Arts news

• ACLU Lawsuit Challenges Revocation of Visas for Students at US Universities, Including RISD

  21-04-2025 22:46 via artnews.com
  
  A group of ACLU-affiliated organizations filed a class-action lawsuit Friday in federal court in New Hampshire, seeking to reinstate the legal status of over 100 international students whose visas were abruptly revoked this year.The suit aims to protect students in New England and Puerto Rico who advocates say were stripped of their legal standing by the Trump administration without due process.Gilles Bissonnette, legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, called the move an unlawful overreach
  
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• Pope Francis’s Legacy Includes a Historic Venice Biennale Visit and a Call for Restitution

  21-04-2025 22:00 via artnews.com
  
  Pope Francis died on April 20 at 88, marking the end of an epoch for the Catholic Church and the beginning of its search for the next spiritual leader, who will also become proprietor of the Vatican’s library and vast art collection.He was born in 1936 as Mario Bergoglio, and was named Pope in 2013, following the resignation of Benedict Pope Benedict XVI. Francis was the first Jesuit priest to lead the 1.3 billion Catholics worldwide and having hailed from Argentina, he was the first from
  
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• Kehinde Wiley Accused of Sexually Assaulting Woman in New Lawsuit

  21-04-2025 21:33 via artnews.com
  
  Artist Kehinde Wiley has been accused of sexual assault by a fellow artist, Ogechi Chieke, in a lawsuit that was filed in New York this past February.Wiley, who is most famous for painting Barack Obama’s official presidential portrait, has faced multiple allegations of sexual assault by men in the past year. Many of those claims were made on Instagram, and he has repeatedly denied the allegations against him.But Chieke’s lawsuit is the first time any of those accusations have been ai
  
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• House Democrats Urge Vice President J.D. Vance to Stop Smithsonian Overhaul Following Trump Executive Order

  21-04-2025 17:50 via artnews.com
  
  On Thursday, four members of the United States’ House of Representatives sent a letter to Vice President J.D. Vance urging him to reject an overhaul of the Smithsonian Institution. The letter was sent in response to President Donald Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order, issued on March 27, to eliminate “divisive” and “anti-American” content from the Smithsonian’s exhibitions and to restore “monuments, memorials
  
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• National Gallery of Art Director Meets with Elon Musk’s DOGE

  21-04-2025 17:44 via artnews.com
  
  The director and the secretary of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. met with representatives from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), according to a report published by Kriston Capps in Bloomberg CityLab on Friday evening.The Trump administration has not previously targeted the National Gallery of Art. Instead, the administration has focused much of its attention on the Smithsonian Institution, whose many museums do not count the National Gallery. Previous
  
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• A Magritte Drawing Found on eBay for Less Than $2,000 Heads to Auction for Over $100,000

  21-04-2025 17:28 via artnews.com
  
  In a story that feels more than a bit surreal, a recently discovered drawing by René Magritte that was picked up on eBay for just $1,580 will now headline Rago/Wright’s Post War & Contemporary Art auction on May 21. The untitled work on paper is estimated to sell for between $100,000 and $150,000.Executed in ballpoint pen, colored pencil, and pencil, the drawing depicts oversized chess pieces amid a sky of soft clouds. Both the chess pieces and the clouds were images Magritte re
  
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• Isaac Julien Gets an Electrifying US Retrospective at Long Last

  21-04-2025 16:50 via artnews.com
  
  Perhaps you don’t associate Blaxploitation filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles with Renaissance painting? I didn’t, at least not before last week, but now I’ll never be able to unhitch Van Peebles from the image of him admiring The Ideal City, a quattrocento painting of an open plaza.That image figures prominently in Isaac Julien’s video installation Baltimore (2003), one of 13 transfixing works in Julien’s newly opened retrospective at San Francisco’s de Young Museu
  
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• Singer-Songwriter Lucy Dacus Talks Art and Museums at the Barnes Foundation

  21-04-2025 16:25 via artnews.com
  
  Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.Singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus‘s newly released album Forever Is A Feeling has been widely anticipated by her fans, but art aficionados have good reason to be excited too.The cover of the album features a portrait of Dacus painted by artist Will St. John in a Renaissance style. In the work, the 29-year-
  
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• Pope Francis Has Died, Democratic Lawmakers Call for Stop to Trump’s Smithsonian Overhaul and More: Morning Links for April 21, 2025

  21-04-2025 16:09 via artnews.com
  
  To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.The Headlines A SOMBER DAY. Pope Francis died Easter Monday at his home in Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican announced in a statement on social media. He was 88. In addition to pushing for a more inclusive Roman Catholic Church  in support of marginalized voices over the course of his 12-year papacy, the first Jesuit and Latin Americ
  
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• In His US Retrospective, Ai Weiwei Takes Old Ideas to New Extremes

  21-04-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  
  The word “fuck” in giant neon letters, (FUCK, 2020), greets visitors to the Seattle Art Museum’s exhibition “Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei,” the superstar artist’s largest United States retrospective ever. The glowing expletive about sums up the prevailing liberal mood in the country these days—though perhaps not in the way the show’s curator, Ping Foong, intended. Like the nearby sculpture of a human hand making the gesture, (Middle
  
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