This week, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. announced the repatriation of three antiquities collectively valued at $725,000 to Yemen. The items are an alabaster ram with an inscribed base, an alabaster female figure, and a silver vessel with elaborate inscribed decorations.

The three items had been recovered as part of the criminal investigation into private collector and Metropolitan Museum of Art trustee Shelby White. As a result of the investigation, 89 items from 10 different countries, valued at nearly $69 million, were seized from White. These included nine antiquities repatriated to Turkey last month and seizures of Roman and Greek antiquities that took place last December.

According to the Manhattan DA’s office, the three items were acquired by White from the Mansour Gallery in London; art dealer Robin Symes, who was later convicted of antiquities trafficking in 2005; and from a Christie’s auction in New York.

The first item of the three repatriated items, an alabaster ram, is a funerary object from the Hayd bin Aqeel necropolis in Shabwa, Yemen. The ram was looted in 1994 during the country’s civil war and dates back to the 5th century B.C.E. The second, an alabaster female figure, is also a funerary item depicting a female god. The figure dates back to the 2nd century B.C.E. The third, an inscribed silver vessel, dates back to 200 to 300 C.E. It features an inscription that allowed experts to identify its origin as the same looted location as the alabaster ram.

“This repatriation underscores how art and culture can serve as powerful symbols of hope,” District Attorney Bragg said in a statement. “Our investigation into the collector Shelby White has allowed dozens of antiquities that were ripped from their countries of origin to finally return home,”

Due to the ongoing civil war in Yemen, the three items will be temporarily displayed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

The trilogy's most 'unruly and excessive' instalment is also 'sweetly touching'

A months-long artists’ boycott of a prominent Finnish museum came to an end after the institution said it would cut ties with a controversial patron.

Last December, Finnish art workers and artists began protesting Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma for its ties to arms dealer heir Chaim “Poju” Zabludowicz, whose has long supported pro-Israel initiatives. The Finnish-British billionaire has long sat on the board of the institution’s support foundation and has lent many artworks to the museum over the years.

The strike came to an end yesterday when the Finnish National Gallery (of which Kiasma is a part) committed to new guidelines for ethical fundraising.

“The strike was begun out of solidarity with the Palestinians. It matters that our biggest art institution has taken human rights issues seriously,” said Finnish artist Terike Haapoja, who participated in a boycott of the Kiasma.

The boycott lasted five months and involved 220 art workers and four art organizations. Some 150 artists agreed to boycott Kiasma until ties to Zabludowicz were severed.

Pet owners who love to travel, as well those that live in Greece, will soon have a lot more places to take their beloved animal companions. This week, the country’s Culture Ministry announced that pets will soon be allowed into more than 120 archaeological sites—but not some of the most popular locations for tourists.

The policy change was unanimously approved by Greece’s Central Archaeological Council. But pet owners shouldn’t rush to make plans, as the organization did not specify an implementation date for the new regulations.

Pets still won’t be allowed at popular sites like the Acropolis in Athens, Knossos in Crete, Olympia, and Delphi due to their large annual populations of visitors, as well as as ancient theaters, temples, graves and monuments with mosaic floors.

Currently, only guide dogs for disabled visitors are allowed into the country’s archaeological sites.

The decision is “a first, but important, step toward harmonizing the framework of accessibility to monuments and archaeological sites with the standards of other European countries, where entry rules for pets already apply,” Culture Minister Lina Mendoni said in a statement.

Esther McGowan, the current director of Visual AIDS, will depart her role at the end of May. She will join the Aperture as its director of development in June.

In 2012, McGowan joined Visual AIDS, the contemporary art nonprofit dedicated to supporting the work of artists living with HIV/AIDS and those lost to AIDS-related causes, as its deputy director. In 2017, she was promoted to executive director.

During her tenure there, McGowan helped to significantly raise the organization’s profile, expanding its staff and moving the organization to a larger space that houses archives related to artists and institutions that Visual AIDS maintains.

“When I first joined Visual AIDS in 2012, I was thrilled to become a part of an incredible community and to work for an organization with such an important legacy in AIDS activism and visual art,” McGowan wrote in an email to ARTnews. “When I was promoted to Executive Director in 2017, my goal was to grow the organization in ways that were sustainable but that also provided a platform for the high level of programming that takes place year after year.”

A major focus of McGowan’s leadership at Visual AIDS has been to deepen the organization’s connections with HIV+ women, who have historically been marginalized in conversations about HIV/AIDS. The nonprofit’s monthly Women’s Empowerment Art Therapy Workshops, founded by artist and activist Shirlene Cooper, have been staged via partnerships with major museums, including MoMA PS1, the Queens Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum.  

A 2011 study at University College London found that when we behold a pleasing work of art, blood rushes to our head in a physiological reflex that’s akin to gazing at a loved one. What explains such an immediate and unconscious seduction? In his new book Affinities: On Art and Fascination, critic and essayist Brian Dillon takes this instinctive rapport as the starting point for a series of elegant and discursive meditations on art’s enchantments. The book is the third in a trilogy devoted to close reading; its predecessors, Essayism (2017) and Suppose a Sentence (2020), were paeans to essays and sentences respectively. In Affinities, Dillon turns his attention to images, and is again a rangy scavenger. His source material—photographs, film stills, and engravings, among other artifacts—chronologically spans the 17th century to the pandemic lockdown of 2020. Each chapter riffs on an image, tracing the contours of an artist’s biography or following Dillon’s own intuitive associations. Heavyweights such as Warhol, Arbus, and Eggleston mingle with more esoteric subjects like migraine auras, the 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, and the 19th century astronomical observations of the English polymath John Herschel. Interlaced with these short exegeses is a ten-part “essay on affinity” that unpacks the historical, etymological, conceptual, and personal baggage of the term. The result is a provocative and open-ended investigation of art’s ineffable allure.   

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Dillon begins with semantic negotiations. “How to describe, as a writer, the relation it seemed the artists had with their chosen and not chosen—what is the word? Talismans? Tastes? Sympathies? Familiars? Superstitions? Affinities,” he writes. He describes affinity as “something like but unlike critical interest, which has its own excitements but remains too often at the level of knowledge, analysis, conclusions, at worst the total boredom of having opinions.” Dillon’s brand of affinity goes deeper than the internet’s algorithmic recommendations, and is more authentic than the manufactured kinships trumpeted in marketing collateral. Affinity, he writes, is like fascination, but not. It’s a less sentimental sibling to appreciation: a term with the same bloodline but a different character. It’s beyond aesthetics. It’s impermanent. Ultimately, it’s not even thinkable—a “mode of dumb fascination.” Elsewhere in the book, he describes the attempt to anatomize affinity as “stupid” and “idiotic.” His thematic playground here is the gap between how art transfixes us and our inability to articulate that transfixion. (T.J. Clark’s 2006 book on Poussin, The Sight of Death, shares such language; he wonders if only “the physical, literal, dumb” act of looking can satisfy the mind.)   

It’s risky to structure a book as a kind of Wunderkammer—what if it dissipates into its own eclecticism?—and riskier still to feature artists who have been embalmed by decades of analysis. But Dillon’s accretive method is itself a textual demonstration of affinity that helps his various subjects cohere. Artists who have their own chapter reappear in chapters about others: William Klein is invoked alongside Arbus and the Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada; Claude Cahun is mentioned in connection to Dora Maar and Francesca Woodman. Chapters succeed each other in subtle embellishment, echoing or annotating earlier themes. In the first essay, for example, Dillon considers Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, the first book in English to present observations made with a microscope. “Among the better-known illustrations in the first edition of 1665 are those showing a fly’s many-faceted eye, the starry shapes of ice crystals and a prodigious bristling fold-out flea,” Dillon writes. This is followed by a chapter on Louis Daguerre’s Vue du boulevard du Temple (ca. 1838), a photograph of a Paris street that’s believed to be the first to depict living people: the smudged apparitions of a man and his boot polisher. Nothing links these two works except an analogy that Dillon leaves implicit: Just as a microscope reveals the invisible world around us, so can a photograph illuminate what we typically ignore.  

John Herschel, Results of astronomical observations made during the years 1834, 5, 6, 7, 8, at the Cape of Good Hope, 1847.

This understated approach is typical of Dillon. He writes atmospherically and impressionistically rather than critically. Here is how he describes a photo of dancer Loie Fuller: “She looks like a primitive aircraft coming apart, a soft disintegrated Blériot.” About the elderly subject of a 1970s Eggleston photo, whose particolored dress clashes with the floral cushion she sits on, he writes: “She holds onto her cigarette as if she might disappear amid all this patterned excess.” In Arbus’s ensemble of outcasts and misfits he discerns an “aristocratic distance”—an apt phrase whose accuracy doesn’t evoke any one image but the whole dispassionate vantage of Arbus’s work. 

As befits a book conceived during the pandemic, Affinities is introspective and fitfully elegiac, even as it seeks communion. In his chapter on Vue du boulevard du Temple, Dillion recalls walking around London during the spring of 2020. He notes “a category of city person who seemed suddenly more visible than before”—fellow housebound Londoners out for a stroll who, like Daguerre’s phantasmal figures from nearly two centuries earlier, are rendered newly vivid by their circumstances. A chapter about the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, a monument in London whose plaques record stories of ordinary people who died while saving the lives of others, begins as another pandemic scene before taking a more philosophical turn. “The things a nation may conceal from itself inside an idea of heroism,” Dillon muses, noting that many would-be plaques on the monument remain blank. Elisions, often conceptual, recur throughout the book, most pointedly in the final chapter, which lists “images that are not mentioned and do not appear in this book, but will not leave the mind.” (Among the missing: French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue’s depiction of his cat catching a ball; filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Polaroid of his wife and their dog standing by a fence in Russia.) 

Project For Empty Space (PES), the New Jersey-based arts organization that supports socially-aware artists, has tripled their operating budget thanks to a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Grant in Arts and Culture. 

With this windfall, which will flow into the PES coffers through 2024, the organization will be able to expand its hub in Newark, double the number of artists who can participate in its residency program, and hire much needed staff.

“There are so many ways that this funding allows us to realize many of our long-standing goals,” the PES co-directors Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol told ARTnews via email.

PES is rooted in art tied to social discourse and activism and the directors say that besides the obvious benefits of expansion, the Mellon Grant money will help them encourage artists in PES programs “to really flex their imaginations during their times with us.”

Like many small non-profits, PES runs with a relatively small crew. The Grant money will also allow Wahi and Jampol to bolster their staff starting with the addition of a Residency Manager and a Director of Development, who will help with PES’s expansion plans and influx of artists.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has pushed the boundaries of Native American art since the 1970s with her expansive practice, activism, and advocacy. Her just-opened show “Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map” at the Whitney Museum of American Art is the first retrospective for an Indigenous artist that the institution has ever organized. It brings together five decades of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures—including her iconic painting from 2000, Memory Map. Quick-to-See Smith has also been busy working as a curator of “The Land Carries Our Ancestors,” a survey of contemporary Native American art slated to open September 24 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Quick-to-See Smith spoke with Art in America about how she began making memory maps, the importance of Native languages, and bringing different communities together.

How did you start making memory maps?

I started making these kind of abstract landscape maps from fields of fireweed and mustard—things that I would see on my reservation—when I was in graduate school. In the early work from the 1970s, you can see these abstract maps with bars of color intermixed with pictographs. For roughly the last 50 years, I’ve been collecting books on pictographs, petroglyphs, and glyphs, and I visit sites. I’ve always had a long-running interest in how we Native people each see the land because we come from various terrains and geographical areas, all with different foods, housing, traditions, and origin stories. There are 561 federally recognized tribes and hundreds more that are not recognized.

One thing I discovered was that most of us didn’t make a horizon line. I really didn’t know why, but, in talking to people and thinking about myself and how I work, I believe it’s related to our stories, which portray a holistic world: the sky above and the land below, groundwater recharge. Everything is connected. Our stories are often interwoven with things that come down from the sky, particularly in relation to water. Near my house, there’s a site that’s at least 1,000 years old or older and, if I go down in the kiva, all the images inscribed onto the wall—the catfish, the river, a woman giving birth, the eagle with water spray coming out of its mouth sharing with the cactus—center around water. Water is life. Now we’re in a drought, so that makes it even more important.

I don’t usually write to music. I’m too susceptible; I find it can give what I’m writing a false, unearned resonance, like slipping a poem into Garamond to make it “better.” But there are two songs that are rhythmic enough, each in their own way, that I sometimes put on a loop when I’m revising. There’s something about the cadence and the breath in them that works for me, that creates a kind of chamber that keeps the outside world at bay. And though I’ve heard “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” (a quote so apt, it’s attributed to no less than a dozen people), here goes:

“Spiegel im Spiegel,” 1978—Arvo Pärt 

The piece—in English, “Mirror in the Mirror”—begins with a simple ascending arpeggio, little triads that subtly alter, reflected back and forth like light on water, a mirror looking into a mirror. The melody stretches over and through the scales, extending like a long breath. The left hand on the piano arrives, eventually and sparingly, to ground the upward yearning, trees reaching toward light from the roots. The work is minimal in its composition, yet never fails to tug me out of my momentary preoccupations into a broader sense of time, drawing me into eternity through the little window of now. There are many beautiful recordings, but Angèle Dubeau’s version is a good place to begin, I think. If you put it on and close your eyes, everything will soon feel softer.

“Fleurette Africaine,” 1962—Duke Ellington

Karin Hindsbo, the director of Oslo’s National Museum, will be the next director of Tate Modern, making her the second woman in a row—and the second one ever—to lead the London institution.

Hindsbo succeeds Frances Morris, who became the first woman to lead Tate Modern in 2016. Morris’s term at Tate Modern ends this month.

Under Hindsbo, the National Museum launched an epic project to bring together several disparate institutions run by the Norwegian state under its aegis. Along with that came an effort to significantly expand the museum, making it the largest art institution in the Nordic region.

Maria Balshaw, director of the Tate museum network, said in a statement, “The success of the new National Museum in Oslo—delivered in the midst of a global pandemic—is a testament to her skill as a leader. Her nuanced and diverse approach to expressing national and transnational artistic ecologies chimes with Tate Modern’s ethos brilliantly.”

That new building, which opened last June, added more than 580,000 square feet and cost more than $700 million. Upon its opening, the building was well-received in the international press, but the run-up to its inauguration was contentious in Norway, where issues with contractors working on the expansion were widely reported in the press.