The new, 360-foot-high museum is currently under construction and will be located in the Royal Arts Complex in King Salman Park. The building’s design is by Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill.

The Saudi Museums Commission announced the appointment of Fischer in a press release on July 11, calling the flagship museum “a pivotal moment in Saudi Arabia’s cultural renaissance” and part of the commission’s commitment to establishing state-of-the art institutions.

Fischer’s appointment and the new museum are part of several initiatives aimed at expanding its arts and culture sector while shifting the country’s reliance on oil. In addition to the $10 billion King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) development in central Riyadh, Saudi cultural initiatives include the city-wide art festival Noor Riyadh and the Diriyah Biennale, the most recent of which opened in February. The city has also been chosen for World Expo 2030 and the FIFA World Cup in 2034.

Fischer stepped down as director of the British Museum last August after the institution announced that more than 1,500 items from its collections were lost, stolen, or damaged. Fischer was initially expected to depart earlier this year. However, whistleblower Ittai Gradel said that he had alerted Fischer and other senior museum officials about the thefts in 2021. While Fischer initially claimed that he took Gradel’s allegations “seriously”, he later withdrew them and said he held responsibility as director for the British Museum failing to “respond as comprehensively as it should have”.

“The money has to come from somewhere,” Mark Jones, who served as interim director last year, told the Sunday Times on June 30.

Jones told the Sunday Times that while museums should remain free of charge for British taxpayers and foreign visitors under 25, visitors from abroad should pay a general admission fee to institutions such as the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.

“The British put a very high value on free entry to museums—that is our tradition,” he said. “People who support museums as taxpayers shouldn’t also have to pay to visit them.”

Jones said the admission price of “around £20” would also reduce crowds at exhibits and the length of time for visitors waiting to enter.

“The museum is too busy for people to experience it as they should; fighting your way through the crowds doesn’t put you in the best state of mind to look at the collections,” Jones told The Sunday Times.

The former head of the Victoria and Albert Museum also said the additional revenue could improve staff pay and lower the price of tickets for special exhibitions.

Last December, the British Museum announced a controversial, £50 million ($63.3 million) 10-year-sponsorship deal with BP that would help fund the refurbishment and redisplay of the museum’s permanent collection. The total cost of the “extensive refurbishment” for the London museum is between £400 and £500 million, according to the Independent.

Jones was appointed to the interim director position at the British Museum in September after the institution admitted that more than 1,500 items from its collections had been lost, stolen, or damaged, prompting director Hartwig Fischer’s resignation last August. Jones left the position this month following the permanent appointment of Nicholas Cullinan in March.

In Jones’s interview with the Sunday Times, he also said the institution should share the long-disputed Parthenon Marbles with Greece.

“If we were ever to find a way to create a partnership with the Greeks over the Parthenon Marbles, we would need to find a way to fund it,” said Jones.

The law enforcement agency assisted the Metropolitan Police with the recent return of 268 items from a collector in Washington, D.C. The FBI also contacted a buyer in New Orleans via email about two items purchased on eBay.

The email from the FBI agent said they were assisting the Metropolitan Police in its investigation of the British Museum’s missing, stolen, and damaged items. The buyer, Tonio Birbiglia, told the BBC that he bought the two gems from the same eBay account later identified by whistleblower Ittai Gradel as selling items from the British Museum’s collection for as little as $51.

Birbiglia told the BBC that he paid £42 for an amethyst gem depicting Cupid in May 2016, and later purchased an orange scarab-beetle gem for £170.

The BBC reported that neither the FBI, the British Museum, nor British police requested further information from Birbiglia, and he is no longer in possession of these items.

The British Museum announced last August that ancient gems, jewelry, and other items from its collection were missing or damaged. Many of the items had not been cataloged or photographed by the museum.

The institution’s press release did not mention the name of the staffer who was fired, but the individual was soon identified by media as senior curator Peter Higgs. The museum is currently suing Higgs in a civil case. According to court documents, the British Museum alleges the thefts from its storerooms took place over a decade, and sales of the ancient gems to “at least” 45 buyers generated an estimated £100,000 in total.

Higgs has not been charged or arrested, and his family has denied the allegations.

The impact of the thefts at the British Museum has been immense, with resignations, testimonies at parliamentary committees, an independent review, as well as renewed calls for the repatriation of high-profile items: they include director Hartwig Fischer’s having immediately stepped down instead of departing early in 2024 as was previously announced; the subsequent departure of deputy director Jonathan Williams; the independent review’s 36 recommendations for the museum’s security, governance, and record-keeping operations; as well as plans for a complete documentation of the museum’s collection in five years at a cost of $12.1 million.

The lack of cataloging of the museum’s collection also prompted the creation of a web page requesting the public’s assistance in locating some of the missing and stolen items. The BBC also reported that in some cases, collectors have agreed to donate items to the British Museum so that staff can assess if they came from its collection.

Of the 1,500 missing, stolen, and damaged items, the Museum announced earlier this month it had recovered 626 pieces, and located 100 more that had not yet returned to the institution.

The British Museum did not respond to a request for comment from ARTnews. The FBI cited “longstanding DOJ policy” and wrote in an email to ARTnews “the FBI neither confirms nor denies an investigation and has no further comment.”

The INAH places the blame squarely in the hands of Guanajuato’s conservative government, which it says lacks the “knowledge about proper protocols and the lack of training of the personnel in charge of carrying out these tasks.”

The mummy was dug up in the 1860s after the families of the deceased were unable to keep up with burial fees. This one and others like it have for years been on display at a museum in Guanajuato; some have traveled internationally for shows, including one staged in the United States in 2009.

The dispute between the INAH and the Guanajuato city government centers on who has jurisdiction over the mummified corpses. The INAH claims authority over the mummies because they are part of the “national patrimony.” The city of Guanajuato and its eponymous state are governed by the conservative National Action Party, staunch rivals of the liberal Morena party, which holds power in Mexico’s federal government. 

Earlier this week, the INAH said it will demand information about the permits and procedures followed during the museum renovations.

“These events confirm that the way the museum’s collection was moved is not the correct one, and that, far from applying proper corrective and conservation strategies, the actions carried out resulted in damages, not only to this body,” the institute said in a statement.

Museum workers unaffiliated with the INAH appear to have been in charge of the approximately 100 mummies in the museum’s care. The bodies are under local control because they were unearthed before the INAH was founded in 1939.

The display of mummified remains, and even the descriptor “mummy,” has been called into question in recent years. In early 2023, the British Museum and other institutions in the UK announced they would reconsider using the term “mummy” and instead describe the preserved bodies as the “mummified remains of” or a “mummified person” when referring to Egyptian mummies.

THE HEADLINES

ACCUSATION. British-born, Ghana-based artist Joseph Awuah-Darko has accused star artist and presidential portraitist Kehinde Wiley of sexual assault, which the latter denied, reports Harrison Jacobs for ARTnews. “It almost destroyed me,” wrote Awuah-Darko in an Instagram post on Sunday. He told ARTnews he was seeking legal action and hopes “speaking about my abuse will empower other victims to do the same.” The artist said in 2021 Wiley “inappropriately groped” him first, and then alluded to a later, “much more sever and violent” assault, and believes “other artists, curators and collectors have quietly expressed witnessing this pattern of predatory behavior.” Wiley instead described his interaction with Awuah-Darko a “consensual relationship,” and claimed the artist was “making false, disturbing, and defamatory accusations about our time together,” in his own post. In a longer message to ARTnews, Wiley added that Awuah-Darko “has been trying to be part of my life ever since we met,” flying to his birthday in Nigeria, and “attempting to visit” his home in New York.

RECOVERED LOOT. The British Museum announced on Friday it has recovered 268 objects that went missing or were stolen from its collection. The museum announced in February that some 350 objects had been recovered, from the over 1,500 identified as lost or stolen last summer. That brings the total figure to 626 recovered. Plus, the museum said it has leads for about 100 more missing pieces. The loss of poorly cataloged items, many of which were allegedly sold for a fraction of their worth on eBay, occurred over 30 years, and has been tied to the former museum curator Peter Higgs, in a scandal that has shaken the institution’s reputation and led to a leadership reshuffle.

THE DIGEST

Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCDA), home to the M+ museum, the Palace Museum, and the Xiqu Centre, is in a funding crisis, with recorded net losses of HKD 1.56 billion ($199 million) in 2022, almost double the previous year. On Saturday, Henry Tang, the district’s chairman, told local media that if the government doesn’t respond quickly to the looming threat of bankruptcy, “we have an urgent need to take relatively large action,” such as reducing operating hours. [ArtAsiaPacific]

Dealer Nino Mier is “strongly considering closing some” of his gallery space in Los Angeles, following allegations of underpaying artists, first reported in The Art Newspaper. On Friday, Artnet News reported all four of Mier’s Los Angeles galleries are due to shutter. [ARTnews]

More than a dozen exhibitors have dropped out of Toronto’s Contact Photography Festival, in protest over opposition to its sponsor, Scotiabank, which reportedly has ties to the Israel-based military tech company, Elbit Systems. The protest was organized by No Arms in the Arts (NAITA) and Artists Against Artwashing (AAA), and earlier this week, Scotiabank announced it halved its stake in Elbit. [The Art Newspaper]

The Danish artist Jens Haaning is going to permanently exhibit his cheeky artwork, Take the Money and Run, at the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark, according to a museum statement. Haaning reportedly complied with a court order and paid the museum back a $76,000 cash commission it gave him for the works, which the unamused institution was surprised to discover consisted of nothing more than a pair of blank canvases. [Le Figaro]

A designated person responsible for monitoring treatment of children on film sets will be required to obtain public funding in France, said the country’s minister of culture, Rachida Dati, while at the Cannes Film Festival. The announcement comes in response to a #MeToo reckoning in France’s film industry, and a specific request by actress Judith Godrèche, who has spoken out about being sexual assaulted as a child actor. [AFP and Le Monde]

The art-world commentator behind the Jerry Gogosian Instagram account, Hilde Lynn Helphenstein, apologized for mocking the name of Sotheby’s New York-based head of contemporary art day sales in the Middle East, Ashkan Baghestani. [ARTnews]

A rare, little-seen 1995 painting by Yayoi Kusama will head to auction at Bonhams in Hong Kong. Titled Infinity, the 6.5 feet-tall painting is estimated to be worth some  $5.1 million. [Hypebeast]

South African artist Lebohang Kganye was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for 2024. Her photographic montages, including performance and film animation are on view in a group show at The Photographers’ Gallery in London until June 2. [Artforum]

Writer Tim Jonze shares a descriptive encounter with the filmmaker, flower-delivering, and fat-cigar-smoking artist Harmony Korine on the occasion of an exhibition in London. Asked if he had a message behind his retina-burning paintings of stills from his recent video game aesthetics inspired film Aggro Dr1ft, the artist could only guffaw. “A message? No. That’s disgusting!” He said. [The Guardian]

The Dublin-New York “Portal” installation is back up, after it was closed due to “inappropriate behavior.” This time, the live-stream art project that lets people in both cities see each other in real time, has limited operating hours and measures have been taking to prevent people from holding phones up to the camera lens, or touching it. [BBC]

THE KICKER

LET THEM EAT BAGUETTE. The French baguette can be thought of as a form of art, and certainly a stamp of French heritage. Literally. The baguette, on the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List, is now gracing French stamps issued in celebration of the Olympics. They are also scratch-and-sniff. In short, letters from France may very well start smelling like a warm (or stale?) baguette. The new stamps featuring a graphic drawing of a baguette tied with a red, white, and blue ribbon, were revealed on the feast day of Saint Honoré, in celebration of “our cultural treasure,” said the postage printer Philaposte de Boulazac at an unveiling ceremony, reports Le Parisien. After giving one stamp a scratch and sniff, a man named Lionel said, “It smells like a baguette was just taken out of the oven.” Meanwhile, others are getting hungry for a croissant version.

The museum announced in February an initial number of around 350 objects recovered, from the over 1,500 identified as lost or stolen last summer. That brings the total figure to 626 recovered. On Friday, the museum said it was currently pursuing new leads for around 100 other objects, and that pieces had been found in Europe and North America.

The British Museum scandal broke last August when the institution announced that a staff member, later identified as senior curator Peter Higgs, had been fired after thousands of items were discovered to be missing or stolen. The thefts allegedly occurred over the course of 30 years, with many items sold for a fraction of their worth on the ecommerce website eBay.

As ARTnews‘ Karen K. Ho detailed in December, as a result of the extent of the thefts, director Hartwig Fischer immediately stepped down instead of departing early in 2024 as previously announced. Deputy director Jonathan Williams also left following the recent conclusion of an independent review, which had 36 recommendations for the museum’s security, governance, and record-keeping operations. There are plans for a complete documentation of the museum’s collection in five years at a cost of $12.1 million. There have also been renewed calls for the repatriation of items such as the Benin Bronzes and the Parthenon Marbles from Nigerian and Greek officials.

In a statement, George Osborne, the chairman of the museum trustees, said, “Few expected to see this day, and even I had my doubts. When we announced the devastating news that objects had been stolen from our collection, people understandably assumed that was it – we were unlikely to ever see more than a handful of them again.

“That’s usually the history with thefts like this. But the team at the British Museum refused to give up. Through clever detective work and a network of well-wishers, we’ve achieved a remarkable result: more than 600 of the objects are back with us, and a further 100 have been identified – in total almost half the stolen items that we could recover.

“It’s a great result but we’re not resting here – the hunt goes on for the remaining missing objects. I urge anyone with any information to follow the example of all who’ve helped us and get in touch.”

Ivor Agyeman-Duah, the lead negotiator for Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, the monarch of the Asante Kingdom, described the historic occasion as “very touching.”

“The emotions that came out of the Asantehene when he first saw these objects weeks ago underlined the whole history of the 19th century,” Agyeman-Duah told ARTnews, speaking after the opening of an exhibition of the returned objects at the revamped Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti Region. “It was very emotional negotiating for them, but it was even more so when we first listed the objects and identified the ones that will come here.”

Some of these objects come from two London museums, the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum, and one in Los Angeles, UCLA’s Fowler Museum. Agyeman-Duah, who is also the director of the Manhyia Palace Museum, said there are ongoing discussions with individuals, corporate organizations, and galleries in South Africa and the United Kingdom to return more regalia. He teased a meeting in England in about two months to start new negotiations.

Among the objects in the show are a 300-year-old sword of state (Mponponso), a gold peace pipe, sika mena (elephant tail whisk), royal stool ornaments, an Asante royal gold necklace, and ceremonial gold bangles. The objects have not been seen in Ghana in about 150 years.

Some of the returns will last forever while others are temporary. The Fowler Museum, for example, permanently gave back seven items in early February. The British Museum and the V&A, meanwhile, have only lent their objects for three years, with the possibility to extend the loan. (England’s National Heritage Act of 1963 prohibits British museums from permanently removing items from their collections.) Whether the objects are here to stay or not, the show is an important one because of the spiritual and ceremonial significance of the objects to the Asante Kingdom.

While repatriation has only recently received wider attention in the West, requests for the return of looted objects have been common in Ghana and other countries for the past century. The request for the return of the Asante regalia, for example, started in the 1920s during the reign of Prempeh I.

The regalia was looted by British soldiers from the Manhyia Palace of Asantehene Kofi Karikari in 1874 during the Sagrenti War, also referred to as the Third Anglo-Ashanti War. The war was fought between the Ashanti Empire and the British Empire, and during the conflict, Kumasi and the palace were burnt and plundered.

The opening of the show at the Manhyia Palace Museum on May 1 also marked the 150th anniversary of the British invasion of Kumasi; the 100th anniversary of the return of Nana Agyeman Prempeh I, an Asantehene who was sent into exile by the British to Seychelles; and the silver jubilee of His Royal Majesty, the Asantehene as the leader of the Asante Kingdom.

The Manhyia Palace Museum was initially the home of Asantehene Nana Agyeman Prempeh I following his return from decades of British-imposed exile in the Seychelles. The British built it as a replacement for the destruction of the earlier palace, but the king only moved in after the Ashanti Kingdom had fully paid for it. Prempeh lived in the palace from 1925 to 1931; the building later became a museum, opening to the public in 1995.

“We all accept that there are universal values of culture which attract people from all ethnic groups, nationalities, and beliefs,” Otumfuo Osei Tutu II said during a speech at the opening. “The reactions to these objects coming home are ample evidence of this.”

He called the returned regalia “the soul of the people of Asante,” adding that these objects “embody the soul of Asante. And I believe that during the period that they are being displayed everybody will make the effort to come and see it for themselves, to believe that these were created by our own artisans.”

The Asantehene said he has asked the Manhyia Palace Museum to design an initiative to support traditional art in Ghana in collaboration with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology art school. Partners in this project include the British Museum, the V&A, and British Airways.

Starting in 2025, he continued, the initiative will award three prizes yearly; finalists’ works will be purchased locally for upcoming contemporary art museums, the goal being to keep these works within Ghana. When he travels to London in July to deliver a public lecture at the British Museum, he also plans to meet artists and goldsmiths in the Ghanaian diaspora in the country. 

Among those on hand to witness the opening of the exhibition were V&A director Tristram Hunt, British Museum trustee Chris Gosden, and Edmond Moukala, UNESCO’s Ghana head. The international cast of onlookers is a sign that something has shifted in the UK, a country whose museums have been largely resistant to returning art to nations abroad.

“I think it’s a thickening of the relationship between Ghana and the UK, which is longstanding and deep,” remarked Hunt to ARTnews. “I think what is important here is the strength of the partnership between museums in London, the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and Manhyia Palace. And so, it’s more than the objects landing here. It’s about how we share knowledge, it’s about how we share conservation skills, how we share education, so it’s a richer partnership over time, hopefully.”

According to the Telegraph, museum trustees on the selection panel were ordered by officials at Downing Street (the London residence of UK Prime Ministers) to send the names of the two finalists to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his advisors; Sunak’s office planned to decide which candidate was fit for the institution’s keenly watched top position.

However, Osborne reportedly rejected this demand, saying “it went against customary practice” and that it threatened the museum’s independence.

Per tradition, the Prime Minister formally ratifies the position after the British Museum trustees announce its choice of director.

Cullinan was named the next director on March 28. The announcement came amid a series of controversies at the British Museum, most prominently its handling of the theft of more than 1,800 items from its collection. The museum has since filed a lawsuit against former curator Peter Higgs, alleging he was behind the theft.

This isn’t the first staff shakeup at the British Museum to incite tension with Downing Street. In 2020, the office of Prime Minister Theresa May reportedly rejected adding Mary Beard to the British Museum’s board, citing her political views. Beard, a renowned British classicist and University of Cambridge professor, had voiced support for the UK remaining in the European Union.

The British Museum’s board of trustees bypassed the process of reference from Downing Street by appointing Beard themselves, as five of its 25 seats can be appointed without government approval.

Interim museum director Mark Jones told the Guardian on April 11: “There’s been an increasing politicization of the nominations to the boards of museums and galleries.”

Speaking in a personal capacity, Jones added: “That seems to me to be a shame because I think the criteria for selection should be their suitability for being on the board and the contribution they can make to the museum or gallery.”

Institutions including the Imperial War Museum, the National Museum of Scotland, and the Natural History Museum reported a variety of missing historic items. The information was released in response to Freedom of Information requests filed by The Independent, which first reported the news earlier this week.

Between 2018 and 2023, the Imperial War museum recorded 539 items as lost and one item as stolen. For the same period, the Natural History Museum reported 12 items from its collection had gone missing, while the National Museum of Scotland reported six items lost, one item stolen, and another destroyed in a fire.

The Independent reported that among the missing items from the Natural History Museum are mammal teeth over 65 million years old from the Mesozoic Era, as well as a stomach stone known as a gastrolith from its Dinosaur Gallery assumed to have been stolen. A spokesperson for the Natural History Museum told the Independent that security of its collection was a serious issue, which totaled more than 80 million items, many of them small ecological specimens such as teeth, fish, and frozen animal tissue.

Another item likely stolen from public display in 2022 was a telephone handset from the Havilland Comet 4C at the National Museum of Scotland. The plane was the world’s first commercial passenger jet aircraft, making its first commercial journey in 1952 and officially retired in 1997.

According to the Independent, other institutions that recorded the loss of items since 2017 include Museum Wales, which reported 16 missing items, and four lost objects at The Science Museum Group between 2018 and 2023. The newspaper also said cuts to budgets and staff at the Metropolitan Police’s Art and Antiques Unit had a “massive impact” on the already-small team’s ability to investigation art crime in London.

The news follows the recent appointment of Nicholas Cullinan as the new director of the British Museum after the institution’s previous leadership resigned due to revelations that 2,000 items in the museum’s collection were stolen or damaged, or otherwise went missing.

Cullinan joins the 256-year-old institution during a period of low-morale and serious questions about its operations. The museum is still trying to recover a significant number of missing items. Meanwhile, it is also tightening its security and inventory records, and is also facing renewed and impassioned calls for the repatriation of objects that many have claimed were looted. Among those objects are the Parthenon Marbles and the Benin Bronzes, both of which have long been main attractions of the British Museum collection.

Last year’s theft scandal led to the resignations of director Hartwig Fischer and deputy director Jonathan Williams.

The museum is also suing former long-time curator Peter Higgs over the missing items. While the institution’s initial announcement about the thefts did not name the staff member who was fired, Higgs was quickly identified in news reports.

THE HEADLINES

GENTILESCHI PROTEST. Dramatic acts of protest in controversial Italian art exhibits continue, though nonviolent this time, with a feminist group outraged by an Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition in Genoa’s Palazzo Ducale, which critics say sensationalizes the artist’s 1612 rape. On Friday, protesters led by Bruciamo Tutto (Let’s Burn Everything) shrouded the paintings by Gentileschi’s convicted rapist, Agostino Tassi, in black fabric and left crimson handprints on wall texts, along with a pool of red paint on the floor. The exhibit has been the subject of vehement criticism for its explicit attention to Gentileschi’s rape, and inclusion of her attacker’s artworks in the show, along with a “rape room” describing the crime in visual and audio form, based on graphic testimony from the rape trial. Activists also drew attention to contemporary domestic violence in Italy, and in a press release, said: “We are deeply disturbed by the choice to make the rape spectacular.”

BRITISH MUSEUM INVESTIGATED. The UK’s regulatory Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is investigating the British Museum’s alleged failure to disclose materials about 11 sacred Ethiopian artifacts in its collection, which were looted in 1868, reports ARTnews senior writer Karen K. Ho. The wood and stone altar tablets, or tabots, were snatched by British soldiers during the Battle of Maqdala and have never been on public display. Per Ethiopian tradition, only priests from the nation’s Orthodox Church are permitted to see them. However, the Returning Heritage nonprofit has filed a complaint against the museum, stating it reneged on their freedom of information request about the artworks, which it hopes to have restituted to Ethiopia, effectively launching the current investigation.

THE DIGEST

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung has been named chief curator for the 2025 Bienal de São Paulo. One of today’s most closely watched curators, Ndikung is currently director and chief curator of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. [ARTnews]

More information is coming to light about Bolivia’s program for the Venice Biennale, which will be exhibited in the Russian pavilion, lent to them amid their tightening bilateral economic and cultural ties. Following the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, official Russian delegations were barred from participating in the exhibition, but as Russia and Bolivia sign lithium extraction and atomic research agreements, the former has handed its Giardini pavilion to Bolivia. [The Art Newspaper]

Jonathan Frost has donated nearly 700 prints spanning a millennium to the Norton Museum of Art in Florida. The gift, ranging from a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer to a Henry Moore etching, will increase the museum’s print collection by nearly 40 percent. [The Art Newspaper]

A stolen Vincent Van Gogh painting titled The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring is back on view at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, along with the famous IKEA bag in which it was returned to art sleuth Arthur Brand in 2023. The display is part of a new exhibit, “150 Years of the Groninger Museum – Behind the Scenes,” on view until June 1, 2025. [Groninger Museum, Twitter]

A new study analyzes the importance of shipwrecked treasures, following a decade of research into one vessel’s valuable 16th-century cargo, found on the Belinho Beach in Portugal. [The Journal of Maritime Archaeology and Artnet News]

Quisqueya Henríquez, a conceptual artist whose installations and sculptures had a humorous edge to them, died in Santo Domingo at the age of 58. [ARTnews]

THE KICKER

STAR TREK TREASURE. A massive collection of Star Trek memorabilia, which has become an online sensation, is headed to auction, with experts arguing it may be the largest of its kind. But behind the Trekkie obsession, is also the tragic story of its creator, Troy Nelson, who took his own life on February 28 at age 57, only a few hours after the sudden death of his brother, Andrew, from a heart attack at age 55. Troy Nelson had said before, “if Andrew goes, I’m out of here,” remembers his older sister, Evan Browne, speaking to the New York Times. Images of Nelson’s collection, begun in the 1970s, have since gone viral, as the family posted photos of rooms lined with shelves brimming with displays of action figures, models, ornaments, toys, life-size cutouts, and a captain’s chair, to name a few. Russ Haslage, president of the International Federation of Trekkers, which has a museum in Ohio, concurs he has “never seen a collection that size.” Others simply “pale in comparison,” he said.