthing the 4,500-year-old relic on Eglwysilan mountain and posted the video to Facebook, according to local heritage officials. In a first prosecution of its sort in Wales, Baker has been ordered to pay £4,400 (roughly $5,600) for its restoration. Additionally, he was given a four-month custodial sentence, suspended for two years, at the Magistrates Court in Wales, according to the BBC. 

The buried monument is two large sandstones with “enigmatic” cup marks carved into their surface. Experts guess that the stones “may have acted as route markers or demarcated territorial boundaries.” In the video, Baker roughly separates a panel of rock art from the stone.

Baker was charged with executing “unauthorized work affecting a scheduled monument” and acting to “destroy or damage an ancient protected monument”.

“This damage is a serious incident at a rare class of prehistoric monument in Wales,” a spokesperson for Welsh government heritage body Cadw told the BBC. “Significant archaeological information has been lost forever, and although some evidence may remain, the significance and value of the part of the monument damaged has been significantly diminished. We welcome the court’s decision in this case, the first we have submitted under section 28 of the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979.”

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