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Good Morning!
- A new AI chatbot helps speed up provenance research for Nazi-looted artworks.
- The new Africa Cultural Initiative wants to build a collaborative arts infrastructure across the continent.
- San Francisco’s Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week Returns September 30.
The Headlines
END OF THE LINE. Gail Asper, whose family helped fund Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights, says the Asper Foundation will stop supporting the institution over its exhibition “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present.” The Art Newspaper reported that Asper criticized the show for lacking context on Israel’s founding and Hamas’s October 7 attack, while the museum defended the exhibition as part of its human rights mandate. The dispute has sparked wider debate over donor influence, curatorial independence, and how museums address contested histories, with supporters of the exhibition arguing that Palestinian experiences deserve representation.
LAST LAUGH. A little over a year since President Donald Trump attempted to fire Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet, the Dutch art historian sat down with the New York Times‘s Robin Pogrebin for a debrief. Since Sajet left the NPG last year, she has accepted a position as director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Trump administration’s campaign against the Smithsonian has only intensified. As Congress interrogates Smithsonian officials, Sajet makes an impassioned defense of the authority, independence, and scholarship of the institution, but concludes that ultimately the fate of the museum network is with the American people. “The overarching thing we’ve all got to ask ourselves is, do we want politicians deciding how history is taught and understood?” she said. “Is that the role of government—to control what we learn about the past and ourselves? I would suggest it’s not.”
The Digest
San Francisco’s Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week is set to return on September 30 for its third edition, with exhibitions and events celebrating Black artists across the region. [San Francisco Chronicle]
The new Africa Cultural Initiative aims to build a collaborative arts infrastructure across the continent, by African artists and for African audiences. [ARTnews]
A Jewish Australian artist was reportedly dropped from a residency and lost friends after a leaked private message, in which she called Hamas “animals,” sparked a backlash. [ABC News]
A 28-year-old architectural restorer in Rome is taking on the city’s graffiti problem one historic wall at a time, armed with a sandblaster and a growing online following.[Euronews]
The Kicker
FRIENDLY ROBOT. File this one under actual use cases for AI. Researchers at Santa Clara University have created an AI chatbot connected to a database of 40,000 pieces of Nazi-looted artwork to assist provenance research. Titled “AI Provenance Assistant,” the bot was created by management professor Michael Santoro and information systems and analytics professors Haibing Lu and Michele Samorani to help speed up litigation and research related to repatriation, which even in the best cases takes years. Santoro and Lu consider the bot very much a work in progress and are seeking both financial assistance and the input of provenance researchers to help fine-tune the system for their needs. Still, not a bad start.
