Smithsonian Fallout Continues, Art Institute of Chicago Didn’t Name Donor When Restituting Stolen Buddha, and More: Morning Links for April 3, 2025

The Headlines

THE SMITHSONIAN DRAMA CONTINUES, with the Washington Post reporting yesterday that Kevin Young, the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, has been on leave since March 14 and will be out of office indefinitely. It’s unclear whether Young’s leave was related to President Donald Trump’s March 27 executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution, which runs the NMAAHC and many other museums. In that order, Trump claimed that the Smithsonian is showing “anti-American ideology” in its galleries, something that many have since said is not true. Yesterday, also in the Post, Monica Hesse wrote of going to the Smithsonian’s museums in search of “corrosive ideology” and said she more or less didn’t find it. Meanwhile, Smithsonian secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III affirmed in a memo to staff that the institution will “remain steadfast in our mission to bring history, science, education, research and the arts to all Americans,” Courthouse News reports.

THERE’S DONOR CONTROVERSY IN CHICAGO, with Art Institute of Chicago now under scrutiny for what preceded the recent return of a 12th-century Buddha sculpture to Nepal. ProPublica  reports that the museum failed to mention that the statue once belonged to the late donor Marilynn Alsdorf, a wealthy Chicago donor who may have obtained works with uncertain provenances. The museum has galleries named after Alsdorf and her husband James, who gave the institution around 500 objects from Nepal, India, and other countries in the region. According to the museum, the recently returned Buddha Sheltered by the Serpent King Muchalinda was stolen from the Kathmandu Valley. But ProPublica reveals it is one of over a dozen Asian antiquities belonging to the Alsdorfs that are facing similar claims.

The Digest

Bruce McGaw, a key figure of the Bay Area Figurative movement, has died at age 89. Born in 1935, he taught painting for 60 years at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was the school’s longest-tenured faculty member. [SF Gate]

Swedish artist Lap-See Lam has won the $100,000 Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, one of the world’s biggest art prizes. As part of the award, Lam will also have an exhibition at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter museum in Norway. [The Art Newspaper]

Could joint museum ownership be a solution to remedying the costs of growing permanent collections? Some Los Angeles institutions are starting to work together to bring objects into their collections. [Observer]

David Hockney speaks about his forthcoming retrospective, his largest to date, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. The artist said he hopes the 400-work show will inspire “joy, some real joy!” [The New York Times]

A 1970s Barcelona power plant will be turned into a culture and media center, as well as “land art piece.” The space, titled E la nave va, will be designed by architecture studios Garcés de Seta Bonet Arquitectes and Marvel. [Dezeen]

The Kicker

ROMANS WERE RECYCLING with impressive efficiency long before our time, thanks to an architectural technique called spolia, which involves reusing elements of older buildings on new ones. Mismatched columns and a hodgepodge of materials can still be found in Roman monuments, and along with reducing waste and new resources, the technique helped cut costs. Today, these ancient building methods are being reappraised by designers as solutions for modern-day recycling in the face of climate change, according to the Washington Post. “I see spolia architecture as a kind of role model that inspires reuse and integrates the past in contemporary architecture,” said Maria Fabricius Hansen, an art historian at the University of Copenhagen.