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The winning Wellington club rugby 1926 Senior Championship side Athletic, featuring All Blacks Cliff Porter and Kenneth Svenson in the front row.  As we enter a new season of rugby in the Wellington region, a look back at how the season panned out 100 years ago. This year it is 1926. A recap of the...

The Queens Museum has named Debra Wimpfheimer as its next executive director. She replaces Sally Tallant, who departed last month ahead of taking on the directorship of the Hayward Gallery in London. Wimpfheimer, a Queens native, has worked for the museum for more than two decades. She first joined as the institution’s director of external affairs in 2002, a role she held until 2006, when she left to serve as director of special projects at Lincoln Center for just over a year, according to her LinkedIn . She rejoined the Queens Museum in 2008 as director of strategic partnerships. She has twice served as the museum’s interim director, first in 2014 for nine months and then in 2018 for just over a year. After both stints in the top position, she assumed the role of deputy director. “No one knows the Queens Museum like Debra,” Queens Museum board chair Paula Kirby said in a statement. “Her many years of dedication have already shaped the Museum’s successes and as we look to the futur...

The UK can’t seem to get enough of David Bowie. “David Bowie Is,” an exhibition about the late pop icon’s life, music, videos, and art, was organized by the V&A in London, where it opened in 2013 and proceeded to tour the world for five years. The V&A also recently opened the David Bowie Centre, a permanent installation of objects drawn from the musician’s 90,000-item archives, housed in the museum’s new storage facility in East London. Now comes “David Bowie: You’re Not Alone,” will open on April 22 at Lightroom, a venue for immersive exhibitions near London’s Kings Cross Station. “You’re Not Alone” is organized by Mark Grimmer, the creative director of “David Bowie Is.” The immersive experience will feature performance footage, interviews, film clips, drawings, and other visual materials projected onto Lightroom’s nearly 40-foot-tall walls and floor. Grimmer also produced Lightroom’s inaugural exhibition in 2023, “David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & furt...

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles has announced the winners of the three prizes it gives out for each edition of its Made in L.A. biennial. Ali Eyal has won the Mohn Award, which comes with $100,000 and a Hammer-produced monograph on his work. Carl Cheng, who is in his 80s, won the Career Achievement Award, which comes with $25,000. Greg Breda was selected by public vote of visitors to the exhibition to receive the Public Recognition Award, which also comes with $25,000. Eyal and Cheng were selected by a jury that included Gean Moreno, director of the Art + Research Center at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Margot Norton, chief curator of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and Daniela Lieja Quintanar, chief curator and deputy director of programs at REDCAT in Los Angeles. Eyal is the youngest artist featured in the exhibition and is represented by only one painting, a 12-foot-wide canvas titled And Look Where I Went (2025). Born in Baghdad in 1994, Eyal gre...

A small metal object excavated almost 100 years ago has been identified as the oldest known drilling tool yet found in Egypt. The news was reported by Archeology Today . The artifact came from a predynastic cemetery at the archeological site of Badari in Upper Egypt and dates to the late 4th millennium BCE. Part of the grave goods of an adult male, it is made of copper alloy and measures only about two and a half inches. A 1924 catalog entry at Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where the object is housed, describes it as “a little awl of copper, with some leather thong wound round it.” But a new study, undertaken by researchers from Newcastle University and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna has determined that the tool is in fact the remains of what is known as a bow drill. A prehistoric invention, a bow drill consists of a cord wrapped around a shaft and held taut by a bow, which is rapidly moved back and forth to spin the drill. While the existence of bow drills in ...

In a new interview with The Guardian in advance of his forthcoming book On Censorship , artist Ai Weiwei talked about experiencing censorship not just in his native China but also in the West—including an incident involving his membership in London’s Royal Academy. After chronicling some of his storied challenges and acts of defiance against China’s communist regime, Ai told writer Lanre Bakare he feels “the same kind of surveillance, same kind of censorship in the west.” As Bakare recounts, “Pressed for an example, he tells me a story about the Royal Academy in London, an institution that gave him a landmark exhibition in 2015 and made him an honorary member in 2011 following his detainment in China. In November 2023, an exhibition of new works to be shown at the Lisson Gallery was pulled after he posted a tweet that began: ‘The sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been, at times, transferred to offset the Arab world.’ The tweet was deleted, with the ar...