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As New York City Doubles Grants for Individual Artists to $10,000, Cultural Affairs Commissioner Diya Vij Discusses Vision for City Agency

New York will increase its direct support to artists, Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani and Cultural Affairs commissioner Diya Vij announced today. Rising from $5,000 to up to $10,000, the increase doubles the funds given to artists and represents the first change in this funding stream in some 20 years. The funding comes from the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) and is distributed to each borough’s arts councils, which act as regrant partners and dole out grants to individual artists annually as part of an open call. The funds will come from the DCLA’s budget, totaling around $3.5 million given to all five councils cumulatively. “Artists are working New Yorkers, and they pay the same rent and the same grocery bills as everyone else in this city,” Mayor Mamdani said in a statement. “A grant frozen at $5,000 for twenty years has been losing value every single year. Doubling it is a first step toward making sure the people who give this city its culture can a...
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Free Entry to UK National Museums Will Continue, Government Says

On Monday, the UK government poured cold water on speculation that overseas visitors could soon be forced to pay entry fees to the country’s national museums. Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS), confirmed that institutions including the British Museum, Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, and National Museums Liverpool will continue to offer free admission. Nandy made the announcement at an event at Tate Liverpool organized by Art Fund and the Cultural Policy Unit. It comes as the UK’s free museum-entry policy approaches its 25th anniversary. The 15 national museums sponsored by the DCMS began offering free admission on December 1, 2001, under the Labour government. She said the policy is about keeping museums open and accessible to everyone. “They remind us of our shared history and enable us to step outside the confines of our lives,” Nandy said. She added that free entry should remain in place “forever,...
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Sotheby’s To Sell Artworks from Collection of Bankrupt Hedge Funder George Allen Weiss

Sotheby’s will offer a dozen works from the holdings of Miami hedge funder and art collector George Allen Weiss in the wake of his firm, Weiss, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year. The proceeds will go toward satisfying a $123 million debt to Bank of America that was secured by his artwork, Bloomberg reports. The auction house will sell 16 of Weiss’s works during its marquee November sales, Weiss’s lawyer, Paul Battista, said at a court hearing Wednesday, according to Bloomberg. Court papers indicate that Weiss collects works by artists including Francis Bacon, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol. Lawyers at the court hearing said that Sotheby’s has guaranteed a minimum price for six of the 16 works. His collection includes at least 25 additional pieces, according to Bloomberg . Weiss’s attorney did not immediately respond to ARTnews ’s request for comment. Sotheby’s declined to comment. A year ago, Weiss sought to sell a Clau...
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Brazil’s Inhotim Marks 20 Years and Looks to a Future Beyond Its Founder

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Twenty years after it opened to the public, Inhotim is going through one of the most decisive transitions in its history. The contemporary art museum and botanical garden, which collector Bernardo Paz imagined on an unprecedented scale in the Brazilian mining town of Brumadinho, with individual pavilions for specific artists, monumental works, and paths stretching across 346 acres, recorded its highest annual attendance in 2025, welcoming 365,000 visitors. But Paz, who donated the land, galleries, and 326 works to Inhotim in 2022, is no longer involved in its operations. (He announced earlier this year that he is building another museum right next door, on land that Inhotim had planned to expand.) Adviser Allan Schwartzman, a cofounder of Inhotim and now chief curatorial adviser to the forthcoming Museu Bernardo Paz, described the two projects as “two halves of a body.” They share a founder, a border, and a similar ambition: to create experiences around artwork...
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UK’s Ashmolean Museum Joins Forces with Samdani Art Foundation to Build Bangladeshi Art Collection

The Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford in the UK and the Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) based in Dhaka have joined forces on a new program focused on contemporary art from Bangladesh. The partnership will bring a Bangladeshi artist to Oxford each year and will also see the museum build a dedicated collection of contemporary Bangladeshi art. The first artist selected for the Ashmolean Samdani Visiting Artist program is Munem Wasif, a Dhaka-based artist and curator. Wasif is spending two weeks at the museum, where he’s working with its collections and archives. His practice brings together photography, moving image, archival materials, and found objects, often exploring ideas around impermanence, insecurity, and memory. During his time at the Ashmolean, Wasif will be looking at the colonial history of Bengal and considering how the museum’s collections might connect with his existing work. “For years, my practice has returned to the colonial history...
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Senators Blumenthal and Cornyn File Amicus Brief in Case of Heirs Suing for Nazi-Looted Egon Schiele Works

Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and his Republican counterpart John Cornyn of Texas have filed an amicus (or “friend of the court”) brief defending their own Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act, which was signed into law in 2016, against claims of unconstitutionality by Austrian defendants seeking to hold on to Nazi-looted works by Egon Schiele. The senators filed the brief on September 18 in the Southern District of New York in the case Reif v. Republic of Austria, in which Timothy Reif, a descendant of Austrian Jewish performer Fritz Grünbaum, who was killed at the Dachau concentration camp in 1941, sued the government of Austria along with the Albertina Museum and the Leopold Museum, both in Vienna, for the return of a dozen artworks. Reif and fellow descendants David Fraenkel and Milos Vavra filed the case in December 2022, saying that Austria had become “a haven for traffickers in Nazi looted art” by imposing “impossible fin...
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Artists Christine Sun Kim, Rodney McMillian, and Vincent Valdez Win MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grants

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced the 20 recipients of its annual MacArthur Fellowships, colloquially called “Genius Grants,” which comes with $800,000 in unrestricted funds. This year’s cohort includes four artists: Christine Sun Kim (based in Berlin), Rodney McMillian (Los Angeles), Vincent Valdez (Houston and San Antonio), and Chip Thomas (Flagstaff, Arizona). The subject of a recent Whitney Museum survey , Kim is known for her works that challenge institutions and audiences to confront their own ableism, particularly as it relates to Deafness. One of her best-known series is “Degrees of Deaf Rage” (2018–19), drawings in charcoal and oil pastel that which humorously and bitingly recounts some of these moments in which hearing privilege does not account for the lived realities of Deaf people. In 2020, she memorably performed the national anthem in American Sign Language at the Super Bowl, an experience she wrote about in t...
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