"How a City Agency Saves New York’s Discarded Objects for Art" by Lisa Wong Macabasco #ARTNews
"As New York’s largest creative-reuse center and a program of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Materials for the Arts collects a boundless array of reusable materials from businesses and individuals that are then made available to nonprofits, schools, and other city agencies, thus diverting some 1.7 million pounds of materials from landfills in 2023.
The first donation Fremont received for what would become Materials for the Arts was 50 glass exhibition cases from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which to this day continues to gift materials to MFTA, like a large cache of recently digitized slides."
Does LACMA Have a Looted Art Problem? by Gary Baum #ARTNews
"Activists and scholars believe such sacred objects lose their meaning when displayed in glass cases, separated from their cultural context. They also believe many of LACMA’s Nepalese holdings could have been illegally removed from their land of origin. In a few cases, they wield smoking-gun documentation of objects purportedly in-situ back in Nepal. In general, they note that the country allowed foreign visitors only beginning in the early 1950s, after the fall of the authoritarian Rana dynasty; soon after, the government banned the export of culturally significant historic and artistic objects".
Federal Regulations Prompt Closure of Native American Displays at American Museum of Natural History by Karen K. Ho #ARTNews
"The American Museum of Natural History recently announced it will close two major halls exhibiting Native American objects in response to new federal regulations regarding the display or research of cultural items.
“The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples,” museum president Sean Decatur wrote in a letter to the museum’s staff on the morning of January 26. “Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.”"
"The British Museum’s Decisive Year: A 2023 Filled with a Lot of Scandal, and Not Enough Change" by Karen K. Ho (ARTNews).
"For now, the British Museum can no longer assert it is the safest, best place for millions of artifacts from around the world. Hundreds of items are still missing and its primary suspect is not cooperating with the police investigation.
The British Museum could turn this moment into an opportunity to rebuild relationships with other countries and institutions it has long alienated and antagonized. But based on its history and the statements of its current leadership, it would require a significant shift in foresight and humility to make this happen".
“Juanita was an #artist who used #painting to delve into the deepest aspects of her life and she showed tremendous #courage in the face of overwhelming adversity,” collector Mera Rubell said in a statement.
As with much of McNeely’s most powerful work, this painting deals with the #LivedExperiences of #women told from a woman’s perspective: the difficulty of labor and birth, monthly menstruation and all that comes with it, and even raw sexuality.
France and Germany Forge Joint Fund for Colonial-Era Research by Angelica Villa (ARTnews).
"On Tuesday, government officials from Germany and France’s culture ministries forged an agreement for the two countries to jointly launch a fund centered on researching the provenance records of museum artifacts deriving from formerly colonized African regions."
"Officials of both European nations have publicly pledged to return art objects uprooted from former colonized African territories, with each restituted objects flagged as having been looted from their museums. In 2021, France returned more than 20 objects looted by the British military from the Republic of Benin. Last year, Germany returned more than 1,000 Benin bronzes to Nigeria."