Inspiration

This summer, I took Diné Bizaad (Navajo language) and Diné history classes at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation. My time there reminded me of Indigenous tenacity — the quiet, daily work of Native language and history professors, art teachers, staff, and students who sustain culture from within. Their commitment keeps Indigenous languages, knowledge systems, and creative practices alive for future generations.  As Native American people, many of our ancestors survived their own versions of erasure under colonial rule. This Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we are witnessing another chapter of that same violence unfold in Palestine — an all-too-familiar attempt at genocide, streamed to us in real time. At home, the ongoing American colonial project continues to meet resistance, a presence I felt in the classrooms of Diné College. My Diné grandparents were forced to leave their Diné Bizaad-speaking families as young children to attend Christian, English-speaking boarding schools sanctioned by the United States government. Shimásání (my grandmother) always encouraged me to learn Diné Bizaad and Diné history. Our ancestors’ strength laid the road for us, and it’s our responsi

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Mavericks of Style: The Seventies in Color, by Uri McMillan. It releases October 21 from Duke University Press.[Grace] Jones and [Ming] Smith initially bonded over the obvious—neither fit into the modeling world’s narrow ethos at the time. Jones very briefly worked for the Black Beauty agency but left after a month because she was told her facial features did not fit within “Black beauty” standards: “They said, Your face doesn’t fit. You are really black and your lips are big but your nose is too thin and your eyes are slanty. You won’t get the catalog work that brings in the big bucks.”1 Both were also initially passed over by Wilhelmina Models, opened in 1967 by Dutch-born model Wilhemina Cooper, presumably because neither was potentially marketable in Cooper’s eyes. But perhaps even more fundamental, they both felt an urgent desire for aesthetic freedom. “It was a much more conservative time,” Smith said. “We didn’t fit in as regular models. We were too exotic, too light, too dark.” Jones concurs, remarking that she was perceived as “too black for the white world, not black enough for the black world.”2 Smith adds that Jones was often perce

In 1963 Keïta was forced to close his studio by Mali’s post-independence socialist government and start work as its official photographer. His studio portraits were anonymously exhibited for the first time in the West in 1991 in a group show at New York’s Museum for African Art; a subsequent solo show at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 1994—of prints made from negatives brought to France from Mali—was a sensation, sparking an explosion of interest in Keïta’s work as well as in African photography in general. With international fame came more new prints, made both in Keïta’s lifetime and after his death. Larger in scale and cooler in tone than the original photographs, they are now how most contemporary viewers experience Keïta’s images. To Western scholars and curators, Keïta’s photographs—coinciding with the lead-up to, and early years of, Malian independence—are both captivating portraits of self-defined individuals and an important record of African life at a moment of transition. To Keïta’s Malian clients, the photos were much more. Pocket-size and made for personal use, they signaled worldly success, commemorated special events and holidays, assisted in matchmaking, and even

A version of the show was on view in 2020 at Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art; Close donated to collection to the university’s Elizabeth Sage Historic Costume Collection in 2017. Close chose IU for her collection after visiting the school, where she got to tour the library facilities and meet the curators and archivists who would be managing her costume collection.

Diane Keaton, the beloved actress known for her singular style and screen presence, died Saturday at the age of 79. While she was primarily celebrated for her iconic roles—such as the title character in Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall and Kay Adams-Corleone in The Godfather—Keaton was also a devoted maker of art, particularly in the fields of photography and collage. Still, Keaton didn’t exactly think of herself as “much of an artist,” at least according to an August interview with House Beautiful. Interestingly, Saved wasn’t the first art book published by Keaton. In 1980, Knopf released Reservations, a monograph of her black-and-white images of old hotel interiors shot throughout the 1970s. In 2017, she published The House That Pinterest Built, on home design, and in 2019, she released California Romantica, a coffee-table book dedicated to Southern California architecture. Images and art-making were always central to Keaton’s life. In that same Times interview, she said that French artist Sophie Calle’s Blind stays on her nightstand, calling it “a reminder of one of the greatest gifts of life—the gift of seeing.”

The Musée du Louvre acquired its first video work: Les 4 temps (The 4 Seasons), which was made by by the Algeria-born artist Mohamed Bourouissa. The video work centers around the well-known Tuileries Gardens in Paris that connect the museum with the Place de la Concorde. The gardens were created for Catherine de’ Medici in 1564 and were opened to the public in the 17th century. Since 2005, they have been managed by the Louvre and protected as a UNESCO Historic Monument and World Heritage site. The piece entered the museum’s collection via its Histoire du Louvre program, focused on acquiring historic or contemporary works that reference the institution’s history.

Two activists from the climate group Futuro Vegetal were arrested on Sunday, October 12, the date Spain commemorates the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, after throwing biodegradable red paint on a painting of Columbus at the Naval Museum in Madrid.  Per reports from El Confidencial and El País, the paint damaged the left portion of José Garnelo’s 1892 First Tribute to Christopher Columbus, which is displayed at the museum entrance. The activists also unfurled a banner reading “October 12, nothing to celebrate. Ecosocial justice.” Futuro Vegetal said in a statement that the incident aimed to call attention to the “extractive neocolonialism” that continues to exploit Indigenous land and natural resources. Museum security detained the activists, who were later charged with crimes against cultural heritage and taken for questioning.  Elsewhere on Sunday in Madrid, some 20 activists from Marea Palestina staged a sit-in around Picasso’s Guernica at the Reina Sofía Museum. The protest demanded an end to “the genocide against the Palestinian people.” The museum gallery closed temporarily while security addressed the action, and has since been reopened.

Bronze Foot in the Form of a Sphinx depicts a siren, counter to its name. The item first appeared in the collection of a trafficker who then sold it to now-convicted art dealer Robin Symes, who then sold it to a private collector, who then donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2000. The Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan DA’s office seized the Bronze Foot from the museum this year. Bronze Applique of a Gorgon, “depicts a running mythological Gorgon and would originally have been attached to a bronze vessel”, according to a press release from the Manhattan DA’s office. The Bronze Applique of a Gorgon first appeared with antiquities trafficker Robert Hecht, who then sold it to the New York art gallery Fortuna Fine Arts, whose owners were arrested by the FBI in September 2020 after being indicted in federal court for fraud.

By Francesca Aton Associate Digital Editor, ARTnews and Art in America Many questions about the famous moai statues on Easter Island, Chile, have long eluded scholars—from their cultural significance to how they were made and transported. A recent study in the Journal of Archaeological Science by archaeologists Carl Lipo of Binghamton University and Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona poses the theory that the 92-ton statues were transported in a vertical position, with movers using ropes to “walk” the moai across the island and onto their ahu, or platforms. This theory is supported by the oral traditions of the island’s Indigenous Rapa Nui people, which reference the moai “walking” from the quarry where the statues were carved to their platforms. While Lipo had previously conducted rudimentary field tests suggesting the technique was possible, his hypothesis also drew criticism. His new paper addresses that with fresh experimental evidence using three-dimensional modeling of the statues’ physics, along with new field tests that recreate the “walking” motion. Out of a database of 962 moai identified on the island through field surveys and photogrammetric documentation, Lipo and

India, the most populous nation in the world, has had an inconsistent presence at the 125-year-old exhibition. Its first national pavilion was staged in 2011 and the second in 2019. It hasn’t had a pavilion at the storied art festival since then. India wasn’t totally lacking representation at the last Venice Biennale: Adriano Pedrosa 2024 iteration, titled “Foreigners Everywhere,” featured 12 Indian artists, a record-high for the main exhibition, which is not related to the national pavilions.  However the lack of stable representation has increasingly drawn scrutiny from the international art world, given the recent, high-profile development of its arts infrastructure. India boasts one of the fastest-rising collector bases, and some of its wealthiest patrons are gearing up to open new art institutions, further driving global interest in the South Asian art market. The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), for example, is scheduled to open its new building in New Delhi in 2026, the same year of the next Venice Biennale. India is home to some 700 officially recognized ethnic groups, with distinct cultural customs and artistic expressions. Shekhawat, speaking at the conference, said the

In her new role, Weinstein will develop strategy across the institution’s four divisions: the Museum, Research Institute, Conservation Institute, and Foundation. Her efforts will be directed toward strengthening a range of directives such as the Getty’s art historical scholarship and community partnerships. Weinstein has been director of the Getty Foundation since 2019. In that role, she was responsible for the Getty’s grantmaking programs, which disseminate money to museums, as well as to researchers leading art historical and conservation efforts.

On the west side of the fortress, archaeologists also found a 75-meter-long glass wall, “dividing it from north to south and surrounding a residential area reserved for soldiers, a distinctive architectural design in the modern state era that reflects the capability of ancient Egyptian architecture on adapting to the harsh environment.”

Con motivo de la celebración de las I Jornadas Internacionales del Encaje, organizadas por el Cabildo Insular de Tenerife y con la colaboración de los ayuntamientos de San Cristóbal de La Laguna y Tegueste, así como por el Centro Internacional para la Conservación del Patrimonio, CICOP, que tendrán lugar en la citada ciudad de Aguere y Tegueste (22-25 de octubre de 2025), el Museo de Historia y Antropología de Tenerife, en la sala 2 y anexa de su sede de la Casa Lercaro, siguiendo el mensaje del citado evento, acogerá una exposición que tiene como elemento aglutinador el encaje en sus más variantes expresiones, técnicas, modalidades y procedencias de un arte familiar que se ha perdurado a lo largo de generaciones. Bajo el título «El arte del encaje: la belleza oculta», la citada muestra dará a conocer un extraordinario ejemplo del ajuar particular que, a lo largo de los años, ha sabido atesorar doña Ana María González-Moro en atención a sus características y fragilidad de cada una de las piezas que constituyen una de las colecciones más completas existentes en Canarias, perteneciente a los siglos XVIII-XIX-XX, tanto de talleres locales como foráneos. El espectador tendrá la oportun

Las galaxias son como huellas dactilares cósmicas: cada forma cuenta una historia única. Las espirales, con sus brazos elegantes, nos hablan de formación estelar activa. Las elípticas, suaves y redondas, revelan historias de fusiones galácticas violentas. Las irregulares nos muestran galaxias jóvenes aún en construcción. Pero clasificar morfologías no es solo catalogar formas bonitas: es descifrar la historia del universo.

In addition to growing the museum’s operating budget from $15 million to $23 million and expanding its endowment by $90 million, he launched TMA Labs, an in-house consultancy designed to help Toledo innovate around data, Web3, AI, and other emerging technologies. That work has led to acquisitions of digital art (from NFTs to digital numismatics), a digital artist-in-residence program, and “Infinite Images,” an exhibition tracing the long history of computer and digital art, on view through November. At just 38 years old, Levine is one of the youngest museum directors in the US—a fact that shows most clearly in his enthusiasm for novel ways to engage audiences and future-proof his institution. ARTnews spoke with Levine over Zoom to discuss the evolution of TMA Labs, which now led by Ian Charles Stewart, a cofounder of Wired magazine; the opening of “Infinite Images”; and how he is preparing the museum for a future in which personalization is as expected in museums as it is in online shopping. ARTnews: You’ve said museums shouldn’t just pivot online but rethink what they’re for. How has that process unfolded in Toledo, especially with the launch of TMA Labs and “Infinite Images”? The