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Former High Museum COO Sentenced to One Year in Prison for Siphoning $600,000 to Buy Guitars

A federal judge sentenced the former chief operating officer of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta to one year in prison and one year of supervised release for stealing more than $600,000 from the museum. Brady Lum, 60, served as the High Museum’s COO from January 2019 until December 2025, when he resigned. He began siphoning money from the museum in September 2019, around nine months into the job, until November 2025, when it was discovered. Lum’s theft involved the purchase of “non-business items and services for himself, including expensive guitars and other music equipment, personal music lessons, and woodworking equipment, through direct supplier invoicing and the High Museum’s corporate credit card reimbursement process,” according to a press release from the Office of US Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, which prosecuted the case. The release adds that Lum concealed the theft by “submitting altered invoices, using his position to ...
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Dia Art Foundation Teams Up with MCA Australia on Two-Part Exhibition for Indigenous Artist d harding

New York’s Dia Art Foundation will co-present a two-part exhibition of work by the Indigenous Australian artist d harding to be split between Dia Chelsea and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney. The New York component will open in February, with the other part slated for March; both will run into August of next year. “A through line in harding’s practice is the concept of transfer—a consideration of how histories are carried through materials, techniques, and places, transporting ancestral knowledge into dialogue with the spaces in which their work is encountered,” Dia curator Jordan Carter said in a statement. “Presented in parallel at two institutions, bridging Australia and the U.S., this two-part exhibition reveals the iterative logic, conceptual depth, and cultural resonance of harding’s practice.” For the Dia show, harding has drawn inspiration from a number of site visits to the foundation’s storied Land art holdings in the American ...
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Miquel Navarro, Sculptor of Large-Scale, Pared-Down Cities and Valencia’s Beloved ‘Pink Panther,’ Dies at 81

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Miquel Navarro, a sculptor known for his pared-down installation of cities that reflected on the promises of modernity in the latter-half of the 20th century, died on Sunday at 81 in Mislata, Spain, after a long illness, reports El País . Navarro’s hometown of Mislata, just outside València, served as a never-ending source of inspiration for him throughout his career. “The city that inspired part of his imagery was also where he lived, worked, and developed much of his creative process. From his studio in the Morería neighborhood, the artist built a universal career without ever relinquishing his connection to the land where he grew up,” the Mislata City Council said in a statement announcing his death. Part of a generation of Spanish artists who came to prominence in the 1980s, Navarro would make his first “City” sculpture in 1973, two years before the Franco regime ended. “In the fifties, I would approach the city on a tram, and the encounter with it w...
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Remembering Dolores Huerta: Artists Barbara Carrasco, Judith F. Baca, Yreina D. Cervántez, and Vincent Valdez Reflect on the Iconic Activist’s Legacy

“It’s hard to believe this amazing icon is gone from our world,” artist Judith F. Baca said of Dolores Huerta, the labor activist who died last week at 96. A cofounder of the United Farm Workers of America, Huerta is best-known for her decades-long dedication to fighting for the labor rights of farmworkers in the fields of California and more broadly for helping to galvanize the Chicano civil rights movement. She recruited members to the union’s cause, led strikes and ensured that companies felt the impact of the absence of the farmworkers whom they exploited, and negotiated the contracts that provided material change to the lives and working conditions for campesinos and campesinas . “She turned the phrase ‘Sí, se puede!’ into a chant that animated rallies and marches well into a new century,” as the Los Angeles Times put it . “She was always conscious of having women be at the table,” artist Barbara Carrasco told ARTnews , noting that as a UFW negoti...
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Czech Archaeologists Rediscover Long-Lost Tombs of Ancient Egyptian High Officials

Czech archaeologists working at Saqqara have re-excavated a group of tombs belonging to high priests and senior officials of Egypt’s Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2181 BCE). The news was first reported by Ahram Online following an announcement by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. Located 20 miles south of Cairo, the Saqqara archaeological site was the main necropolis for the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis, which was founded around 3100 BCE and abandoned in the 7th century CE. The excavations were made as part of a project by the Czech Institute of Egyptology to locate, excavate, and document tombs partially explored in the 19th century and buried again over time. These tombs were first discovered by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, founder of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, between 1858 and 1860. During those years, Mariette identified approximately 160 tombs in the area dating to the Old Kingdom. However, his excavations focused larg...
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In Fiery Court Filing, Democratic Lawmaker Says Kennedy Center’s Closure Is Meant to Hide Its Failure Under Trump

The much-debated potential two-year closure of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is being proposed to cover up the institution’s failings since US president Donald Trump installed loyalists to the board and became its chair, says Ohio Democrat Joyce Beatty in a fiery 51-page Friday filing in US District Court for Washington, D.C. Beatty is an ex-officio member of the board of trustees. Trump has insisted the closure is necessary and dictated a date for it, the filing points out, without any proper board oversight. The strongly worded filing says the administration has responded “grudgingly—to put it generously” to requests for information; criticizes a defense by Trump as being based on “a fake one-year review that never happened”; cites a “sham process to lend a false patina of legitimacy”; and, in a piquant choice of words given Trump’s admiration of the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, calls Trump’s decision to close the center a “ukase,” a term re...
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Sideline Conversions 2 November (some rugby news to start the new week)

Georgia Daals on the burst for Petone against Poneke in their WRFU women’s 7s tournament on Saturday. Photo: Andy McArthur. The first of five scheduled Saturdays of sevens was held at Rugby League Park on Saturday with the first of the two WRFU women’s tournaments. The Petone Ponies have the upper hand heading into this...
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