When the Long Museum, the private institution founded by Chinese mega-collectors Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei, began selling work last year, it felt like a sign of the times. It meant that Asian collectors were not only being less active in terms of buying. They were actively selling, too.

Previously, the paintings being sold by collectors like Liu and Wang—a $34.9 million Modigliani that appeared at Sotheby’s last year, for example—came from the West and made their way to China via flashy purchases. Today, it is the opposite: these very same paintings are being sent back to the West, where they will likely find new buyers.

Now, there is news of at least two major paintings on the market that appear to come from China: a Warhol that, according to a source close to the gallery, is priced in excess of $100 million and a Basquiat that sold in 2013 for $29 million.

In mid-May—not coincidentally, during the major auctions in New York—Gagosian opened “Icons From a Half Century of Art,” an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Basquiat, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Cy Twombly, and Warhol. It is open only to collectors, and can only be seen by appointment at Gagosian’s 24th Street gallery in New York. The image the gallery used to promote the exhibition on its website is of a Warhol “Mao.” Warhol famously created no fewer than 199 images of “Mao,” but this isn’t just any “Mao.” It is the only one of the four so-called “giant Maos”—they stand a full 15 feet high—that is not in a museum.

The last time the Gagosian “Mao” was publicly on the market was in 2008, when Christie’s, in collaboration with London dealer James Mayor, sent the painting to Hong Kong with a price tag of $120 million. As described in write-up at the time in the Wall Street Journal, that price would have set a record for the artist: the auction record for a Warhol then was the $71.7 million Christie’s got in May 2007 for the 1963 silkscreen Green Car Crash. (The record today is the $195 million that Larry Gagosian paid for a painting of Marilyn Monroe at Christie’s in 2022.) But the “Mao” didn’t sell in 2008 in Hong Kong, and then came the recession. According to a source with close knowledge of the painting, it did, however, sell around 2013 for a price within the range of $120 million.

The person involved in that transaction, dealers say, was Rosaline Wong, who has in the past reportedly worked on behalf of Henry Cheng, chairman of Hong Kong–based New World Development. According to Forbes, Cheng, who succeeded his own father at New World, is China’s third-richest person. New World’s shares dropped 60 percent between January 2023 and January 2024, and the Cheng family’s net worth dropped by nearly a fourth, to $22.1 billion.

Wong is a former Hong Kong barrister that Artnet News and the South China Morning Post previously linked to the purchase of a $150 million Gustav Klimt painting. The painting was previously owned by Oprah Winfrey, and the transaction was brokered by Gagosian, according to Bloomberg. More recently, Artnet News linked Wong with a Klimt that sold at Sotheby’s last year for $108.4 million. Dealers who worked with Wong between 2013 and 2015 say she appeared to be buying on behalf of a foundation that was in formation.

According to South China Morning Post, around 2015, Wong founded an investment advisory company, HomeArt, which matches individuals and companies with art for sale. The SCMP reported in 2022 that at that time Wong was “in the middle of setting up a US$1 billion ‘museum-grade’ art investment fund with Hong Kong- and Singapore-based asset management firm Zheng He Capital, which counts among its heavyweight advisers Gagosian and Wong’s close friend, the Hong Kong billionaire Henry Cheng Kar-shun,” head of New World Development and father of collector Adrian Cheng, executive vice chairman and CEO of New World Development and founder of the K11 , a venture that blends art, commerce, and development, and that has an associated foundation, the K11 Art Foundation. Artnet News reported last year that Wong was “launching a fractional ownership fund specializing in museum-quality works for a broader pool of investors.”

Wong has also been linked to Joseph Lau, whose purchase of a smaller Warhol “Mao” painting in 2006 for $17 million set the stage for Christie’s bringing the “giant Mao” to Hong Kong.

Since 2021, Homeart has since done several exhibitions in collaboration with Christie’s, among them an 11-work Basquiat show in Hong Kong. That exhibition, held in May 2021, included an untitled 1982 painting that was purchased at Christie’s London in 2013 for $29 million. (It’s worth noting that Christie’s made a point of telling the New York Times just after that sale that there was a large amount of bidding from Asia.) That Basquiat painting is also in the current Gagosian “Icons” exhibition, according to several sources who have seen the show.

A representative for Gagosian declined to comment on the identity of the consignor of the Warhol and Basquiat paintings. Wong did not return a request for comment submitted to Homeart.

The four “giant Mao” paintings are so big that Warhol had to make them in the Factory’s screening room rather than the painting studio. They were so expensive to produce that he needed backing from two galleries (Knoedler & Co. and Castelli) and an avid collector of his (Peter Brant). In return, each of those parties got a “giant Mao” painting. The one Christie’s sent to Hong Kong in 2008 went through Castelli to James Mayor, who placed it in a private collection in Europe. Another was sold by Knoedler in 1974 to the Art Institute of Chicago. The third, Brant gifted in 1977 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The fourth “Mao” Warhol kept, and eventually sold it to Charles Saatchi , who eventually sold the piece to the late German collector Erich Marx, who, in 2007, put it on long-term loan to the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin.

Coincidentally, the Hamburger Bahnhof “Mao” was in the news this week. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ran an op-ed by art historian Von Hubertus Butin, who speculated that the painting might soon hit the market. Marx died in 2020; three paintings from the Marx collection—two Warhols and a Twombly —that previously appeared at the Hamburger Bahnhof have been removed from the museum by his heirs. Butin writes that those paintings, which he claims are collectively worth some $170 million, have been consigned to Gagosian and that some may have sold. (Gagosian declined to comment on this; the museum said only that the paintings have been removed.) The Marx collection’s “Mao” could be next to go, Butin claimed, writing that there had at one point been a $155 million offer made for that “Mao.” The museum said it had no knowledge of this, and dealers told ARTnews that the figure seemed unrealistic. One dealer even called the sum “aspirational,” particularly in the current art market conditions.

As for whether the “Mao” at Gagosian has found a buyer, the gallery isn’t saying. The “Icons” show is up through July 19.

Qiao Space was founded in 2015 by Qiao Zhibing, who has appeared on the annual ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list each year since 2013. Qiao is also the founder of Tank Shanghai, a private museum that has welcomed international dignitaries and art world luminaries when they have visited Shanghai and the extended West Bund area.  

For the past decade, the West Bund has been known for its groundbreaking private museums, art galleries, and artists’ studios. ShanghArt, one of China’s earliest galleries for contemporary art, has been closed, as have Don Gallery, Aike Gallery, Part Group, and artist Ding Yi’s studio.

For now, Tank Shanghai is safe, since it is on the other side of the road (near the Huangpu River) and has a relatively long-term agreement with government-managed enterprises. That institution, along with two other private museums, the Long Museum and the Start Museum, as well as the West Bund Museum, form a “cultural corridor at a relatively minimal level,” according to industry insiders.

Qiao Space was known for showcasing works by contemporary artists such as Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Xiaogang, and Zhang Enli. Unlike some of the other resident galleries, it did not hold a closing event. However, artists and arts enthusiasts visited the site during its closure and demolition, documenting its ending with photographs and videos.

Speaking to ARTnews via phone from Shanghai, Qiao said, “This happened rather suddenly. We were just informed in March that the whole area needed to be shut down so we only had three months to process this development.”

Given the suddenness of the decision, the Chinese entrepreneur and night club owner is still considering whether he wants to reopen Qiao Space in a new physical space. Currently, Tank Shanghai has “a lot of space” to hold exhibitions, he said, and Qiao Space’s next exhibition will be held there.

Shanghai- and Beijing-based independent curator Evonne Jiawei Yuan noted, “It’s indeed a pity to see this demolition of at least five art institutions in one block at West Bund, including two collectors’ spaces and three commercial galleries, which were all of the pioneering generation boosting the development of this art zone a decade ago along with some leading architects’ offices and private museums.”

Last year saw the Yuz Museum, previously a key attraction in the West Bund, relocate an hour away from downtown Shanghai, as well as the permanent closure of the Shanghai Center of Photography. The Art Tower was sold to tech titan Alibaba, which is set to use the premises as part of its Shanghai headquarters.

In interviews with ARTnews, industry insiders said that, during the past decade, the West Bund area has faced significant changes, with the government pushing out policies such as rental discounts to attract galleries, museums, and artists. However, in recent years, this policy has shifted, and more efforts have been made to cultivate the area as a zone of technology and finance, with a special focus on AI and big data.

“The local government enterprises changed their strategy and withdraw the preferential policy of letting out spaces on the art industry at low rates due to the downcycle of the real estate market,” Yuan said. “Actually, all the spaces got notices a few years ago that they would have been removed one day and it finally happened this year.”

Mathieu Borysevicz, founder of BANK Gallery, said, “Artists and art spaces have been the catalyst for gentrification worldwide and Shanghai has been no exception. In fact, the history of contemporary arts in Shanghai has been plagued with nomadism from the outset. Gallery centers and studio enclaves seem to relocate every five years or so. China’s maxim of certain uncertainty rules supreme.”

Nonetheless, Qiao remains optimistic, currently considering how to embrace the changes of the local and global art scene while creating and supporting relevant and timely contemporary art.

“This indicates the general environment is changing—we just need to get used to it,” he said. “You cannot change the environment, you need to adjust yourself to the environment. I believe in the creation and energy of art.”

And at the center of the BKC is the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), opened last year by art patron Nita Mukesh Ambani, whose husband, Mukesh, sits at number 9 on the Forbes “World Billionaires List.” After a show dedicated to TOILETPAPER, the magazine and creative studio founded by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, and one on American Pop art, the NMACC has shifted its focus closer to home, with its third exhibition “Liminal Gaps” (through June 9), focusing on four contemporary Indian artists and collectives as a way to reshape “perspectives on India’s evolving cultural identity,” according to the catalog.

In explaining the exhibition’s approach to liminality, Mafalda Millies, one of the show’s curators and a cofounder of TRIADIC, a self-described “creative house and cultural engine,” said, “we aren’t from here and wanted to understand India in today’s time and space. We noticed that art in India has always had a historical element while shedding light on the present. India seems to thrive in this liminality between the past and the future and that is how the theme came to us.”

The exhibition takes over the four floors of NMACC’s Art House venue, with each artist getting their own floor: Ayesha Singh, Raqs Media Collective, Asim Waqif, and Afrah Shafiq (from the ground floor up). With the works on view, the show insists on sensorial and cognitive participation from its audience, asking them to occupy the museum’s many lines and nooks—to touch, click, scroll, play, listen, read, think, scribble, walk, stop, chuckle, rest, and most important, take pictures.

Roya Sachs, a cofounder of TRIADIC and its artistic director, said the group wanted to approach this exhibition in an untraditional format, as it had with the TOILETPAPER show and with its editions of the Format Festival in Bentonville, Arkansas. “We come from different worlds—art, performance, production—and our ethos has been to mix mediums and people,” she told ARTnews. “The contemporary art world is a disruptive space where we increasingly witness interdisciplinarity: choreographers working with visual artists, fashion designers creating sculptures, or sound engineers collaborating with painters. We are always trying to make bridges, take risks, and find magic in the unexpected.”

“Liminal Gaps” begins with visitors physically entering Delhi-based Ayesha Singh’s Hybrid Drawings (2024), a white-box room housing a wireframe installation of a two-point perspective. As you move around the space, architectural elements from different cultures and eras—Mughal, Indo-Saracenic, Sikh, Hindu, and modern—come into view. While the lines are a technical abstraction of Delhi’s architecture, they could be representative of any ancient city in the Indian subcontinent where imprints of past civilizations continue to transcend time and space. Even so, there is a clear erasure of the complexity, chaos, disarray, and entropy that resides in Delhi, or any Indian city for that matter. Singh’s work purges and reduces the city into sanitized lines of black against the spotless white of the walls, ceiling, and floor.

Established in 1992 by three artists (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), Raqs Media Collective presents several works that are meditations on time. The first, titled Nerves (2018), starts in a stairwell that leads from the floor where Singh’s work is installed to the other Raqs pieces. Set against a deep cobalt blue background are line drawings of neurons as they were represented in the early 20th century; running alongside them are expressions like “hit a raw nerve,” “nerves of steel,” or “you have some nerve.”

This passageway leads to Chromacron (2023), where stripes of Pantone’s Color of the Year from 2000 to 2024 line up in chronological order, leading to the installation called Escapement (2018). As the name suggests, its liminality derives from the mechanism in clocks (escapement) that governs consistent and uninterrupted motion of its arms. The work’s 27 seemingly identical clocks are set to different time zones. However, there are two aberrations: the hours are denoted by moods and emotions—remorse, awe, fear, epiphany—instead of numbers, and three clocks, running counterclockwise, are tagged to fictional cities (Babel, Shangri La, and Macondo). Nearby, a giant 24-hour clock sits by itself toward the end of this space; its digits are replaced by words in the Devanagari script that take on literal and symbolic meanings associated with time, such as shran (second), pran (life), atithi (guest), ritu (season), and kaal (era).

The center of the room looks deceptively empty wherein sits Betaal, an augmented reality work of abstract geometric figures that can be seen using iPads. Raqs has said they see this work as an entity that moves in the liminal gap between time and consciousness. There is a comfortable rhythm to Raqs’ work, the repetition and symmetry of clocks for instance lull you into reading it as an obvious rendition of time, until you are faced with the giant clock that compels you to dwell on the immense volatility of time and how it shapes our lives, language, and consciousness.

On the third floor is Asim Waqif’s Chaal (2024), an elaborate bamboo structure that is brought to life as you walk around or into it. While the work, and the exhibition as a whole, could perhaps be interpreted as an escape from the world, Waqif sees it differently. “I am nauseated by celebration right now, especially in the arts which has become a medium of celebrating redevelopment projects, real estate, new infrastructure, or just about anything. So Chaal while being playful is intended to have a dark mood, an element of unsettlement owing to its unpredictability.”

That unsettling feeling can come in the form of sudden sounds and lights activated by stepping on the bending bamboo structure or getting lost in its crevices—like entering a maze that has no exit. The experience can often vacillate between a childlike curiosity or a melancholic sense of doom.

In thinking about Waqif’s work within this context, BKC, the real estate development where this work is now sited, itself become a negation and denial of the realities of Mumbai, especially its poor. BKC and the NMACC within it are technically open to everyone are traversed by few, and comfortably so by even fewer. The looming glass facades, luxury brands, and absence of public transport or affordably priced food all ensure that the barrier of class and caste stands inviolable. The show itself is priced at INR 299 ($3.60 USD), an amount that could buy three dinners in Mumbai; it is, however, free for art students, if previously booked online.

For Sultana’s Reality (2017), Afra Shafiq takes the liminal gaps of the exhibition’s title more literally, presenting a mini library of books written by South Asian women, which visitors can annotate using sticky notes and graphite pencils, and a black box displaying a fantastical interactive experience (it can also be accessed online). This multimedia story, which borrows part of its name from Begum Rokeya’s 1905 feminist utopian story Sultana’s Dream, explores the relationship between women and colonial education movement in India using archival imagery, humor, contemporary culture, and historical nuggets.

“Most conversation around women’s education in India has been in the lines of ‘beti bachao… beti padhao’ (translation: save the daughter by educating the daughter) devoid of women’s autonomy or even voice,” Shafiq said. “Even the early reformers—colonial and Brahmanical alike—never thought of women’s education as a way to make them equal partners, or to imagine a world where they’d be educated and hence emancipated. She sees this reform movement “as a software update” that is “full of bugs.” Indeed, a thinking, liberated woman would be disastrous to their world order, especially when taking into account that Indian women were to be taught “to read but not to write,” according to one primary source in the video, and “only literature on devotion, gardening, child rearing, perhaps poetry” but never mathematics, chemistry, philosophy, or political science.

How this exhibit will “reshape India’s cultural identity” remains an unanswered and forgotten assertion when actually visiting “Liminal Gaps.” The insistence on these artists’ Indian-ness, on the part of the curators and NMACC’s billionaire founders, fails to register.

Since June 2022, LAXART has been closed amid preparations to move from its longtime home at 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood to 518 North Western Avenue, just south of Melrose Hill, a neighborhood now home to galleries such as David Zwirner, Southern Guild, James Fuentes, and Morán Morán. The Brick’s new space, with around 5,000 square feet, will more than double the institution’s footprint in the city.  

“Our new home and new name speak to the evolution and growth of the organization,” Hamza Walker, the Brick’s executive director, said in a statement. “Purchasing our building secures our future, and is in turn a commitment to the cultural communities of Los Angeles. Of the name’s many associations, the idea of a building block that is part of a larger whole is paramount.”

Shortly after it announced its plans to move to a new home, the Brick received a donation of $1 million from LA philanthropists Jarl and Pamela Mohn, who have ranked on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list several times. The Brick’s exhibition space and courtyard will be named in the couple’s honor. (They also endowed the $100,000 Mohn Award that goes to an artist participating in each edition of the Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum.)

At the time, the Mohns said in a statement, “We want to recognize the important role that LAXART has and will play in inspiring and shaping the future of arts inLos Angeles. We hope this gift will move LAXART into a new era and serve as a catalyst for further progress.”

When it was founded in 2005 by Lauri Firstenberg, LAXART quickly made a name for itself in the city by showing local talents and under-recognized artists. Early exhibitions included solos for Mark Bradford, Leslie Hewitt, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Charles Gaines, Anna Sew Hoy, and others. In 2012, it also co-organized the first edition of the Made in L.A. biennial with the Hammer Museum and produced the performance festival that accompanied the inaugural iteration of the Getty Foundation’s PST Art. Walker joined the organization as director in 2016, succeeding Firstenberg.

In deciding on its new name, the organization drew from the new building’s exposed red brick, which runs throughout the interior space, according to a release. The mission, however, remains the same: being “dedicated to understanding key issues of our time through contemporary art,” per that release.

Before its transformation by John Frane of HGA Architects, the building, which dates back to 1952, was a furniture showroom. The transformed gallery, with 4,000 square feet of exhibition space, has an open floor plan and is column-free.  

The Brick will be inaugurated by three events: two performances by saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell on Sunday, June 16 and Monday, June 17, and a community party on June 23. The latter event will also see the launch of a week-long garage sale of the home library (and other items) of artist Allan Sekula and art historian Sally Stein.

The first exhibition at the Brick’s new location will be a solo outing of new work by Gregg Bordowitz. A mural dedicated to Pope.L, who died in December, will soon adorn its exterior façade.

In the fall, the Brick will open a group show titled “Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism” as part of PST Art: Art & Science Collide. The organization’s long-awaited “Monuments” exhibition is scheduled for fall 2025.

In a statement, Brick board chair Margaret Morgan said, “The stability of a permanent home allows us to do what we do best: present artists, exhibitions and projects that engage the issues of our times with bravery, brilliance — and even beauty. A home of our own has been a dream long envisioned. Now that it’s realized, our board, leadership, artists, and staff can’t wait to show you what’s to come.”

Smith, who was born in Los Angeles and is now based in New York, is a closely watched artist known for working in a variety of mediums, from video to sculpture to photography to painting. Her work primarily focuses on the US carceral system and how it not only impacts incarcerated people and their family but also has wide-reaching effects across society.

Her work featured in both the 2022 Venice Biennale and the 2022 Whitney Biennial. For the latter exhibition, she presented a large-scale sculpture that took the form of a rotating Ferris wheel, made of black-painted tables connected together; the tables are similar to those that are typically seen in visiting rooms in US prisons.

She has had solo shows at the Queens Museum in New York and at Atlanta Contemporary, as well as being included in a number of important thematic exhibitions, including “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” at the New Museum (2021), “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration” at MoMA PS1 (2020), “Colored People Time: Banal Presents” at the ICA Philadelphia (2019), and “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” at the New Museum (2017).

The winner of the Deal Booth / FLAG Prize is chosen based on past work, exhibition history, the award money’s significance to supporting their career, and how the artist’s forthcoming exhibition would impact the two institutions’ local communities.

In a statement, sharon maidenberg, the executive director and CEO of the Contemporary Austin, said, “At The Contemporary Austin, we believe that art holds the potential to transform the lives of artists and the lives of audiences and this is exactly what the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize has done since its establishment. I am incredibly grateful that we have the opportunity to bring the work of a brilliant, thought-provoking, and distinct artist like Sable to Austin.”

Smith was selected by a five-person jury that included Dan Byers, the director of Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University; Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, the former Director of the Kunstinstiuut Melly; Christine Y. Kim, a curator-at-large at Tate Modern; and the Contemporary Austin’s head curator and director of curatorial affairs, Alex Klein, who chaired the jury. FLAG Art Foundation director Jonathan Rider served as an institutional adviser to the jury.

The prize was founded in 2016 by ARTnews Top 200 Collector Suzanne Deal Booth, a longtime trustee of the Contemporary Austin; the first edition came with $100,000 and went to Rodney McMillian. In 2018, fellow Top 200 Collector Glenn Fuhrman signed on to expand the prize’s purse to $200,000. The other three winners include Nicole Eisenman (2020), Tarek Atoui (2022), and Lubaina Himid (2024). Himid’s exhibition is currently on view at the Contemporary Austin (through July 21) and will travel to the FLAG Art Foundation in September.

In a statement, Deal Booth said, “Sable is a prescient voice among her generation with a dynamic artistic background, and does not shy away from asking challenging questions. I’m eager to see how she will continue expanding the impact and possibilities of an artistic practice.”

Once again, Hauser & Wirth and White Cube, two blue-chip operations with galleries across multiple operations, were among those who reported big sales. (Because sales of artworks at fairs are self-reported, they are difficult to verify independently.) Still, a range of midsize operations spoke of moving works at lower price points.

The Seoul-based Kukje Gallery sold all its paper collage works by Haegue Yang, with prices ranging from €27,000 to €42,000. Tif Sigfrids from Athens, Georgia, sold all the paintings in its booth by artist Hasani Sahlehe for between $15,000 and $20,000 each, the Georgia Museum of Art acquiring one of them. Stephen Friedman reported selling all its wall-based sculptures by British artist Holly Hendry for prices ranging from £6,500 to £15,000 each.

Against the backdrop of these purchases, celebrities from all sectors came to the fair. Musician David Byrne, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, Chelsea Clinton, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, and singer Kesha visited Frieze New York on its preview day, according to a fair representative.

Collectors were also in attendance, among them Agnes Gund, Marieluise Hessel, Gael Neeson, Marty Eisenberg, Michael and Susan Hort, and Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip Aarons. And curators were there too: Studio Museum in Harlem director and chief curator Thelma Golden, High Line curator Cecilia Alemani, New Museum deputy director Isolde Brielmaier, Sharjah Art Foundation director Hoor Al Qasimi, and others were among those on hand.

Below, a look at five of the biggest sales reported by galleries showing at Frieze New York this week.

“Dani Levinas’s passion and enthusiasm for art by living artists will have an enduring impact on The Phillips Collection,” said current board chair John Despres in a statement. “We will truly miss his inspiration and guidance.”

With his late wife, Mirella, Levinas bought a significant grouping of works by Latin American artists, acquiring pieces by Jose Dávila, Cildo Meireles, Gabriel de la Mora, Iván Navarro, Jorge Pardo, and others. His collection also came to include works by artists based outside the region, among them Anish Kapoor and Amalia Pica.

“I love to help artists, but I also enjoy living with the pieces,” he told the New York Times in 2020.

His most lasting legacy within the art world, however, is not his collection, but his conversations with his colleagues, from the late Rosa de la Cruz to the collecting couple Don and Mera Rubell. He published these interviews in a 2023 book called The Guardians of Art: Conversations with Major Collectors and as articles in El País, where he served as a columnist. “I don’t just collect art, I collect collectors,” he said in the Times interview.

Born in 1948 to Jewish migrants who had departed Europe for Argentina, Levinas went on to depart himself for the United States in 1981, amid the rise of a military junta in his home country. He launched his own company selling prepaid debit cards.

He served as board chair at the Phillips Collection from 2016 to 2022, and was also on the board of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

He spoke of his collection as a permanently evolving entity, telling the Times, “after 50 years of collecting, you change; the artwork changes and you change, too.”

On the social media platform Telegram, Ostorozhno Novosti, a local news channel, said that police officers were at a building that holds the Garage Museum’s archives. The museum’s leaders and curators were reportedly being kept from using their phones and were being held until the search ended.

The reason for the search were not clear, but Ostorozhno Novosti speculated that it was related to the LGBTQ+ literature archived in the museum. Earlier this month, works put out by the left-wing publishing house Directio Liberia and books released by Moloko Plus, an alternative publisher that promises to provide “journalism that no longer exists,” were removed from Garage Museum’s bookstore, according to Ostorozhno Novosti.

Adding further confusion to the mix was a Telegram post from Podyom, which reported that employees at the museum denied that the search was still active earlier today.

A spokesperson for the museum did not immediately respond to an ARTnews request for comment.

The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art was founded in 2008 by collectors Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich, who were married at the time; Abramovich is an oligarch who was sanctioned in the UK, the EU, and Switzerland in 2022.

That same year, as Russia invaded Ukraine, the Garage Museum paused its exhibition program, calling the war a “human and political tragedy.” The museum’s exhibition program has not resumed since then, although the institution has remained open, regularly hosting events, film screenings, and more.

The tiny island—you could walk the perimeter in fewer than 10 minutes—has a rather interesting history. An 11th-century doge donated it to become a monastery and it’s been the home to a few different monastic orders over the centuries, as well as serving as a hospice for pilgrims en route to the Holy Lands and then a military outpost. And then in 1975 Polish avant-garde theatre director Jerzy Grotowski staged an interactive version of his iconic Apocalypsis cum figuris. Each visitor who arrived received an apple from Grotowski.

That small gift has borne fruit anew as part of a performance staged by Korean performance artist Eun-Me Ahn, commissioned by the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Titled Pinky Pinky ‘Good’: San Giacomo’s Leap into Tomorrow, the island-spanning spectacle serves as a blessing for San Giacomo. Upon arrival, visitors again received an apple for making the journey.

The island’s building are still under renovation—construction was not halted for the performance, adding to the charm of the morning’s events. After disembarking from the boat, I found performers, all wearing pink-colored traditional Korean garb, banging drums and gongs and intoning, their voices radiating through a few speakers. On a raised mound between the two main buildings, where flora was starting to sprout, two performers danced facing each other. Behind them a hot pink inflatable man blew in the wind. Elsewhere, another performer, lifted by one of the construction crew’s cranes, rose into the air, dousing the island with water, a baptism of sorts.

Inside one building was an installation of hanging white streamers meant to serve as the barrier between the “here and hereafter,” according to an exhibition brochure. On the other side was an installation of some 500 wooden dolls inspired by kkoktu, puppets placed on funeral biers that transform into beings that can cross between the here and the hereafter. And around the island, and in both buildings, were several LED disco balls. That work was titled PLEASE BLIND MY EYES (all works 2024), a reference to Ahn’s belief that “color is the starting point of an artist’s life” and that the work would “invite audiences to reconsider their position on the boundary between reality and illusion,” per the brochure.  

The other moments on the island carried similar titles: PLEASE TOUCH ME (the pink smoke), PLEASE HOLD MY HAND (the inflatable man), PLEASE HELP ME (the dolls). But the most evocative was PLEASE LOVE US at the back of the island, where a woman stood in a boat, precariously resting on a mound of dirt. Inside the boat was hot pink paint and nearby were fragments of bricks (from the construction), which visitors would give to the performer. Upon receiving it, she looked directly into my eyes and smiled, as if to say thank you. She then dipped the fragment into the paint and handed it to another performer who placed it atop a cone-shaped mound of dirt to create a sculpture.

I’m not sure if the resulting work will be permanently installed on the island, but it felt like all who were invited were asked to help bless and baptize the island, the forthcoming home for an arts center. If Ahn’s Pinky Pinky ‘Good’ is any indication of what the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo has planned for future Biennales, this will be a can’t-be-missed trip.

Other members of the list include journalist Connie Walker, entertainer Dua Lipa, entrepreneur Mark Cuban, and Prime Minister of Italy Giorgia Meloni.

Jenny Holzer

Artist Kiki Smith recalled encountering Holzer’s “Truisms” photostat prints anonymously posted up in New York’s Lower East Side, where they both lived, in the 1970s.

“We were members of the artist collective Colab and for a time lived in the same building. Jenny used words as agitprop. They were declarative, inflammatory, and provocative. She claimed no authorship but questioned the authority of language. They were rants that exemplified the predicament we faced in New York City in the late ’70s.” 

Smith also highlighted the visual artist’s 1989 show at the Guggenheim Museum and the upcoming solo show “Light Lines” opening on May 17. “Jenny has allowed her art to grow by embracing collaboration and new technologies, but her singularity as an artist has always persevered and her work continues to be radical,” Smith wrote.

LaToya Ruby Frazier

Playwright Lynn Nottage said Frazier’s intimate, collaborative photographs of workers across America “force us to confront how disenfranchisement, corporate greed, and government neglect have impacted the lives of people”.

“Her work captures the anxiety, the beauty, and the reality of people negotiating the complexities of life on the brink,” Nottage wrote.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner also highlighted Frazier’s upcoming solo show “Monuments of Solidarity” will open at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on May 12. The exhibition will include 100 works spanning two decades of the artist’s career.

Frazier won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2015 and a Carnegie International Prize in 2022.

‘Icon’ Thelma Golden

Notably, former First Lady Michelle Obama wrote the TIME essay on Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Obama called Golden a “paradigm-shifting curator” who often shocks people who underestimate her based on her short appearance.

“As one of the most influential people in art, Thelma knows the power of flipping an assumption on its head,” Obama wrote, noting Golden’s steadfast work bringing much-needed attention to Black artists and curators through exhibitions at the Studio Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Golden is also a board member of the Barack Obama Foundation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Crystal Bridges Museum.

Her career in the art industry was also featured in a New Yorker profile earlier this year and she wrote an essay in support of artist Faith Ringgold for TIME’s list of influential people in 2022. Ringgold died on April 12 at the age of 93.

Jonathan Anderson

Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino described the work of Loewe’s creative director as “always ahead of the curve.”

“Jonathan is one of the most intelligent, empathetic, and curious people I know, but he also has a wonderful sense of humor, and a capacity not to take himself too seriously,” The director of “Call Me By Your Name” wrote.

Anderson has led high-profile collaborations with artists including Julien Nguyen, Lynda Benglis and Richard Hawkins.

Anderson’s collections often include references to visual art, and the designer’s influence was evident in the brand’s first public exhibition “Crafted World“, currently on display at the Shanghai Exhibition Center until May 5. The exhibition included 150 artworks from the Loewe Art Collection, including items commissioned for fashion shows and an entire room of winning examples from the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, which awards annual prizes of €50,000.

Larry Ellison

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair praised Ellison’s work co-founding the technology company Oracle, and his vision for managing a significant portion of global data.

“Larry has the mind of an engineer, the curiosity of a thousand cats, and the humility to keep learning—which is the chief characteristic of the true changemaker,” Blair wrote.

Ellison, who is still chairman of Oracle’s board, is the fifth wealthiest person in the world. He is also an avid art collector, specializing in ancient to early 20th-century Japanese art and late 19th- and early 20th-century European art.

In 2013, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco hosted an exhibition of 60 works of Japanese art from Ellison’s collection, some of them more than 1,000 years old. It was the first time items from Ellison’s private collection were available for public viewing, including a wooden Buddhist sculpture from the 13th century depicting Prince Shōtoku, a figure from Japan’s classical Asuka period.