The Netherlands has returned a trove of pre-Hispanic artifacts to Panama, aiding the country as it works toward its goal of reclaiming looted cultural heritage from international collections.

Some 343 ceramic objects were returned on August 29 in what Panama’s Foreign Minister, Erika Mouynes, has called the “largest repatriation of archaeological pieces in the history of Central America.” The Foreign Ministry also reported that another repatriation of heritage objects is set to be received from Italy. 

According to the ministry, this past March, Panama’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Elizabeth Ward, discovered the ceramic artifacts in the collection of the Leiden University, which supported their return. They will join the collection of the Reina Torres de Arauz archaeological museum in Panama City.

The Minister of Culture, Giselle González Villarrué, said in a statement that “the recovery of this Panamanian cultural good shows with facts, the fulfillment of our responsibility and commitment to rescue our identity, of our history as a source of social cohesion and collective pride.”

He added that “the archaeological assets recovered, as well as those that rest in different museums in the country, serve as an economic engine for cultural tourism that we develop, hence the importance of preserving them, restoring them and providing them with the value that allows an exhibition of these with their historical context.”

Remnants of a turret from Hadrian’s Wall were unearthed by archaeologists during construction work for student accommodations in Ouseburn, near Newcastle, England.

Hadrian’s Wall was a defensive fortification that spanned 73 miles across Roman Britain. Sixteen stone forts were built every 1,000 paces, with 80 milecastles, turrets and 6 supply forts set in between. Construction along the Stanegate Road route began in 122 CE and took seven years to complete.

The turret is the only known example of its kind that has been found east of Newcastle. Additionally, the team uncovered a wall ditch and six berm obstacle pits. The finds were announced on Wednesday in a press release by Pre-Construct Archaeology.

Turret 3a, as the structure is now known, is roughly 39 feet long, with foundations that run as long as 8 feet wide.

No remnants of a clay or flagged floor surface were found within the structure, and the archaeologists said this loss may have resulted from construction or leveling undertaken during the 19th or 20th century. They did, however, find a single fragment of a tegula, a tile used in roofing by Romans, among the foundations of the northern wall. 

A towering mother is stationed at Central Park’s mouth. She’s 18-feet-tall with a body of painted bronze. The heads of her 23 children sprout from her womb, belly, shoulders, and back. Her expression is kind: all passersby—and any who may spot her from the distance—are welcome within her embrace. Titled, Ancestor, she’s the work of Bharti Kher, a New Delhi– and London-based artist whose practice collapses daily ritual and ancient symbol, sacred objects and ephemera into new forms. Her creations—sometimes painting, sculpture, or installation—explore individual and collective relations to the cultural past. If we’re not content with history, Kher proposes, manifest a better future.

Ancestor is the most monumental entry in Kher’s practice that spans two decades. It belongs to the artist’s ongoing “Intermediaries” series, mostly surreal clay chimeras—a mix of human, animal, and mythical creature whose fluid identities mirror Kher’s own cross-cultural journey. The work is presented by the Public Art Fund, a nonprofit organization that has been transforming New York’s communal spaces with incisive works of art, and its presentation is curated by Daniel S. Palmer, who was named the chief curator of SCAD Art Museum earlier this year.

Ancestor will be on display in Doris C. Freedman Plaza, near the Fifth Avenue and 59th Street entrance of the park, until next August, after which it will travel to the United Kingdom. Its forever home, however, will be the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. Nadar, the collector who founded the eponymous institution and who has ranked on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list since 2019, has been collecting Kher for around 10 years and considers her one of the “foremost contemporary artists in India.”

“The vision for my collection,” Nadar said upon the sculpture’s unveiling on Thursday, “is to archive memories and preserve the creativity of our culture for future generations. Bharti says her work Ancestor is the keeper of all memories and time. The narrative that this sculpture brings forth has been my trajectory of building KNMA over the last 12 years as a leading institution for the arts of South Asia. This work succinctly captures all of my dreams and wishes and much more.”

To learn more about the work, ARTnews spoke with Kher via email.

At this year’s massive edition of the Armory Show, numbering nearly 250 exhibitors, a moment of reflection comes courtesy of two booths in the fair’s Presents section, for galleries in business for fewer than 10 years. The works on view are by two artists—Joiri Minaya (at Calderón) and Nona Faustine (at Higher Pictures Generation)—whose practices have long explored what our relationship to the land we live on.

Minaya’s works often reflect on how white people imagine the Caribbean landscape, specifically that of the Dominican Republican, and what their misconceptions mean for those who actually inhabit it. Two untitled examples from her ongoing “Divergences” series are hung over a printed wallpaper showing impressionistic lush greenery; Minaya photographed mid-century wallpaper and then digitally altered it in Photoshop to create a non-repeating pattern that seems to glitch.

Other examples from this series went on view at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, in 2020 as part of a commissioned installation. As with her past work, which saw Minaya in a full-cover bodysuit printed with a tropical design blending into the landscapes, these recent pieces are about “both agency and opacity” as a way to “escape notions” of tropical landscapes like those in the Caribbean simply as vacation vistas in the minds of Americans and Europeans, the artist said during the fair’s VIP preview. She added that she wants to “deconstruct that baggage of respite” as a way to think about the colonial legacies of these places.

Installation view of works by Nona Faustine, from her “White Shoes” series, in the booth of Higher Pictures Generation, New York, at the 2022 Armory Show.

Minaya’s Kemper installation was, in part, influenced by the local history of Quindaro Townsite, an abolitionist community in Kansas City that had a short-lived history but served as a safe site for enslaved people who had escaped from the South. Faustine’s work similarly looks at sites throughout New York that are entangled in the city’s under-known and frequently erased history with slavery in the U.S.

A small booth by Higher Pictures Generation, 20 photographs from the artist’s 40-image portfolio “White Shoes” are on view. (The portfolio was published as a monograph with essays by Pamela Sneed and Jessica Lanay last year.) Faustine has previously shown several of these images, which often show her wearing nothing but the titular white pumps at these sites, but when seen alongside the new works, these older pictures still feel as fresh and poignant as when they debuted.  

Isn’t it amazing? That will likely be the case for a new exhibition opening Friday at David Zwirner in New York, titled “A Maze Zanine, Amaze Zaning, A Mezzaning, Meza-9” that brings together the work of 50 artists benefiting Performance Space New York. Proceeds from sales made through the exhibition, which is organized by four artists—Kerstin Brätsch, Ei Arakawa, Laura Owens, and Nicole Eisenman—will allow the nonprofit to expand its programming and offer artist fellowships.

“As soon as Jenny Schlenzka and Pati Hertling at Performance Space enlisted these four artists to organize this show, it was clear this would be something more than just another benefit,” Thor Shannon, a director at Zwirner, told ARTnews in an email. “I think everyone was eager to somehow capture the guerrilla attitude of Performance Space with each creative decision. There was immediate consensus to take the (let’s admit) slightly tired, if noble, format of the benefit group show, and elevate it, complicate it, dial it up to 100. “

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The concept of the group show quickly ballooned in proportion as the organizers kept inviting artists (all painters) until they reached a gobsmacking 50. Artists featured in the show include Mickalene Thomas, Giangiacomo Rossetti, Marilyn Minter, and Dana Schutz, whose vivid work Painting with a Gun (2022) of a fire-breathing artist painting in a black void will be on offer.

Kerstin Brätsch, Unstable Talismanic Rendering_Psychopompo (with gratitude to master marbler Dirk Lange), 2017.

In addition to those works, Brätsch, Arakawa, Owens, and Eisenman will also debut their own collaborative work, which they created over the summer at Zwirner’s space on West 19th Street in Chelsea, which Shannon said the four artists used “as an art studio for the end of the summer, with carte blanche to do whatever they wanted to it.”

He continued, “I think the art world and market really discourages these kinds of acts of collaboration between artists—demanding a kind of almighty mono-ego—so everyone said it felt special to work alongside peers they admired without external market pressure, given the show is a benefit.”

Virginia Dwan, a dealer whose short-lived gallery propelled many Minimalist and Land artists to fame during the late ’60s and early ’70s, died on September 5 after a battle with cancer. She was 90, a representative for her archive said.

In the past decade, Dwan has been canonized as one of the 20th century’s great American dealers for her risk-taking sensibility and her willingness to put money behind game-changing artworks.

Her gallery, which opened in Los Angeles and later moved to New York, was in operation for only a little over a decade, but in that time, it helped spur the careers of artists like Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, Fred Sandback, Carl Andre, William Anastasi, and more. Along the way, she amassed a rich collection of art from the era, which she pledged as a gift to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 2013.

Dwan has been feted by museums, beloved by artists, and touted by dealers who are influenced by her. But she has always kept a low profile, and New York Times critic Holland Cotter reported that curator James Meyer had to persuade her to agree to a 2016 show surveying her gallery. The show ended up appearing at the National Gallery of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and was widely praised.

That all may explain why prior to the 2016 retrospective, Dwan was considered an underrated figure. The New York Times interviewed her in 2003 for an article titled “The Forgotten Godmother of Dia’s Artists.” Writing in X-TRA in 2011, critic Jessica Dawson asked, “Why has Dwan gone largely uncredited in the development of postwar Los Angeles art?”

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Marcus, Luke, Andy and Jim are here after a mixed bag of European results, as West Ham finally cast off their Romanian hoodoo, Man United's renaissance ends abruptly and Arsenal win at the Home of Football.

We also look over some of the seismic moves going down this week, as Graham Potter casts Breach's Brighton aside and Nathan Redmond frees himself from the fevered grasp of Papa Pep Guardiola. 

***We recorded this episode on Friday morning before the Premier League fixture postponements were announced***

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Curious what it looks like to run for school board? Wondering if now is your time to step up and help provide governance for your local education system? Let’s dive in.

It’s no secret that school board elections right now are crucial. It’s also no secret that some school board candidates — even in nonpartisan elections — are being funded by right-wing political action committees to infuse the board with specific conservative agendas. Groups like Moms For Liberty run trainings across the country, hoping to get their agenda on the local level to further remove the voices of any non-white, non-straight, non-Christians from schools (and to help accelerate the process of destroying public school funding more broadly). While certainly these groups have money and people behind them, they do not speak on behalf of an entire community, and it is crucial that those with talent, passion, and an interest in serving all of a community, rather than a cherry-picked portion of it, put their name into the hat of serving on the local school board.

The following is applicable to most school boards in the US, but because no information is uniform across the country, spend a little time ensuring you know the steps and process for your municipality. Each state has an association of school boards, and those websites will be flush with updated information and insight into the rules specific to your location.

How To Run for School Board

Determining Eligibility and Time Commitment

Familiarize yourself with what school boards do. It might sound silly to say that, but it is vital to know what you may or may not be able to do with a role on the board. Know when your next school board election is and how many seats will be up for election. Research the candidates in those seats currently to determine if you want to run against them or wait to run until another candidate’s seat is available. In some cases, you may see an open seat you want to run for, but your residency does not meet the boundaries of that seat. Some are district wide “at large,” meaning you represent the entire district and some come from specific limits within a community, meaning you’d represent a specific part of a community. (Note: you can access some school board information for eight states in the US with our School Board Project Part 1 and Part 2). Make sure you are eligible to run. Every state is different, but in general, you must be 18, have no felony convictions, are not employed by the district for which you’re running, and you live in the district. Some states have educational requirements as well. Prepare to volunteer — most school board positions are unpaid. School boards are, by design, inequitable and thus, those without financial strains have more ability to serve. Know that you’ll spend 15-20 hours a month, if not more, doing school board related work. Some state school board associations clock that time much higher. School boards are, by design, inequitable and thus, those without work, family, or extracurricular strains have more ability to serve.

Qualities of Good School Board Candidates

I’ve written about my book club for Book Riot before. It’s been one of my favorite things for almost ten years. How our book clubs works, generally, is that each member takes a turn choosing a book. Everyone reads it, and then we meet once a month to discuss that pick. When you choose the book, you lead the discussion. That means, yes, if you choose the book, you ask the questions. 

At my book club, each meeting begins with the discussion leader sharing why they chose the book and what they thought about it. Maybe they chose the book because it’s a buzzy new book that they’re excited about or maybe it’s a classic that they have been meaning to read for years. Their initial thoughts are usually just a quick summary — they thought it was exciting, they thought it was boring, it was a slow start but got better — and then they, popcorn-style, ask someone else in the group for their initial thoughts. This primes the pump for the rest of the conversation, and often the book club discussion goes fairly smoothly from there. But, if it doesn’t, then the person who chose the book is in charge of keeping the conversation going. 

This has led to varying degrees of panic over the past ten years — less now than then, but still sometimes now. But after more than 100 book club meetings, I’ve learned a few things about what makes a good book club question. 

A good book club question invites your book club to get talking. My book club’s first question is sort of a no-judgment zone. The point is just to start talking. The first few quiet moments of book club can feel a bit like staring at a blank page that needs to be filled, so your goal with your first question is just to break that silence. A good book club question is concerned about character. Even the most plot-driven story is driven by people on the page making decisions and going about their days. So what do you think about the characters in your book? But don’t just ask if they were likable. Were they believable? Do their decisions make sense? Would you do the same in their situation? A good book club question is an investigation. Authors love to leave clues in their work, little allusions to work that inspires them. Is there an epigraph in the beginning of the book? What book (or movie or play or song) is it from? What might that have to do with the book you hold in your hands? Do the characters listen to a particular song? Is it a real song or invented for the book, like “Never Let Me Go” was invented for the book of the same name? A good book club question directs the conversation outwards. Does this book have something to say about the larger world? If it’s an old book, does it still feel relevant, or do the ideals of the characters seem dated? If it’s a new book, does it talk about the world in an interesting way, or does it seem to beat a dead horse? A good book club question might be the result of — or inspire — a Google search. When you read the book, did you come across any questions that drove you to a web search? Maybe you’re curious about the bookstore the characters visited. Is it real? Is it based on a real store? Or maybe you want to know where the author is from, and how that influenced the book. Ask your book club members what they think! A good book club question imagines what might have been different. My book club recently read a book where the first quarter of the book was about a conversation in a graveyard. Would the conversation have been different if it had taken place in a barn? Or in a restaurant? What if it was a different genre? Sometimes imagining something different about a book shows you what is essential about the book. A good book club question might come from a reading guide — or it might not. These days, many books have a URL on the back flap or maybe on a back cover that invites you to download reading guide questions. (If not, you can Google “BOOK TITLE + discussion questions” and usually come up with something.) These can be a great starting point, and there was a point in my life when I was committed to printing these guides out or saving them in my notes app so I knew I would always have a question handy. They’re useful, especially when they provide some background to the book, but I wouldn’t rely on them. Going down the list of questions often feels like you’re going through a school assignment. A good book club question gets various — and sometimes conflicting! — answers. The most boring book club conversations I’ve ever been a part of were the meetings where everyone liked the book. When you just sit in a circle and agree with each other, there’s just not much to go on. The most fun, on the other hand, were when we had a 50/50 split of people who loved the book and people who absolutely hated it. The fun of book club is in learning about your book club members through their opinions of the book. The best book clubs are the ones where I leave with a head full of different ideas about the book than I had when I walked in. A good book club question inspires respectful and kind conversation. The fastest way to kill a conversation is to make someone feel silly or stupid for their opinion or because they misremembered a plot point. Book club arguments are a delight, but everyone has to understand that the stakes at book club are low: you don’t need to agree, and you don’t have to convert someone to liking the exact same things about a novel that you do.

Hopefully, this list gave you some great ideas for how to keep the conversation rolling at your book club! If you want great book club discussion questions that can work for any book, check out this list!

Want some rules to keep your book club running? Here’s what my book club does. Here are some great picks for your book club to read this fall!