May 12 – July 1, 2023

From Barbie and Oppenheimer to the latest Mission: Impossible

May 13 – July 1, 2023

June 3 – July 2, 2023

May 5 – July 2, 2023

April 14 – July 1, 2023

Why fashion and food tell the story in season two of the TV drama

Is No Hard Feelings a comment on today's teens?

May 11 – June 17, 2023

May 25 – July 1, 2023

Gustav Klimt's final masterpiece

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April 21 – June 24, 2023

From Grace Jones to Madonna, the trope of the drama-loving diva is everywhere

From Stevie Nicks to Taylor Swift, the floaty rock-goddess aesthetic endures

The Harvard Art Museums has announced a new free admission policy, which administrators have hailed as a “significant expansion” of public access to its collections, exhibitions, and research in a press release on Friday. The policy will remain in place permanently.

“Art is for everyone, and the Harvard Art Museums will now be free to all visitors,” university president Lawrence S. Bacow said in a statement. “This initiative ensures that every visitor to our campus will now have the opportunity to view and engage with the phenomenal collections in our care at the Harvard Art Museums.”

Most university-affiliated museums are free for all visitors, making Harvard Art Museums—until now—an outlier in that respect. According to a statement from Bacow’s office, it took several years for the university to secure enough funds to ensure the expensive upkeep of the collection, as well as the salaries of its staff. The endowment was finally promised thanks to a contribution from the Estate of David Rockefeller.

The museums, which underwent a major revamp around 2015, are important hubs for research and conservation, and display objects from the Harvard’s collection that spans Ancient Greece to Postwar America. Among the collection standouts are a series of Mark Rothko murals commissioned by Harvard in the 1960s, materials from Bruce Nauman’s studio, and a prodigious group of drawings by Netherlandish, Dutch, and Flemish Masters.

“We are seeing that lowering that barrier of admission has made a difference [in reaching the Greater Boston community],” Harvard Art Museums Director Martha Tedeschi told WBUR. “And we’re looking forward to just eliminating that completely so that our local audience increasingly begins to just feel this is a place for them,” she continued. “We’ve been practicing this now for about a year and a half, and we know how it changes us, so we’re excited.”

Indian artist Nalini Malani has been awarded this year’s Kyoto Prize, Japan’s highest private award, which carries a $700,000 purse.

Malani is among India’s first video artists, though her practice has extended to include theater, installations, paintings, and drawings. She is being recognized for her “phantasmagorical spaces with approachable art forms” as well as her “pioneered artistic expression that brings the voices of the voiceless to more people,” per the press release.

“She is active globally as a non-Western artist, contributing greatly to current trends reconsidering Western-centrism in art,” the release continues.

Malani, who came to India as a refugee during the partition of India and Pakistan, studied art in Mumbai and Paris, before returning to India, wherein she began to address the country’s socio-political issues in her work.

The Kyoto Prize, commonly called Japan’s Nobel, is an annual grant aimed at recognizing lifetime achievements in the arts and sciences across three categories, including advanced technology, basic sciences, and arts and philosophy. The award is endowed with 100 million yen ($695,290) per category.

The estate of Douglas A.J. Latchford, an art and antiquities dealer who was accused of selling ancient artifacts stolen from Cambodia, has agreed to hand over $12 million and a 17th Vietnamese bronze statue to settle a civil lawsuit brought by the U.S. Government, according to the New York Times.

In 2019, federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York alleged that Latchford had “built a career out of the smuggling and illicit sale of priceless Cambodian antiquities, often straight from archaeological sites” and forged documents in order to sell the artifacts.

Latchford’s daughter, whom the Times reports is identified in court documents as Julia Copleston, inherited an “undetermined amount of money from her father” and more than 125 artifacts suspected to have been looted from Cambodia after his death in 2020. She has since agreed to return the objects to Cambodia, as well forfeit “tainted proceeds” from the sale of looted works.

“The late Douglas Latchford was a prolific dealer of stolen antiquities,” U.S. Homeland Security special agent Ivan J. Arvelo said in a statement. “His complicity in numerous illicit transactions over several decades garnered him millions of dollars in payments from buyers and dealers in the United States, of which as part of this agreement, $12 million will be rightfully forfeited by his estate.”

The Cambodian government has been central to the restitution debate in recent years and has gone to great lengths to require works from museums and institutions that have been looted from religious and archaeological sites. Among those institutions is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where Cambodian officials believe dozens of looted works are on display or in storage, many of which were sold or gifted to the museum by Latchford. 

One of Tarik Kiswanson’s newest sculptures, Nest (2022), is an ovoid fiberglass resin form, larger than a human, its shape reminiscent of eggs and cocoons, and also seeds; Kiswanson notes that the Greek roots of the word “diaspora” come from spreading seeds. Especially as a polyglot—he speaks Swedish, Arabic, English, French, and Italian—the artist likes having, as he puts it, “something so dense or layered that it produces things outside of your body and boundary.”

Kiswanson was born in Halmstad, Sweden, in 1986, to Palestinian parents. When his father arrived from Jerusalem in 1979, he was one of only a handful of Arabs in the city, and the Swedish administration naturalized their original surname, Al Kiswani, to the chimeric Kiswanson. He grew up not in the posh part of the city where rich Swedes have summer houses, but in the housing projects along with other second-generation immigrants from places including the former Yugoslavia, Vietnam, and Iraq. The Paris-based Kiswanson finds it annoying when people assume he is a refugee because of his Palestinian heritage, because the exiling happened before he was born. He said he is “moving between these realms of cultures, identities, languages and the enormous anxiety I feel when I don’t fit into society’s black and white.”

Kiswanson’s earlier works centered on his family, “to understand who I was, where I was coming from,” he said. “To understand I don’t really come from anywhere.” One example, Grandfather’s Cabinet (2014), is a skeletal reconstruction of his grandfather’s filing cabinet, which his family took with them when they fled Jerusalem. Kiswanson re-created the shape using strips of brass, between which he poured silver melted down from family heirlooms (such as a spoon and a necklace) to seal the strips together. “All of my family history is embedded in the seams,” he said.

Later, he began focusing on the experience of fellow second-generation immigrants, collaborating with preteen youths whose parents had likewise emigrated. In the film The Fall (2020), a boy named Mehdi, who was born in Belgium to Moroccan parents, plays with a pencil until it drops, then tilts his chair back until it too falls to the ground. The whole sequence was shot on a Phantom camera, which can record thousands of frames a second, and is slowed down throughout to keep Mehdi suspended in the state of instability; it cuts out and re-loops just before Mehdi’s head hits the ground, such that he doesn’t have time to be afraid, even though he knew before filming that it would hurt. This in-between state, which Kiswanson called the “floating condition of existing, detached and removed from one’s own heritage, culture, country, family,” is where he likes to work. That is partly why he has more recently moved into abstraction, as it’s not specific to any culture or time.

This is a busy year for the artist. Solo exhibitions opened at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm in April. Another will open at Salzburger Kunstverein in Austria in July, as will a group show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris next fall, featuring Kiswanson as a finalist for the Prix Marcel Duchamp. Even as he enjoys his success, he feels it hard-won, after years of waiting for the art world to catch up with the fuzzy way he presents identity in his art.

In a Guardian essay published Friday, South Korean student Noh Hyun-soo explained his decision to eat the banana that constitutes Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019).

Hyun-soo made headlines when he visited Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art on April 27 and chose to interact with the Cattelan sculpture in a decidedly unusual way. He wasn’t the first to consume this work—artist David Datuna also did so during the debut of Comedian at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019—but his stunt provoked a new level of fascination with the piece.

When Perrotin gallery premiered Comedian four years ago, the piece sold for $120,000. Composed of little more than a banana duct-taped to a wall, the piece was ultimately removed from Perrotin’s Art Basel booth due to safety concerns. Earlier this month, Cattelan won a copyright infringement lawsuit that centered around the work.

Cattelan’s art regularly provokes controversy, with past works involving a kneeling miniature Hitler and a sculpture of the Pope felled by a meteorite. But, in his Guardian essay, Hyun-soo said that he didn’t know much about Cattelan prior to eating the banana.

“I’m not familiar with Cattelan’s work, other than the banana,” Hyun-soo wrote. “I think Comedian can be considered a work of art, apart from the ridiculous price. But there will be different opinions. I’ve never met him, so I don’t really know what he thought of my eating the banana, but I read an article in which his response was ‘no problem at all’.”