The Headlines

THE POLITICAL SCENE. Thursday was quite a news day in Washington, D.C., as politicians reacted to the bombshell that President Trump was being indicted in a case concerning his handling of classified documents. Before that, though, on Wednesday, a bronze statue was unveiled in National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol that depicts the acclaimed writer Willa Cather, who died in 1947. It was created by Littleton Alston, who became the first Black artist to have work included in that collection. (Each state selects two statues to be displayed there; the Cather piece came from Nebraska.) In other news from the Hill, Congress is looking to hire a new Architect of the Capitol, who oversees its home and various collections. (The last one was ousted amid scandal. He has denied wrongdoing.) A member of the team seeking to fill the job told the New York Times, “This is a uniquely complex role. A term we often use is a ‘unicorn.’ ”

ARTISTS SPACE. It is one of those special days when editorial calendars align, and a bunch of great interviews are all published at once. Grab a cup of coffee! Grab a cocktail! There’s a lot to read. Apollo romped around Reykjavik with hometown hero and performance legend Ragnar Kjartansson. “What I love about being from Iceland,” he said, “is that I really did not understand the idea of the art object until I was 35 or something. Like, you go to the museum here and you just see some Icelandic shit… there is no art history, and there are no objects of mega-value.” Sculptor Anselm Kiefer, an expert in mega-value, has a new show at White Cube in London and spoke to the Guardian. Two more stories from England: Painter Hurvin Anderson, who has a show up at the Hepworth Wakefield, is in the New York Times, and Lubaina Himid, who’s presenting work at the Glyndebourne opera house, is also in the Guardian.

The Digest

In a court filing, a lawyer for Lisa Schiff said that the embattled art adviser is cooperating with federal and state investigations into her business, which she is liquidating. The attorney also rejected claims made in a lawsuit against her that she was running a Ponzi scheme. [The Art Newspaper]

In November, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will present around 30 modern and contemporary Korean works collected by the late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee that are now held by South Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art. [The Dong-A Ilbo]

Around 40 prehistoric menhirs that were erected in Carnac, France, some 7,000 years ago have been removed to make way for a location of the DIY chain store Mr. Bricolage, according to an incensed French archaeologist. The local mayor said that the stones had “low archaeological value.” [AFP/France24]

Dealer Larry Gagosian gave a rare interview to the New York Post. While some gallerists have been opening in Tribeca and elsewhere, when it comes to “contemporary art nothing is supplanting Chelsea,” he said. And while he visits his artists at their Brooklyn studios, for a space “it’s a bridge too far, literally and figuratively.” [NYP]

This year’s shortlist for the Film London Jarman Award, which honors British artists working with moving images, consists of Ayo Akingbade, Andrew Black, Julianknxx, Sophie Koko Gate, Karen Russo, and Rehana Zaman. The winner of the closely watched prize receives £10,000 (about $12,600). [Ocula]

Norman Rosenthal, the former exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy in London, said that he was not invited to the opening of its summer exhibition this year. “I think they would rather forget about me,” he said. “It was noted.” He also recommended Kiefer’s White Cube show. [Evening Standard/Yahoo! News]

The Kicker

BUCKLE UP. The big one, Art Basel in Switzerland, opens in a matter of days, and Bloomberg has a crisp preview of the festivities that also offers a look at the state-of-play in the art market. Amid uncertainty about the economy, dealer Marianne Boesky, who has galleries in New York and Aspen, offered some refreshingly candid thoughts. “Certain dealers you’ll talk to, they’ll tell you—no matter what day of the year or month—that sales are gangbusters and that everything’s perfect,” she told journalist James Tarmy. “But it’s not always perfect. It’s a bit of a rollercoaster.” Be careful out there, Baselers! [Bloomberg]

On Wednesday, Chevron admitted that it took down the public art piece in a statement made to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“The installation on company property was removed, in keeping with our security, safety and facilities policies,” a Chevron representative wrote to ARTnews. “Our fences and other company facilities are functional equipment and we cannot allow tampering or unauthorized construction.”

The artists and organizers behind the project, meanwhile, argue that Fencelines was mostly on a city-owned portion of the fence, which runs alongside a running trail and is separated from Chevron property by a six-lane thoroughfare. Fencelines, which was brought to life by community organizer Princess Robinson and artist Graham LP, had been in the making over the past year and a half, during which they and Gita Khandagle, an artist and designer, reached out to Chevron and city officials to ascertain who owned the fence so they could get approval for the project.

According to the organizers, Chevron never responded but the city did, approving the project. Graham LP and other people involved claim that the majority of the project was installed on the city-owned portion of the fence but bled into a part of the fence that Chevron owns.

“But we don’t want this to just become about the fence and who owns it. This conversation is about who owns the air, who has permission or the right to [impact it],” LP told ARTnews. “Though we’ll definitely push the property aspect of this when it comes down to it, they massively overreached.”

Fencelines was designed to call attention to the environmental and health impact that the refinery has on the Richmond community, where asthma rates are double the state average, according to an ongoing study at University of California, San Francisco. Slats painted with wishes for clean air and water from the community were attached to the fence and topped with ribbons that were activated by the wind, showing that the residents of Richmond live perpetually downwind from the refinery. The piece was installed April 22, on Earth Day.

As of publication, the company has not confirmed whether the piece has been destroyed or is in storage somewhere. Up until Wednesday evening, the artists and organizers associated with Fencelines thought the piece had been stolen as Chevron never reached out to them following the deinstallation or warned them of their impending action. But there were suspicions.

“As soon as it happened I was like, ‘That was Chevron, they’re trying to erase us,'” Katt Ramos, the managing director of Richmond Our Power Coalition, told ARTnews. The coalition brings together local organizations fighting for housing and a just transition away from the oil based industries that surround the area.

“[I thought] that was Chevron because we were three or four days away from Anti-Chevron Day and four or five days away from their stakeholder meeting, they don’t want any bad press.”

The Coalition and Anti-Chevron Day began as a response to the 2012 Chevron Richmond Refinery Fire, the resulting chemical release incident, and the general health issues that residents of Richmond tie to their proximity to the refinery, which has been operating in the city for 120 years. Ramos pointed out that earlier this year unionized steelworkers at the Chevron refinery struck for safer working conditions, which led, the union alleged, to at least five workers being let go.

“But there’s some signs on the fence and now they’re worried about safety?” said Ramos.

Robinson, LP, and Khandagle partnered with numerous organizations and with the Richmond Arts Center to make the installation as well as an accompanying exhibition at RAC that was made possible with a grant from the California Arts Council.

“We invited people to come and make some of these wooden slats, to paint messages of hope, messages of vision for a future where we have clean air, a healthy environment,” Roberto Martinez, a curator at RAC, told ARTnews. “We wanted to bring in people for dialogue about the lived experience of of the Richmond community, which has a very rich and complex history with environmental justice.”

Though there were a few references to Chevron in the signs, for the most part Martinez recalled that messages were generally calls for clean air and water, for love, and for resilience, and that the project was not particularly confrontational. Over 200 wooden slats were painted for the project, which was slated to be de-installed on June 3.

Princess Robinson, who works with Urban Tilth, never saw the project as antagonistic. “I’m a cooperative education and facilitator, I really believe in the cooperative model, to work amongst each other and for everyone to be at the table,” Robinson told ARTnews. Since finding out Chevron took down the piece, Robinson has been trying to see the positive side to this unfortunate situation, but it hasn’t been easy.

“Being a human, at first I was mad, I felt discouraged. I felt disrespected. I felt like well, dang, I don’t matter, all that work that I did doesn’t matter, bringing my community out doesn’t matter,” said Robinson. “But my intentions are now a reality, right, I wanted to have a conversation.”

Now Chevron is reaching out to the organizers as they try to backtrack from what has become a much larger story than could have been anticipated. The next steps are to find out if the work was destroyed and how to respond to the events with another art piece.

Luckily, for Chevron, Robinson is magnanimous.

“Me personally, there’s no bad blood,” said Robinson. “I want Chevron to know, let’s cooperate together and be more compassionate, more respectful, because there’s a better way that we could have done this.”

The Māori portraits, Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure, were painted by the Czech-New Zealand artist in 1884. The art works were stolen from the International Art Centre gallery and auction house in a “smash-and-grab” incident in April 2017, only a few days before they were to be sold.

The thieves reversed a stolen van into the front window of the gallery and auction house before loading the two paintings into a white Holden Commodore SSV sedan.

The paintings were two examples of Lindauer’s prolific portrait work featuring Māori subjects, ranging from leaders to ordinary people. In March, an auction for a portrait of Harawira Te Mahikai, chief of the Ngāti Kahungunu Tribe, sold for nearly $615,000 US including fees ($1,009,008 NZD).

Last December, New Zealand police announced that Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure had been returned with only minor damage. According to the Herald, police were “deliberately vague” in providing details on what happened to the portraits, referring only to “an intermediary who sought to return the paintings on behalf of others” to the artworks’ owners.

“To me this is a good news story,” Detective Inspector Scott Beard said at a press conference in December. “You get involved in investigations, you want to resolve them, you want to solve them. The cultural significance and value of these paintings, we never gave up hope. And now we’ve had them returned.”

“We’re still looking for people to come with information that can assist us solving who did the burglary and who stole these [paintings].”

On June 7, the Herald reported the return of the two stolen Lindauer portraits was made through an agreement with two senior criminal figures, but “wide-ranging suppression orders” made by the country’s Court of Appeal will permanently suppress their identities. “Strict non-publication orders” also prevent the reporting and public disclosure of how the Lindauer paintings were safely returned to police.

“The gang members are currently serving long periods of imprisonment but their criminal offending cannot be reported without breaching the suppression orders,” reported the Herald‘s investigative journalist Jared Savage. “There is no suggestion either of the two gang members was involved in the theft of the paintings, rather that they were able to use their standing in the criminal world to obtain access to something the police wanted.”

When Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure were returned to police, there was fingerprint and DNA testing done. However, no charges have been laid.

The ancient slice of decorative oak, which was carved 2,000 years before Stonehenge and more than 4,000 years before the Romans set foot on the British Isles, is believed to be the oldest piece of carved wood in Britain.

The wood, which measures just about three-feet-long, one-and-a-half feet wide, and half-an-inch thick, was found snuggly underground in a thick layer of peat, which impeccably preserved the wood. 

Since its discovery, the Mesolithic piece of wood has undergone scientific analysis by experts at Historic England in partnership with scientists from the Nottingham tree-ring dating laboratory, and the Centre for Isotope Research at the university of Groningen. 

Radiocarbon and tree ring dating on the slab give a 95% chance probability that the wood was carved between 4,640 BC and 4,605 BC, at the tail end of the Middle Stone Age when inhabitants of England roamed in hunter-gatherer communities and began using stone tools. 

While the meaning behind the carvings on the wood remain a mystery, experts say they are similar to the decorations on the Shigir Idol – a 12,500-year-old wooden sculpture that was discovered in the Ural Mountains of Russia and is thought to be the oldest example of carved wood in the world.

Derek Fawcett, the owner of the land where the carved wood was found, will donate the artifact to the to the West Berkshire Museum in Newbury once scientific analysis is complete, Historic England said in a press release. The donation coincides with England’s Museum Week which this year runs from June 5-11.

“This is a really brilliant find…and a tangible link to humans who lived in this area long before any towns and villages had been created,” Janine Fox, curator at West Berkshire Museum, told Historic England.

Creuzet’s exhibitions typically carry paragraph-length titles that point to the show’s underlying themes, as did this one that recently traveled from LUMA Arles in France to LUMA Westbau in Zurich: “Orpheus was musing upon braised words, under the light rain of a blazing fog, snakes are deaf and dumb anyway, oblivion buried in the depths of insomnia.”

Not unlike the mythical Orpheus, who descended into Hades to retrieve his love Eurydice only to lose her at the last moment, we too travel into Creuzet’s world, set somewhere below the surface of wakeful consciousness. There, in his reimagined version of an immersive opera, we’re invited to experience forgotten memories told in song accompanied by hanging skeletal sculptures of landscapes, spirit creatures, panel paintings, and holograms of artifacts come to new life from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. If we peer and listen closely, pieced together narratives surface, overlapping before they too fade away, transformed into something else with every new turn.

Creuzet’s work is a hard-to-pin sensory exploration that sparks the imagination. It’s this friction between the strange and unknown that makes us question the familiar, an exercise at the heart of Creuzet’s practice. He wants us to question everything.

That is increasingly possible through Creuzet’s work, as it becomes more visible internationally, with the latest feather in his cap being the French Pavilion; he will be the first Black man to take it over. Other major exhibitions include solos at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2019) and Camden Arts Center in London (2022), as well as appearances in Manifesta 13 in 2020, the 2018 Gwangju Biennale, and the 2017 Lyon Biennale. In 2021, he was nominated for the esteemed Prix Marcel Duchamp, administered by the Centre Pompidou.

Yet, the prestigious platform of Venice seems to have no bearing on Creuzet. “For me, it’s just a title. One step. One exhibition,” he told ARTnews in a video interview earlier this year from his Paris studio. “It’s about continuing with my work, which is to share various imaginations with others. And in a sense, to question the world, our context, our history, our present. … Nothing has changed.”

In essence, he’s interested in reaching the widest audience possible—“art only exists when we give it to others to see”—because that is the way to “generate areas of space for movements of emancipation and movements of the imagination,” he added.

Within those spaces, Creuzet challenges preconceived categorizations, particularly ones that relate to his own lived experience, such as the African and Caribbean diasporas, the significance of artistic and literary voices from those diasporas, the legacy of colonialism, and the struggle to share our planet’s resources. For Creuzet, these subjects are personal and inescapable.

Born 1986 in a working-class Paris suburb, Creuzet was raised in Martinique, where he was introduced early on to artists from the Caribbean, thanks to his family’s love for culture. “Being surrounded by that [artistic] nourishment fascinated me—it made me dream,” he said. He still remembers the blue enamel ceramics by local artist Victor Anicet that are evocative of local pre-Columbian ceramics and the music of Eugene Mona. The “enigma” of his childhood is the source of Creuzet’s “imaginary reservoir,” with Martinique its “emotional heart,” said Creuzet who returned to France in 2006 when he was 20 years-old to pursue a standard educational track at French art schools; he is now a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

“I’m always left trapped, because the Other … endlessly boxes me into this one identity,” Creuzet said. “I try to be what I have to be. But in one way or another, I’m constantly reminded of my condition as a Black man. … It makes me realize there is still a lot to do in terms movements to emancipate and decolonize the body, knowledge, culture, and arts.”

Throughout our hour-long conversation, Creuzet often responded in open-to-interpretation metaphoric French prose (certain nuances, of course, have been lost to translation), which should come as no surprise given that he is also a prolific poet. “I answer this way, because I don’t want to reduce everything to one thing,” he said, pointing his finger into the air in front of him.

“Julien’s vision is needed right now,” said Sibylle Friche, a partner at Chicago’s Document Gallery, one of three that represents him. “The decolonial turn in recent art is not just a trend. It is part and parcel of former imperial nations like France coming to terms with the less savory aspects of their history—work that has only begun. Julien addresses colonialism poetically, which draws attention to its affective consequences as much as its material traces.”

At his LUMA exhibitions, Creuzet’s human-scale, drawing-sculptures, made of bent poles smothered in a colorful, gummy paste, at first appear abstract, but slowly reveal themselves to be spirit-like beings. In one, a fairy emerges from a dark blue ooze, as painted-over, pre-Columbian demons mock us. Elsewhere are mesmerizing holograms of African artifacts dancing bélé, a genre associated with slavery’s abolition in Martinique.

In his practice, Creuzet orchestrates self-described operatic installations using a range of mediums and collaborations with other artists, including musicians and dancers. Through those collaborations, as well as drawing from the writings of Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, and André Breton, among others, Creuzet wants to “complexify … the way different African and Creole cultures have actually played an important role in the current manifestations of contemporary France, and by extension, the contemporary world,” said Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, director of exhibitions and programs at LUMA.

There’s also a sense of hope, even joy, imbued in these works, a nod to Creuzet’s own feelings about this “moment of crystallization” and “emancipation” that we are witnessing.

“We are living through a changing context,” Creuzet said, pointing to issues as wide ranging as Covid, the energy crises, and efforts in France and elsewhere to restitute looted artworks from Africa. Society is “asking individuals to try to situate themselves in terms of who they are, where they come from, how they feel in their skin and in their bodies, and heads,” he said.

In his art, Creuzet aims to discuss socio-political issues like these in a language he hopes can reach beyond the art world’s institutional boundaries. “Julien’s work feels so urgent because of the many references and transnational connections he makes, that go beyond the bubble of contemporary art discourses,” said independent curator Cindy Sissokho, who with Céline Kopp will curate the French Pavilion. “It’s a practice that is liberating, opening up imaginaries and therefore possibilities that expand discourses about the African diaspora.”

And Creuzet’s international acclaim will likely only continue to increase in the near future. In addition to the Venice exhibition, Sissokho and Kopp will also organize a solo exhibition of Creuzet’s work later this year at the Magasin in Grenoble, where Kopp is director. Co-produced with Brown Arts Institute and David Winton Bell Gallery, the show will travel to the US starting in 2024, marking Creuzet’s first major solo institutional exhibition there. Beginning this month, he will participate in the 2023 Liverpool Biennial, and in November, he will present a new commission as part of the Performa biennial in New York. His work is also featured in the traveling exhibition, “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today,” which debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and will open at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in October.

With a method reliant on archival and on-the-ground research, Creuzet sticks to a constant, daily work ethic. “Art is deeply about daily research. I never stop nourishing and cultivating myself. I never stop learning,” he said.

His art-making is one that forces him to “se debrouiller,” or manage with what he’s got. “I always thought of art as a door to survival or fresh air, an absolute, visceral necessity,” he said. For years, and because of financial and material constraints, Creuzet’s pieces were largely composed of found objects. They still maintain that aspect, though his production means have recently expanded, and he’s incorporated new, technically advanced elements, including virtual reality.

Today, Creuzet says he “gets the most pleasure from sharing” with others. “Generosity is the most beautiful thing,” even when much of the world is currently set up to make it “difficult to share essentials, like water and food. It’s hard to share the same planet. It’s hard to simply be.”

He continued, “I’m learning not to point fingers in an inquisitive way anymore, because I don’t think it helps improve the situation. I think everyone has to do the work of emancipation and decolonization, and we still have far to go. … I’m now trying to figure out how to engage in a form of activism and denunciation, but with less pain.”

Earlier this year, Rajaratnam announced that she would leave her role as partner at Mnuchin Gallery after 15 years. During her tenure there, she was known for staging groundbreaking exhibitions of artists who had long been overlooked by the mainstream art world, including Sam Gilliam, Ed Clark, Alma Thomas, Betty Blayton, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, and David Hammons, whose five-decade retrospective in 2016 is still on one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of the elusive artist ever mounted. In the process, she also helped to build up markets for these artists.

In a statement, White Cube founder Jay Jopling said, “I have closely followed Sukanya’s exhibition programming over the past years and consider her to be one of the most outstanding market-makers in the art world. I am delighted that she has chosen to join White Cube and I look forward very much to working with her.”

Based in New York, Rajaratnam’s new role, according to a release, “will focus on market-making and exhibition-making” across White Cube’s various locations, which currently includes permanent ones in London, Hong Kong, and Paris, as well a seasonal West Palm Beach space.

In a statement, Rajaratnam said, “I admire the curatorial integrity that White Cube brings to its artists and estates and am excited to be able to contribute to that across a global platform. We may be at an inflection point in the market and I believe it is imperative for galleries to add value through exhibition programming and content.”

White Cube will also open its first New York location later this year and hired Courtney Willis Blair, a former partner at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, to lead the space last November. Located at 1002 Madison Avenue in New York’s Upper East Side, the space’s inaugural exhibition, organized by Willis Blair, will be titled “Chopped & Screwed.” Exploring “the idea of distortion as both a formal and conceptual tool used to examine and subvert well-established narratives or systems,” per a release, the show will include work by artists like Theaster Gates, David Hammons, Christian Marclay, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Julie Mehretu, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn.

In addition to news of Rajaratnam’s hiring, White Cube also announced that it will expand to Seoul, which was first reported by the Financial Times. Citing the success of the inaugural edition of Frieze Seoul last September, the new ground-floor, 3,230 square-foot space will consist of exhibition spaces, a viewing room, and offices. Located in the capital city’s Gangnam-gu district, it will be in the same building as the private museum Horim Art Centre, which focuses on Korean antiquities and modern art.

In the past two years, numerous Western galleries have expanded to Seoul, including Gladstone, Esther Schipper, Perrotin, and Thaddaeus Ropac, which recently announced that it will add another floor to its Seoul location. Two galleries, Pace and Lehmann Maupin, that had established presences in the city slightly earlier also recently grew their footprint. And in March, the Centre Pompidou confirmed rumors that it would open a branch in Seoul, tentatively scheduled to open in 2025.

The Headlines

ON THE PENINSULA. In recent years, galleries from the United States and Europe, like Gladstone and König, have been opening outposts in Seoul, hoping to tap into South Korea’s burgeoning art market. Now, Melanie Gerlis reports in her weekly Financial Times column, White Cube is joining them. It plans to open a location in the city’s Gangnam district this fall. The London-based firm is apparently in expansion mode, as it also plans to open a New York branch in the fall. Peres Projects recently inaugurated a grand new gallery in the South Korean capital, and rumors persist about other dealers that might soon take the plunge. Gerlis also reports that Thaddaeus Ropac, which has had a Seoul venue since 2021, is taking on more space.

THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR. Almost exactly a year after the National Gallery of Canada’s previous leader, Sasha Suda, announced that she was decamping to run the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Ottawa institution has a new director and CEO: Jean-François Bélisle. He is currently the director and chief curator of the Musée d’art de Joliette in Quebec. The national museum has faced criticism of late, following the dismissal of four senior staffers amid an effort to reach a more diverse audience, as the Global and Mail reports. “I believe that art can change society, and look forward to collaborating with the gallery’s staff, as well as artists from across the country, to ensure our institution continues to be a fantastic force for good,” Bélisle said in a statement.

The Digest

Artist Sterling Wells has created a modestly size barge that is now floating in Los Angeles’s Ballona Creek. Wells is planning to paint aboard the craft for the next month, and will open a solo show at Night Gallery in the city on July 8. [Fox 11 Los Angeles]

The billionaire former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has given $130 million to the under-construction Perelman Performing Arts Center (more than its namesake, art-collecting businessman Ronald O. Perelman, donated). Bloomberg’s totals to the multifarious Shed also now total $130 million. [The New York Times]

As dangerous wildfire smoke gripped parts of North America on Wednesday, some galleries closed their doors or canceled openings and other events. Among them was Pace, which shut down in the middle of the day due to the air quality. [Pace Gallery/Instagram]

Lehmann Maupin global comms director Sarah Levine and photographer William Jess Laird were married in beautiful Marfa, Texas, with Levine wearing a Vera Wang dress inspired by the work of artist and noted Marfa resident Donald Judd. [Vogue]

New York City filed suit against architect Steven Holl and his namesake firm, arguing that their acclaimed design for a Queens library does not meet the requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act. A company spox noted that the city approved the project and said, “Accessibility is a core value of our work.” [The New York Times]

Archaeologists excavating a former temple complex on the Greek island of Kythnos found more than 2,000 clay figures, apparently left there to worship the goddess of agriculture, Demeter. The area is believed to have been inhabited from the 12th century B.C.E. to the 7th century C.E. [The Associated Press]

The Kicker

THE MAJOR LEAGUES. The artist Rick Lowe just opened two exhibitions of his scintillating paintings in Athens, at the Benaki Museum and Gagosian. When T: The New York Times Style Magazinecaught up with Lowe in advance of those shows, he said that he was working as many as 16 hours a day, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. “You know, I feel like this moment right now for me, getting ready for these shows in Athens, this is like my N.B.A. playoffs,” he told the magazine. “There’s no stopping. As Kobe [Bryant] once said, ‘You rest at the end.’ ” Do what you’ll love, as they say, and you’ll never work another day in your life. [T]

On June 7, the museum issued a statement about the exhibition Ngura Pulka – Epic Country officially being postponed. Scheduled to open this month, the show featured the work of Aboriginal artists from the APY Art Center Collective (APY ACC) and was billed as one of the largest community-driven art projects to be displayed at the NGA.

“All parts of Ngura Pulka are being entirely conceived, created, directed, and determined by Aṉangu people,” said a statement on the gallery’s website. “Home to 2,500 people, the APY Lands, in remote South Australia, support a network of Aṉangu communities, including seven key art centres.”

However, in April, the museum announced it was reviewing the exhibition’s artworks after a report from The Australian alleged that white studio staff had been painting on the works attributed to residents of Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY), sparsely populated lands in remote South Australia that are home to more than 20 Aboriginal communities. The Australian also published video that it said appeared to show a non-Indigenous art assistant making creative decisions and painting on a depiction of the Tjukurpa — the creation period of ancestral beings that also formed the religion, law, and moral systems that govern Anangu society.

The NGA said the decision to postpone the opening Ngura Pulka – Epic Country had been made due to an independent panel review needing more time to “fully complete their work” to check if the works were consistent with the museum’s provenance policy, as well as the Australian government also announcing it would undertake a joint investigation.

“The National Gallery will work with the artists and Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) community leaders in relation to the exhibition and will await the outcome of both reviews,” the museum statement said. “The National Gallery is committed to continuing to work with APY Lands artists and supporting their ground-breaking work.”

The NGA originally said it expected to receive findings from the independent review by May 31.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the APY ACC issued a statement supporting the gallery’s decision to postpone the exhibition. “Light is always the best defense to darkness,” it said.

“Given recent accusations that we believe are without merit, we welcome the most rigorous and robust reviews of the work. Knowing the truth and authenticity of the works and having an abundance of pride in this project and every facet of our important program and the business we’ve built, we are content to wait for the independent panel to make their findings.”

The head of Foreign Missions of the Egyptian Antiquities Service accused the museum in a leaked email of “falsifying history” due to the “Afrocentric” lens of the show’s storytelling, the Dutch news site NRC reported on Monday. The news was confirmed by the museum’s managing director, Wim Weijland, in a statement to CNN.

Saqqara, a sprawling burial site some 20 miles south of the capital, Cairo, is home to Egypt’s oldest pyramid, the pyramid of Djoser. The museum has been consistently excavating Saqqara for more than 40 years, and most recently returned in February for a monthlong dig.

“The Rijksmuseum van Oudheden has been working at Saqqara since 1975,” Weijland told CNN. “For the upcoming season, the museum has been denied the permit to excavate here.”

Weijland added that the museum is attempting to “open the dialogue” with the Egyptian Antiquities Service about the ban. The aim of the “Kemet” exhibition, according to Weijland, was to “show and understand the depiction of ancient Egypt and the messages in music by black artists,” and to “show what scientific, Egyptological research can tell us about ancient Egypt and Nubia.”

The ancient Nubian empire in northeast Africa extended from Aswan, Egypt, down to Khartoum, the modern-day capital of Sudan. Nubia hosted several significant empires, the most important being the Kingdom of Kush, whose so-called “Black Pharaohs” ruled Egypt in the 8th century BCE in the 25th Dynasty. Per the museum’s website, the “Kemet” show examined “the influence of ancient Egypt and Nubia … in the works of a multitude of musicians of African descent, including icons of jazz such as Miles Davis and Sun Ra and contemporary artists such as Beyoncé and Rihanna.”

The show was met with criticism almost immediately upon opening. The Leiden National Museum of Antiquities’ social media accounts were bombarded with negative comments, some of which expressed veiled or explicit distaste over the show’s imagery of dark-skinned ancient Egyptians. In response to the backlash, the museum added a note on its website with additional information on its curatorial goals, as well as a warning that any offensive or racist comments posted to its social channels will be deleted.

The painting, View of the Sea from Haut Cagnes (ca. 1910), was originally owned by Jakob Goldschmidt, one of the most influential bankers in Weimar Germany and a major collector of Old Masters and Impressionist art in the 1920s. He was also a major patron of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. Nazi persecution forced Goldschmidt to flee in 1933 to Switzerland, before emigrating to the United States, where he died in 1955.

Some of Goldschmidt’s art collection stayed behind in Berlin, however, as collateral for a loan. In 1941, the Nazis seized the collection, which included the Renoir painting. The work was sold at the Berlin auction house Hans W. Lange later that year. It came up for sale again in 1960 at Galerie Nathan in Zurich. It was later purchased by Fritz Berg, the first president of the BDI association of German industry; after the passing of Berg’s widow, in 1989, their collection went to the Osthaus Museum in Hagen, where it has remained.

The city restituted the painting to the banker’s heirs and then repurchased it so it can remain on view at the Osthaus Museum. The painting will be displayed with information about Goldschmidt.

“The heirs of Jakob Goldschmidt are happy to have reached a satisfactory agreement for both sides in this matter after more than 15 years of intensive discussions,” their lawyer Sabine Rudolph said in a statement. “The restitution of the painting is a recognition of the fact that their grandfather suffered great wrongs under the Nazi regime, including huge financial losses.”

The repurchase was funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the German culture ministry, and the Cultural Foundation of the States.