As the art fair calendar continues in full swing and a Johannes Vermeer retrospective at the Rijksmuseum sold out, a new report from Sotheby’s further confirms a robust recovery in the high-end art market.

The new report, published Tuesday, says the biggest area of growth for pieces sold at auction is the $20 million and up range, which accounted for 45.2% of all sales of $1 million or more in 2022.

For the report, art market analytics firm ArtTactic analyzed auction sales data from Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips between 2018 and 2022 in the categories of Impressionist, Modern, Old Masters, and contemporary art. Additionally, it includes information from Sotheby’s private sales department.

ArtTactic produced the “insight report” for the auction house and similar surveys in the series are set to be released in the future.

The $1 million benchmark is significant because while the financial figure for art works represents just 4% of lots sold, the report notes that this tier “accounts for 74% of total sales by value in the collecting categories covered in this report.” While private sales of art at $1 million or greater fell to $1.05 billion in 2022, down from the peak of $1.41 billion in 2020, the report noted that is still 30.8% higher than that tier of sales in 2019 at $803.5 million.

The remains of nine Indigenous people, unearthed by archaeologists on the small Dutch-Caribbean island of St. Eustatius more than 30 years ago, have been returned by the Netherlands, ABC News reports.

The first inhabitants of St. Eustatius (known locally as Statia) are believed to be Caribs, a people originating in the Amazon basin, though multiple pre-Colombian sites have been found on the island. Further European settlement began with the Dutch in the 17th century, and later came under the rule of both Britain and France. St. Eustatius is currently a special municipality of the Netherlands.

The island’s culture department requested the repatriation, which took nearly a year to complete. Uncovered during Dutch colonial rule, the island is making an effort to recover its stolen artifacts and human remains from institutional collections worldwide.

Some of the artifacts and bone fragments, including boxes containing remnants of ceramic and shell food, date back to the 5th century, according to the government press release on Monday, and were uncovered during an excavation at the capital Oranjestad airport between 1984- 1989.

The remains were flown back on a commercial airline by two professors from Leiden University in the Netherlands, while the artifacts are expected to be returned over the next few months. They will be reburied with the help of a local cultural heritage committee in close collaboration with local residents.

Liste Art Fair has named the 88 galleries that will participate in its upcoming 2023 edition in Basel. A satellite of the larger Art Basel, Liste is scheduled to take place June 12–18 in Hall 1.1 at Messe Basel, where Art Basel also takes place.

Among the exhibitors lined up to take part are among some of the world’s most closely watched gallery programs known for showing rising artists, including François Ghebaly, Embajada, Addis Fine Art, Blindspot, Peana, Lodos, and Sultana.

Twenty galleries will take part for the first time, including Regards, Afriart Gallery, PHD Group, wanda, Ginny on Frederick, and Parc Offsite, Eli Kerr, while Bangkok’s Nova and Jakarta’s ROH Projects will return to the fair for the first time since the pandemic. Additionally, the patron group Friends of Liste will support 12 galleries’ participation in the fair, including Gianni Manhattan, Gallery Vacancy, Clima, Crisis, and Voloshyn.

In a statement, Liste director Joanna Kamm said, “For the past few years, artists seemed to have taken inward-looking gazes as their starting points, but this year we’re noticing a reversal to outward-facing gazes. With immersive installations, timebased media, AI and computer-generated images, as well as strong positions in painting and photography, they highlight how differently the world is seen when experienced from different perspectives, under different conditions and in different places. We are very excited to see the works by this sharp-eyed generation of artists at Liste Art Fair Basel 2023.”

The full exhibitor list follows below.

The arts and culture sectors represented more than $1 trillion of the US economy in 2021 and accounted for a record portion of country’s overall economic value, per new data from the government.

On Wednesday, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) published their latest analysis of the economic health of 35 industries within the arts. Additional emphasis was placed on measuring whether each industry had returned to pre-pandemic levels of economic performance—or if they had failed to recover. 

According to the report, between 2020 and 2021, the total economic value contributed by arts and cultural industries increased by 13.7 percent, vastly surpassing the gains of the wider US economy, which grew by just 5.9 percent over the same period. By the end of 2021, the arts industries made up 4.4 percent of the nation’s overall gross domestic product (GDP).

Of the 35 industries studied, ten—including independent performers and artists and performing arts organizations—recorded significant growth within 2021, however none reached 2019-levels of economic output. The NEA also reported that just under 4.9 million people were employed in the arts industries in 2021, representing an increase from 2020, when the pandemic curtailed economic activity in the arts worldwide. That too was still below the 5.2 million employed in 2019.

Performing arts workers and performing art venues, two of the hardest hit areas in 2019, grew in 2021 by 14 percent to about 230,000 employees in total. Again, a gain that was still below the 323,000 workers employed by the industry before Covid-19. 

A 1971 portrait of the artist Stanley Whitney painted by Barkley Hendricks is poised to break a record for the artists when it is offered at auction in May.

The painting, titled “Stanley,” picture its titular subject in street clothes standing against a gold background and smoking a cigarette. It will be offered during a single owner sale at Christie’s where it’s expected to fetch $5 million. If it reaches its low estimate, the painting’s sale will be a record price for a work by Hendricks, who died in 2017 at the age of 72.

The two Philadelphia-born artists met while studying at Yale University in the 1970s. Hendricks would eventually become known for his paintings of fashion forward subjects —predominantly depicting people of color in his inner circles. He’s credited for influencing the current generation of Black figurative painters working today.

The last time a major Hendricks work came to auction was in December 2020. The 1972 canvas Mr. Johnson (Sammy from Miami), 1972, depicting one of the artist’s signature nonchalantly-posed models sold for $4 million during a Sotheby’s contemporary sale in New York—setting a new auction record for the artist. The result surpassed the previous high of $3.7 million paid for Hendricks’s Yocks (1975) at Sotheby’s in 2019. 

Recognition surged for Hendricks following the Nasher Museum of Art’s lauded retrospective “Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool,” in 2008 at Duke University. Whitney, who is 77, has seen his own milestones recently. His abstract works garnered attention during a collateral exhibition staged at the last edition of the Venice Biennale in 2022.

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