Modern history has most often been written through the Western gaze and, with that power, comes the ability to control and shape narratives.

For Africans specifically, this gaze has distorted perceptions of the continent’s diverse historical experiences and failed to properly reflect Africans’ true stories. A new generation of Africans, however, are taking ownership of their countries’ histories and, in effect, helping reclaim their narratives.

Rita Mawuena Benissan, a Ghanaian-American interdisciplinary artist, has been at the forefront of this drive. In 2020, Benissan founded Si Hene, an award-winning non-profit foundation collecting and preserving archives telling stories about Ghana’s chieftaincy and traditional culture, creating awareness around its royal history, and making it accessible globally via digital media.

The nonprofit’s name means “Enstoolment” in Ghana’s Akan language, referring to the process of raising a chief to power in many African ethnic groups.

Benissan’s work has been exhibited at the 2022 La Biennale De Dakar, 2021 Afrochella Festival, and EFIE: Museum as Home, a group museum exhibition at Dortmund U in Germany in 2021.

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The Headlines

CALENDAR CONFIRMATION. The new New York fair from Independent, which will focus on 20th-century art, was just announced in May, but it already has an exhibitor list, and it is 31 galleries strong, Maximilíano Durón reports in ARTnews. Independent 20th Century, as the venture is called, will land at the Battery Maritime Building at the southern tip of Manhattan in early September as the Armory Show runs in Midtown. The galleries taking part include Corbett vs. Dempsey of Chicago, Garth Greenan of New York, and Parker Gallery of Los Angeles. About half of them will be doing an Independent fair for the first time. For more on the event, head to ARTnews.

MARKET MOVEMENT. It not just at Art Basel where artworks are selling for substantial sums, defying the downturn in the equities markets: On Thursday, Heritage Auctions sold the cover art of the first issue of the vaunted miniseries Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) for a cool $2.4 million, the New York Times reports. Created by Frank Miller , it is the latest in a number of comic piece to sell for seven figures in recent years, as the paper details. Meanwhile, the market for female Old Masters has been heating up in recent years, the Financial Times reports. “I think everyone, museums and private collectors alike, took a step back and thought about their collections and realized how important it was to make sure they had a diverse collection,” Calvine Harvey, of Sotheby’s, told the paper.

The Digest

Federal charges have been filed against a 71-year-old man for allegedly illegally excavating Native American artifacts near Tightwad, Missouri, over the course of five years, causing extensive damage. The man’s lawyers have not commented. [The Washington Post]

Good news for Walter De Maria fans: Two of his key installations in Manhattan, The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), are closing for temporary renovations that will allow them to stay open all year round. (They currently shutter for the summer.) [The Art Newspaper]

Independent, which organizes an annual art fair each spring in New York, has announced the 31 galleries that will participate in its new 20th-century art focused fair, set to have its inaugural edition in September at the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan.

Among the exhibitors lined up to take part in Independent 20th Century, which will run September 8–11 and coincide with the Armory Show, are Cheim & Read, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Garth Greenan Gallery, Karma, Parker Gallery, and Venus Over Manhattan. This edition will also see 15 galleries participate for the first time in any iteration of Independent ever, including Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, James Fuentes, Susan Inglett Gallery, Nahmad Contemporary, and Shin Gallery.

All of the exhibitors will present work by artists from the 20th-century whose practices have historically been overlooked or under-recognized, matching a tendency that has been rising in the art world over the past decade, including at museums and international biennials such as this year’s Venice Biennale.

Though Independent 20th Century will operate as a commercial art fair, not all the works on view will be for sale, as some will come as loans from private collections.

In an email to ARTnews, Matthew Higgs, the director of New York’s White Columns who is organizing the fair with Independent’s director Elizabeth Dee, said, “Over the past 20 years we have seen the increased presence of historical bodies of work within exhibitions of contemporary art. In the past large-scale exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale focused almost exclusively on the art of the present, whereas almost 50 percent of the artists in the current edition might be described as ‘historical.’ This tendency—i.e. the framing of the ‘contemporary’ through the lens of the past—is arguably the dominant curatorial narrative of this century.”

Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the Swiss watch company’s art-focused arm, has commissioned artist Andreas Angelidakis to create a monumental artwork that will pay homage to ancient Greek culture.

Titled the Center for the Critical Appreciation of Antiquity, the new work will be situated inside the Espace Niemeyer, a dome-like structure in Paris that was designed by the Brazilian modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer.

The piece’s 19-day run will kick off on October 11, and will be viewable during the first edition of Art Basel’s Paris fair.

Angelidakis, who is based in Athens, will look to his home country’s distant past and attempt to bridge it with the present with his new work, which will fill the Espace Niemeyer with sculptures, paintings, and collages. It is loosely based on the Temple of Olympian Zeus, an Athens structure that predates the Espace Niemeyer by more than two centuries.

The artist was trained as an architect and, in his own description, is now an “architect who doesn’t build.” He frequently considers places and their history, often connecting them to ancient Greece. For the Athens portion of Documenta 14 in 2017, for example, he created works composed of seating modules whose names referred to the Greek words for community and the daemon representing war.

The football season has one final huge fixture before its quick summer break: Andy Brassell vs Vithushan Ehantharajah, of course! Explicit language warning for this one…

Jim, Andy and Vish are back for the final daily Ramble of the season to chat Romelu Lukaku’s mooted Chelsea u-turn, Arsenal’s surprise execution of The Quiet Transfer™, and our new favourite commentator over in Anguilla! 

We kick off with an announcement about our upcoming schedule over the summer!

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

Italy has established a new museum in Rome dedicated to showcasing more than 200 artifacts that are believed to have been stolen from cultural sites across the country and trafficked in the US.

211 of the artifacts, the majority of the 260 that make up the new museum’s rotating collection, were recovered during seizures led by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which estimates the value of the grouping of recovered artifacts to be worth around $10 million.

The newly-minted institution, “Museum of Rescued Art,” is housed in the complex of the National Roman Museum that is home to the ancient city’s 306 C.E. Baths of Diocletian. The 260 artifacts, ranging from Etruscan, Greek and Roman origins, which are still being returned in batches to the Italian government, have gone on display as part of the new enterprise’s first exhibit. Some of the objects were recovered from private collections, museums, and auction houses.

Inaugurating the museum’s Octagonal Hall exhibition space on Wednesday in an official ceremony was Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini, Carabinieri commander Teo Luzi, and Massimo Osanna, director of Italy’s state museums. In a press conference, Franceschini described the objects populating the new space as having an “intangible value” linked to Italy’s “historical memory.” Many of them, he said, had never been viewed in public before.

Matthew Bogdanos, the Manhattan assistant district attorney who has since 2017 been in charge of overseeing the department’s cultural property seizures and works closely with the Carabinieri, told ARTnews the New York unit is “humbled that these repatriated antiquities can be on display for the public back in their country of origin.”

Damien Hirst, who rose to fame in the ’90s as the enfant terrible of the Young British Artists, is best known for shocking audiences with his art—from dead animals suspended in formaldehyde to floating basketballs to collections of pills—and the high price tags that have now come to accompany his works.

Hirst’s first came to prominence with his inclusion in the controversial 1988 exhibition “Freeze” that brought together several YBA artists; the show was staged while Hirst was still a student at London’s Goldsmiths College. Utilizing low-brow found objects with an entrepreneurial spirit, the YBAs exemplified a shift in what could be considered art, one that was accompanied by considerable criticism and outrage as to their art’s merit.

Hirst’s own work often centers on issues like death and systems of belief and value, in particular, focusing on the power of the art market. In September 2008, on the brink of the Great Recession, Hirst notoriously sold a body of new work at Sotheby’s, bringing in £70.5 million (around $127 million at the time) and skipping the art world’s gallery system, which would typically handle the first sales of new work. Some have argued that this ended his run “as an art-market darling,” but presently Hirst is represented by major galleries like Gagosian and White Cube. Add to this Hirst’s reputation as the U.K’s richest artist, who has amassed a serious collection of contemporary art that landed him on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list each year between 2008 and 2014.

In the years since, controversy has continued to follow Hirst, from designing the penthouse suite at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas in 2019 filled with his greatest hits to recent reports that his infamous diamond skull allegedly didn’t actually sell in 2007 for $100 million. His history of following the money has recently extended into his first foray into NFTs last summer. “The Currency,” a digital collection that riffs on his series of “spot” paintings, which are visually similar to the NFTs, gave buyers the option to decide between a physical painting or an NFT. In an added flair of drama, the piece not chosen would subsequently be burned.

But he is not only focused on the NFT market: his recent real-life exhibition, “Forgiving and Forgetting” at Gagosian’s 24th Street location was his first show in New York in four years. That show opened in January and was later extended until April 16. Through it all, Hirst has succeeded in keeping his name at the top of our minds.

When putting together the book censorship news this week, it felt like each story was trying to one up the next, ranging from the ridiculous to the truly chilling. We’re seeing an increase in lawsuits and legal involvement, from residents suing officials for banning books, to parents suing teachers for reading LGBTQ books in class, to the ACLU planning legal action against a school’s new book challenge policy.

This is why Kelly Jensen and I keep emphasizing that simply reading banned books or buying them isn’t enough: this is a systemic issue, and it needs a systemic solution. We need to organize in order to fight back against this wave of censorship, and that includes paying attention to who is getting elected to school and library boards — if you have the opportunity, running for these positions is one of the most effective ways that you as an individual can fight censorship.

In May, we announced the School Board Project, which is a database in progress that documents every school board and school board election in the country, state by state. It’s a massive project, but we’ve been chipping away it, prioritizing the states that have school board elections coming up. Eventually, we hope to do the same thing for library boards.

As Kelly explained, this is meant to be a resource that you can build on for your own local activism:

The School Board Project allows anyone to download the spreadsheets and add any relevant information that helps them. For example: individuals or groups may find including the names and stances of those running for boards in the sheet to help guide voters and/or as a means of tracking the kind of topics that are producing the most discussion in those districts. It can be useful for those considering a run for school board to collect information about what they need to do to become eligible or how long they have to prepare for a run. The possibilities here are wide open.