This piece was published originally by Capital & Main.

Business groups are vigorously opposing Julie Su, President Joe Biden’s nominee for labor secretary, and they are counting on a handful of votes from swing senators to defeat her confirmation.

Leading the charge are trade groups representing companies like McDonald’s and Uber that currently are not the employers of record for workers in fast-food franchises or drivers who are treated as independent contractors. Because of that arm’s length relationship, those corporations are often shielded from responsibility for labor law violations. They fear Su would more aggressively enforce labor laws that could expose them to penalties for infractions.

Those fears stem from Su’s record. She rose to prominence in the 1990s for representing Thai seamstresses who were enslaved in a sweatshop in El Monte, California. She brought a suit on their behalf that held retailers and manufacturers liable for using slave labor that resulted in $4 million in restitution for the garment workers.

She served as the state’s top labor-law enforcer under Gov. Jerry Brown, launching a “Wage Theft Is a Crime” campaign and aggressively pursuing claims on behalf of restaurant, car wash, and garment workers. As California’s labor secretary under Gov. Gavin Newsom, she steered the department’s expanded unemployment system for those thrown out of work by the pandemic. Her opponents are also attacking her for the fraud that emerged in that program, although such fraud was common nationwide. Now serving as acting secretary of labor, she has the support of organized labor, some business leaders and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. 

From Beyoncé's body suit to red-carpet flesh-baring – why now?

The Independent art fair’s “no booth” layout, where there are few walls and visitors can mingle freely, has itself garnered a reputation among dealers. It’s not hard to see why. At the opening of the fair, which runs through May 14 at Tribeca’s Spring Studios, emerging and mid-size galleries showed off their wares as healthy crowds of people moved about, creating a more intimate vibe than is typical at most art fairs.

In the early hours of the opening on Thursday, disgraced art dealer Mary Boone and journalist Anderson Cooper were among the attendees. Cooper stopped by London-based dealer Niru Ratnam’s booth to view works by painter Kimathi Donkor. Meanwhile, New York dealer Nicola Vassell told ARTnews that there had already been several museums vying to buy works by Elizabeth Schwaiger on view in her booth.

As with previous editions, Elizabeth Dee, the fair’s founder and director, said, “Every year we kind of grow this audience exponentially.” According to Dee, the fair expected around 2,000 VIP attendees to attend Thursday morning. “We really choreograph that first three hours carefully,” she said, explaining that giving collectors and dealers the time to have discussions in those opening hours is key.

Twenty-three of the 70-plus participating galleries were staging debut presentations for their artists. Dee told ARTnews that introducing new talent was a focus: “This should be a place that almost mimics a whole day in New York going to galleries.”

Below, a look at the standout showcases.

The New York edition of the European Fine Art Fair, or TEFAF, has returned to the Park Avenue Armory with its grab-bag of antiquities, historic and cutting-edge design, jewels, and modern and contemporary art. The flagship edition in Maastricht is a fusty affair known for its offerings of Old Masters, while the New York version is a feast of exciting juxtapositions—or a long-simmering identity crisis, depending on your perspective. 

Some 91 galleries are participating in the fair’s 2023 edition, which fills the Park Avenue Armory through May 16. The blue-chip presenters include David Zwirner, Pace, Gladstone Gallery, Gallery Hyundai, Mnuchin Gallery, and Thaddaeus Ropac. Jump scare warning: Gagosian, located immediately inside the Armory’s great hall, brought a blown-up image from Jeff Koons’ smug “Made in Heaven” series, in which the nude artist is entwined with his former wife, the porn star La Cicciolina.

TEFAF New York lacks the dedicated irreverence of Spring/Break or the focus of Independent, which has curated an admirably inclusive show downtown. Accordingly, the fair is best approached piece by piece. Thankfully, many pieces for sale are exquisite.

Keep an eye out for David Zwirner’s solo presentation of Joseph Albers, which spotlights his seminal series “Variant/Adobe,” started in 1947. A standout is the painting Browns, Ochre, Yellow (1948). Mayor Gallery is reintroducing the singular geometric compositions of Verena Loewensberg (1912–1986), a dancer, weaver, designer, and impressive color theorist based for most of her life in Zurich. Meanwhile, Demisch Danant has brought elegant wall textiles by Sheila Hicks and an eye-catching crimson lacquer console by Maria Pergay.

Below are our picks of the best booths TEFAF New York 2023 has to offer.

Columbus, Georgia, a small college town south of Atlanta, is an unlikely place to meet the glamorous actress and painter Kate Capshaw, considered cinema royalty for her marriage to director-extraordinaire Steven Spielberg. But Capshaw is not in Georgia to talk about Hollywood. She’s there to discuss Unaccompanied, her new exhibition at Columbus State University’s Bo Bartlett Center. 

The exhibition is comprised of portraits and life-sized busts of homeless children and adolescents that live on the margins in Los Angeles, Chicago, Fargo, Minneapolis, San Francisco, St. Louis, and New York.

Approximately 4.2 million children experience homelessness in the US each year, around 700,000 of which are unaccompanied minors, according to the bipartisan policy research center National Conference of State Legislatures. The exhibition’s title comes from the official government name for those minors and young adults: unaccompanied youth.

Capshaw met her subjects primarily throuh youth development organizations like The Door in New York and The Night Ministry in Chicago. Many bounce around foster homes and avoid being out in daylight. Those that do venture out during the day often pass unnoticed or, more likely, ignored.

Capshaw’s works then are an act of noticing, of registering these forgotten children as worthy of depiction. In each of the paintings, typically, a young boy or girl gazes directly at the viewer or slightly to the size. Behind them is a great mass of dark, near-black negative space, as if they are  stepping out of a shadowy place, but haven’t decided if they are able to move all the way forward, to be completely seen. Towards the bottom of the frame, their clothes slowly fade away. Not into the void behind them but into runny drips of fading color. T-shirts disintegrate and melt into their logos. Patterns dissolve into clothes and hair. 

At its annual gala on Thursday evening, the Queens Museum honored two of its board members, artist Sable Elyse Smith and designer Angelo Baque.

The evening’s festivities opened with a cocktail hour that was organized by digital producer Jaeki Cho of Righteous Eats that brought together tastings from five different Queens-based restaurants, all set against the iconic Unisphere in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, just outside the Queens Museum, in addition to the institution’s two current solo shows for Aliza Nisenbaum and Tracey Rose.

During dinner, the evening’s program began with remarks from Lauri Cumbo, the current commissioner of cultural affairs for New York City, and the museum’s director Sally Tallant, followed by a performance by Nick Hakim. That led into the honoree presentation.

“It’s beautiful and poetic to receive this honor from the Queens Museum,” Smith said during her remarks. “I just want to sincerely thank the Queens Museum for this honor, which is a way of the recognize and to recognize they must see. And what a surprise it’s been that the Queens Museum has seen me in many ways, over and over again.”

Smith added that being honored meant a lot to her, “especially as someone who grew up being told that they would never amount to anything by teachers and educators. … Because personally, I was never shaken by others’ sheer and utter racism. I’ve always known the expanse of the world was greater than anyone’s words.”

In Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, the narrator, Adam, goes to the Prado every morning to stand in front of the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross. On one particular morning, another man is standing in his place, looking at the painting, and this man suddenly bursts into tears. Adam is irritated and confused: “I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew.” I too have worried about this; a painting has never moved me to tears. A poem has never changed my life. This is why the opera came to me as a surprise—both my love of it and the fact that, the first time I saw La Bohème, I cried through the whole fourth act. The pathos! I was deeply moved by the tragic story and by the register of the musical spectacle, but it was something more primal, too. Here was an art form that seemed not to shy from melodrama but move into its absolute depths, and then transcend and transform them.

I love opera not as an expert, or even as an informed connoisseur. I love it as an amateur, a near-total beginner. And despite its reputation, I think opera is surprisingly accessible, in part because of its absolute embrace and elevation of human feeling. I’m sure that as I spend more time in the Family Circle seats at the Met, I will learn more, and I might even become discerning. But for now I am going for pure pleasure.

This week, we’re publishing a series of pieces on opera. Colm Tóibín shares a letter to his mother, written from the moment when he fell in love with opera; Nancy Lemannconsiders the contenders for the greatest Don Giovanni of all time; Andrew Martin recounts a visit to Nixon in China; Adam Kirsch comes to the defense of Faust. Plus, two reviews of recent opera productions, a piece adapted from Patrick Mackie’s Mozart in Motion, a dispatch from our poetry editor, and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Michael Bazzett’s poem in our Spring issue.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in Sydney announced Friday that it would return an intricately carved temple strut, or tunala, depicting a Hindu goddess to Nepal.

The strut, looted from the 13th-century Ratneshwar temple in Lalitpur, a city southeast of Kathmandu, will be returned in a ceremony attended by Australia’s assistant foreign minister, Tim Watts, at the Patan Museum in Kathmandu on Tuesday, the Sydney Morning Herald reported Friday.

“This is a significant gesture in line with Australia’s commitment to the highest standards of ethical practice and international obligations,” Watts told ABC News Australia. “The return of this tunala to Nepal will further strengthen our bilateral relationship.”

The strut is carved in the form of a tree god known as a shalabhanjika or yakshi and was one of six such struts stolen in 1975 from the shrine. It is thought to have been stolen after Mary Shepherd Slusser, a scholar of architectural studies and Nepalese cultural-history, identified the woodwork at the temple in Lalitpur, during which she photographed the pieces. Shortly after her visit, the ornate woodwork pieces went missing.

Thousands of important artifacts were stolen and illegally smuggled out of Nepal during the 1980s, and, in recent years, there have been extensive grassroots campaigns to see those artifacts, many of which now reside in major museums, returned to the country. The Ratneshwar temple strut became a target for those campaigns in 2021, when Nepali scholars identified it on social media.

A man with a metal detector uncovered a trove of 2,000 year old artifacts while explore a pasture in Llantrisant Fawr, Wales, in March 2019. The National Museum Wales announced the news in a release with McClatchy News late last month.

When metal detectorist Jon Matthews realized he had accidentally found a collection of buried treasure, he contacted local archaeological authorities who further excavated the site. Adelle Bricking, an archaeologist who worked on the excavation, explained the process on Twitter.

The team determined the eight finds, including two that were completely intact, dated back to the Iron Age and were likely buried around the time of Roman conquest during the second half of the first century CE.

One such object includes a metal bowl handle in the shape of an ox head with bowed horns and a jaw that extends into a handle loop.

Along with an ancient Roman saucepan and a broken handle, the team also found two wooden barrel fragments, an Iron Age bucket with copper alloy fittings, and an Iron Age copper alloy cauldron and strainer. A pair of metal bucket mounts also uncovered at the site have an abstract black and orange design.

“Live through Jim Crow, so you can live off of Harlan Crow.”

That’s how MoJo’s Garrison Hayes archly summarizes the hypocrisies of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in light of recent blockbuster revelations that he accepted elite private school tuition money from the real estate mogul for his grandnephew, alongside other lavish, all-expense-paid holidays and gifts from the Texas billionaire.

“If these things are true,” Garrison observes, ironically, in his new video about the many contradictions of Thomas, “your favorite Black conservative appears to be the most exaggerated version of a welfare queen, feeding off the generosity of a wealthy white benefactor who showers him and his family with unlimited trips.”

Since discovering that Thomas once identified as a Black nationalist, Garrison has been fascinated with better understanding the events that led him to become one of the most prominent figures in right-wing politics. Garrison has spent the last few weeks diving deeply into Thomas’ on-the-record speeches, biographies, interviews, and judicial opinions. In this video, he highlights instances where Thomas has opposed programs designed to help Black communities, despite personally benefiting from similar programs. Thomas attended Yale’s law school in 1971 through an affirmative action program but later opposed a similar program in a judicial opinion. When he couldn’t find a legal job after graduation, he saw affirmative action as the reason for his difficulties, writing in his 2007 memoir, “Now I knew what a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preference. I was humiliated—and desperate.”

Despite receiving extraordinary opportunities and assistance throughout his life, Justice Thomas, Garrison concludes, seems committed to subjecting other groups—particularly Black people—to a rigid “bootstrap” individualism. In other words: opportunity for me, but not for thee.