A catastrophic dam collapse in southern Ukraine has reportedly flooded the house museum of late artist Polina Rayko, whose image of a dove has been adopted as a symbol of Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion.

The Kakhova dam on the Dnieper River collapsed Tuesday, flooding dozens of regions in Ukraine and leaving thousands homeless and tens of thousands without clean drinking water, per the Associated Press. Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of deliberately destroying the dam, a move Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy later described as an act of “ecoterrorism”. The Russian military has denied any wrongdoing.

Rayko’s museum, located in the artist’s hometown of Oleshky, was a priceless repository of her life’s work. A self-taught artist, she channeled her harrowing biography into lyrical visions of fauna and flora, most of which painted directly onto the walls, ceilings, and doors of her home. “As of now (7/6/23 6:00 p.m.), I know that the house with the frescoes is under water,” Simon Khramtsov, the head of a foundation that manages Rayko’s legacy, in a Facebook post, as quoted by the Art Newspaper.

Rayko, who was born in 1928, began teaching herself to paint at the age of 69, after a traumatic experience in the Second World War and the death of her daughter in a car accident. Following her death in 2004, her work drew international acclaim similarly to that of another Ukrainian folk artist, Maria Prymachenko, whose museum near Kyiv was shelled by Russian missiles in the first month of the war.

Artists, historians, and museum professionals have since shared their regret for the loss of Rayko’s home on social media.

A field of ancient stones in Carnac, a town in northern France, has been swept away to make room for a hardware store chain, France 24 reported Thursday.

“The site has been destroyed,” Carnac-based archaeologist Christian Obeltz told Agence France Presse of the local pre-historic treasure. The 39 stones were around two to four feet in height and thought to be around 7,000 years old. 

While these particular stones were close to a protected site where 3,000 similar stones known as menhirs exist, the land they were on was not protected. Last August, hardware chain Mr. Bricolage successfully applied for a building permit on the land to open a new store. 

The mayor of Carnac, Olivier Lepick, told AFP that those stones in particular were “of low archaeological value” and that the site had been inspected prior to the start of construction, as required by law. 

The Regional Office of Cultural Affairs (Drac) for Brittany, which oversees cultural sites like the menhir fields in Carnac followed suit, releasing a statement earlier this week that said given “the uncertain and in any case non-major character of the remains, as revealed by checks, damage to a site of archaeological value has not been established.”

Rita Asfour was not like most artists. How many painters would leave Southern California’s artistic community for Las Vegas—then come out of retirement to paint showgirls, no less?

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Then again, most artists were not Rita Asfour. The late painter, sculptor, and gallerist blew up the walls separating highbrow and lowbrow, then danced on the rubble.

Born Markrit Thomassian in 1933, Asfour was the child of refugees who had settled in Egypt after the Armenian Genocide. When she was only eight years, Hitler bombed Egypt; to negate the unpleasant images in her mind, Asfour used crayons to paint flowers. This formative traumatic experience inspired her to spend her life creating beautiful art. Asfour received her early art education at the Leonardo da Vinci Italian International School in Cairo, then worked as a commercial illustrator in Beirut for five years. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1965, she found work as a sketch artist for tourists at Universal Studios in Hollywood. Those inverted professional experiences—rendering photorealistic portrayals of glamorous women in everyday settings, then capturing everyday people in a glamorous setting—informed the keen observational eye Asfour would bring to her later impressionist-style work.

Asfour settled in Malibu, where she lived for 30 years. That period was her most prolific, painting seascapes and experimenting with various artistic mediums. Here, she developed her style and became embedded in the Los Angeles art community, opening her own gallery, Galerie Camille, in Beverly Hills in 1970. She attracted a number of celebrity clients who commissioned her to paint portraits of then-President Richard Nixon’s daughter Tricia, singer Ella Fitzgerald, and Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler.

It was in Malibu, too, that Asfour pursued one of the major throughlines of her career: painting ballet students in motion. She was inspired to focus on dancers after seeing Pepperdine University students perform, observing the corps backstage on multiple occasions. Asfour also shadowed toddler-age dancers at Ballet Studio By The Sea, a private dance studio. She was intrigued by the age groups’ divergent approaches to dance: The Pepperdine dancers approached their craft with rigor and acute self-imposed expectations, while the toddlers were genial and unself-conscious. “It was a joy to watch the little marvels give it all they had in a show that sometimes lasted only a few minutes,” Asfour recalled in the exhibition brochure of a 2016 retrospective at the University of Nevada Las Vegas’s College of Fine Arts.

For Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects, released earlier this year, writer and museum consultant András Szántó conducted interviews with established and rising stars in the field of museum design.

The cast of subjects is widely international, and the roster includes architects at different stages in their careers, including David Adjaye, David Chipperfield, Elizabeth Diller (of Diller Scofidio + Renfro), Bjarke Ingels, and Jing Liu & Florian Idenburg (of SO – IL), among others.

The new volume follows the 2020 book The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues, for which Szántó interviewed museum directors in the midst of the pandemic about the state of art institutions going forward.

Below, Szántó spoke with ARTnews about aspirational architecture, museums’ new trend toward humility, and how the art world can help guide society at large.

ARTnews: Before getting to the new book, what was the response like around The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues? Was there anything that surprised you or stood out?

Artist, scholar, and activist Amalia Mesa-Bains is a magnetic storyteller in many senses of the word. For six decades, she has advocated—or agitated, as she has often put it—for real change in the art world, with the aim of upending systems that have long marginalized artists of color, women artists, and queer artists. Just as she passes along tales of her own efforts to do this to younger generations, her art also conveys the narratives of those who refuse to be forgotten, erased, dispelled, or silenced.

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Generations of artists, scholars, curators, and writers that have followed are forever indebted to women of color like Mesa-Bains, whose outstanding retrospective, “Archaeology of Memory,” on view until August 13 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), is the fruit of all her labors, no matter how delayed. It is not to be missed.

This is the 79-year-old artist’s first museum retrospective, and one of only a dozen or so solo exhibitions she’s ever had. It is the rare opportunity to see well-known works together, like the stunning Transparent Migrations (2001), which reflects on the perilous journeys of migrations that many in the Latinx community know all too well. An armoire made of mirrors sits in a field of shattered glass straddled by two sculptures of agave plants. Inside the artist’s wedding mantilla hangs above an array of carefully placed objects.

That work finds its analog in a lesser-known piece by Mesa-Bains, Queen of the Waters, Mother of the Land of the Dead: Homenaje a Tonantzin/Guadalupe (1992), made of a three-tiered mirrored altar to the Virgen de Guadalupe that is flanked by six bejeweled clocks with an image of the Virgen on their faces. Above hangs a sky-blue cascade of fabric; affixed to the wall are dozens of crystal jewels; and on the floor is a pool of potpourri.  

Mesa-Bains’s artistic and scholarly practices are centered around holding space for those whom the mainstream would prefer to ignore. This dates all the way back to the late ’70s, when, as a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology, she interviewed ten Chicana artists of her generation about their lived experiences, what led them to art-making, and how their culture influenced the formation of their identities. In the ensuing decades, Mesa-Bains would continue this work, curating exhibitions of and penning essays on Chicanx and Latinx artists—often writing some of the earliest scholarship on these artists.

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The Headlines

THE POLITICAL SCENE. Thursday was quite a news day in Washington, D.C., as politicians reacted to the bombshell that President Trump was being indicted in a case concerning his handling of classified documents. Before that, though, on Wednesday, a bronze statue was unveiled in National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol that depicts the acclaimed writer Willa Cather, who died in 1947. It was created by Littleton Alston, who became the first Black artist to have work included in that collection. (Each state selects two statues to be displayed there; the Cather piece came from Nebraska.) In other news from the Hill, Congress is looking to hire a new Architect of the Capitol, who oversees its home and various collections. (The last one was ousted amid scandal. He has denied wrongdoing.) A member of the team seeking to fill the job told the New York Times, “This is a uniquely complex role. A term we often use is a ‘unicorn.’ ”

ARTISTS SPACE. It is one of those special days when editorial calendars align, and a bunch of great interviews are all published at once. Grab a cup of coffee! Grab a cocktail! There’s a lot to read. Apollo romped around Reykjavik with hometown hero and performance legend Ragnar Kjartansson. “What I love about being from Iceland,” he said, “is that I really did not understand the idea of the art object until I was 35 or something. Like, you go to the museum here and you just see some Icelandic shit… there is no art history, and there are no objects of mega-value.” Sculptor Anselm Kiefer, an expert in mega-value, has a new show at White Cube in London and spoke to the Guardian. Two more stories from England: Painter Hurvin Anderson, who has a show up at the Hepworth Wakefield, is in the New York Times, and Lubaina Himid, who’s presenting work at the Glyndebourne opera house, is also in the Guardian.

The Digest

In the middle of the night on May 15, a public art project in Richmond, California, disappeared without a trace. The project, titled Fencelines – A Collective Monument to Resilience, was a collection of slats onto which community members wrote their hopes and wishes for the future of the city and its environment. The slats were installed on a fence that cordons off the Chevron refinery, which sits along the waterfront of the San Francisco Bay.

On Wednesday, Chevron admitted that it took down the public art piece in a statement made to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“The installation on company property was removed, in keeping with our security, safety and facilities policies,” a Chevron representative wrote to ARTnews. “Our fences and other company facilities are functional equipment and we cannot allow tampering or unauthorized construction.”

The artists and organizers behind the project, meanwhile, argue that Fencelines was mostly on a city-owned portion of the fence, which runs alongside a running trail and is separated from Chevron property by a six-lane thoroughfare. Fencelines, which was brought to life by community organizer Princess Robinson and artist Graham LP, had been in the making over the past year and a half, during which they and Gita Khandagle, an artist and designer, reached out to Chevron and city officials to ascertain who owned the fence so they could get approval for the project.

According to the organizers, Chevron never responded but the city did, approving the project. Graham LP and other people involved claim that the majority of the project was installed on the city-owned portion of the fence but bled into a part of the fence that Chevron owns.

Two paintings by Gottfried Lindauer, valued around $490,000 US ($800,000 NZD) that were stolen in 2017 were returned to police through a secretive deal arranged by senior gang members, the New Zealand Herald reported Wednesday.

The Māori portraits, Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure, were painted by the Czech-New Zealand artist in 1884. The art works were stolen from the International Art Centre gallery and auction house in a “smash-and-grab” incident in April 2017, only a few days before they were to be sold.

The thieves reversed a stolen van into the front window of the gallery and auction house before loading the two paintings into a white Holden Commodore SSV sedan.

The paintings were two examples of Lindauer’s prolific portrait work featuring Māori subjects, ranging from leaders to ordinary people. In March, an auction for a portrait of Harawira Te Mahikai, chief of the Ngāti Kahungunu Tribe, sold for nearly $615,000 US including fees ($1,009,008 NZD).

Last December, New Zealand police announced that Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure had been returned with only minor damage. According to the Herald, police were “deliberately vague” in providing details on what happened to the portraits, referring only to “an intermediary who sought to return the paintings on behalf of others” to the artworks’ owners.

My pieces begin as titles. Titles come to me when I’m washing dishes, or running, or showering. A recent example is Aloha Sadness (2023): I thought, That’s so dumb, but also so real. Aloha means goodbye, but also hello. I asked what would Aloha Sadness look like? I did a little research—looked up tiki culture, watched Lilo & Stitch, played that song “Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride” in the studio.

I’m driven by curiosity, and I can get interested in literally anything. I’m less interested in judging whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, than I am in asking, What is this thing? Why is this thing? Exhibitions are a helpful way of focusing my curiosity. I can point to one and say, “That’s my oceanography era,” or that’s my how-TVs-work era.

For me, “artist” is kind of like a catchall term. Takashi Murakami’s 2008 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum drew me to art. He was making mugs, pins, paintings… I thought, Maybe I could do one of those. I’m also a writer, but there’s something about the authority of language that feels daunting, whereas in art there’s more wiggle room.

The title of my recent show at Tara Downs gallery in New York was “Live,” and I left it deliberately unclear as to whether I meant the noun or the verb. I wanted to permit the viewer/reader to take it however they want. There’s something beautiful about the state of not-knowing, and I want my viewers to feel curious. I never want it to be, “I’m the artist, listen to me.”

I started making my quilt works in 2013, hoping to combine my love for making with my interest in painting. I wanted to be able to physically pick up colors and move them around. I also love learning how things work, down to the molecular level. If you’re dyeing something, you have to ask, Is this a cellulose fiber or is it a protein fiber? Some pieces incorporate resist dyes using wax. Since wax is nonpolar and water is a polar molecule, the two materials don’t interact.

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Liste Art Fair Basel is delighted to present 88 galleries from 35 countries with artworks by over 100 artists from 12–18 June 2023 in Hall 1.1 at Messe Basel.

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Dedicated to introducing the latest voices in contemporary art, the participating galleries will showcase immersive installations, time-based media, AI and computer-generated images, as well as strong positions in painting and photography, by a generation of artists who highlight how differently the world is seen when experienced from different perspectives, under different conditions and in different places. The fair will also feature “Whistlers”, a special exhibition curated by Sarah Johanna Theuer on the theme of sustainability with a focus on resilience.

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April 27 – June 4, 2023

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