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Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum Names New Director

The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto has named Nicholas R. Bell as its next director and CEO. Bell, who was selected via an international search, will start in the role on July 6. He succeeds Josh Basseches, who stepped down at the end of last year after a decade in the role. Bell is currently president and CEO of Glenbow, an art museum with a collection of more than 250,000 objects in Calgary, Alberta. There since 2019, he has focused on developing the institution’s strategic plan, which “prioritized financial sustainability, increased inclusion and accessibility, and furthered Indigenous community engagement and reconciliation,” according to a release. He also established an endowment that made the museum admission free, a first for a major museum in Canada, and launched Glenbow Reimagined, a $250 million capital campaign that includes a renovation of the museum’s campus, set to open in 2027. In a statement, Glenbow board chair Lori Van Rooijen said, “The Board is deeply grateful ...
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Dalí Museum in Florida Announces $65 M. Expansion Planned for 2028

The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg is planning a major expansion expected to begin construction in 2026, with the new facilities slated to open in 2028. The museum said the approximately 35,000-square-foot addition will cost an estimated $65 million and is intended to grow the exhibition spaces, create a dedicated learning center, and introduce new immersive experiences combining art and digital technology. The project will be designed and built by the Beck Group, which also constructed the museum’s current building that opened in 2011. Founded in 1982, the museum holds one of the largest collections of works by the Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí outside Spain. According to the institution, it has welcomed more than 10 million visitors since opening. Executive director Hank Hine described the expansion as a way to accommodate growing audiences and deepen the museum’s educational programming. “It’s not about being bigger; it’s about being bolde...
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Site of Failed Pompidou Museum in Jersey City May Become Affordable Housing

After a years-long saga with countless twists and turns came to end last month, new reports signal that the site once prepared for the Centre Pompidou’s Jersey City museum has been eyed for affordable housing and community space. As reported by Gothamist (beneath a headline that begins “Au Revoir, Pompidou”), Jersey City Mayor James Solomon, shortly after taking office in January, “announced Monday that the city would work with Kushner Real Estate Group on new plans for the Artwalk Towers development at 808 Pavonia Ave. in Journal Square.” That runs starkly counter to once-ambitious plans for a starry outpost of Paris’s Centre Pompidou in a city just across the Hudson River from New York. As reported by ARTnews when the plans were summarily canceled, the Centre Pompidou x Jersey City “was first announced in 2021 as a 58,000-square-foot museum set in a 109-year-old building on Journal Square. But as often happens in New Jersey, local politics interfered, and the plan quickly fest...
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Our Critics Are Split on the Weirdest Whitney Biennial in Recent Memory

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The Whitney Biennial is both the most important recurring art exhibition in the US and, often, the most polarizing one . During a year when notions about what does and doesn’t constitute Americanness are the subject of everyday discourse, this survey of American art has now returned for its 82nd edition at the Whitney Museum in New York. Curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, it is bound to spur on yet more debate. Some 56 artists are included in this biennial, and they hail from countries ranging from Palestine to the Philippines to Japan. Working in mediums such as performance, sculpture, and painting, and even utilizing AI and other emergent technologies, these artists appear to be concerned with a concise set of themes: the relationship between humans and nonhumans, the influence of American empire on foreign nations, how infrastructure can either support or hurt those who rely upon it, and the meaning of horror imagery during fearsome times. With the biennial having offic...
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Club Rugby Summer Series: Trophies Chat Volume 2

Northern United and Marist St Pat’s celebrate their shared Jubilee Cup title win in 2008, the last time it was shared. The cup itself is lidless, and had been for at least 35 years.  There are many cups and trophies that are contested each year between clubs or internally in clubs to be presented at...
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Supreme Court Declines to Reconsider Copyright Case on AI Art

The US Supreme Court said on Monday that it will not hear a case over whether art by artificial intelligence can recieve copyright protection. The decision all but ends the years-long quest by computer scientist Stephen Thaler to have art crafted by his AI system “DABUS” recieve federal copyright protection. In a 2024 profile in Art in America , Thaler told Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that he viewed DABUS as a “proto-conciousness” capable of experiencing stress and trauma. Gaining copyright protection, as Thaler painted it, was about affirming the agency of his AI model, rather than ensuring some financial benefit. “Is DABUS an inventor? Or is he an artist?” he said at the time. “I don’t know. I can’t tell you that. It’s more like a sentient, artificial being. But I even question the artificial part.” Thaler’s quixotic quest began when he submitted a federal copyright registration in 2018 for the artwork A Recent Entrance to Paradise , produced during one of his many experiments w...
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The Lume, the Controversial Immersive Digital Art Gallery at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Closed at the End of February

In 2021, the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields turned the museum’s fourth floor contemporary art galleries into an exhibition space for high-tech digital art called the Lume. Over the past five years, the controversial initiative featured immersive, crowd-pleasing exhibitions like “Van Gogh Alive” (2021), “Monet & Friends Alive” (2022-23), and “Dalí Alive” (2024-25). However, at the end of February the museum announced that the Lume’s current show, “Connection: Land, Water, Sky — Art & Music from Indigenous Australians,” which closed on Feb. 28, was its last. The museum said in a statement to the Indianapolis Business Journal that the closure will make way for “a new monumental exhibition that will further advance the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s contemporary art vision and expand how audiences experience art at Newfields,” though didn’t elaborate on what this new endeavor entails. The Lume space was created by the Australian company Grande Experiences, which special...
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