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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’.”

Pride Month is here, and while the celebrations go on as they always do, this year’s have been shadowed by a wave of trans- and homophobic incidents as well as by a spate of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation coming out of Republican-controlled statehouses. Elements on the right seem bent on forcing the LGBTQ+ community back into the closet, but unfortunately for them, they’re too late: Whether it’s in the courts or at the polls, they’re unlikely to succeed in the long run.

The spirit of Pride continues, as does the vital place of queer people in American society and culture. And there is no better evidence of that than the current slate of institutional exhibitions by LGBTQ+ artists across the country.

Below are 12 shows we recommend by a variety of artists working in multiple mediums who keep the rainbow flag flying high and proud.

Between 1900 and 2000, performance art evolved from a fringe practice to a global divertissement. Its history divides into two periods: the first half of the 20th century, when performative practices by the avant-garde weren’t formally categorized as art, and the postwar era, when they eventually were. Moreover, these activities were confined largely to Europe and America before spreading worldwide after 1950.

Performance before and after midcentury was also distinguished by its increasing reliance on the camera, first for documentation, and later as an element integral to the work. The genre became increasingly bound up with photography, film, and video, which transformed a transitory medium into an art object after the fact.

Moreover, by the 1990s, film and video had achieved production values commensurate with mainstream movies, which had the effect of turning performance art into another form of cinematic mise-en-scène disconnected from live action in front of an audience.

The most salient development for performance art after 1950, though, was the sheer number of artists who embraced it. What follows, then, is a necessarily abridged account of this fascinating chapter in art history.

Read “The ARTnews Guide to Performance Art, Part One: 1700s–1920s” here.

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The Headlines

SETTLING HIS AFFAIRS. The estate of the late antiquities dealer Douglas A.J. Latchford has agreed to forfeit $12 million in a deal with U.S. officials, who claimed in a civil case that Latchford trafficked in looted Cambodian artifacts, the New York Times reports. Latchford was criminally charged in 2019 with dealing stolen material, but died the next year at the age of 88, before any trial. Since then, Latchford’s daughter and heir, Julia Copleston, has been repatriating scores of artifacts that the Cambodian government has said were illegally taken out of the country. The deal also calls for the estate to surrender a seventh-century bronze statue from Vietnam that was improperly obtained. In a statement quoted by Bloomberg, an agent with Homeland Security Investigations termed Latchford “a prolific dealer of stolen antiquities.”

THE STAR TREATMENT. September will see the release of Dumb Money, a film version of Ben Mezrich’s eponymous book about the mayhem around GameStop in 2021, and art types might want to consider booking a ticket. During that episode, retail traders poured money into the videogame seller’s stock, inflicting pain on firms that were shorting it. As some many recall, a couple art-collecting hedge-funders were involved in the affair, Ken Griffin and Steve Cohen, who provided financing for an embattled colleague, and so the big question is . . . who will play them in the movie? Bloomberg’s Katia Porzecanski has the details.Cohen will be played by Vincent D’Onofrio, of Law & Order fame, and Griffin by Nick Offerman, of Parks and Recreation. And yes, the script apparently features Cohen sitting near his famous Damien Hirst shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), as the action unfolds.

The Digest

Archaeologists have uncovered a mysterious sanctuary in the central Netherlands made of burial mounds and ancient offerings of human and animal bones that has striking similarities to Stonehenge.

The 4,000-year-old site was discovered in the town of Tiel and, like prehistoric stone circle Stonehenge, tracked the position of the sun on the solstices.

“The largest mound served as a sun calendar, similar to the famous stones of Stonehenge in England,” the municipality of Tiel said in a statement. “This sanctuary must have been a highly significant place where people kept track of special days in the year, performed rituals and buried their dead. Rows of poles stood along pathways used for processions.”

The site previously yielded significant archaeological finds. In 2017 excavators unearthed several graves, one of which held the remains of a woman buried with a glass bead from Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). It was the oldest bead ever found in the Netherlands and finally proved that the region was, to some degree, in contact with far-flung civilizations.

A selection of the discoveries from the site will be exhibited in a local Tiel museum and in the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities.

Henry Shum paints under dim overhead light in his childhood bedroom. His parents’ home, where he started painting at age 14, is in the eastern New Territories of Hong Kong. He left the island for a few years to study at the Chelsea College of Arts in London, then returned in 2020 as the pandemic broke out. Given the subdued radiance of his paintings, the poorly lit studio is surprising. But Shum likes it this way, reasoning that “if you can see the painting well in a harsh environment, then in a setting where the light is proper and the wall is clean, it should look good.”

Shum always intended to move back to Hong Kong, mostly because his family is there. It helped that he was offered a debut solo show from Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery after a representative saw his thesis work. During a series of strict lockdowns over the last three years, Shum developed a distinctive working process. He begins by laying down thin layers of primer. As those layers build up, they invite a certain unpredictability to the surface. Suffused with lapis atmospheres and often accented with scarlet or chlorophyll green, his paintings feature silhouettes that appear to liquify into their surroundings; oil paint appears to bleed like watercolors. In Dream Construction (2020), two glowing cyan figures perch in front of an amber anthropomorphic fire. The surface is finished with a dry brush, which gives the faces a dusted quality.

Despite his clear skill, Shum believes the best paintings are out of his control; they have “a mystery that allows you to go in, discover, maybe reveal the painting.” Painting, he said, is “about not knowing what you’re doing. It’s about allowing the process to take over. It’s a constant exploration in the dark.” Because of lockdown, Shum lived with those paintings for an unusual length of time. “Sometimes it’s very painful, living with your work,” he told me. “It means that you’re thinking about it all the time.” The paintings appeared in a solo exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York this past November.

Lately, Shum has been experimenting with various finishes, combining dull and glossy surfaces on the same canvas. A new painting depicts one figure leading another through a marshy grove. Only from a certain angle can one see that two bands of unprimed canvas runs across the composition. There, the landscape appears gently interrupted, at once more saturated and palpable. But the ground they stand on is laid in dry, disassembling swaths, as if the whole scene is still a landscape of the mind.

5 min read

In 1929, flying pioneer Alan Cobham launched his Municipal Aerodrome Campaign to encourage Town Councils to build local airports. He wrote to Oxford City Council’s Planning Committee but no action was taken at that time. Three years later, in 1932, an Oxford Times editorial argued that the City Council dealt with the question of a municipal aerodrome to serve the City of Oxford. The editorial suggested that, with the development of civil aviation, cities with aerodromes would benefit from mail and internal airline services.

It wasn’t until 1933 that Town Planning Committee recommended that the City Council approve, in principle, the establishment of a Municipal Aerodrome. In 1935, £20,000 was set aside for the purchase of land near Kidlington, 8 miles north of Oxford City centre, for development into an aerodrome. Three parcels of land were purchased; one from the Duke of Marlborough and two from farmers Frank Henman and G J E Bulford. In 1936, the Council formed an Aerodrome Committee under the Deputy Mayor, Councillor G C Pipkin.

Although the aerodrome was intended to serve civil aircraft, the Royal Air Force (RAF) was under pressure to train pilots and the Air Ministry was offered a lease for a RAF Volunteer Reserve (RAFVR) flying training school. By 1938, the building of the aerodrome was proceeding well and the formation of No. 26 Elementary and Reserve Flying Training School was announced by the Mayor, Councillor Dr H T Gillett in the Assembly Room in Oxford. The first aircraft allocated were Miles Magisters, Hawker Hinds and Hawker Audaxes.

The City Engineer arranged for a circular concrete landing circle and applied to the Air Ministry for an aerodrome license as “Oxford (Campsfield) Civil Aerodrome”, Campsfield being close to Kidlington.

7 min read

Oxford early sewage disposal

In 18th century Britain, many towns underwent rapid expansion, which resulted in widespread public concern around the appearance of urban surroundings. In Oxford, one such issue was the draining systems and sewage disposal, which before the late 18th century, mainly involved collection from domestic cesspits and drainage via open gutters, often in the middle of the streets. During the 15th and 16th centuries, the council was not very successful in tackling the increasing issue of drainage, resulting in frequent amercements (financial penalties imposed either by courts or peers) by the commission responsible for sewers. City drains and watercourses were considered at the time to be ‘open sewers’, a subject which was often complained about by inhabitants. Between 1700 – 1840, parliament passed approximately 600 Private Acts of Parliament, which at the time was the usual method of initiating infrastructure-related improvements, in which inhabitants were granted powers to undertake such projects. For Oxford, the appointment of the Paving Commissioners under the Oxford Improvement Act of 1771, marked the beginning of significant changes to its infrastructure. The city’s sewage and drainage were considerably improved between the years of 1778 and 1806, with several covered drains being built or repaired. However, most of the sewers still discharged straight into rivers, many above the waterworks site at the Folly Bridge, which proved to be a great issue pertaining to the cholera outbreaks of 1832, 1849, and 1854.

Cholera outbreaks in Oxford

Cholera is caused by infection with the bacteria Vibrato cholera, its symptoms including diarrhea, nausea and vomiting leading to dehydration from fluid loss, lethargy, erratic heartbeat, sunken eyes and dry, shriveled skin, with a blueish hue. According to Dr W.P Ormerod, a surgeon at the Radcliffe Infirmary and a member of the Paving Commission, the first case of cholera was recorded in Oxford on June 24th, 1832. The first wave of the cholera outbreak lasted 19 weeks, infecting 184 people and killing 95. An independent Board of Health, with members from the city, university and parish was established, in response to the first outbreak. They worked alongside the Paving Commission, the latter of which became the official body responsible for sanitation duties related to the epidemic. Some elements of public health were addressed at this time by passing the Oxford Paving Act of 1835, which banned certain acts such as the slaughter of cattle in the streets, but this was not enough to counteract the prevalence of cholera and other water-borne diseases, such as dysentery, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, influenza, yellow fever, and malaria, among others.

Local doctors, such as Dr. Ormerod, linked the high mortality rates of the cholera outbreaks to the large open drains in the city. However, any new improvements to the city’s public health were hindered by conflicts related to individual responsibilities between the university, town, and commissions. Later, in 1856, Dr Henry Acland, medical professor, and public health advocate, would create maps recording cases of cholera and typhoid, as part of a wider campaign for sanitary reform, building on Dr. Ormerod’s work. The sanitary reform campaign was spearheaded by both university representatives, such as Acland, but also officials, such as Alfred Winkfield and Gilbert Child and William Henry White, Oxford’s chief engineer, at the time, representing a rare collaboration between town and gown. One such contributor of note from this group is Henry Liddell (whose daughter Alice is said to have inspired ‘Alice in Wonderland’), who at the time was the Dean of Christ Church College and used this influence to push for change alongside Acland by using the spectre of typhoid.

The City Council began considering implementing the Public Health Act of 1848, only after Parliament’s approval and threats of government-run health inspections. Between the years 1850 and 1873, multiple bodies were appointed and then re-appointed to no effect to survey the city’s drainage system, with conflicts arising around its state and the required improvements. In 1873, the first sewage contract was signed by all commissions involved, a sufficient sewage system only being completed in 1880.

April 22 – June 17, 2023