"It's the one thing in the world that is just there to make things beautiful," Palestinian-American artist Sabri Sundos says of flowers. The motif appears throughout Chasing Flowers, his solo exhibition at Fisk Gallery in Portland, Oregon, where dancing figures and floral forms become vehicles for exploring freedom, longing, and Palestinian diasporic identity. 

Yet painting is a relatively recent chapter in Sundos' creative life. Before turning to visual art in 2018, the Brooklyn-based artist spent years making music, touring, and performing, only picking up a paintbrush while designing an album cover. 

“The first time I painted, I remember how good it made me feel,” he recalls in an interview with Hyperallergic. Unlike in music, where collaboration often mediates the outcome, painting offered him a direct line between his thoughts and the final image.

In recent years, Sundos’ understanding of what art is and can do has continued to evolve. In 2024, he and his artist collective, Unibrow Sun, designed the “Somebody I Love is Palestinian” t-shirt as part of a fundraising campaign for Gaza Mutual Aid Solidarity, helping raise money for displaced families in Gaza. The phrase emerged from a simple conviction: If someone you love is Palestinian, how can you remain silent? By grounding the message in love, Sundos hoped to expose the absurdity of the hostility it provoked, while also demonstrating how even a small act of design could build solidarity, foster community, and translate empathy into tangible support. 

As a son of immigrants raised in San Diego, Sundos grew up navigating a complicated sense of identity. He spent much of his childhood in neighborhoods populated by surfers, skaters, and alternative subcultures. As one of the few people of color in his community, he often struggled to understand where he fit. While his parents encouraged assimilation and success in America, his teta ensured that Palestine remained central to his identity. Visiting for long stretches, she would tell him stories of the Nakba, grounding him in a history that might otherwise have faded. “She put Palestine in me,” he says.

Sundos’ practice exists now across two distinct bodies of work: paintings and tatreez-inspired embroidery. His embroidery pieces are deliberate, conceptual, and meticulously planned. He begins by knowing the colors, composition, and ideas he wants to communicate. For Sundos, tatreez carries a particular responsibility. It is a way to participate in a centuries-old Palestinian tradition while also helping to secure its place in the contemporary art history canon. Painting, by contrast, is intuitive and exploratory. “Painting is having fun,” he says. “It’s like being a kid.” The canvas for him becomes a site of discovery, where images emerge through experimentation.

A dancing figure recurs throughout Sundos' work. The motif emerged from a series of continuous-line drawings he created while studying photographs of Alvin Ailey dancers. Over time, Sundos gave the figure curly hair and a unibrow, making it distinctly his own. Yet the figure remains intentionally ambiguous. It could be a child, a parent, a woman, a man, or none of those things. Sundos wants it to remain open enough for anyone to see themselves within it. The figure carries traces of his childhood, where his father sang, and his mother danced at family gatherings. His parents were often the life of the party, and those memories continue to resonate in the work. The figure also speaks to broader ideas of liberation. “I am obsessed with autonomy and movement,” he says. “Freedom of movement.” For an artist deeply conscious of borders and displacement, dance is one of the ultimate expressions of freedom.

Sundos describes his painting process as one of “finding” a figure rather than creating one. He rarely begins with a fixed image in mind, instead painting intuitively until a face or body emerges. Rooted in the subconscious, spontaneity guides his work. While some viewers interpret the resulting figures as sad or melancholic, Sundos sees them as hopeful, thoughtful, and waiting. “As Palestinians, we're constantly asked to wait,” he says. His figures embody the tension between patience and frustration & resilience and uncertainty.

For Sundos, the work is not simply an exploration of personal identity. He hopes viewers will recognize something of themselves in it. Growing up, he often felt pressured to choose between different parts of himself: between being Arab and being a skater, a musician, or simply himself. Through his work, he hopes to offer younger generations a broader sense of possibility. He wants people to understand that cultural inheritance and individuality are not mutually exclusive, that one can be both deeply connected to their heritage and entirely themselves.

Flowers are another recurring motif throughout Sundos' work and serve as the conceptual foundation for Chasing Flowers. Initially drawn to flowers as symbols of beauty and attraction, Sundos began painting them in the colors of the Palestinian flag, allowing them to subtly evoke Palestine memory and identity. In Chasing Flowers, beauty becomes more complicated. As the exhibition text explains, the works explore “the tension between escape and engagement, attraction and apathy,” asking how we can continue to pursue beauty without turning away from the realities that surround us. 

Alongside the paintings, the exhibition includes a series of drawings and animations featuring Sundos' recurring dancing figures. The animations, accompanied by piano music composed by Sundos, extend many of the exhibition's themes into moving image and sound, further connecting his visual practice to his musical beginnings.

Running throughout Sundos' practice is a persistent and radical sense of hope. Raised on stories of Palestine, Sabri understands both the weight of inherited histories and the resilience required to carry them forward. His ancestors' struggles continue to sustain that hope, along with the life he has built in New York with his wife, children, and community. He speaks about the ability of Levantine cultures to move fluidly between joy and grief, laughter and sorrow, which is a duality that permeates his work. He does not center pain, but rather makes space for beauty, movement, humor, and possibility. His work reminds us that Palestinian identity is not defined solely by hardship, but also by creativity, celebration, endurance, and the ongoing pursuit of freedom.

In all of its coastal, evergreen, and folkloric beauty, the city of Seattle has surprisingly appointed a common urban raccoon as its unofficial mascot in the last week. Only, the raccoon in question is anything but common — it's ✨Jimothy.✨

Jimothy, who recently went viral after he was filmed gallivanting between yards in the Ballard neighborhood, looks more like a pom-pom than a raccoon due to his unnatural physique. The rotund little thing lives with a condition called short spine syndrome — a rare congenital birth defect in which the spinal vertebrae fail to properly separate during fetal development, resulting in a severely compressed spinal column that gives Jimothy a shortened torso and little to no neck. The raccoon also has an unusually short tail that enhances his already spherical stature.

There's actually a handful of dogs with short spine syndrome who have become popular and beloved ambassadors for the condition on social media, but Jimothy stands out as a particularly unique case because he is a wild animal who isn't just surviving, but thriving as is — without direct human intervention. Equal parts ridiculous and sickeningly cute, Jimothy does everything an urban raccoon is supposed to do: climb and descend fences, scamper about, be scruffy and conniving, squeeze between tight gaps, and scavenge for food. Most importantly, Jimothy doesn't appear to be in any pain or distress due to his condition; he's simply Mother Nature's answer to the human preoccupation with Bigfoot and other cryptids.

As was the case with the baby pygmy hippo Moo Deng, the enormous king penguin chick Pesto, and the socially anxious macaque Punch, Jimothy exploded in popularity overnight as the clip of him running across a sidewalk proliferated online. Soon after, Jimothy was being honored through news segments, fan art, tattoos, local sports, an honorary doctorate, and murals, like that by local muralist Andrew Miller for the Ballard Clay pottery studio, where the raccoon had once been spotted skulking. The round raccoon has been so well-received by the city that Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck is set to issue a proclamation designating this summer as “Jimothy Summer” this coming Sunday, July 26.

Jimothy has come to represent those who feel like outliers and misfits. Plenty of artists highlight the raccoon's uniqueness and resilience in celebratory fan art reminding viewers to be comfortable with and proud of themselves.

Without his knowledge, Jimothy inadvertently became a community hero after another local artist, Ryan Henry Ward, auctioned off a painting he made of the raccoon for a whopping $6,543.21 (you read that right) and forwarded all the proceeds to the Ballard Food Bank. Ward's auction also ended up influencing Amazon, Alaska Air, and T-Mobile to match the lucky bidder's donation.

@tsame16 An icon. The @Seattle Mariners ♬ original sound - Jimothy Stan 🦝

While Jimothy has already (and unwittingly) proven himself as a model community member, his catapult into the spotlight also coincides with Disability Pride Month, effectively establishing him as a charming mascot for celebrating inclusivity, diversity, accessibility, and perseverance.

Artists and activists in the disability community have called on Jimothy's new fans to help protect and advocate for disability rights with the same fervor and love they show for the little raccoon, especially as several states are challenging Section 504, which mandates that all entities and programs receiving federal funding must equally serve people with disabilities in an integrated setting.

People have let their imaginations run wild with the documented sightings of the short-spined raccoon across Ballard, but when it comes down to Jimothy in the flesh, Washington's Department of Fish and Wildlife reminds the public to love him from afar so that he, too, can remain wild. This means the following: don't feed the Jimothy, don't approach the Jimothy, don't follow the Jimothy, and do not touch the Jimothy. Or any raccoon, really.

Grad student thesis shows run the risk of curatorial chaos, given their typical premise. Brought together under the auspices of a degree-granting program, the creative output of an eclectic group of artists with diverging interests, aesthetics, and methods might not naturally gel into a harmonious exhibition. 

This could have been the case for the nine thesis candidates wrapping up their time in the School of Visual Art’s MFA Art Practice program, particularly given the seismic shifts rocking the institution. The three-year low-residency program will move exclusively online next academic year, and it’s no longer accepting applications for future classes. In February, the program’s longtime chair resigned after Epstein revelations. Then, SVA announced that the Curatorial Practice program will also shut down in 2027. Yet, amid this tumult, the members of the MFA Art Practice’s penultimate graduating class honed their thesis projects and managed to locate a throughline — a spirit of scavenging and reimagining across layered terrains of memory and meaning — to cohere their disparate pursuits into a lively exhibition. Titled Finding Here, the presentation is currently on view at Art Cake in Brooklyn.

The show opens with a series of nearly two dozen “redactions” (2026) — spreads from the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column that artist Richard Montañez has taken to with a keen eye and a black permanent marker. He leaves on the page a voicey edit, often stemming from drag culture and queer history, for example, “Girrlll…” and “KIKI! tonight.” 

Photographer Helen Levitt, who was born in Bensonhurst in 1913 and died at the age of 95 in her fifth-floor apartment in Greenwich Village, lived in New York City her entire life (save for a five-month sojourn to Mexico) and never lost her Flatbush accent. She was friends with photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans, and, like the latter, collaborated with writer James Agee, but she never received the level of attention and acclaim that her male contemporaries did. Though Levitt is perhaps best known for her photographs of children’s chalk drawings in the 1930s, they comprise only a fraction of her six-decade practice, whose emotional complexity and formal innovation continue to captivate. The comprehensive book Helen Levitt, edited by Joshua Chuang, draws from the breadth of her output with rarely seen images and scholarly essays that focus on her early expeditions with a Leica, 1941 trip to Mexico, experiments with color photography, two series taken in the New York subway, and final photographs from the 1980s.

Levitt was an avid reader and movie-goer who dropped out of high school because she was bored with rote memorization, as Chuang, who also organized a traveling exhibition of the same name, notes in his introductory essay. After apprenticing in a commercial photography studio, she bought her own camera and in 1934 joined the leftist New York Film and Photo League, where she met and befriended Cartier-Bresson, whom she said “made me ambitious.” In 1937, Levitt started teaching children’s art classes in East Harlem through the Federal Art Project and began photographing her pupils’ sidewalk chalk drawings. It was around this time that she sought out Evans, who took her on as a mentee, assistant, and, briefly, a lover. 

The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) plans to eliminate its entire in-house custodial workforce in August, according to the institution and the union American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31 (AFSCME Council 31).

Up to 25 of the museum's custodians — including 23 unionized workers — would lose their current jobs as part of the museum's plan to outsource its custodial work to a private, third-party vendor. The affected workers are responsible for cleaning the institution's galleries and facilities. Some of them have worked at the AIC for decades. The museum told Hyperallergic that staff members will be offered new positions by the contractor, contingent upon their completion of a separate application process.

The AIC Workers United, the institution's umbrella union organization, called the plan a "devastating and unconscionable injustice" that violated union agreements in a circulating petition. The group said if the plan succeeds, staff who "carry out indispensable, difficult work for the institution" would experience a detrimental loss of essential employee benefits.

Union workers are planning to rally in support of the custodians on Wednesday, July 22. The change would take effect on August 14, the union said.

A spokesperson for the AIC confirmed to Hyperallergic that the museum plans to outsource its custodial workforce to GDI Integrated Facility Services, a private contractor based in Canada. Each affected custodian, the museum said, would have the opportunity "to join [its] custodial partner after completing their employment screening process."

"The Art Institute deeply values our employees, and we are grateful for the important work our custodial team does every day," the spokesperson continued. "We made the decision to shift our custodial services to a contractor model to better support daily museum operations, and we prioritized choosing a partner that would commit to offering employment to our custodial staff."

The move follows layoffs at the institute's private art school last November, when the School of the Art Institute laid off 20 workers and shuttered its beloved Video Data Bank, citing a decline in enrollment.

The museum denies that it violated any union contract terms. However, AFSCME Council 31 spokesperson Ben Conboy told Hyperallergic that union lawyers have filed a grievance with the museum for allegedly not providing appropriate notice to staff about the decision, and have "demanded to bargain" over the decision.

An AIC custodial staff member who spoke to Hyperallergic on the condition of anonymity, fearing that speaking to the media could affect their employment status, said they felt "betrayed" by the institution's decision.

The staff member said the custodians were first notified of the institution's plan on June 29 in a meeting attended by representatives of GDI.

"Going to that museum is my passion," the custodial worker said in a phone call. "And [then] just being told that you're no longer gonna be an AIC employee and you'll be transferred to a new company broke my heart."

The custodial worker said their current hourly pay is $18, which is $0.95 above Chicago's minimum wage. A spokesperson for the museum said that they could not confirm the final wages that GDI would offer the staff, but stated that it would not be less than their current pay.

While the staff member is considering AIC's offer to apply to GDI — mostly out of fear that it would be difficult for them to find another job in the current economy — they said they would be seriously impacted by losing their AIC-specific benefits.

According to Conboy, custodial staff would lose accrued paid time off, tuition remission benefits, and eligibility for Public Service Loan Forgiveness — which is contingent on working for a public institution — as a result of the change. A spokesperson for AIC said that free access to the institute would continue for the workers who decided to join GDI, and that "discussions about extending other additional, Art Institute-specific benefits are underway."

The anonymous staff member told Hyperallergic that "most" of their coworkers were not considering working for GDI.

 "Our union's position is that management should abandon this effort," Conboy said. "It is the wrong move for visitors and guests, and it is certainly the wrong move for its custodians who give so much ... whose work contributes so much to making the museum what it is."

When asked if the institution would ratify its plan despite recent opposition, an AIC spokesperson affirmed it would move forward.

"I also want to speak for my coworkers who've been there for 20-plus years, giving their all to this company," the AIC custodial worker told Hyperallergic. "A few of them were supposed to retire within a year or two, and then out of nowhere this happens."

This is not Homer’s Odyssey. Let’s get that out of the way. As a Homerist, I had to remind myself of this throughout a film that reduces a narrative of 12,000 lines to just under three hours of airtime. The cuts are significant for someone who knows Homer well: The entire Phaeacian episode is gone; Matt Damon’s Odysseus never meets his father. Where the Homeric epic splits and gives its hero 12 books on Ithaca, the movie is about two-thirds journey and flashback with under an hour once Odysseus returns home.

The middle of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) delivers visceral discomfort. When the witch Circe (Samantha Morton) serves her transformative feast to Odysseus’s companions on the island of Aeaea, the camera tracks their voracious hunger, following their shift from greedily slurping, increasingly frantic men into squealing pigs. Circe physically wrests them out of one shape into another, later commenting that their appetites made them what they truly are.

This scene bears the promise of what the magic of modern film can do for ancient myth. It is physically affective, making vivid what could only be imagined before. And it also allows for the adaptation of the story: This Circe has been abused by travelers before. The animals who lurk on her island are the men who have met their comeuppance.

Just a few months after the reopening of the New Museum's expanded building, a water leak shut down the Manhattan institution for a full weekend.

According to Artnews, museum workers scrambled to address a "significant" leak during the flash floods of July 18, using buckets to catch water that streamed into a gallery housing artist WangShui's piece "oppose the serpent" (2024).

In an email to Hyperallergic, the New Museum said that "immediate steps were taken to address the leak," and that no artwork was harmed.

In an Instagram post on Saturday, the museum announced that it would be closing for the weekend due to "extreme weather in New York City."

The Lower Manhattan museum unveiled its $82 million OMA-designed expansion in March after two years of closure. The 60,000-square-foot expansion doubled the institution’s exhibition space, adding much-needed breathing space, but as Aaron Short reported for Hyperallergic, "bits of masking tape were still stuck to the stairway railings, and a handful of missing wall panels revealed internal wires, rebar, and insulation."

WangShui's work is included in the inaugural exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future, which explores what it means to be human amid the cataclysmic technological changes of the 20th and 21st centuries through the work of more than 150 artists.

The new building received mixed reviews from Hyperallergic's critics with Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian calling it a "mishmash of Obama-era startup culture, dated by the lime green and perforated metal."

After over a week of ambiguity surrounding his whereabouts following his scheduled release from a five-year sentence for “contempt, defamation, and public disorder,” Cuban dissident performance artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara arrived in Miami on Saturday, July 18.

A self-taught artist, Otero Alcántara co-founded the San Isidro Movement (SIM) in 2018 alongside other artists and scholars organizing against Decree 349, a Cuban law requiring prior state approval for all public and private performances and exhibitions.

“As the end of his sentence approached, his support team contacted the US Embassy in Havana to request humanitarian parole for Luis,” said SIM member and Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco, who liaised extensively with Otero Alcántara during his incarceration and advocated for his unconditional release, in an email to Hyperallergic.

“We assume that he was taken to what Cubans call a 'protocol house' — an official state residence used for keeping dissidents incommunicado,” Fusco continued, expanding on what may have happened to the artist after the state removed him from prison on July 7. She added that as soon as the United States State Department approved his humanitarian parole on July 17, the Cuban Foreign Ministry put Otero Alcántara on a flight to Miami the following day.

The artist was detained and arrested in July 2021 while he was on his way to participate in the historic anti-government protests targeting resource shortages and waning civil liberties. Just two months before his arrest, Otero Alcántara, who had been detained several times for his activism and art, was forcibly hospitalized by the state after embarking on a hunger and fluid strike to protest the confiscation of multiple artworks during a police raid on his studio.

Otero Alcántara was held in custody and moved to the Guanajay maximum-security prison before being handed his five-year sentence for “crimes of insulting the symbols of the homeland, contempt, and public disorder” in June 2022. In mobilizing against Decree 349, Otero Alcántara personally invoked the Cuban Flag in live and documented performance work, alongside other symbols critical of the government. The artist initially declined the government's offer of exile in exchange for release, as he indicated in a letter published by Hyperallergic ahead of his sentencing.

However, Otero Alcántara eventually accepted exile while serving time, telling El País, “I never thought of leaving, but the regime has insinuated that there’s no option for me to walk through the streets of Cuba, because of the threat they’ve made me believe I am, or that people believe I am.”

“I realize that the art I make represents a danger for them,” the artist continued during the 2024 interview with the Spanish newspaper. “The options are between exile, or remaining [in Cuba] and always being in trouble.”

Fusco pointed to two other prominent political prisoners, Felix Navarro and José Daniel Ferrer, who were arrested in 2021 and paroled in 2025, only to be arrested again shortly thereafter, in her email correspondence with Hyperallergic.

The artist's partner, curator Claudia Genlui Hidalgo, wrote that “Alcántara is treated differently from the rest of the prisoners” in the foreword of an interview with the artist for Hyperallergic in 2023, reporting that he was routinely denied his right to personal phone calls and letters, and “subjected to harassment and psychological torture.” Nevertheless, from myriad hunger strikes over the brutality in Guanajay and the detention of political prisoners, to honing in on drawing and participatory conceptual art, Otero Alcántara continued his activism and art practice while incarcerated.

“I am very glad that Luis does not have to suffer the deprivations he lived with for five long years,” Fusco said, noting that the artist wants to enjoy his new life in the US and continue his art practice. However, she recognized “forced exile is just one more injustice committed against him.”

Though Otero Alcántara is no longer incarcerated, other dissident artists, including Grammy-winning rapper and fellow SIM member Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez, remain behind bars as political prisoners. Pérez, whose song “Patria y Vida” (2021) became emblematic of the July 2021 protests, was arrested alongside Otero Alcántara and sentenced to nine years in 2022.

Kyung-Me has yet to be recognized as one of the most compelling artists of her generation. Now in her mid-30s, she has transformed her process to make at least four distinct bodies of work. First, she published her graphic novel, Bad Korean (2016), a pictorial diary done in pastel and colored pencil of a gullible young woman in New York, looking for love. Alienated and unhappy, she believes sex, alcohol, food, and dressing hip will help her escape her hyper-awareness of not fitting in. Told in snippets of speech, such as the repeated phrase “I want to be your only friend,” the self-deprecating narrative is an engrossing combination of quiet desperation and blunt humor. It is easy to imagine that Kyung-Me could have authored a series of books about this character, but she didn’t. In Copy Kitty (2020), Kyung-Me used graphite to depict an intricate, wordless tale of a cat who keeps changing her identity in the pursuit of love and affection from a young blonde man.

While the themes of alienation and trying to fit in — a common trope for those living in the diaspora — convey a narrative ripe for exploration, Kyung-Me shifted everything about her work for her first solo exhibition in 2022 at Bureau, which I reviewed. Working meticulously with pen and pencil, she created eight drawings of elaborately detailed, nested rooms. About this dream house, whose occupant’s face is always hidden, I wrote that it was "as if she drew each line with a razor blade that cuts deep but draws no blood. The effect is mesmerizing and unsettling."

Just weeks before a historic collection of 20th-century Mexican art is slated to leave the country for an exhibition in Europe, a group of advocates is suing Mexico’s principal cultural entity over allegations regarding the legal basis for exporting the nation’s artistic heritage.  

The three lawsuits were filed by the advocacy group Defendamos la Colección Gelman (“Let’s Defend the Gelman Collection”) on June 29 and July 1 against Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL), the agency responsible for issuing export permits for artworks protected under cultural heritage laws. The legal actions concern the imminent international tour of a private collection that includes works designated as “artistic monuments” and thus subject to strict statutes regarding their circulation.

Assembled by Jewish émigré film producer Jacques Gelman and his wife Natasha Zahalka in Mexico City in the 1940s, the recently renamed Gelman Santander Collection comprises 161 works by artists including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and María Izquierdo. In January, it was announced that the Gelman Collection would be managed by the Santander Bank Foundation. A three-party, five-year agreement revealed that the collection had been under the partial ownership of the cement billionaire Zambrano family since 2023 and that it will depart Mexico later this year for a two-year tour that begins in northern Spain, where it will be shown as part of the inaugural exhibition program at Faro Santander, the bank’s “new cultural project” set to open on September 8. 

About 30 works in the grouping are designated as “artistic monuments,” meaning they may only leave the country temporarily and with INBAL’s permission. While such works are legally restricted to one-year export and return permits, with the possibility of a two-year extension, the terms of an original agreement seemingly licensed their international circulation through 2030, with the possibility of renewal.

In March, hundreds of Mexican cultural workers signed an open letter calling for greater transparency surrounding the collection’s travel, particularly with regard to the works of Kahlo. 

"It's striking to see the disparity between the effort that has gone into repatriating the nation's archaeological heritage, in order to enforce the law, and the lax way in which they are allowing the departure of major works, not only by the most relevant Mexican artist today, but by painters who, together, helped build a significant part of our national artistic identity,” the letter read.

Of the 161 works, which include Kahlo’s oil paintings “Self-Portrait with Monkeys” (1943) and “Diego in My Mind” (1943), 68 are currently on view to the Mexican public for the first time in nearly two decades at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. However, upon the closing of Modern Stories: Emblematic Works from the Gelman Santander Collection on July 19, they will depart for Spain with the rest of the collection. 

Upon learning of the change of the collection’s name and its shuffling in ownership and management, art historian Francisco Berzunza and two friends formed Defendamos. They soon began asking questions regarding the duration of the protected works’ export and speculation that the Zambranos took out a $150 million loan on the collection. They also questioned the specifics of the Zambranos’ purchase of the collection in 2023 from Robert Littman, the executor of Natasha Zahalka’s will, who, according to Defendamos, “subsequently became not only curator of the collection, but also its owner, for reasons that are still unclear.” 

In a statement shared with Hyperallergic, INBAL said that after leaving Spain, the collection will travel to the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, followed by the National Museum of Norway. In 2028, the works will return to Mexico for an exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, INBAL said.

“The agreement with Banco Santander Foundation is limited to research, conservation and international cultural programming,” the statement said. “It does not entail the transfer of ownership or the sale of any artwork to foreign institutions. The name Gelman Santander Collection reflects this institutional alliance only.”

In April, the Santander Bank Foundation also said that it “will comply at all times with Mexican laws” and that the collection would return to Mexico in two years.

The foundation shared another statement with Hyperallergic that described its "commitment to Mexico" as "long-standing, substantial and deeply rooted."

Even with these assurances, there are a number of requests that Berzanza says still have not been answered. 

“The government till this day has refused to show the permits, it refused to show the agreement, it refused to explain why Santander said that Mexican law is flexible,” he said to Hyperallergic. 

Berzunza also said that such questions have even been met with hostility. The lead plaintiff in the lawsuits told Hyperallergic that members of the activist group have faced political backlash and other pressures in the weeks leading up to and after the filings, alleging that members “have had funding withdrawn” and that their relatives “have had commissions canceled” since the group initiated their public-facing actions in March.

“These questions led to us being publicly shamed by the president on national TV, accused of being political adversaries to her regime,” he said, referring to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s dismissal of fears over the collection’s fate.

The president’s reaction prompted the group to begin a different course of action.

“We decided the government would only act if we were to act legally,” Berzunza said. “And we began legal proceedings.” 

Despite these pressures and others, including “anonymous threats on social media” and their “presence at public events, at public institutions” being called into question, Berzunza and Defendamos remain steadfast in their action. 

“And if we didn’t raise our voice, this could be lost because the adversary is the global free circulation market,” he said.

Amid the last days of the collection’s public display at the Museo de Arte Moderno, the fate of the Gelman Santander Collection remains a hot-button issue regarding the role that governmental agencies, arts institutions, and the public play in protecting national cultural heritage.   

“No major museum today would knowingly present a collection that was looted or acquired through conflict,” Berzunza said. “Yet Santander has dismissed the legitimate concerns of the people of Mexico and the serious questions surrounding how Mr. Littman acquired the collection. Ethics, it seems, is not part of Santander’s vocabulary.”

Following a legal battle between the city of Philadelphia and the Trump administration, federal officials replaced exhibits describing the history of slavery in the United States at a Pennsylvania historical park. 

Last Wednesday, July 15, the Trump administration complied with a court order to restore exhibits it had abruptly removed from Independence National Historical Park in January as part of an order to ensure its exhibits did not “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” However, federal judges this month allowed the administration to install altered panels that minimize the Founding Fathers' participation in the institution of slavery, according to local activists. 

The new texts replace the longstanding outdoor exhibition, Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation, co-created by the city and the federal government at the President’s House site in 2010 and removed in January under President Trump’s orders.

Michael Coard, a trial attorney and founder of the advocacy group Avenging The Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), which joined the city’s lawsuit against the Trump administration over the panel removals, described the new exhibits to Hyperallergic as “ sanitized, whitewashed, and censored.”

Since 2002, ATAC has led a push to compel the National Park Service to create a permanent memorial dedicated to the nine individuals Washington enslaved in his Philadelphia residence.

Coard said the new panels overemphasized George Washington’s role in drafting the Fairfax Resolves, a 1774 document that called for the end of the “wicked,” “cruel,” and “unnatural” slave trade. The new texts also make no mention of the hundreds of individuals whom the president enslaved, Coard said. 

“Privately, George Washington often expressed discomfort with the institution and a desire to see it abolished,” the alternative text reads. “Yet as a Virginia plantation owner, his wealth and livelihood were deeply tied to it.”

“ If he had discomfort, what the hell did they have?” Coard said. “Why highlight the discomfort of the victimizer and ignore the hell of the victims?”

Another new text reads: “Slaves living in the President’s House experienced a greater modicum of autonomy than elsewhere in the South, such as to explore the city and sometimes even attend the theater, with Washington buying the tickets.”

“ It [is] outrageous because the definition of slavery is no autonomy,” Coard said. 

In February, Philadelphia federal judge Cynthia M. Rufe ordered the administration to restore the exhibition in a scathing opinion that compared Trump’s tactics to those of George Orwell’s fictional Big Brother character. The Trump administration then tried to install its new versions of the plaques, but was prevented by an appeals court from doing so until this month. 

“ You can try to tidy up by putting out this information about George Washington, but the bottom line is that you don't like the issue of slavery being taught,” Coard said.

In a statement to Hyperallergic, the Department of the Interior (DOI) said the agency was “pleased the Courts have sided with the Trump administration on restoring truth and sanity to our country in our nation's 250th.”

“[The exhibits] acknowledge the evils of slavery, including its injustices and hypocrisies, and, by telling the stories of the nine slaves that Washington kept in the President’s House, remind us of their essential humanity,” the DOI spokesperson continued. “The panels also recall the price our nation paid to finish the work that the Founders had begun and end slavery in the United States once and for all.”

Coard said that he and ATAC would pursue “all available legal options” in their fight against the federal government for the new exhibition.  

“ What this president has done with regard to the President's House lays the foundation for himself or the next right-wing fascist president to get rid of any symbols he doesn't like,” Coard said.

Located 20 miles southeast of Sheridan, Wyoming, the UW Neltje Center’s Jentel Artist Residency, now in its 25th year, offers dedicated individuals a supportive environment to further their artistic development. Jentel offers 3-week residencies from mid-January through early December with private studios and access to Wyoming’s natural beauty. 

We welcome visual artists in all mediums; writers in fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry; and composers in all genres of music. Artistic merit and promise form the basis for selections. Established as well as emerging artists are encouraged to apply.

Jentel lies in the Lower Piney Creek Valley with spectacular views over scoria-topped hills to the majestic Bighorn Mountains. Five new and two renovated structures evoke the agricultural and historical setting of the valley and echo the sweeping lines of the foothills and mountains.

Accommodations for each resident include a private room, a shared living area and kitchen, and a separate studio space. A $300 stipend helps defray the cost of living and food expenses. Typically, three artists, two writers, and a composer are invited to participate in each of 11 annual 3-week sessions.

The application deadline for the Winter/Spring 2027 residencies (January through April) is September 15, 2026. 

Applications for Summer/Fall 2027 residencies (May through November) open on October 1, 2026, and close on January 15, 2027.

For more information and to apply, visit jentelarts.org.