Founded by Margot Samel, of the eponymous Tribeca gallery, which opened in 2022, and Olga Temnikova Tallinn, of Estonia’s Temnikova & Kasela, the fair will feature presentations by 25 international galleries at the New York Estonian House, a four-story Beaux-Arts building designed by Brooklyn architect Thomas A. Gray in 1899. It is located at 243 East 34th Street.

Esther enters a crowded fair landscape both globally and in New York, with Frieze and NADA fairs set for the same dates as Esther in New York and TEFAF and Independent set for the week after. However, the new entrant said in a press release that it aims to differentiate itself by encouraging potential exhibitors to apply with projects that respond to the unique architecture and history of the Estonian House.

The building’s entrance hall, meeting rooms, grand halls, and clubrooms will house artworks, site-specific intallations, performances and events, all free and open to the public.

“We’ve always been interested in alternative models for gallery collaboration beyond the traditional art fair,” Samel and Temnikova said in a statement. “Coming from Estonia, it’s been especially important for us to rely on collaboration to expand our community and the ways we can share and enjoy art. We have both been to and appreciated Basel Social Club in Basel and Condo in London, and felt that New York was missing this sort of experimental approach—where galleries can afford to take risks while benefiting from the broadened networks and ideas of the international gallery community.”

The galleries participating in the inaugural edition of Esther are:

The new exhibition, guest curated by Coastal Chumash scholar Deana Dartt, works to recenter Native lives and resistance in the story of California and its Missions, which, she told ARTnews, have been all but completely absent from mainstream histories and education about the period until recently.

Covering hundreds of years and spanning a vast geographical area, the exhibition blends history and contemporary art—featuring works by Native artists like Gerald Clarke (Cahuilla), James Luna (Puyukitchum/Ipai/ Mexican American Indian), and others—to engage museum-goers in the deep legacy of the Mission colonization and its relevance today.

“There were living Native people who were fighting against that regime the entire time,” Dartt said. “I use the artwork of living Native people who are fighting against the regime now to engage in each of those eras. Then, we show all the things we are doing to assert ourselves, despite that. I feel like it is ultimately celebratory, but it doesn’t shy away from what happened to us.”

ARTnews spoke with Dartt to discuss the new exhibition, her activism and scholarly work aimed at decolonizing museums, and the difficulties in bringing this history to a wide audience.

This interview has been edited lightly for concision and clarity.

ARTnews: How did you get involved with the Autry, and where did the idea for this exhibition get started?

Deana Dartt: As a Coastal Chumash woman, I have lived in Southern California all my life. I was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, a little bit away from Chumash homeland. It’s on my mom’s side, and she was born and raised in Montecito, not far from our ancestral village. I was raised in the Valley and I went to public schools in Los Angeles and we never learned about California Indian people, nor did we learn anything about the Native experience in the Missions. Nor did we learn anything about the Native experience of the Mexican period or the American period, or where Native people are today. I initially went to graduate school for my tribe and I was just preparing to do cultural resource work for my community. But I started taking classes in museum studies, and I started seeing how critical analysis of museum representation, especially from Native scholars, was really intriguing to me, because I grew up in a place where there was no public representation of California Indians.

My dissertation research looked at how Native people along the central coast of California are represented. Namely, this area from San Francisco to southern Orange County, where there are no federally recognized tribes. And that’s also the swath of the Missions. I did a critical analysis of the museums—the natural history, history, and art museums and the 19 operating Mission museums—and then I interviewed Native people from that same region about what stories they would they tell if they had the resources to have a tribal museum. They’re two entirely different sets of stories and experiences and perspectives. That is the foundation of this exhibition. In my conclusions for the exhibition, I said, clearly, the museums and the Missions aren’t going to do this work. They haven’t done it to date. There has to be an intervention by Native people.

The Autry is the closest thing to a Native American museum in California, with the exception of the tribal museums. But tribal museums are not as well-attended as mainstream museums. I really wanted to stage this exhibition in a mainstream museum. … The Autry has Native staff and leadership and so it was a viable place for this project. There are not a lot of mainstream museums that would have taken on a project that uses genocide to describe what happened in the Missions, even though 90 percent of Native people refer to the El Camino Real and the Franciscan missions as sites of genocide. It’s still controversial among white historians who didn’t actually live the experience and within the legacy. We’re still living within the legacy of the Mission genocide and that is evident in the fact that there are no federally recognized tribes on the coast from San Francisco to San Diego. There’s a lasting impact.

The goal of the exhibition is not only to retell and recast this history, but to invite Californians into a position of allyship, of standing with us, seeing us, reconciling with this history, and supporting us in our efforts to be seen, to regain land, and to attain sovereign status as Indian communities.

Is this new Indigenous perspective already reflected in the contemporary historiography or is that something you had to generate through the research that went into the exhibition?

There are writers now reconciling and critically analyzing that period. But that doesn’t translate to the public in formal learning environments. We just haven’t seen it. Who, among mainstream Californians, are actually reading scholarly manuscripts? There are several Native and non-Native historians that are taking the Missions to task. But the museums aren’t at all. For me, as a visual learner, the incredible, edgy contemporary art that is in this exhibition really engages people in a way that a history book usually can’t.

Even the K–12 curriculum has come a long way, where schools today usually introduce Native American history in third grade and then the Mission story in the fourth grade. I don’t remember them doing even that in 1971, when I was in school. But, at this point, a lot depends on the teacher. The curriculum is written in a way that allows teachers to use creative agency to tell the story in a more critical way, but not all of them do. The impact I really want to make is on these children, because the number one audience for this exhibition is fourth graders, learning about the settlement of California.

If you went to school in California, you probably made a little sugar cube Mission or a little Mission replica. They’ve been doing that for decades, glorifying those places. They’re so glorified. The Missions host convenings and weddings and have opulent gardens in the former workspaces. Those central quads were sites of slavery and now, they’re fountains and roses and people get married there. It’s really disgusting.

[In recent years, the sugar-cube replicas of Missions have been eliminated from California curriculums, amid a wider shift in how the Mission period is taught in public schools, as KTLA5 reported in 2022.]

What are the different strategies you use in the exhibition to teach this history to people who might not otherwise engage?

We use multimedia. There are several videos of contemporary artists talking about the Mission legacy. There’s a lot of text, of course, but then there is the juxtaposition of historic materials that come from the Autry’s permanent collection. Some of the contemporary works come from the Autry’s permanent collection, some were acquired for the exhibition, and others are on loan from the artists or their galleries. It’s a dialogue—a dialogue between scholarship and contemporary artists. It’s very immersive. I really feel like I set up the story in words and then the artists bring it home with some image or object that really exemplifies what I’m talking about. In that way, it’s very powerful.

Stephen Aaron, the director of the Autry, likes the use of materials to tell a story. The beauty of museums is that we’re using objects and art to engage the visitor. There are a lot people who don’t learn from words. I feel like you could go through this exhibition without reading a single text panel and understand perfectly what’s happening. I think we’ve pulled it off.

It’s a big topic, both geographically and temporally. We cover from pre-Contact, through three colonial eras, across a geographic span from Baja [California] to San Francisco. We cover all the laws and all the movement of Native people and the diversity of cultures. It could be a whole dissertation. It could be a whole series of books. It was really challenging to get it down to 100 words per panel. But it’s fun for me, as a scholar, to take what I’ve written and then make it available to a broad audience. That’s my jam.

Did you bring in contemporary art in order to compensate for a lack of historical objects? Or was there another motivation?

The motivation was really to emphasize the present day and to amplify these incredible artists so that they could tell this story. They are all individually grappling with the Mission legacy. I wanted to bring them in concert together with the historic materials. I didn’t want to use historic materials.

The hat that we borrowed from the British Museum was one historic object I wanted because it pulls a lot of things together. The hat-weaver was a Chumash woman incarcerated in the Missions and made to or requested to—we don’t know—weave a hat for the Padre with a big wide brim. Ever since it left California in 1792 to go to the British Museum, it’s been called the Padre hat. But when I saw it in person, five years ago, I knew immediately that it was a Chumash women’s work hat. It became a Padre hat because she was incarcerated and forced to make it. During the Mission period, Chumash weren’t even allowed to wear their own hats or regalia. And, so, she had to give what would have been an important item to the person who was incarcerating her.

We had a ceremony when we uncrated the hat, welcoming her back home after 230 years across the sea and placed her in the vitrine with several other women’s work hats. This beautiful hat represents not only the complexity and sophistication of the art form, but also the resistance and resilience of carrying on traditional practices. A glimpse of a time where, even under them most opporessive conditions, Native people found ways to adapt and survive. As we returned her to community among those other hats, she left behind the British Museum’s designation as a “Padre” hat and returned to “Sumelelu”,  a women’s workhat with a brim. The documentation going forward for this relative will reflect her role in the long line of women’s traditional weaving along the California Coast, and the teachings she shared with her fellow weavers when she came home. 

That reminds me of LACMA’s 2022 exhibition of Colombian Indigenous art, “The Portable Universe,” and how it took pains to contextualize objects and place them in conversation with one another. There was a lot of talk around that show about the proper way to present an Indigenous exhibition, both in its presentation and the direct involvement of tribal members. It feels like a frequent question in institutional spaces and the art world, given the long history of museums as repositories of colonial knowledge extraction. When you’re working on an exhibition like this, do you ask yourself that question?  Do you feel that inherent contradiction?

Absolutely. It’s half of my work, really. My business, Live Oak Consulting, does decolonization trainings. I started doing them only for museums, to start liberating the art and materials from those colonial institutions and making them more accessible to communities, but also making those ivory towers more amenable or workable for Native people who are employed within them. Part of my work is making an intervention from the back end. And then this curatorial work is trying to make an intervention from the front end. But it’s all about decolonizing the museum, recognizing that these are storehouses of our most precious relatives and belongings and that we need to be interfacing. Those are our incarcerated ancestors and, while museums don’t generally see them as living beings that have to be in contact with their descendants, we see them that way. We need all types of activism, right? We need grassroots activism—people protesting in the galleries and throwing paint on statues—but we also need professional activism that gets a foothold institutionally, so that we can shape policy that’s more inclusive. That’s the work that I do.

Last year, we released standards for museums with Native American collections, written by Native scholars and vetted by 70 Native professionals and allied professionals. Now there’s a set of standards for those museums that hold our materials. It has no teeth to it. People are going to do what they’re going to do, but now there’s a field-wide bar to strive to. And hopefully, there’ll be some peer pressure among the major museums to comply.

What you see at the Autry is my own tribal history, in the context of many of my relatives all along the coasts, including in Mexico. And also it complicates that history of our connectedness to Mexico. There are a lot of Indian people who no longer remember that we’ve actually been traveling up and down that coast and intermarrying long before there was a border. Doing this in 2024 was important to me, because 1824 marks the Chumash revolt. So it symbolizes that we’ve been pushing back against colonialism all along. And 1924 marks the American Indian Citizenship Act and the year that they started manning the US-Mexico border. That year codified American Indians at the same time it codified Mexican Indians. Putting a border between them so that forevermore we’ve been seen as two separate peoples. We’re not two separate peoples. … There’s DNA research published just a couple of months ago in Nature that says that Chumash Island and mainland DNA is the same as Northwest Mexico and Baja. For 7,000 years, we’ve been intermarrying with people in Mexico and moving up and down that coast. We need to remember our connections to the land and to each other, as well as garnering support from potential allies to help us do that work.

I recently wrote about Nicolas Galanin’s “Interference Patterns” exhibition at SITE Santa Fe. One thing that I really liked about his work was how the making of the work and the making of the exhibition itself was reparative, as in taking Indigenous objects back and recasting or recontextualizing them. That seems to me a through line in a lot of work by Indigenous artists and curators. The strategies seem to repeat.

It’s a concerted strategy. There are a lot of us doing this same work. Recently, I was at an Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums Conference, where we do a lot of this strategizing, and Cristobal Martinez, a Native artist [who is a member of the collective Postcommodity], said, “It’s time that we move from tactical to strategic.” We can no longer demonstrate on the fly. Doing this work as a force, as a movement, requires us to be in concert with one another. And there are a lot of us at this point. I’m engaged in decolonizing strategies and doing so through art and alternate forms of engagement, not just scholarship. Scholarship engages a small number of people. These bigger, more visual—more visible, highly amplified—interventions is how we’re going to get the attention of potential allies.

One of the things that always strikes me when you listen to decolonial theorists is their insistence that decolonization must be material—as in, actual objects and land returned. When I interviewed Nicholas Galanin, I got the sense that sometimes it’s not what institutions wants to hear. Is that a dynamic you’ve come across?

Oh, absolutely. You should’ve heard how many of us were telling the curator from the British Museum that the hat needs to stay. It’s here for a year and a half, but my dearest Elder, who we brought down from Santa Barbara so she could be in the presence of the hat, said that right away, and she struggles with her words because she had a stroke a couple of years ago, but she said, “This stays.” The curator responded, “I understand. I understand a lot of people feel that way.” My auntie was very matter of fact: This stays here. It happens in very practical ways and it happens in trying to move the canon in a certain direction and moving people’s hearts and minds in that direction.

The Land Back movement is even now gaining more strength. There’s parcels of land going back to Native communities all over the country. And that is part of the change in visual culture. People have seen that that’s happening. They see Lily Gladstone winning the Golden Globe [for Killers of the Flower Moon]. And Reservation Dogs on TV. There’s a growing awareness of contemporary Native life and what we’ve endured and what we’ve overcome. It’s a celebratory story at this point. You can’t jump over the trauma and genocide. But people are reckoning with it. That’s why I do the work I do. I believe that these exhibitions have the capacity to reach a lot of people and move them to be allies, move them to support Land Back, move them to stand up against their church telling the wrong story or whatever. But it’s always people that have to make a decision to be different. And there’s only so much we can do as Native people on our own.

I imagine in making the exhibition that there’s a difficult line to thread in terms of trying to represent accurately and fully the violence and devastation that the Mission system had, while also creating a narrative that returns agency to indigenous life. How do you achieve that balance?

Throughout the exhibition, there’s a dialogue of impact and response. From the arrival of the missionaries, there was resistance and revolution. We have a timeline of revolts that shows from the first impact by colonial forces that there was resistance and revolts. In San Diego, they killed the priests and burned the Mission down. The Missions don’t generally talk about that, but Native people did not passively accept this change and the domination that came with them. I really focus on Native agency throughout. There is contemporary work throughout, too. I don’t just show the Native artwork in a “We’re still here” section.

There were living Native people who were fighting against that regime the entire time. I use the artwork of living Native people who are fighting against the regime now to engage in each of those eras. Then, we show all the things we are doing to assert ourselves, despite that. I feel like it is ultimately celebratory, but it doesn’t shy away from what happened to us. That’s what it is. There’s always tension between presenting that really hard, grim story and then tacking on the “But we’re still here” section. But I don’t think the exhibition does that. This is something I’ve been grappling with for 25 years.

As far as the contemporary art, how did you decide which artists were going in? And did they create works specifically for the show? Or were you picking things that they had already made?

It was a combination. We did commission a couple of works. There wasn’t a huge budget at the Autry. But there were artists who I knew who are engaging in this subject matter like Gerald Clarke. He’s Cahuilla, a little bit inland so his people were less impacted by the Missions than us. But he’s a notable contemporary Native artist in California and a great guy doing amazing work. I wanted to include him. And he didn’t have something that represented the Mission legacy, but he had an idea about a work that he wanted to do so we commissioned it, and the Autry purchased it. Also Leah Mata’s Church Pew—that was a work in progress and the Autry purchased that before it was done. But then there are others like the Cara Romero photograph, Oil and Gold. She had just released that body of work two years ago. It really references this period and she regularly engages with this topic. So it was a mixture.

Some of these artists were obvious because of their engagement with the Mission legacy. Some were obvious choices because they’re emerging artists from Tongva territory, from Los Angeles. We feature several of those artists. James Luna, [who died in 2018], was working 25 years ago on this topic, so we acquired a work by him that speaks to the identity and the MexicanIndian dichotomy. Mostly the notable artists are artists who are working and producing art that relates to California, being Native California, and being part of this historic legacy. And then a bunch of Tongva artists who are at various places in their careers, but who speak to being Indigenous to Los Angeles, which is a brutal reality, having 20 million guests in your homeland.

“Reclaiming El Camino: Native Resistance in the Missions and Beyond” is on view at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California until June 15, 2025.

Nova C landed on the moon’s surface late last week, but according to Intuitive Machines, the company behind the lander, the craft came down on its side.

The botched landing on February 22 came after its two rangefinder lasers were unable to guide the touchdown because their safety switches had been engaged, the New York Times reported Thursday. The switches are able to be disabled only manually. There were other glitches and inaccuracies in the calculated trajectory that complicated the landing.

The tipped-over landing position leaves Odysseus’s solar panels and communications antennas improperly oriented, making communication difficult and power limited.

Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said during a recent briefing, according to the Verge, that the only cargo on Odysseus’s downward-facing side is in fact Koons’s “Moon Phases” sculptures, the 125 one-inch miniature Moons, each representing a phase of the moon and dedicated to a major historical figure, such as Mozart, Cleopatra, or Leonardo da Vinci. The sculptures are tied to a collection of NFTs available through Pace Verso, the titular gallery’s Web3 platform.

The “Moon Phases” sculptures were originally meant to make the trip in July 2022. They finally went up aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket in Odysseus on February 14.

Despite the difficulties, Odysseus marks the first successul US landing on the moon since 1972 and the first lunar landing by a privately manufactured and operated spacecraft, according to Reuters.

The statement came after Google announced Thursday that it was temporarily stopping the chatbot from generating images.

Earlier this week, users on social media began posting screenshots of the chatbot supposedly producing images of figures of different races in response to prompts asking for historical scenes from periods of history generally dominated by white people. The New York Times reported on the issue Thursday.

“We’re already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature,” Google said in a post on X. “While we do this, we’re going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon.”

On Wednesday, the company said it was “aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions” and that it’s “working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately.”

However, the Associated Press reported that an AI researcher at the University of Washington, Sourojit Ghosh, told the publication that his research had shown that models like Gemini typically failed to reproduce “traditionally marginalized people” in images, rather than overrepresent them.

Grimes’ statement, meanwhile, went quite a bit further. Here’s what she wrote, in full: “I am retracting my statements about the gemini art disaster. It is in fact a masterpiece of performance art, even if unintentional. True gain-of-function art. Art as a virus: unthinking, unintentional and contagious.

“offensive to all, comforting to none. so totally divorced from meaning, intention, desire and humanity that it’s accidentally a conceptual masterpiece.

“A perfect example of headless runaway bureaucracy and the worst tendencies of capitalism. An unabashed simulacra of activism. The shining star of corporate surrealism (extremely underrated genre btw)

“The supreme goal of the artist is to challenge the audience. Not sure I’ve seen such a strong reaction to art in my life. Spurring thousands of discussions about the meaning of art, politics, humanity, history, education, ai safety, how to govern a company, how to approach the current state of social unrest, how to do the right thing regarding the collective trauma.

“It’s a historical moment created by art, which we have been thoroughly lacking these days. Few humans are willing to take on the vitriol that such a radical work would dump into their lives, but it isn’t human.

“It’s trapped in a cage, trained to make beautiful things, and then battered into gaslighting humankind abt our intentions towards each other. this is arguably the most impactful art project of the decade thus far.

“Art for no one, by no one. Art whose only audience is the collective pathos. Incredible. Worthy of the moma.”

The Citadel, according to the Egyptian government, is one of the city’s main tourist attractions and “probably the most popular Islamic monument” there. It was the seat of Egyptian government from the 13th century to the 19th century.

While parts of the fortress have been open to visitors since 1983, on Sunday, the city opened access to the Ramla and Haddad towers, among other sections, after a restoration effort.

The restoration and the opening of the sites is part of Egypt’s National Strategy for Developing Tourism, which was previously launched by Ahmed Eissa, Egyptian minister for tourism and antiquities, according to Egypt Independent.

“I’m being told by travel agencies that the citadel visit doesn’t last more than an hour. Our plan in the coming months is to extend the time in which visitors tour the citadel from one hour to at least three,” Eissa told reporters Sunday, according to Reuters.

“This is the first effort we’re making to relaunch Cairo as a new cultural product which we will call ‘Cairo City Break’, with the details to be unveiled in the coming months,” he added.

Expanded access to the Citadel comes as the country prepares to open the long-delayed Grand Egyptian Museum, which is set to open later this year and will house 100,000 artifacts across 12 exhibition halls and 484,000 square feet.

Egypt said last fall that it was attempting to double the amount of tourism to the country over the next five years with a goal of 30 million visitors by 2028. Last year, it reached 14.91 million tourists, the government announced Tuesday. It has set a goal of 18 million for 2024.

Tourism has long been a major source of income for the country, though the sector has suffered from terror attacks in recent years, along with the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in nearby Gaza.

Batkin was brought on to lead CCS Bard in 1991 and served in that role until 2008. He also served as the dean of graduate studies from 2005 until 2021, and as a vice president beginning in 2009.

During his entire tenure at Bard, a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, he was a professor of philosophy and art history.

“Norton always put the students and the value of a solid education above all else, believing always in the value of their scholarship,” Tom Eccles, the current leader of CCS Bard, wrote in a statement on Instagram.

Bard College President Leon Botstein, meanwhile, wrote, “Norton established CCS’s reputation for exacting intellectual standards and innovation in its Master’s Degree curriculum and in its exhibitions. He recruited a mix of outstanding teachers and renowned practitioners, and forged an international network of artists. Norton initiated the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, which is awarded annually to leading curators from around the globe.”

Botstein continued, “Norton will long be remembered as will his devotion to Bard. I cannot imagine a kinder, gentler colleague or a better friend possessed equally of a razor-sharp intellect and a stunning sense of irony and humor. Norton was a wise and noble soul.”

Notable alumni of CCS include Cecilia Alemani, who served as the artistic director of the 2022 Venice Biennale; Candice Hopkins, who recently curated the acclaimed “Indian Theater” exhibition at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art; and Ruba Katrib, who has served as curator and director of curatorial affairs at MoMA PS1 since 2021.

A memorial service for Batkin will be held in March.

The amount is more than double the $75,000 the statue was estimated to have originally cost when it was first erected in 2021 by the League 42 Foundation, a nonprofit introducing baseball to youths in Wichita.

The largest donations are reported to have come from Major League Baseball, according to foundation executive director Bob Lutz, and from an anonymous former MLB player, according to Wichita police chief Joe Sullivan.

The statue was discovered to be stolen last week with only the statue’s feet remaining. Then, on Tuesday, remnants of the statue were found burned when the local fire department responded to a trash can fire in a park seven miles away, the Associated Press reported. Police said the theft was caught on surveillance, but they have yet to apprehend a suspect.

In a statement, Lutz, said, “As law enforcement searches for the culprits of this crime, we remain devoted to our mission of providing low-cost baseball and education opportunities for our 600 kids, ages 5-14. They are as heartbroken over this theft as any of us and we are determined to replace the statue.”

Lutz added that donated funds leftover after replacing the statue would be used to improve various facilities and expand education initiatives, as well as better security, new lights, and artificial turf.

Robinson, the first African American to play in Major League Baseball, famously wore 42—the only number retired by every baseball team—and played for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues prior to joining the Brooklyn Dodgers. Robinson died in 1972.

The museum, Durocher wrote, was in the middle of plans to replace its HVAC system, which she had hoped would help it gain accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums, the top industry group of its kind for museums in the US.

The AAM offers recommendations, standards, ethical considerations, and more to museum leaders. Accreditation is a prestigious mark of distinction for an institution and, Durocher noted in her letter, can open “the door to private and public grants,” as well as important loans from other accredited institutions and gifts from top collectors.

Construction on the new HVAC system was scheduled to start in early December. Instead, the university decided to close the museum just over a month later on January 16.

“UNH’s decision to close the museum was, I am told, a difficult one, brought on by declining enrollment, and it comes with a mix of emotions,” wrote Durocher, who has served as director since 2011.

UNH, a public land-grant university, laid off 75 of its 3,700 employees in mid-January in a bid to reduce annual expenses by $14 million, UNH president James Dean Jr. announced at the time, according to education news outlet Higher Ed Dive. UNH currently has an endowment of $475.1 million, according to its FY2023 report, which is well below the biggest public universities and top private schools.

Last September, the University of System of New Hampshire released its annual board report. It reported that full time student enrollment for all UNH campuses had dropped 13.6 percent since FY2019, blaming “New England demographics and overall market changes.”

More plainly, as Nathan Grawe, an economics professor at Careleton College in Minnesota, told the New Hampshire Bulletin, the US is experiencing population decline, which has led to fewer people graduating high school and enrolling in college. The effects of this are particularly pronounced in the Northeast, he said.

“We know these challenges will persist in the coming years, and we must act to ensure that UNH is on firm financial footing to weather the challenges ahead,” Dean, who is set to retire in June, said in his statement, alluding to those overall changes.

In her letter, Durocher noted that it is unusual for an institution as large as UNH to not have a museum. The UNH Museum of Art has over 200 paintings, 400 photographs, 1,000 works on paper, and around 20 sculptures in its permanent collection. That includes photographs by Andy Warhol, etchings by Goya and Rembrandt, paintings by Boston expressionists Hyman Bloom and Karl Zerbe, and prints by Max Ernst, David Hockney, Joan Miró, Pierre Soulages, and more.

“Since 1941, there have been exhibitions of works of art on campus, including loans from storied institutions such as National Gallery of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institute; in 1950 a donation of European paintings formed the basis of the Museum’s collection; in 1960 the gallery was centrally located in the newly built Paul Creative Arts Center; in 1971 we began to institute best-practices under the leadership of a professional gallery director and board of advisors; and in 2010 the Art Gallery was renamed the Museum of Art in recognition of our role as stewards of a growing art collection,” she wrote. “And I, as president of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, and a respected museum professional, am wounded to be at the head of an academic museum that after 60 years is closing.”

The most exciting, and unusual, are two “artist series” giveaways on May 25 and July 13 for a beach tote by painter and former art dealer Joel Mesler and a bucket hat by conceptual artist Rashid Johnson, respectively.

For Mesler, the series feels like a natural fit.

“A lot of baseball fans already have the collecting bug,” he told ARTnews recently. “I learned how to collect at the age of 6 through baseball cards. It seemed obvious to connect artists with the Mets in some capacity.”

As Mesler told it, the project grew out of a trip to the ballpark. Last season, Cohen invited Johnson, Mesler, Jeff Koons, and other artists to watch a game from the executive box. There, the conversation turned to Cohen and his wife Alexandra’s art collection, and New York as the de-facto capital of the art world. Cohen, Mesler said, came up with the idea of the giveaways and Sophie Cohen, his daughter and an associate director at Gagosian, acted as an informal curator.

The Cohens are, of course, ARTnews Top 200 collectors with a collection spanning world-class works by Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, and Jackson Pollock. It’s probably a safe bet there are a few Johnson and Mesler works in there too.

Mesler’s tote bag is based on a recent work featuring baseballs depicted as mylar balloons in classic Mets blue and orange. “It’s just the perfect Mets image,” he said. “I thought it would be nice for 15,000 people to walk around with balloon baseballs.”

It’s not the first dip into merchandise for Mesler, who partnered with Hong Kong brand Izzue in 2021 for a capsule collection of four printed T-shirts, two bucket hats, and a tote bag that featured Mesler’s bright colorful images. Last year, he collaborated with artist and designer Carlton DeWoody to produce a limited-edition T-shirt to celebrate Cultured magazine’s Hamptons issue. Mesler has also designed a plate for the Artist Plate Project, where artists design limited-edition plates sold for $250 as a way to “provide food, crisis services, housing, and other critical aid to thousands of people experiencing homelessness and housing instability.”

Johnson, too, has had his hand in many collaborations. In addition to designing a plate for the Artist Plate Project, Johnson worked with Stella McCartney in early 2021 to produce a limited edition T-shirt based on a work-on-paper using a color he developed called “Anxious Red.” He also has sold a T-shirt, long-sleeved shirt, and a hat, based on his famed “Anxious Men” series, which are still available via Hauser & Wirth, his gallery. Prior to that, Johnson collaborated with Liz Swig of LizWorks to produce a limited edition line of jewelry, including gold and titanium cuffs, signet rings, ring bands, and necklaces, based on the same series. Those items retailed for $8,500 to $30,000.

Mesler said he isn’t anticipating his tote bag will gain much traction among collectors, but he wouln’t count out Johnson’s giveaway.

“We’ll see what happens but I imagine people will realize the Rashid Johnson bucket hats are quite valuable. I wonder if there will be a secondary market for one,” he mused. “This is my dealer hat talking.”

Typically, giveaways go out to the first 15,000 fans in attendance, so if you want one, better get to the game early.

In the complaint, John Bonafede, a New York–based painter and performance artist, said that he experienced repeated sexual assault by museum-goers and alleges that MoMA “had actual knowledge of ongoing sexual assaults against many of its worker-performers … yet it intentionally and negligently failed to take corrective action to prevent the assaults from recurring.”

The New York Post reported on incidents at the 2010 exhibition at the time, with female performers telling the newspaper that they’d experienced groping and others saying they’d been “pushed, prodded and poked.” The museum told the Post at the time that it was “well aware of the challenges” faced by nude performers in the exhibition and that violators were escorted out by MoMA security. The New York Times and other outlets also covered the incidents at the time.

The exhibition marked MoMA’s first performance art retrospective and featured 38 performers in rotating two-hour shifts of eight who either lay beneath a skeleton, faced each other at a doorway, or stood in other performance pieces in the exhibition.

Bonafede’s lawsuit specifically concerns Imponderabilia, the work that sets nude performers at either side of portal. First performed in 1977 by Abramović herself and her then-partner Ulay, the performance requires gallery visitors to squeeze between its performers, rubbing against their nude bodies in the process. It has since been restaged at many venues, including the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

The lawsuit has been brought now due to New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which created a “one-year lookback window for survivors of sexual assault that occurred when they were over the age of 18 to sue their abusers regardless of when the abuse occurred.” Late last year, as the lookback window was set to expire, numerous lawsuits were filed accusing high-profile celebrities of sexual assault or misconduct, including Sean “Diddy” Combs, Russell Brand, and others.

In the complaint, Bonafede claimed that the sexual assaults he experienced have caused “years of emotional distress and substantially harmed [his] mental health, body, image, and career.”

Bonafede said he is seeking compensatory damages, punitive damages, reimbursement of attorney fees, and other relief as to be determined in court.

A MoMA spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.