Director Maximilian Davis’s second campaign as the house’s newly appointed director features models donning sleek Ferragamo clothes before backdrops printed with Italian paintings from the Uffizi’s collection. In a statement announcing the Uffizi collaboration, Davis said, “The Renaissance is hardwired into Florence.”

Works from the 15th and 16th centuries were among the scenes that appeared in his images for Ferragamo. Models were posed in front of canonical subjects: Italian nobles, biblical figures, and Tuscan landscapes visible in works like Botticelli’s The Annunciation of San Martino alla Scala (1481) and Piero della Francesca’s Diptych of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza (1467–72). At various points, Mitchell also serves as a model.

Over the past few years, Mitchell has gained a following for his imagery that have centered Black subjects, ranging from the famous to unrecognized. In 2020, Mitchell joined the roster of Jack Shainman Gallery; he was just 25 at the time. Not long beforehand, he’d been the subject of a traveling museum exhibition that opened at the Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam and traveled to New York at the International Center of Photography in 2019.

Mitchell’s work has collapsed divisions between the worlds of fashion and art. In 2021, Mitchell told Art in America that he leans on his background in filmmaking to inform his art and commercial projects, saying, “I think of myself as basically a director.”

Founded in 2012, the Long Museum has become a major player in the Shanghai art scene. It was initially based in the West Bund district of Shanghai, and has since opened a second location in the city’s Pudong neighborhood. It now also operates a space in Chongqing.

Specific dates for the Sotheby’s sale, which was first reported by Artnet News on Tuesday, have not yet been announced.

Liu and Wang have become well-known, both within and beyond the art world, for acquired highly priced works such as Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu couché (Reclining Nude) and Paulette Jourdain (1919), which fetched $170.4 million and $42.8 million, respectively, in separate auctions in 2015.

Between 50 and 60 works will be sold. Works by Amadeo Modigliani, Zao Wou-ki, Kazuo Shirago, Leonard Foujita, René Magritte, David Hockney, Matthew Wong, Dana Schutz, Nicolas Party, Georgette Chen and Yayoi Kusama, will be among those sold, Sotheby’s said in a statement to ARTnews.

According to Artnet, other works by Jenny Saville and Kerry James Marshall are among the works that are being considering for sale.

In June 2016, the museum acquired Jenny Saville’s painting Shift (1996–97) for then-record price of $9.1 million at a Sotheby’s auction. The same year, the Long Museum was the buyer of a 1992 painting by Kerry James Marshall at Christie’s in New York. The work, titled Plunge, sold for $2.1 million, breaking the artist’s record at the time.

Artnet reported that the couple approached executives and specialists for Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips to pitch proposals to sell works of contemporary and modern art from the holdings. The reason for the sale is still unknown.

It is uncommon on the auction circuit for collectors who are so major and so active to sell works from their holdings at auction.

Sotheby’s declined to respond to ARTnews’s inquiry on whether the sale is linked to any financial strain. A representative for the Long Museum did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Liu, whose wealth derives from the Sunline Group, a pharmaceuticals, real estate and financial services holding company, began collecting in the mid-1990s. He and his wife have since built a reputation as two of Asia’s most high-profile collectors; he is now said to be worth an estimated $5 billion.

Since the museum’s opening more than a decade ago, the pair’s profile rose as a private museum boom hit China. Their museum has mounted major exhibitions featuring contemporary artists like Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell.

Sotheby’s has said that funds from the planned sales will go toward initiatives and future acquisitions at the museum, which plans to remain open.

Its packed openings stand out among those of many other downtown New York galleries for a variety of reasons. One is that it isn’t just a gallery. Yes, it does sell and show art, but the space has a tendency to feel like an ongoing party as well. Now, it’s set up as a makeshift eatery too.

The founders, painters Jamian Juliano-Villani and Billy Grant, have now relocated O’Flaherty’s to the former home of a theater run by the Upright Citizens Brigade. Their first presentation there could be seen as an exhibition, but you might call it a performance as well. You can eat there, you can buy art there, and, most importantly, you can hang out there.

At the entrance, Juliano-Villani and Grant set up a table with a pair of sleek Apple monitors, a vase of flowers, and printouts introducing the show’s latest concept, the typical things you might expect at a gallery reception desk. Inside, the offerings diverge significantly from anything traditional.

“We were told we could never get this restaurant legal,” an ironically worded press release reads. “We can’t, but that doesn’t matter. Just taste our food before you hurt yourself.”

Grant, who manned the desk as roughly 400 guests filtered in to fill the space to capacity, was coy when asked about the write-up. Were there really permit troubles? All he would say was: “This is poetry.”

There is a rich tradition of artists launching food ventures. “The Café” owes something to the spirit of Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1971 collective FOOD, a restaurant in SoHo that served bone marrow and live brine shrimp. It also owes something to Los Angeles–based artist Kim Dingle, an O’Flaherty’s alum who ran a vegetarian restaurant out of her studio.

In “The Café,” the art was on the periphery. All of the seven artists participating have at some point worked in New York. One guest posed for a photography with his arm stretched around a 1984 plaster piece by American sculptor George Segal featuring a woman, legs splayed, sitting in a wicker chair. It’s the sort of work you’d expect to see in a blue-chip gallery, not in a smoke-filled East Village diner, and it was priced at $200,000.

There were works by artists more familiar to the downtown scene, like a sculpture by Brandon Ndife, whose work appeared in the 2021 New Museum Triennial. But then there were stranger additions, like a 2001 Catherine Murphy painting of the artist’s name written backward in a frost-covered window. The work, which critic Roberta Smith once called a “tour de force,” is on sale for $160,000. At the opening, it became the backdrop for a photo-op for a server modeling a chef’s hat and apron printed with black text that read: THE ODIOUS SMELL Of TRUTH.

O’Flaherty’s has been written about as a reaction to the commercial art world’s wide-scale marketization. Yet Juliano-Villani seemed serious about selling the art on view anyway. In an email to ARTnews, she said, “We are looking for the right people, as the works are coming from artists and collections that are close to us.”

As for the opening itself, the party brought less mayhem than previous ones held at O’Flaherty’s. Perhaps it was a sign of a newer, slightly more cleaned-up O’Flaherty’s—the emphasis, of course, being on “slightly.” Cigarette smoke still filled the space, and guests still spilled everywhere. The art remained unusual too. One TV mounted high on the wall played Cory Arcangel’s Pollock and American Pickers (2012), a 16-minute-long video that, despite being made a decade ago, barely appears in any reviews, suggesting that it remains a deep cut in the practice of a well-known artist.

Add to all this strangeness the artists and other creative types who were working as servers in this café, doling out bar food and Frosé drinks priced between $5 and $10. Served circulated between the main room and a minuscule kitchen in the back to bring food out, though few people actually ordered anything. One waiter, the artist Devin Cronin, said she had discovered the gig via a targeted ad on Instagram stating that O’Flaherty’s was hiring. She was hazy on the details of how she’d come to known O’Flaherty’s, and quoted fashion photographer Terry Richardson, saying, “It’s who you know and who you blow.”

As the night went on, the air inside became increasingly unbreathable as cigarette smoke filled the space. “You know how I know they didn’t get a permit? They’re passing out ash trays,” said Robert Girardin, one attendee at the party. “They’re trying to get shut down.” Girardin and others who spoke with ARTnews felt the space has provided a break from the art world’s formalities. “It’s nice to have a spectacle, not everything being so tight.”

At a table in the café, some gathered to recall other artists that contained the same ethos. One was the artist Sven Sachsalber, who died of heart failure at 33 on the verge of stardom, having just begun to receive positive notices for works such as one in which he searched for a needle hidden in a haystack by a curator. His 2020 work Untitled (Schweiz), a yellow ski-suit mounted to a blank canvas, hung on one of the cafe’s walls.

“He wanted what I had, I wanted what he had,” mused the artist Armando Nin, who reminisced on a period of time before Sachsalber died, when the two worked together in his Brooklyn studio. As he spoke with Nick Farhi and Andrew Kass, Nin seemed to view Sachsalber as belonging to a bygone New York art scene, when their work and their social world felt more intertwined. Nin said he now paints the walls at the Guggenheim Museum.

There were signs that the O’Flaherty’s that opened in 2021 may be different from its 2023 iteration. Private security manned the door, to avoid the cops showing up to overcrowding, as has happened in the past. Artists expressed a collective anxiety that the gallery might be at risk of becoming overexposed. “I feel like if this space was open all the time, it would be filled with NYU kids with their laptops, said Kass.

Others embraced O’Flaherty’s commitment to not caring about tastes. Albert Samreth, another artist in attendance, described the gallery as filling a social void for reluctant insiders. He called O’Flaherty’s “the Museum of Ice Cream for people who went to RISD.”  

Initially, the class action lawsuit focused solely on Yuga Labs. The suit centers around allegations that it misled investors in the marketing of the BAYC digital assets.

In an amendment to the original legal filing dated last Friday, the investors claim that Sotheby’s was an active player in “misleadingly” promoting the BAYC NFTs in the results of its public sales. The suit alleged that the auction house attempted to “manipulate” NFTs in the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club collection.

According to the Art Newspaper, which first reported news of the updated lawsuit, Sean Masson, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, said that the 250-year-old auction house’s “stamp of approval” played a role in “the deceptive promotion of the NFT collection as a legitimate investment.”

In court documents, investors argued that Sotheby’s misrepresented the buyer of a BAYC NFT collection linked to an affiliate of the fallen crypto company FTX in 2021, creating misleading information around the group of NFTs as stable investments. In September 2021, when the house held an online sale of 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, the grouping went to an anonymous buyer for £24.4 million. The results surpassed the house’s presale estimates of $12 million–$18 million.

Max Moore, a Sotheby’s NFT specialist based in Hong Kong, described the anonymous buyer of a popular BAYC NFT as a “traditional buyer” via social media when promoting the sale results. But the filing stated that the NFT collection is actually believed to have been purchased by an affiliate of FTX Ventures.

Moore’s statements online on behalf of Sotheby’s “misleadingly created the impression that the market for BAYC NFTs had crossed over to a mainstream audience,” the filing stated. (FTX, whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried is facing fraud charges, was also a backer of Yuga Labs fundraising in 2022.)

The lawsuit’s scrutiny of Sotheby’s representations of its digital asset sales comes as the house scales back its NFT-related operations. In July, ARTnews reported that an estimated 10 senior employees who worked on NFT sales had been laid off since April, and other staffers from Sotheby’s Metaverse have left the company. Meanwhile, financial regulators in the US and Europe have raised increasing alarm over the marketing of digital assets.

The staff cutbacks followed a period of turbulence for the NFT market as crypto lost roughly two-thirds of its value from its 2021 peak. Still, sales from liquidated crypto companies are continuing apace. In June, the auction house generated $11 million from the bankruptcy sales of Three Arrows Capital, a since-disbanded cryptocurrency hedge fund that was based in Singapore.

A representative for Sotheby’s described the allegations in the suit as “baseless,” adding that the house is “prepared to vigorously defend itself.” A representative for Yuga Labs could not immediately be reached for comment.

Historically, the Barnes has adhered to legalese set by the foundation’s executors stipulating that the collection should not be altered or used for loans, as is the case for most institutions.

In a decision filed on July 21, Pennsylvania judge Melissa S. Sterling granted the foundation’s board of trustees permission to break a legal agreement that has for decades halted any changes to the Barnes collection. The Barnes’s founder, academic Albert C. Barnes, set up the museum to house his personal collection in 1922.

In a statement, the museum said that the decision aligns with Barnes’s original vision for the foundation as a teaching institution.

“Barnes envisioned the institution as a classroom,” the statement said, arguing that the museum’s ability to selectively lend works to outside exhibitions adds to its authority in the field. The museum called this “a mark of an intellectually dynamic institution.”

For decades, the Barnes’s paintings have been left largely untouched in order to comply with the collector’s posthumous plans for the foundation, which are legally binding. But now, the museum can alter the way it presents its collection.

Changes to the Barnes’s original display have been a source of ongoing dispute. Controversy ensued in 2012, when the Barnes relocated from the founder’s original estate to a new building on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in the city’s museum district. Detractors of the shift argued it violated the trustee agreement Barnes had laid out before his death.

The current policy change, which is still in its proposal phase with the museum’s board of trustees, has several limits. No more than 20 paintings can be loaned at once, and no more than 2 paintings from one room. Individual loans are limited to 12 months during a 24-month period. Only under select circumstances can a work be loaned for up to 15 months during a 30-month period.

In April, lawyers and advocates of the current policy change, among them Barnes officials, argued in a hearing before Judge Sterling that Barnes loaned works from his collection to outside institutions during his lifetime.

It’s not yet clear which works could end up being loaned to outside institutions. Major works in the Barnes collection include Pablo Picasso’s Acrobat and Young Harlequin (1905) and Henri Matisse’s The Dance (1932).

In the past, museum leadership has parted from the restrictive policy in order to raise funds for the Barnes endowment. The former director, Richard Glanton, oversaw a temporary change to the policy restricting loans in the 1990s with the aim to raise $7 million in endowment funds.

The new loan policy has attracted pushback. Pennsylvania-based attorney Richard R. Feudale filed a motion on August 8 to dispute the July decision, but it was dismissed, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Feudale did not respond to an ARTnews request for additional comment.

Auction sales accounted for $409 million of the total sum for the first half of 2023, which also includes private sales. That’s a 31 percent decrease from the $590 million reported for the same period last year. This year’s figure was also lower than the $452 million reported in the first half of 2021.

Private sales were also down significantly, to $44 million, a 72 percent decrease from last year’s result of $156 million.

The drop in private sales appears even more stark considering that last year’s result was a record high, even as Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips returned to the traditional auction sales calendar. That 2022 private sales figure signaled a strong recovery for the house from the pandemic months after an industry-wide shift that moved sales into hybrid and online formats.

By way of more positive evidence, Phillips cited its contemporary art day sales, where the works of emerging and trending midcareer artists, often painters, are offered around primary market prices. These figures are considered to be more accessible.

In a statement, Phillips pointed to a wave of new entrants to sales, both artists and clients, as a metric of success. Between January and June, 50 artists were introduced to the auction stage through Phillips, including Sarah Cunningham, Yuan Fang, Henni Alftan, Jess Valice, and Emma Cousin. New and younger collectors, Phillips said, were also a focus in the spring. More than 40 percent of buyers came to Phillips for the first time. Millennial and Gen Z collectors made up 30 percent of bidders and buyers.

In recent months, other executives overseeing businesses at the top of the market have publicly warned of a market dip. In July, Christie’s revealed that it had generated $3.2 billion in sales in the first half of 2023, a 23 percent drop from its 2022 results for the same period. Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti attributed the results to a “challenging macro-environment.”

Meanwhile, in June, the online art platform Artsy had layoffs. In an internal email, its CEO attributed the cutbacks to “broader economic headwinds and an art market slow down.”

In a statement, Phillips CEO Stephen Brooks said, “Continued expansion of market share across the categories offered has also been a priority for us.” A Phillips representative declined to specify the effects of the sales drop on its internal business operations. There are no planned staff reductions.

The first artist commissioned to produce works offered through the platform is Australian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Cj Hendry. One hundred bronze inflatable crowns produced by the 35-year-old artist, whose drawings and sculptures have gained her a following online, will be released on August 20 when the platform first goes live. Prices for the works have not yet been disclosed.

The promise of receiving 3 percent from any resales of their art at Phillips is one draw for artists working with Dropshop.

Because resale royalties are not standard among auction houses, Phillips is aiming to make the model an industry first. Sales of the editioned works from other artists contracted to make work for the platform will be released monthly. The terms of the participating artists’ contracts with Phillips are being kept confidential.

Increasingly, artworks sold directly from artist’s studios have been included in contemporary art day sales at Phillips, as well as at auctions held by competing houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

Hendry, whose Instagram boasts 682,000 followers and who attributes her commercial success to the app, already sells commissioned works directly from her namesake studio. Despite having had solo shows in galleries, she does not maintain representation with dealers—an unconventional move for an artist her age.

In a statement, Christine Miele, the newly appointed Phillips retail sales director, acknowledged that the new platform responds to shifting dynamics in the market. Some artists, she said, are increasingly relying on “self-representation.” Since the pandemic’s onset in 2020, collectors have increasingly bought works from emerging artists without commercial representation via social media.

“This has certainly been relevant to the creation of Dropshop,” Miele added.

Before coming to Phillips, Miele headed the Kehinde Wiley Shop, a merchandise platform launched in 2020 by its namesake artist to raise funds for a Dakar-based nonprofit that he runs.

There are currently few other models like Dropshop at auction house competitors. When works are offered by artists’ studios at auction, the funds from sales generally benefit nonprofits or cultural institutions. Last September, for example, Sotheby’s launched a charity-focused primary market platform that allows artists to sell works directly to buyers.

“Over the past few years, artists have expressed an increased importance in both communicating directly with their audience and in playing a more active role in their secondary markets,” Miele said. “In developing the platform, we wanted to rethink how the traditional model for an auction house might be expanded.”

Competing art sales platforms with similar digital models include Avant Arte and Exhibition A, founded in 2021 and 2010, respectively.

While a Phillips spokesperson did not specify who would participate in Dropshop going forward, the representative did say that the house was seeking “blue-chip,” “self-represented” artists.

Signatories to the letter, which was addressed to outgoing director Hartwig Fischer, described the museum’s partnership with the oil company as “dangerous.” They argued that the museum plays a role in enhancing BP’s reputation by providing “social legitimacy and influence.”

Among the cultural figures who signed the letter are photographer Nan Goldin, climate scientist Bill McGuire, Brunel Museum director Katherine McAlpine, and archaeologist David Wengrow.

The letter condemned BP for its role in lobbying against climate-related policies, stating that the company has funded disinformation campaigns around the effects of climate change, and supported the economic interest of “repressive rulers” in Russia, Egypt, and other countries.

In the letter to Fischer, signatories called on the British Museum to take after other cultural institutions in the UK and abroad that removed the Sackler family name from their buildings. Many of those name changes came after protests by Goldin and her group, PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), highlighting the family-owned pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma’s role in fomenting a drug crisis in the United States through the sale of opioids.

In March 2022, the British Museum was among several institutions in the US and the UK to strip its galleries of the Sackler name.

“The damning evidence of BP’s past—and present—can no longer be ignored,” the letter reads. “Renaming the lecture theatre would send a powerful message about the future the museum wants to see … You would be demonstrating the kind of climate leadership that is now so urgently needed.”

This past February, BP reported a record profit of $27.7 billion in 2022.

The sponsorship between BP and the British Museum terminates this year, but BP retains the right to exercise any remaining “supporter benefits” until the end of 2023. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the UK-based climate change watch group Culture Unstained indicate that the final exhibition at the museum sponsored by BP was “Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt,” which closed this past February.

As part of the redevelopment of the museum’s Great Court in 2000, BP provided funds to create the 323-seat BP Lecture Theatre, which hosts major events at the museum. According to Culture Unstained, the petroleum company’s use of the venue for its annual business reception and private events has allowed it to “boost its brand by associating itself with the UK’s most visited cultural institution.”

All this took place on Saturday night in the Hamptons, where a modest size art crowd flocked to Long Island’s East End for the center’s annual benefit held at the Watermill Center. This year’s event was themed around “The Body,” and saw artists pushing their corporeal limits.

The performance art center sits on a sprawling wooded property that bills itself as a testing ground, residency, and “laboratory” for experimental artists and performers. Founded in 1992 by artist and theater director Robert Wilson, Watermill is home to his collection and archive.

The benefit has for years been an attraction in the summer months as commerce quiets down and art world insiders leave the city for more scenic locales. Previous editions have featured 10 or so performances spread across the center’s grounds, taking place inside a concrete lobby and across a substantial gravel courtyard that opens into moss-covered backwoods.

Each year, the personalities attending range widely, from academic types to those with celebrity ties. Among them this year were artists Coco Fusco, Robert Longo, and Daniel Arsham, as well as actor Cuba Gooding Jr. and designer Carolina Sarria.

On view in the center’s galleries was a career-spanning survey dedicated to the Regina José Galindo, a Guatemalan performance artist. A 2005 recipient of the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion award for young artists, Galindo is known for putting herself in dangerous scenarios as a way to respond to conflicts affecting her home country. She’s been suspended from cranes in crowded public squares and has stood naked in cornfields that were being culled by workers; documentation of these works figured prominently in the show.

Galindo herself was on hand at the benefit, staging a new performance called SIREN in Watermill’s courtyard. She arranged to have a police car parked outside the main entrance, its sirens left to wail while partiers milled around. Guests were unable at first to discern if the car was just a prop, and questioned when the noise would stop. As the night went on, a group of 10 or so local mechanics from the East End began to disassemble the vehicle in something like a reverse-engineered riot, cutting it down the middle and eventually dismantling its roof, all while Galindo sat in the back seat unresponsive.

Mechanics contracted for the job were new to the center. One of them, Gurcan Akis, said they had been hired just a week ahead of Saturday’s performance, and had been promised payment and insurance. Akis, speaking on behalf of the group, said a few of the men got nervous when the metal cutting got too close to the artist. They’d also been directed to slow their pace as the performance played out.

Galindo conceived SIREN in response to a 2020 study from the University of Chicago about the use of lethal force in US cities. The report’s authors found that most city police departments were not compliant with international law. Galindo praised her collaborators’ control, saying that throughout the 2 hours and 20 minutes the action lasted, Akis’s group “kept everything very focused.”

In other works, the elements figured prominently. Ola Maciejewska, a Polish choreographer and Water Mill resident, was the artist behind Second Body, the ice block performance. Over the course of an hour, another artist who performed the work in Maciekewska’s place melted the ice using her bare torso. Meanwhile, in the woods, guests, Campari in hand, came across Katimari Niskala, a Finnish artist floating face-up in a shallow pool of water.

By night’s end, Maciejewska and Niskala were not the only ones drenched. A downpour descended, forcing the guests inside, where some encountered works produced by Italian artist Alessandro Di Pietro. At Watermill, he’d mounted an exhibition inspired the late American sculptor Paul Thek, who was known for his macabre encasings of fake flesh. Attendees filtered into the center’s second-floor exhibition space where they viewed a severed limb cloaked in animal fur that revealed the inside of a faux carcass. Reactions ranged from intrigue to disgust, as the work, a part of a larger presentation focused more broadly on Thek’s legacy, served as a twisted interlude before the night’s coda.

The evening’s final event was a performance authored by Wilson called UBU, a riff on Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play, Ubu Roi. By the time Wilson emerged, heavy rain had taken down the sound system, which didn’t deter him from delivering a live address to the benefit audience, thanking them for soaking in the unexpected.

The monastery project, which officially opened July 29, was funded by the Rubin Museum of Art in New York after the repatriation of two artifacts to Nepal. In January 2022, leadership at the Rubin announced that the museum—founded by private collectors in 2004 and focusing on art of the Himalayas—returned two ancient wooden sculptures to Nepal after researchers found that the pieces had been taken illegally from religious sites. Items returned from the Rubin and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are on display in the Itumbaha monastery’s collection.

The opening of the museum drew attention from Nepali activists. A group of local repatriation advocates scrutinized the museum’s involvement in the project, viewing it as a means of diverting attention from other repatriation claims. During the 1970s and 1980s, Nepalese religious sites were the subject of looting; recent campaigns led by repatriation advocacy groups have sought to rectify this by bringing restitution claims for items with ties to vulnerable sites against museums in the United States.

In an interview with ARTnews, Rubin Museum executive director Jorrit Britschgi said that the initiative had come out of discussions with researchers on the ground in Nepal after the 2022 repatriation. Britschgi said initial talks centered around how the museum could lend support to the local context in Nepal. He posed questions to the museum’s board overseeing funding of what could come out of the repatriation. “What is important is for us not to assume this is what people need,” Britschgi said.

The museum was able to step in as a financial backer, and took on an “advisory role” in inventorying the monastery’s collection, he added, clarifying that the project was always envisioned as being community-led.

Members of the Itumbaha Conservation Society and the museology program of Lumbini Buddhist University documented the monastery’s collection, which spans 500 years, as part of the project with the idea to actualize a museum oriented to locals that would make the objects viewable year-round. Researchers involved in the project, among them Swosti Rajbhandari Kayastha, a scholar of Nepalese art and culture, had been eyeing the idea for the last decade.

During the 2022 repatriation claim, Britschgi said that the museum started to engage with conservationists and students “on the ground” to conduct research after the claim was filed, and worked with Nepali government officials overseeing cultural heritage projects to fill in provenance gaps. Talks with conservationists centered around the handling of an artifact collection that was meant to display and document objects with ritual purposes. Britschgi said he believes the documentation process of the monastery’s collection now being completed is “a huge gain” locally.

Challenges to Western concepts of presenting art, Britschghi added, also arose during the inventory of the collection. “We also learned from this project, about the sheer concept of a museum in the context of having a monastery that is an active part of lived culture. Those are interesting tensions and discussions around the needs also.”

Britschgi said the idea was to allocate some of the Rubin’s resources toward local research in a “mutual exchange” between researchers and not conceived to export the Rubin’s footprint internationally. In response to activists claims, the director said the museum is “accelerating efforts by bringing on outside experts,” on current restitution claims. “We are sensitive to the issues raised by those who have objected to the Rubin’s support of the Itumbaha Museum.”

The museum has supported Nepal’s art initiatives in the past. In 2022, the museum funded Nepal’s national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It was first time the country had exhibited in the Italian exhibition. Tsherin Sherpa, a trustee serving on the Rubin’s board who was involved in the Biennale project, defended the Itumbaha partnership. “This type of collaboration as a result of a restitution is meaningful, and helps the community raise awareness around their site.”

In a statement, Kayastha said the documentation process resulted in “discoveries” and emphasized the project was led in part by students aimed at “advancing” Nepal’s cultural sector. Another conservationist involved in the Itumbaha project, Pragya Ratna Shakya, said it should serve as a “model” for other museums involved in rectifying repatriation issues.

In a statement addressed to Britschgi, the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign called on the museum to disclose details of its investigations into current repatriation claims of objects in its collection. The group was critical of the role of private collecting in trafficking Nepali artifacts and of the project’s optics saying, “it cannot be a way to generate misplaced goodwill nor to divert attention from the responsibility of foreign collectors and museums on the matter of stolen heritage items from Kathmandu Valley.”

The museum said it has handed over research to Manhattan authorities concerning a current claim for a Nepali mask in its collection that is still awaiting repatriation. Provenance research is ongoing, the Rubin’s director told ARTnews, but still has its challenges. He sees approaching local researchers familiar with religious sites that were historically the subject of looting is a potential way forward. “We may not always have access to local knowledge. Not all the work can be done from a desk.”