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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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Whitney Union Sets Strike Date Days Before Major Roy Lichtenstein Show

Unionized staff at the Whitney Museum of Art will begin striking on Monday, October 5, if they cannot reach a contract agreement with the museum, Local 2110 UAW announced today. Workers at the Whitney Museum approved strike action earlier this month in a milestone vote held in conjunction with unions at the Brooklyn Museum and American Folk Art Museum. The Whitney union, however, is the first to put a deadline on the calendar—October 5, only three days before member and press previews open for the museum’s major Roy Lichtenstein retrospective (the show opens to the public October 11). The union’s first contract, ratified in 2023 after 16 months of bargaining, expired in June. The three-and-a-half-year contract covered approximately 200 workers and raised the wage floor significantly across the museum: staff members who made the minimum hourly rate of $17 in 2023 were subsequently paid $22, with a final salary bump to $24 per hour by 2025. For their...
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Matchday Scoring Highlights: Wellington U16s (20) v Hawke’s Bay U16s (17)

The two teams met in round one of the 2026 Hurricanes Youth Council U16 competition at Lyndhurst Park, Tawa, on Saturday. A very even game that could have gone either way and duly went down to the last play with Manawatu just failing to come up with the try at the death after a torrid...
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Sideline Conversions 28 September (rugby news and information to start the week)

Commitment – Halfback Milly Mackey looks to get the offload away to Baylee Meroiti in driving rain in the second half of their win over Tasman on Sunday. Photo: Tane Nathan/Kinetic Images. We are just about at the end of the line for representative 15s rugby for 2026, particularly in Wellington. The Wellington Pride have...
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“From Monet and Manet to Money”: A Berlin Museum Spotlights the Dealer Who Made Impressionism an International Sensation

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Three women greet viewers to “Cassirer: Breakthrough of Impressionism” at Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie: Edgar Degas’s Miss La La (1879), Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Lise with a Parasol (1867), and Max Slevogt’s 1901 portrait of Cassirer’s own daughter, Suzanne Aimée Cassirer. Two French, one German, all three paintings are connected to Paul Cassirer, the Berlin dealer who is credited with bringing Impressionism to Germany, including many works now in the Nationalgalerie collections; and with supporting German artists who furthered the developments of the avant-garde. Too often, we try to separate the art market from the museum, as if esteemed collections of now-canonical art could be held apart from the money with which they were bought and the circumstances in which they were sold. This exhibition and the accompanying catalog openly trace the mechanisms by which art crossed borders and exchanged hands. Impressionism ushered in a turn from art academies and state coll...
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WATCH: Tagata Pasifika 2026 Episode 22

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Tagata Pasifika | Television Series Despite the best efforts of organisers, Tuvalu’s Fakaapo Arts Festival was delayed due to bad weather. But this didn’t prevent Tagata Pasifika reporter Neueli Mauafu from spending time with the locals and those who travelled for this special celebration of Tuvaluan arts and culture.
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