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“She sees research as a spiritual and artistic endeavor, one that informs her polymathic practice, which extends to publications, performance, writing, film, and beyond,” Michelle Kuo, a chief curator at large at MoMA who worked with Wales Bonner on the exhibition, told ARTnews.

For the exhibition, on view until April 7, Wales Bonner has taken over part of MoMA’s first-floor galleries, showcasing a collection of 50 artworks with a focus on Black aesthetic and cultural practices inspired by the sounds, styles, and experiences of the African diaspora.

Each of the displays epitomizes the title of the show which Wales Bonner has said “evoke multiple histories, inspire contemplation, and conjure new connections between people and Places.” Works featured in the show come from an array of artists, including Terry Adkins, Betye Saar, Moustapha Dimé, David Hammons, and even the likes of Agnes Martin and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

A recurring theme in the exhibition is a certain musicality, best exemplified by Adkin’s large-scale installation Last Trumpet (1995). Its four eye-catching, elegantly shaped trumpets stand tall at the far side of the first gallery and immediately draw you toward them. These 18-foot-long horns are functional musical instruments, part of Adkin’s aim to connect the worlds of music, sculpture, and performance, like Wales Bonner’s intention in bridging fashion with other creative disciplines.

Literature is just one point of reference for Wales Bonner. Creating worlds for characters to inhabit through different fabric textures, sounds, rhythm, and movement. She has said that fashion is an immediate form of communication to an audience where she can explore deep ideas. Wales Bonner’s practice is also informed by her extensive archival research, which lends each project a holistic approach that aims to create worlds for posterity. One such work is a hard-to-miss wooden carving by Moustapha Dimé titled Lady with a Long Neck (1992) that combines found materials (both organic and industrial) collected from the streets of Dakar. In its raw form, the sculpture bridges Islamic and Sufi spirituality with artistic handiwork.

On view for the first time is David Hammons’s makeshift scroll Afro Asian Eclipse (or Black China), from 1978, which is a reference to Duke Ellington’s 1971 album The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse. In using the form of an East Asian scroll that has at its center a cluster of hair collected from barbershop floors, the work highlights the connection between Afro-Pacific and Afro-Atlantic culture.

“Many works in the show make use of found materials—things that have a history, that have had other lives,” Kuo said. “Moustapha Dimé’s Lady with a Long Neck features a reclaimed butcher’s block at its center, with a rhythmic array of notches that are actually the marks made by cooks who had used the wooden block in Dakar.”

She continued, “There’s a beautiful rhythm, too, in the carefully patterned tufts of hair woven into David Hammons’s Afro-Asian Eclipse, which the artist collected from the floors of barber shops. You can see the trace of hands, of meditative motions, of a different kind of musicality in each piece.”

But, Wales Bonner sees curating art exhibitions as an extension of her work as a fashion designer. Her first exhibition “A Time for New Dreams,” which borrowed its title from a collection by Nigerian British poet Ben Okri, was staged at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2019. Its themes focused on mysticism, magical realism, and ritual within Black cultural and aesthetic practices and looked at the ideas of shrines across the Black Atlantic.

Showcasing sculpture, film, photography, literature, music, poetry, performances, and more, the multisensory installation show brought together a group of artists including Rashid Johnson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Eric N. Mack, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Liz Johnson Artur, who has since become a frequent collaborator. In the show’s catalogue, Okri says of Wales Bonner’s research-focused practice, “We ought to use time like emperors of the mind. Do magic things that the future surprised will find.”

Claude Adjil, the exhibition’s curator, said that in early conversations with Wales Bonner, she mentioned Robert Farris Thompson’s landmark 1983 book Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art & Philosophy, which looks at five African civilizations (Kongo, Yoruba, Mande, Cross River, and Ejagham) and how they have impacted the social, aesthetic and metaphysical traditions and creative output of Black people across the African diaspora. “We were looking at different books but also artists that have inspired her,” Adjil said.

But beyond just presenting a static exhibition with works on view, Wales Bonner thought about how to create a show that could be activated and could come alive through a performance program, including an evening with British musician and songwriter Sampha, whom Wales Bonner has previously collaborated with for a zine Shy Light (2017) and the soundtrack to her Autumn/Winter 2017 show. “Grace holds space for these different collaborations,” Adjil said.

Recurring themes in her practice, both as a designer and as a curator,  are the intergenerational artistic production of Black people across the diaspora. Just as Okri’s poetry collection lent its title to her Serpentine show, Ishmael Reed’s 1972 seminal book Mumbo Jumbo gave her Autumn/Winter 2019 collection its title,  and her research for one project often leads to the next, as Okri led her to Reed. Set in 1920s New York, Mumbo Jumbo follows a series of narratives surrounding jazz music, white supremacy, and voodoo in a collage-style approach. In a statement accompanying the collection, Wales Bonner said, “The collection considers the role of writers as oracles, connecting to a rich and magical lineage, serving as the custodians of ancestral wisdom passed down and reinterpreted.”

For each of Wales Bonner’s boundary-pushing projects, there is a different themebut, according to Adjil, “they’re building blocks in what she has been looking at across over the years.” Such was the case with Johnson Artur, whom Wales Bonner met during a studio visit during the research phase of “A Time for New Dreams.” “We went to her studio and there was a lot of rich and ongoing dialogue, talking about what had inspired her and what she was thinking about for her design collection,” Adjil recalled.

Johnson Artur added, “I have been working on my ongoing art project Black Balloon Archive for the last 30 years and have never compromised on my idea to create a space where the people I photograph can see themselves through their own self. I like to believe this was the reason Grace approached me for the first time for her curated show at the Serpentine.”

Those conversations ultimately laid the groundwork for what would become Wales Bonner’s “Mumbo Jumbo” collection, which featured an assortment of characters, ranging from a West African spiritual healer to an artist shaman. Also included in the cast were intellectuals from Howard University, who dressed in the classic American college wardrobe consisting of wide leg jeans and trousers, oxford and polo shirts, and jazz-era tuxedos.

“I’ve been thinking about black intellectualism as a form of spirituality,” Wales Bonner told AnOther Magazine in an interview at the time. “It’s referencing very recognisable clothing – American college – but trying to imbue that with a sense of magic that originates from African spirituality; imbuing something that’s very classic and American and with a sense of language and culture that comes from somewhere else.”

Wales Bonner and Johnson Artur would collaborate again for the designer’s Autumn/Winter 2020 collection Lovers Rock, which Johnson Artur photographed. The collection was a celebration of the reggae genre of the same name that emerged from the British Afro-Caribbean underground parties of the 1970s. Serving as a love letter to Caribbean music and fashion, the partnering with Johnson Artur was symbiotic, as she has documented the African diaspora for over three decades from underground clubbing scenes to street life, from church celebrations to everyday moments.

 “Art has no boundaries—I believe Grace shares this vision too,” Johnson Artur said. “Collaborating is an essential part of my practice and each one has been a highlight in my career.”

Alongside the MoMA exhibition, there is also a mixtape on Spotify where Wales Bonner takes us on a journey of soundscapes through the exhibition, and an artist’s book, titled Dream in the Rhythm—Visions of Sound and Spirit, created and edited by her as a “an archive of soulful expression,” featuring photographs, texts, poems, and more by authors and artists including Reed, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Langston Hughes, and Quincy Troupe.

“Grace Wales Bonner has changed the way we see style—not only as surface but as

structure,” Kuo said. “Every detail of her polymathic designs, publications, exhibitions, and films is related to long histories, deep archives, and cultural identities across the diasporic world.”

The artist, John Bonafede, sued MoMA last month. In 2010, during a widely seen Abramović retrospective held at MoMA, Bonafede participated in a version of Imponderabilia (1977), a performance in which he and another performer stood at opposite ends of tight portal through which visitors had to squeeze to enter the next gallery.

Bonafede’s lawsuit alleged that he had been sexually assaulted seven times by five male exhibition attendees during the show’s run. During each, the lawsuit claimed, the visitor would “fondle and/or grope Plaintiff’s genitals.” He also claimed that he saw a similar assault take place against a female performer.

Bonafede described “years of emotional distress” following these assaults, and said that MoMA was aware that they were taking place. In a New York Post report published during the show’s run, a museum spokesperson said MoMA was “well aware of the challenges” of having nude performers in the galleries and said that certain visitors had been escorted out by security.

On Tuesday, MoMA denied that it was culpable for Bonafede’s allegations, “even if true,” a lawyer for the museum wrote. The motion called for the lawsuit to be dismissed.

Moreover, the lawyer wrote, MoMA did not exhibit any “gender-based animus” that would render it liable for what allegedly happened to Bonafede within the galleries.

“While incidental contact was expected, MoMA prescribed procedures for performers to report any concerns,” Tuesday’s filing reads. “MoMA hired a stage manager to serve as a liaison between the performers and MoMA curators. Performers and MoMA staff created a signal system to alert security in the event performers were inappropriately touched, the protocols for which were included in the performers’ handbook.”

The museum claimed that Bonafede had informed the stage manager for the show about the assaults, and that Bonafede was given the option to stop performing. He did not take that opportunity, MoMA said.

A lawyer for Bonafede did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bonafede’s lawsuit came amid a flurry of legal actions filed as the window closed for New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which enabled “survivors of sexual assault that occurred when they were over the age of 18 to sue their abusers regardless of when the abuse occurred.” The window closed in November, but according to CNN, Bonafede’s case received an extension.

Abramović’s 2010 retrospective, “The Artist Is Present,” was hugely popular, and is most commonly remembered for its titular performance, in which she sat at a table in MoMA’s atrium as visitors sat facing her. Images of people crying during the performance subsequently went viral.

Imponderabilia was notably restaged for a 2023 Abramović retrospective held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The performance was retooled for that show, with visitors given the option of entering a separate doorway that allowed them to bypass Imponderabilia, and the performers in it were given access to a therapist.

The 2010 version at MoMA was different even from the original 1977 one, which featured an even tighter portal. The MoMA version, by contrast, was widened so that visitors in wheelchairs could pass through. “I felt the piece really suffered for that,” Abramović told the New York Times.

In addition to Marie-Josée Kravis’s position as museum board chair, the couple have donated millions of dollars to the institution.

In a press release, the activists accused KKR of earning “profits from exploitative business practices and investments in dirty fossil fuel projects,” due to nearly $9 billion in funding towards liquid natural gas storage and transportation projects.

Around noon, on February 14, protestors entered the museum atrium chanting “MoMA Dump Kravis” and “We need clean air, not another billionaire.” The protestors also dropped red confetti and fliers with the image of Roy Litchenstein’s 1963 painting Drowning Girl, with the text modified to read “The planet is drowning— Why won’t MoMA drop billionaire climate criminals?”.

The protestors also carried a banner that appeared to draw from artist Ed Ruscha, whose work was the subject of a major retrospective that closed last month. “MOMA DROP KRAVIS,” was written on top of Ruscha’s famed image of a Standard Oil gas station on fire.

MoMA was also the site of a large Pro-Palestine protest on Saturday, and a climate protest specifically highlighting KKR’s funding of fossil fuel projects last September. Calls to drop Marie-Josée Kravis as MoMA’s chair was also the focus of a climate protest in June 2023. Activists set up signs, banners, and a miniature oil rig outside of the institution during its annual Party in the Garden, a major fundraising event.

A press release about Wednesday’s protest said that activists from the organizations Climate Defenders, Strong Economy for All, Planet over Profit, and New York Communities for Change have requested meetings with MoMA directors “multiple times” to discuss the institution’s ties to the Kravises and KKR, but have not received a response.

KKR and MoMA did not immediately respond to requests for comment from ARTnews.

Kuo will now be Chief Curator at Large and Publisher, a newly formed role that will see her continuing to aid in acquiring artworks and mounting exhibitions while also leading the museum’s publications program. She will take up her new role effective immediately.

She joined MoMA in 2018, having led Artforum for seven years prior to that. She departed Artforum in 2017 as it faced a lawsuit over its former publisher, Knight Landesman, who was accused of sexual misconduct by Amanda Schmitt, a former employee. The lawsuit ended in a settlement between Artforum and Schmitt.

At MoMA, Kuo has organized shows such as an immensely popular—and critically polarizing—presentation of a Refik Anadol piece making use of AI technology. The Anadol piece entered MoMA’s collection after going on view there.

Kuo also co-organized “Signals: How Video Transformed the World,” one of the biggest exhibitions of video art in MoMA’s history, and an acclaimed show of works from MoMA’s collection that were selected by painter Amy Sillman.

In a statement, MoMA director Glenn Lowry praised Kuo for the “global perspective” she brought to the job.

Kuo said in a statement, “I am elated to assume this new role and expand MoMA’s support of artistic experimentation in all forms. Art is not beholden to any one geography, medium, or set of techniques– and I look forward to building on the global range and interdisciplinary depth of the Museum’s program, increasing access to new art and new media around the world, and elevating the voices of artists, writers, historians, and thinkers. These perspectives are essential in a time of acute social and technological change.”

The headlines

STONE AGE WONDER. Researchers may have found Europe’s oldest known “megastructure” built by humans: a well-preserved, over 10,000-year-old wall submerged off Germany’s Baltic coast. The nearly one-kilometer-long Stone Age wall, named the “Blinkerwall,” sits on the bottom of the Bay of Mecklenburg and was found accidentally by scientists using sonar equipment, reports Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Believed to have served as a hunting tactic for directing game by hunter-gatherers, the wall includes some 1,400 small stones positioned to connect about 300 larger boulders. 

CANCELED TRIENNIAL. Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art is abruptly shuttering after its first two editions in 2018 and 2022. Organizers said the exhibition might be revived in a different form. They cited funding problems among reasons for the decision to cancel the event planned for 2025, so as not to “disappoint artists and audiences with an exhibition that is less than their expectations,” according to a statement quoted by the Cleveland Scene.

Digest

Last week MoMA acknowledged it had quietly restituted Marc Chagall’s painting Over Vitebsk to the heirs of the Jewish dealer Francis Matthiesen. In a rare agreement of this kind, the museum was paid $4 million in compensation for restitution. However, that arrangement is now at the heart of a legal battle between Matthiesen’s son, and the company Mondex, which had argued on behalf of the heirs that the painting was a Nazi despoliation, for a now contested fee of $8.5 million. [The New York Times]

The toppled statue of 17^th-century slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol is expected to formally move into a museum. The statue has been out of public view since 2022, two years after protestors pulled it down from its plinth in Bristol. Once the anticipated approval is granted, the statue will be displayed at Bristol’s M Shed for an upcoming exhibition about protest movements. [BBC]

On Feb. 11, pro-Palestinian protestors staged a sit-in at the British Museum over its 10-year deal with BP. The group Energy Embargo for Palestine posted on social media that BP was one of six companies granted gas licenses by Israel on October 30, 2023. [ARTnews]

Soho Theater in London has apologized and is investigating a Feb. 10, incident in which Jewish audience members were reportedly “hounded out” of a Paul Currie comedy show. At least six people left the theatre after they were “yelled at” for not standing in support of the Palestinian flag brought on stage. [The Independent]

A new French film about the Surrealist artist Salvador Dali (1904-1989) is out in France. Daaaaaali! is not meant to be a historically accurate biopic, and the artist is played by several different actors, in a Surrealist twist of its own. [Le Monde]

The Kicker

ART SUPPLIES FOR ALL. Abstract painter Frank Bowling is selling hand-signed prints to fund art supplies in 100 UK elementary schools. Proceeds are expected to supply canvas, paint, and curriculum materials for some 30,000 children, and come amid ongoing government spending cuts in arts education. The British artist hopes to raise about $630,000 with the project, done in collaboration with the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Arts (Circa). Bowling’s “ambition is for this to be a gamechanger in the way that children are introduced to fine art so they’re introduced to canvas, to the pleasure and the possibilities of paint and the idea that they can make art,” said the artist’s son, Ben Bowling, speaking to The Guardian.

While the return took place only somewhat recently, it was not known until a New York Times report on court records related to an ongoing legal dispute between the heirs and an outside research firm.

As part of the deal in 2021, the museum received a $4 million fee in exchange for the return of Chagall’s Over Vitebsk (1913). The museum agreed to use the money to set up a provenance research fund in the original owner’s name, but did not announce the establishment of the fund until recently.

The work’s heirs, descendants of the German gallerist Francis Matthiesen, are now in a separate legal dispute over the terms of the work’s return with the Mondex Corporation, a restitution research firm based in Toronto hired to liaise with MoMA over research on the case, per court records reviewed by the Times. Matthieson’s heirs first approached Mondex in 2018 to work on the dispute.

The heirs are stakeholders in the Berlin-based Galerie Matthiesen based. They claim the Canadian firm breached its contract by leaving them out of negotiations with MoMA over the $4 million compensation fee, alleging that they never approved the payment. According to the heirs, Mondex isn’t entitled to the $8.5 million fee stipulated in the contract between them.

James Palmer, founder of the Mondex Corporation, denied that the fee was negotiated improperly. He did not immediately respond to ARTnews’s request for additional comment.

The financial arrangement in the Chagall settlement isn’t uncommon in high-profile restitution cases, where proceeds from sales are divided between the heirs and owners contesting legal title to artworks with suspect provenance.

The Chagall painting, which depicts an elderly man holding a cane while flying above city of Vitebsk, has a complicated ownership record. According to its publicly listed provenance, it was transferred during the Nazi occupation in 1934 to Germany’s Dresner bank, which, according to the gallery’s website, “acquired it in a forced sale” and showed it at the Berlin Nationalgalerie a year later. MoMA bought the work privately in 1949.

Details about the work’s sale to Dresner are still being disputed by researchers. A 2017 book by researcher Lynn Rother titled Art for Credit, about the role of art used as loan collateral during World War II, states that there is no evidence that the Chagall was seized under duress, and that it was negotiated willingly by Matthiesen’s gallery.

Between 2018 and 2021, Mondex presented MoMA with additional research, contending that the transfer of the painting and other artworks from the gallery to settle a bank loan was done under duress, as the bank significantly undervalued them.

In 2021, after acquiring the work through from the museum, the gallery sold it for $24 million to a European collector, whose identity hasn’t been disclosed. Upon listing the work for private sale, the gallery suggested in press materials the painting depicts a Russian emigrant, which “has relevance at a time when stories of displacement and ethnic identity have such media currency.”

The sale marks one of the highest disclosed prices for a work by Chagall. His auction record, set in 2017, currently stands at $28.5 million.

Images and videos posted on Instagram show several banners unfurled inside MoMA’s atrium. The banners said “Free Palestine, From the River to the Sea”, “Ceasefire Now”, “Cultural Workers Stand with Gaza” and accusing members of the institution’s board of trustees of funding “genocide, apartheid” and “settler colonialism”.

Around 3:30 p.m., protestors at MoMA handed out over 1,000 custom-printed mock museum guides calling out the museum’s board of trustees—Leon Black, Larry Fink, Paula Crown, Marie-Josée Kravis, and Ronald S. Lauder. The printed statement said “While MoMA purports ideologies of ‘change’ and ‘creativity,’ the Board of Trustees directly fund Zionist occupation via arms manufacturing, lobbying, and corporate investment. At the same time, the museum derives its legitimacy from artists and cultural workers, including those actively engaged in anti-colonial struggle”.

Fink is the CEO of multinational investment corporation BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, with $9.42 billion in assets. It has been criticized in the past for its investments in arms and defense. Black, meanwhile, is the founder of private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which owns a defense and security company.

After activist protests in 2021, Black stepped down as chairman and chief executive of Apollo Global Management after a review of his donations to Jeffrey Epstein. The ARTnews Top 200 Collector also stepped down as chairman of MoMA’s board that year.

Journalist Afeef Nassouli, a producer for the Wall Street Journal, spoke to a woman named Ariel, who identified themselves as a member of the grassroots political group ACT UP New York—originally formed in response to the AIDS crisis— about how she personally led an affinity group of anti-Zionist Jews, artists, and ACT UP members to the protest at MoMA “because we are all here to take a stand against genocide.”

According to an Instagram post by Alexa Blair Wilkinson, a photojournalist and graphic designer who attended the protest, no arrests were made and the sit-in dispersed around 6pm.

The protest at MoMA was organized by the Writers Against the War on Gaza and the New York chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement. A statement read out loud by protestors said “This action builds on the work of Strike MoMA, Gulf Labor, Art Workers Coalition, and more broadly, on resistance movements including the undying fight for Black Liberation, prison abolition, and Indigenous sovereignty.”

Estimates of the crowd of protestors at the Museum of Modern Art ranged from “more than 500” to “more than 800” people.

Earlier on Saturday, Within Our Lifetime, a grassroots Palestinian-led community organization, held a preotest at the Brooklyn Museum.

Photographer Stephanie Keith posted on Instagram that “NYPD made about 10 arrests while the protest was in front of the Museum including @protestnsurvive who is a credentialed member of New York City media.”

MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum did not respond to ARTnews‘ requests for comment. Writers Against The War on Gaza said in an email statement, “WAWOG does not give comment to publications owned by Penske Media.”

Curated by Paulina Pobocha, who recently left MoMA’s painting and sculpture department to become senior curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the show will survey the whole of Schütte’s five-decade career. It will also shine a light on some of the lesser-seen sides of his oeuvre, including his drawings and prints.

The exhibition presents an unusual curatorial challenge, in that Schütte has exhibited no signature style across his many years of working. An interest in German history has shown up regularly, as has a fascination with architectural models and public monuments, but the look and themes of Schütte’s work have changed with some degree of frequency.

In a phone interview, Pobocha said the unclassifiable nature of Schütte’s output spurred her to do the exhibition in the first place.

“Every time I came across his work before we started working together, it was quite different,” she said. “The more and more I came in contact with the lesser-known aspects of his practice, I was a little befuddled. These look like they could’ve been made by three different people, but they’re of course by one person.”

She continued, “He’s looking into longstanding art-historical genres and playing with them, upending them. The show and all this work is more connected by an attitude than an aesthetic.” That attitude, she said, could be described as “highly critical, but also very curious.”

US audiences have never seen a Schütte exhibition so big as the one due to open at MoMA on September 29. And not since a three-part Dia Art Foundation exhibition staged in New York between 1998 and 2000 has the artist had such a major institutional show in the country.

That means his reputation in this country has lagged behind his following abroad. In 2005, Schütte won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale; he has figured in three editions of the Documenta quinquennial in Kassel, Germany.

When he was a student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf during the ’70s, Schütte studied with artist Gerhard Richter and art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Schütte is considered a pivotal figure in the transition away from Minimalism, with many of his smaller-scale, humbler objects countering that movement’s emphasis on grandness.

His most widely seen works include his “United Enemies” series, a group of sculptures begun in the early 1990s in which people with gnarled faces are shown bound together, their bodies sometimes fusing in the process. The figures are puppet-like, and when shown in public, they seem like half-completed monuments.

But Pobocha said she was most excited to display works from Schütte’s Kunstakademie days, when he was dialoguing with ideas brought forward by fellow pupils—Gerhard Richter, for one—and then subverting them. She described these Schütte works, and others by him, as being imbued with an unusual sense of humor.

“There’s an intense seriousness to what he’s doing, but there’s also so much humor,” Pobocha said. “It’s a deadpan humor—sometimes the humor is dark, but sometimes, there’s also a levity in his work. That’s something I’m trying to bring to the surface.”

Wexner is the billionaire founder of the retail empire Bath & Body Works Inc, formerly known as L Brands. He and his wife Abigail funded the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, and are collectors of New York School artists and Picasso.

Dubin became a billionaire through hedge fund management, cofounding Highbridge Capital Management in 1992. He is currently a board trustee at the Museum of Modern Art.

Both Wexner and Dubin have appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. The connections between the billionaires and Epstein were already publicly known before the release of the unsealed documents on January 3.

In 2016, Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s alleged victims, testified that his companion Ghislaine Maxwell told her to have sex with Dubin. Dubin, his wife Eva Anderssen-Dubin, and their spokesperson vehemently denied the allegations.

In 2019, the anonymous feminist art collective Guerilla Girls called out MoMA following the announcement that a gallery at the museum would be named after Dubin and his wife. There were also several “Strike MoMA” demonstrations in 2021 targeting Dubin and four other board members.

As early as 2002, a feature in New York Magazine described the “weird relationship” between Wexner and Epstein, including their roles in a high-end housing development in New Albany, Ohio. Both had grand homes in the center of the large residential development, which surrounded a Jack Nicklaus–designed golf course. While the project was financed predominantly by Wexner, Epstein was also made a general partner “despite putting only a few million dollars of capital into the project.”

In 2019, the New York Times published a detailed investigation that described Wexner granting Epstein “sweeping powers” over the business titan’s finances, charitable giving, and his personal life. The actions included signing Wexner’s tax returns and borrowing money on his behalf, as well as obtaining a mansion in New York, a private plane, and the luxury estate in Ohio, assets valued at roughly $100 million.

Attempts to access and download the unsealed documents related to Epstein crashed PACER, the federal government’s website for court records. Copies of the zip file and the hundreds of pages were uploaded online by USA Today and 404 Media.

All seven of the Schiele drawings and paintings were given back to Fritz Grünbaum’s heirs during a ceremony at the New York Supreme Civil Court on September 20.

“Today is historic and groundbreaking,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg said at the press conference, which he noted had occurred ahead of Yom Kippur, one of the most important Jewish high holidays.

The value of each of the Austrian Expressionist works returned on September 20 is estimated to be between $780,000 and $2.75 million, according to the New York Times, which first reported the story.

The seven works were previously held by two private collectors—the late Serge Sabarsky and World Jewish Congress president Ronald S. Lauder—and several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Morgan Library & Museum, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

The returns were the result of an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, who were approached by Grünbaum’s heirs in December. The heirs were emboldened to do so by a 2018 ruling that saw collector Richard Nagy give back two Schiele works. Nagy had planned to sell the artworks, but Judge Charles V. Ramos ruled that Grünbaum could not have voluntarily sold them and that he had signed away his title while interned at a concentration camp.

The heirs asked the Manhattan DA’s office to look into other Schiele works formerly owned by Grünbaum that were in New York or had been bought and sold by American art dealer Otto Kallir. These works, they believed, could constitute stolen property, as defined under New York law.

For more than 25 years, Grünbaum’s heirs have argued that he and his wife were forced to sell his assets and large art collection during his internment at Dachau.

According to the court filing against MoMA, Jewish Property Declaration documents show evidence that 81 artworks from Grünbaum’s collection had passed through Nazi ownership.

MoMA surrendered the watercolor and pencil on paper work Prostitute (1912), and the watercolor and charcoal on paper work Girl Putting on Shoe (1910). The Santa Barbara Museum returned the pencil on paper drawing Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Edith (1915). The Morgan Library surrendered the black chalk and watercolor image on brown paper Self-Portrait (1910).

Lauder returned the watercolor and pencil on paper work I Love Antithesis (1912). The Sabarsky estate gave back two gouache, watercolor and pencil on paper works: Portrait of a Boy (Herbert Reiner), from 1910, and Seated Woman (1911).

“This is of huge importance in our world,” Grünbaum heir Timothy Reif told the New York Times in reference to the long-term pursuit of looted items by the descendants of Holocaust victims, eight decades after the end of World War II. “It sets the tone and the agenda for all future cases.”

The Times reported that the three museums and two collectors signed agreements with the DA’s office stating that “pursuant to a criminal investigation” into “Nazi looted art,” they gave up all claims to the works.

Last year, civil suits were filed in New York Supreme Court about these seven artworks, but the lawyer for the heirs, Raymond Dowd, told the Times those cases had been dismissed.

Christie’s will auction six of the returned works in New York in November, split across two sales. The three works with the highest estimates are Stehende Frau (Dime) (1912, with an estimate of $1 million to 2 million), Selbstbildnis (1910, estimate of $1 million to $2 million) and Ich liebe Gegensätze (1912, estimate $1.5 million to $2.5 million). These Schieles are part of the auction house’s 20th Century evening sale on November 9. The three other pieces—a two-sided work on paper from 1910 (estimate of $500,000 to $800,000), a 1910 portrait of a seated woman (estimate of $600,000 to $900,000) and a 1915 portrait of the artist’s wife, Edith Schiele (estimate of $150,000 to $250,000)—will be auctioned during a Christie’s sale of Impressionist and modern works on paper on November 11.

The cumulative high estimate is $8.45 million, according to The Art Newspaper, which first reported news of the auctions on October 5.

Reif, a judge on the United States Court of International Trade, told the Times that the proceeds would fund the newly formed Grünbaum Fischer Foundation and would help establish a scholarship program for young musicians.

It’s worth noting that, according to the Manhattan DA’s office, the most highly valued work of the returned Schieles was I Love Antithesis, which the office said was worth $2.75 million. This is a fraction of the record set for the artist at auction at Sotheby’s in London in 2011, when Hauser mit bunter Wasche (Vorstadt II), 1914, sold for £24.7 million ($40.1 million).

The two other heirs are David Fraenkel, a co-trustee of Grünbaum’s estate, and Milos Vavra. Reif told the Times that Grünbaum was his paternal grandfather’s first cousin.

The press conference followed the issuance of warrants from the Manhattan DA’s office earlier this month for three other artworks by Schiele at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.