June 2, 2022 • View in browser

Good morning. 🌧️ In today's art crimes stories, the New York District Attorney’s office seizes allegedly looted antiquities from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the FBI investigates potentially fake Basquiats at the Orlando Museum of Art. The plunder and fakery just never end.

On a lighter note, a recent discovery at the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology validates the theory that some mammals can lay eggs.

Also today, a special feature about Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts, reviews of Kevin Beasley, Siobhan Liddell, Marta Minujín, and more.

— Hakim Bishara, interim editor-in-chief 

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Marta Minujín Looks Ugliness Right in the Face 

The Argentine artist’s early Informalist works, conjuring decay and degradation, are difficult to look at but deserving of our gaze. | Valentin Di Liscia

WHAT'S HAPPENING

“Untitled (Self-Portrait or Crown Face II)” (1982), a work on view at the Orlando Museum of Art (used with permission from the Orlando Museum of Art)

• The FBI is investigating the authenticity of 25 Basquiat works on display at the Orlando Museum of Art.

• The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office seized five allegedly looted antiquities worth over $3 million from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• The International African American Museum will open its doors next January at the former site of Gadsden's Wharf in Charleston, SC.

• At the Cambridge Museum, recently rediscovered 150-year-old specimens were key to demonstrating that mammals could lay eggs.

REPRESENTATION IN NEW MEXICO

50 Years of Contemporary Native Art at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts

The IAIA remains the only educational institution in the world dedicated to the study of contemporary Native American and Alaska Native arts. | Sarah Sao Mai Habib

An Artist’s Opiate Addiction Recovery Through Photography

For New Mexico-based artist Frank Blazquez, portraiture was the way out of a crippling opiate addiction. | Samantha Anne Carrillo

LATEST REVIEWS

Kevin Beasley Threads Wires That Connect Los Angeles With the South

While this exhibition exists in an austere white cube, far away from the heavy heat and kudzu of Virginia or Louisiana, the artist invokes the South through material and conceptual pull. | Noah Simblist

Siobhan Liddell Presents a Poem of a Show

Her latest exhibition is spare, strange, intentional in its moves, and economical in its means. | Cassie Packard

IN MEMORIAM

Ron Galella (1931-2022)
Paparazzi photographer | Guardian

Samella Lewis (1923–2022)
Art historian, artist, and champion of Black American art | Washington Post

Claude Rutault (1941-2022)
French painter | Artnews

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HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE ARCHIVE

A Beautiful Guide to Colors in the Natural World, Revisited 200 Years Later

“Nature’s Palette” reproduces the groundbreaking color systems and illustrates them with lush engravings. | Lauren Moya Ford