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In a new report published by the State Department’s Bureau of Protocol, records show that former President Joe Biden received a $19,000 painting from the president of Angola, João Lourenço, last year. The report, published annually, details gifts given to the president, their spouse, members of the cabinet, and other senior officals by foreign leaders and governments. Federal employees are required to report such gifts, if they are worth more than $480. Usually, those gifts are then transferred to the National Archives or the General Servies Administration, unless the recipient chooses to reimburse the US Treasury for them. The most recent report, which covers 2024, showed that Biden was gifted the painting, titled Marimba , by Augusto Guizef Guilherme , a self-taught Angolan painter. According to AfriKin , a Miami-based nonprofit that promotes contemporary African and diasporic art, Guilherme’s work “celebrates the cultural richness of Africa” and has been included in international...

When you get to the chance to meet a giant of the art world, it’s an opportunity you don’t pass up. Martial Raysse, 89, is one of those giants. The reclusive artist seldom grants interviews, but he welcomed me into his home, just outside Bordeaux, shortly before the opening of his exhibition at Galerie Templon in Paris earlier this month. The exhibition marks the artist’s debut with the gallery, which is showing 30 of Raysse’s recent paintings and sculptures—narrowed down from more than 50 works when we spoke. Founder Daniel Templon, Raysse recalled, “sent me a handwritten letter at a time when I was looking for a place to show my latest large canvases. It really was that simple.” That matter-of-factness set the tone for our hours-long conversation about art, literature, and life. In France, Raysse, one of the most influential—and most unclassifiable—figures in postwar French painting, needs little introduction. But the restlessly experimental artist’s latest work might come as a sur...

Calian VENTURES-led initiative establishes national network of regional development labs to strengthen sovereignty, security, and operational readiness As global security dynamics continue to shift and pressure on Arctic and continental defence grows, Canada is sharpening its focus on sovereign capability, trusted industrial capacity, and speed-to-field modernization. Against this backdrop, Calian Group Ltd. has launched a major new strategic initiative to accelerate the development and deployment of sovereign C5ISRT capabilities—mobilizing an initial collective investment of $100 million through its defence innovation orchestrator, Calian VENTURES . The initiative is designed to move Canadian defence innovation more quickly from concept to operational capability, while ensuring that the underlying technologies, data, and integration pathways remain under trusted Canadian control. It brings together capital investment from VENTURES, co-development of new intellectual property betwee...

In a rare show of political solidarity for the art world, a growing number of New York galleries will close on Friday, January 30, as part of the nationwide general strike protesting expanded Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations. These actions come amid global scrutiny over the use of deadly force against protestors and allegations that federal tactics are eroding constitutional rights, including protections for free expression and due process. Industry heavyweights, such as Pace Gallery, which will close its US locations, David Zwirner, Almine Rech, P·P·O·W Gallery, David Kordansky, and Marian Goodman—alongside smaller outfits like Ulterior, Hannah Traore, and Hesse Flatow—have aligned with businesses and cultural institutions, such as LA’s Institute of Contemporary Art, in opposition to Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, with a flashpoint emerging in Minneapolis after the fatal shootings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents.  Scatte...

Celebrating community rugby 2016-25 in highlights. Over the break, Club Rugby collated and sorted all our video clip highlights that were recorded and saved in the decade between the 2016-2025 seasons. As we continue add to these clips to our library, it is intended that they will all be posted online – but this is...

Hong Kong’s M+ museum has selected Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander’s hand-painted animated film 3 to 12 Nautical Miles  (2026) for its latest commission for M+ Facade, an enormous LED-embedded media screen measuring approximately several hundred feet across. Co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel, the work will screen from March 23 through June 21. 3 to 12 Nautical Miles  (2026) continues Sikander’s interpretation of the entangled histories of empire and commerce, linking Imperial Britain, the Indian subcontinent, and Qing China within a broader examination of the transmission of visual language and form across these regions. The animation chronicles the waning sway of the Mughal Empire under Akbar II, its intersection with the Qing dynasty in a period of internal turmoil, and the East India Company’s transition from a mercantile entity to a colonial power, culminating in the First Opium War—sparked by Britain’s opium cultivation in India and its trade with Chin...

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei returned to China last month after a decade-long exile in Europe. The three-week trip to Beijing marked his first visit since authorities returned his confiscated passport in 2015, ending years of travel restrictions tied to his political dissent.  Ai is internationally famous for his criticism of authoritarianism and its cultural consequences—censorship, police brutality, extrajudicial incarceration—making him a longtime target of the Chinese government. The artist has lived in Germany, the UK, and Portugal after leaving China in 2015. He told CNN that his reentry to China included a brief airport interrogation, signaling a possible shift in tactics in how Beijing treats its high-profile critics. Ai later shared on Instagram photographs and videos from his three-week stay, during which time his 17-year-old son and 93-year-old mother met.  “It felt like a phone call that had been disconnected for 10 years suddenly reconnecting,” Ai told CNN about t...

New York University announced Tuesday that Alison Weaver will serve as the next director of its Grey Art Museum. She will begin in the role on May 26, after the conclusion of the current academic year. Weaver succeeds Lynn Gumpert, who retired last year and had been in the role since 1997. Weaver comes to NYU from another university museum, the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, where she served as founding executive director since 2015. Her last day at Rice will be on May 1. As founding director, Weaver was charged with overseeing the completion of a new 50,000-square-foot building for the Moody Center, which opened in 2017, and creating the programming and vision for the new institution. She also launched an artist-in-residence program at the museum, which has invited the likes of Mona Hatoum, Coco Fusco, Bryon Kim, Leslie Hewitt, and Trevor Paglen to Houston. During her tenure, she also curated more than 25 exhibitions at the Moody Center and grew Rice’s art...

A cold wind cuts through lower Manhattan, passing shuttered storefronts that once housed small galleries—some casualties of the rent crisis—before losing force at the corner of Broome and Chrystie Streets. There, a different kind of market experiment took shape. Last year, Spielzeug Gallery, a nomadic curatorial project had a turn as a brick-and-mortar commercial gallery, testing a model that reads almost anachronistic beside Tribeca: one in which chaos is not a pose, but the consequence of combining pleasure and survival within the same space. The purpose, after all, is embedded in the name itself. The gallery’s name is the German word for “toy.” “Toys always come with an idea of control,” said Evan Karas, the director and founder of Spielzeug. “Toys are about working with your hands—pulling a Barbie apart. As children, we rely on objects to make sense of reality. That intensity never really goes away in adulthood; it just shifts into something psychosexual.”  The first exhibit...

The Louvre closed on Monday due to a strike as employees’ demands for improved working conditions and pay equity continue to go unmet, marking the fourth day the Paris museum has shuttered since mid-December. The stoppage is one of the longest strikes in the history of the world’s most visited museum, a crisis intensified by the October 19 burglary and related revelations of systemic security failures. According to Le Parisien , roughly 300 employees voted in a general assembly on Monday morning to extend the strike launched on December 15, following several fruitless negotiation sessions with the Ministry of Culture and Louvre management. “What we need is political will to ensure that these pay gaps are compensated without delay,” said union representative Christian Galani in a statement quoted by Le Parisien , calling on French Culture Minister Rachida Dati to honor her word after publicly deeming the strikers’ demands “legitimate.”  Valérie Baud, representative of the unio...

By Touchline The 20-year period between the two World Wars saw the introduction of “the Jubilee Cup” to Wellington’s senior rugby championship. But despite the generally accepted narrative of its origin being in 1929, new information obtained by Touchline suggests its true beginnings are shrouded in the dense tobacco-smoke and oft heady beer-fumes of local...

The Minneapolis Institute of Art, the city’s leading art museum, announced on Sunday that it would remain closed on Sunday “for the safety of staff and visitors,” according to a statement posted to Instagram. The institution was one of many in the city to close on Friday as part of the Day of Truth and Freedom, a statewide protest organized in response to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Minnesota communities in recent weeks. On Saturday, during an ICE operation, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, in Minneapolis. After the shooting, federal officials said that agents acted in self-defense, claiming that Pretti “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun,” according to Security of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. She further said that officers “attempted to disarm” Pretti and that he “violently resisted.” But the killing inflamed tensions in the city after multiple eyewitness videos p...

As Canada moves closer to selecting its next-generation submarine fleet, the Canadian Patrol Submarine Project (CPSP) has become about far more than the acquisition of new boats. It has emerged as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to anchor sovereign industrial capability, create high-value employment, and establish a long-term submarine sustainment enterprise inside Canada. Against this backdrop, Hanwha Ocean and Babcock Canada are advancing a joint approach to the CPSP that places Canadian jobs, skills development, and in-country sustainment at the very centre of their proposed solution. Hanwha Ocean is one of two shortlisted qualified bidders for the CPSP. Babcock Canada is the Prime Contractor for the Royal Canadian Navy’s (RCN) current submarine sustainment contract and Canada’s leading provider of submarine support services. Together, the companies are aligning platform delivery with a deeply localized, purpose-built sustainment ecosystem designed to endure for decades. The...

In an era where defence and advanced mobility systems are expected to operate flawlessly in extreme environments, reliability is no longer a differentiator—it is a baseline requirement. From embedded computing and rugged electronics to mechanical assemblies and real-time communications, modern platforms demand engineering teams that can design, integrate, and sustain complex systems over decades. That reality is driving a new strategic alliance between Orthogone Technologies Inc . and Convergence Design Services , two Canadian engineering leaders that have formally joined forces to support next-generation defence and automotive programs requiring dependable performance, long service lifecycles, and tightly coordinated multidisciplinary engineering. Announced on January 21, 2026, the non-exclusive partnership brings together organizations with deep experience in defence electronics and advanced mobility platforms—teams that understand how to design systems capable of maintaining stab...

Inside one of the world’s most advanced shipyards, Ontario’s Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade sees firsthand the submarine platform proposed for Canada—and explores new pathways for investment, partnership, and growth. On the southern coast of South Korea, where massive hull blocks tower over sprawling dry docks and some of the world’s most sophisticated naval vessels take shape, Ontario’s Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade, the Honourable Victor Fedeli, stepped inside a shipyard that sits at the heart of global naval manufacturing. On January 22, 2026, Minister Fedeli visited Hanwha Ocean’s shipyard in Geoje—one of the largest and most advanced shipbuilding facilities in the world—touring production halls, assembly lines, and active construction areas that illustrate South Korea’s position as a global leader in naval and commercial shipbuilding. A central focus of the visit was the KSS-III submarine program. Minister Fedeli observed th...

Canada has moved a key dependency of its future surface fleet out of the planning phase and into execution. In November 2025, the Department of National Defence began full construction of a Land-Based Test Facility at Hartlen Point in Eastern Passage, Nova Scotia, a shore-based complex designed to integrate and commission combat systems for the Royal Canadian Navy’s new River-class destroyers. With early site preparation complete and structural work now underway, the project has entered a delivery phase that directly underpins the destroyer program’s schedule. Completion is expected in early 2028. PCL Construction of Dartmouth is leading the build, which National Defence says will sustain approximately 200 jobs over the life of the project. Defence Construction Canada is acting as the contracting authority. Meet the facility The Land-Based Test Facility is designed to do work that would be risky, expensive, or impractical to do for the first time at sea. Modern surface combatants...

Gene Hackman ’s longtime home in Santa Fe has quietly come onto the market, offering a rare look at the private world the actor built far from Hollywood. The 13,000-square-foot compound, listed for $6.25 million with Sotheby’s International Realty, sits on a hilltop in the gated Santa Fe Summit community, surrounded by piñon trees and open sky. From the property, the views stretch across the Jemez Mountains and north toward Colorado. Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, lived there for decades, making the house their primary retreat until their deaths last year. When Hackman purchased the property in the 1990s, it was a neglected 1950s structure in poor shape. Architect Stephen Samuelson once recalled that the house was “horrible,” though Hackman saw something worth saving. Drawn by Santa Fe’s light and isolation, he undertook an ambitious renovation alongside Samuelson and Harry Dapples of Studio Arquitectura, transforming the building into a sprawling, highly personal residence. ...

Why did Larry Gagosian want to stage a just-opened blockbuster exhibition of Jasper Johns’s paintings at his Upper East Side gallery in New York? “First of all, because I want to look at them,” he told Alison McDonald in a soon-to-be-published Gagosian Quarterly interview. It’s not an especially lofty justification, but it’s at least an honest one—and it sets the tone for the entire conversation. In the piece, Gagosian talks fluently about the formal characteristics of Johns’s art—the way the 95-year-old artist works his surfaces, the way he wields his materials—but Gagosian generally doesn’t linger on the concepts behind the crosshatch paintings in this show. Instead, Gagosian is quickened, it seems, by what happens when you stand in front of these works for long enough. The exhibition is undeniably strong. The crosshatch paintings, made between 1973 and 1983, are less austere than one might expect. Up close, they’re dense and worked, their encaustic interrupted by the occasional ...