On Wednesday, Chevron admitted that it took down the public art piece in a statement made to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“The installation on company property was removed, in keeping with our security, safety and facilities policies,” a Chevron representative wrote to ARTnews. “Our fences and other company facilities are functional equipment and we cannot allow tampering or unauthorized construction.”

The artists and organizers behind the project, meanwhile, argue that Fencelines was mostly on a city-owned portion of the fence, which runs alongside a running trail and is separated from Chevron property by a six-lane thoroughfare. Fencelines, which was brought to life by community organizer Princess Robinson and artist Graham LP, had been in the making over the past year and a half, during which they and Gita Khandagle, an artist and designer, reached out to Chevron and city officials to ascertain who owned the fence so they could get approval for the project.

According to the organizers, Chevron never responded but the city did, approving the project. Graham LP and other people involved claim that the majority of the project was installed on the city-owned portion of the fence but bled into a part of the fence that Chevron owns.

“But we don’t want this to just become about the fence and who owns it. This conversation is about who owns the air, who has permission or the right to [impact it],” LP told ARTnews. “Though we’ll definitely push the property aspect of this when it comes down to it, they massively overreached.”

Fencelines was designed to call attention to the environmental and health impact that the refinery has on the Richmond community, where asthma rates are double the state average, according to an ongoing study at University of California, San Francisco. Slats painted with wishes for clean air and water from the community were attached to the fence and topped with ribbons that were activated by the wind, showing that the residents of Richmond live perpetually downwind from the refinery. The piece was installed April 22, on Earth Day.

As of publication, the company has not confirmed whether the piece has been destroyed or is in storage somewhere. Up until Wednesday evening, the artists and organizers associated with Fencelines thought the piece had been stolen as Chevron never reached out to them following the deinstallation or warned them of their impending action. But there were suspicions.

“As soon as it happened I was like, ‘That was Chevron, they’re trying to erase us,'” Katt Ramos, the managing director of Richmond Our Power Coalition, told ARTnews. The coalition brings together local organizations fighting for housing and a just transition away from the oil based industries that surround the area.

“[I thought] that was Chevron because we were three or four days away from Anti-Chevron Day and four or five days away from their stakeholder meeting, they don’t want any bad press.”

The Coalition and Anti-Chevron Day began as a response to the 2012 Chevron Richmond Refinery Fire, the resulting chemical release incident, and the general health issues that residents of Richmond tie to their proximity to the refinery, which has been operating in the city for 120 years. Ramos pointed out that earlier this year unionized steelworkers at the Chevron refinery struck for safer working conditions, which led, the union alleged, to at least five workers being let go.

“But there’s some signs on the fence and now they’re worried about safety?” said Ramos.

Robinson, LP, and Khandagle partnered with numerous organizations and with the Richmond Arts Center to make the installation as well as an accompanying exhibition at RAC that was made possible with a grant from the California Arts Council.

“We invited people to come and make some of these wooden slats, to paint messages of hope, messages of vision for a future where we have clean air, a healthy environment,” Roberto Martinez, a curator at RAC, told ARTnews. “We wanted to bring in people for dialogue about the lived experience of of the Richmond community, which has a very rich and complex history with environmental justice.”

Though there were a few references to Chevron in the signs, for the most part Martinez recalled that messages were generally calls for clean air and water, for love, and for resilience, and that the project was not particularly confrontational. Over 200 wooden slats were painted for the project, which was slated to be de-installed on June 3.

Princess Robinson, who works with Urban Tilth, never saw the project as antagonistic. “I’m a cooperative education and facilitator, I really believe in the cooperative model, to work amongst each other and for everyone to be at the table,” Robinson told ARTnews. Since finding out Chevron took down the piece, Robinson has been trying to see the positive side to this unfortunate situation, but it hasn’t been easy.

“Being a human, at first I was mad, I felt discouraged. I felt disrespected. I felt like well, dang, I don’t matter, all that work that I did doesn’t matter, bringing my community out doesn’t matter,” said Robinson. “But my intentions are now a reality, right, I wanted to have a conversation.”

Now Chevron is reaching out to the organizers as they try to backtrack from what has become a much larger story than could have been anticipated. The next steps are to find out if the work was destroyed and how to respond to the events with another art piece.

Luckily, for Chevron, Robinson is magnanimous.

“Me personally, there’s no bad blood,” said Robinson. “I want Chevron to know, let’s cooperate together and be more compassionate, more respectful, because there’s a better way that we could have done this.”

The Māori portraits, Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure, were painted by the Czech-New Zealand artist in 1884. The art works were stolen from the International Art Centre gallery and auction house in a “smash-and-grab” incident in April 2017, only a few days before they were to be sold.

The thieves reversed a stolen van into the front window of the gallery and auction house before loading the two paintings into a white Holden Commodore SSV sedan.

The paintings were two examples of Lindauer’s prolific portrait work featuring Māori subjects, ranging from leaders to ordinary people. In March, an auction for a portrait of Harawira Te Mahikai, chief of the Ngāti Kahungunu Tribe, sold for nearly $615,000 US including fees ($1,009,008 NZD).

Last December, New Zealand police announced that Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure had been returned with only minor damage. According to the Herald, police were “deliberately vague” in providing details on what happened to the portraits, referring only to “an intermediary who sought to return the paintings on behalf of others” to the artworks’ owners.

“To me this is a good news story,” Detective Inspector Scott Beard said at a press conference in December. “You get involved in investigations, you want to resolve them, you want to solve them. The cultural significance and value of these paintings, we never gave up hope. And now we’ve had them returned.”

“We’re still looking for people to come with information that can assist us solving who did the burglary and who stole these [paintings].”

On June 7, the Herald reported the return of the two stolen Lindauer portraits was made through an agreement with two senior criminal figures, but “wide-ranging suppression orders” made by the country’s Court of Appeal will permanently suppress their identities. “Strict non-publication orders” also prevent the reporting and public disclosure of how the Lindauer paintings were safely returned to police.

“The gang members are currently serving long periods of imprisonment but their criminal offending cannot be reported without breaching the suppression orders,” reported the Herald‘s investigative journalist Jared Savage. “There is no suggestion either of the two gang members was involved in the theft of the paintings, rather that they were able to use their standing in the criminal world to obtain access to something the police wanted.”

When Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure were returned to police, there was fingerprint and DNA testing done. However, no charges have been laid.

The ancient slice of decorative oak, which was carved 2,000 years before Stonehenge and more than 4,000 years before the Romans set foot on the British Isles, is believed to be the oldest piece of carved wood in Britain.

The wood, which measures just about three-feet-long, one-and-a-half feet wide, and half-an-inch thick, was found snuggly underground in a thick layer of peat, which impeccably preserved the wood. 

Since its discovery, the Mesolithic piece of wood has undergone scientific analysis by experts at Historic England in partnership with scientists from the Nottingham tree-ring dating laboratory, and the Centre for Isotope Research at the university of Groningen. 

Radiocarbon and tree ring dating on the slab give a 95% chance probability that the wood was carved between 4,640 BC and 4,605 BC, at the tail end of the Middle Stone Age when inhabitants of England roamed in hunter-gatherer communities and began using stone tools. 

While the meaning behind the carvings on the wood remain a mystery, experts say they are similar to the decorations on the Shigir Idol – a 12,500-year-old wooden sculpture that was discovered in the Ural Mountains of Russia and is thought to be the oldest example of carved wood in the world.

Derek Fawcett, the owner of the land where the carved wood was found, will donate the artifact to the to the West Berkshire Museum in Newbury once scientific analysis is complete, Historic England said in a press release. The donation coincides with England’s Museum Week which this year runs from June 5-11.

“This is a really brilliant find…and a tangible link to humans who lived in this area long before any towns and villages had been created,” Janine Fox, curator at West Berkshire Museum, told Historic England.

The Headlines

ON THE PENINSULA. In recent years, galleries from the United States and Europe, like Gladstone and König, have been opening outposts in Seoul, hoping to tap into South Korea’s burgeoning art market. Now, Melanie Gerlis reports in her weekly Financial Times column, White Cube is joining them. It plans to open a location in the city’s Gangnam district this fall. The London-based firm is apparently in expansion mode, as it also plans to open a New York branch in the fall. Peres Projects recently inaugurated a grand new gallery in the South Korean capital, and rumors persist about other dealers that might soon take the plunge. Gerlis also reports that Thaddaeus Ropac, which has had a Seoul venue since 2021, is taking on more space.

THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR. Almost exactly a year after the National Gallery of Canada’s previous leader, Sasha Suda, announced that she was decamping to run the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Ottawa institution has a new director and CEO: Jean-François Bélisle. He is currently the director and chief curator of the Musée d’art de Joliette in Quebec. The national museum has faced criticism of late, following the dismissal of four senior staffers amid an effort to reach a more diverse audience, as the Global and Mail reports. “I believe that art can change society, and look forward to collaborating with the gallery’s staff, as well as artists from across the country, to ensure our institution continues to be a fantastic force for good,” Bélisle said in a statement.

The Digest

Artist Sterling Wells has created a modestly size barge that is now floating in Los Angeles’s Ballona Creek. Wells is planning to paint aboard the craft for the next month, and will open a solo show at Night Gallery in the city on July 8. [Fox 11 Los Angeles]

The billionaire former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has given $130 million to the under-construction Perelman Performing Arts Center (more than its namesake, art-collecting businessman Ronald O. Perelman, donated). Bloomberg’s totals to the multifarious Shed also now total $130 million. [The New York Times]

As dangerous wildfire smoke gripped parts of North America on Wednesday, some galleries closed their doors or canceled openings and other events. Among them was Pace, which shut down in the middle of the day due to the air quality. [Pace Gallery/Instagram]

Lehmann Maupin global comms director Sarah Levine and photographer William Jess Laird were married in beautiful Marfa, Texas, with Levine wearing a Vera Wang dress inspired by the work of artist and noted Marfa resident Donald Judd. [Vogue]

New York City filed suit against architect Steven Holl and his namesake firm, arguing that their acclaimed design for a Queens library does not meet the requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act. A company spox noted that the city approved the project and said, “Accessibility is a core value of our work.” [The New York Times]

Archaeologists excavating a former temple complex on the Greek island of Kythnos found more than 2,000 clay figures, apparently left there to worship the goddess of agriculture, Demeter. The area is believed to have been inhabited from the 12th century B.C.E. to the 7th century C.E. [The Associated Press]

The Kicker

THE MAJOR LEAGUES. The artist Rick Lowe just opened two exhibitions of his scintillating paintings in Athens, at the Benaki Museum and Gagosian. When T: The New York Times Style Magazinecaught up with Lowe in advance of those shows, he said that he was working as many as 16 hours a day, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. “You know, I feel like this moment right now for me, getting ready for these shows in Athens, this is like my N.B.A. playoffs,” he told the magazine. “There’s no stopping. As Kobe [Bryant] once said, ‘You rest at the end.’ ” Do what you’ll love, as they say, and you’ll never work another day in your life. [T]

On June 7, the museum issued a statement about the exhibition Ngura Pulka – Epic Country officially being postponed. Scheduled to open this month, the show featured the work of Aboriginal artists from the APY Art Center Collective (APY ACC) and was billed as one of the largest community-driven art projects to be displayed at the NGA.

“All parts of Ngura Pulka are being entirely conceived, created, directed, and determined by Aṉangu people,” said a statement on the gallery’s website. “Home to 2,500 people, the APY Lands, in remote South Australia, support a network of Aṉangu communities, including seven key art centres.”

However, in April, the museum announced it was reviewing the exhibition’s artworks after a report from The Australian alleged that white studio staff had been painting on the works attributed to residents of Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY), sparsely populated lands in remote South Australia that are home to more than 20 Aboriginal communities. The Australian also published video that it said appeared to show a non-Indigenous art assistant making creative decisions and painting on a depiction of the Tjukurpa — the creation period of ancestral beings that also formed the religion, law, and moral systems that govern Anangu society.

The NGA said the decision to postpone the opening Ngura Pulka – Epic Country had been made due to an independent panel review needing more time to “fully complete their work” to check if the works were consistent with the museum’s provenance policy, as well as the Australian government also announcing it would undertake a joint investigation.

“The National Gallery will work with the artists and Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) community leaders in relation to the exhibition and will await the outcome of both reviews,” the museum statement said. “The National Gallery is committed to continuing to work with APY Lands artists and supporting their ground-breaking work.”

The NGA originally said it expected to receive findings from the independent review by May 31.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the APY ACC issued a statement supporting the gallery’s decision to postpone the exhibition. “Light is always the best defense to darkness,” it said.

“Given recent accusations that we believe are without merit, we welcome the most rigorous and robust reviews of the work. Knowing the truth and authenticity of the works and having an abundance of pride in this project and every facet of our important program and the business we’ve built, we are content to wait for the independent panel to make their findings.”

The head of Foreign Missions of the Egyptian Antiquities Service accused the museum in a leaked email of “falsifying history” due to the “Afrocentric” lens of the show’s storytelling, the Dutch news site NRC reported on Monday. The news was confirmed by the museum’s managing director, Wim Weijland, in a statement to CNN.

Saqqara, a sprawling burial site some 20 miles south of the capital, Cairo, is home to Egypt’s oldest pyramid, the pyramid of Djoser. The museum has been consistently excavating Saqqara for more than 40 years, and most recently returned in February for a monthlong dig.

“The Rijksmuseum van Oudheden has been working at Saqqara since 1975,” Weijland told CNN. “For the upcoming season, the museum has been denied the permit to excavate here.”

Weijland added that the museum is attempting to “open the dialogue” with the Egyptian Antiquities Service about the ban. The aim of the “Kemet” exhibition, according to Weijland, was to “show and understand the depiction of ancient Egypt and the messages in music by black artists,” and to “show what scientific, Egyptological research can tell us about ancient Egypt and Nubia.”

The ancient Nubian empire in northeast Africa extended from Aswan, Egypt, down to Khartoum, the modern-day capital of Sudan. Nubia hosted several significant empires, the most important being the Kingdom of Kush, whose so-called “Black Pharaohs” ruled Egypt in the 8th century BCE in the 25th Dynasty. Per the museum’s website, the “Kemet” show examined “the influence of ancient Egypt and Nubia … in the works of a multitude of musicians of African descent, including icons of jazz such as Miles Davis and Sun Ra and contemporary artists such as Beyoncé and Rihanna.”

The show was met with criticism almost immediately upon opening. The Leiden National Museum of Antiquities’ social media accounts were bombarded with negative comments, some of which expressed veiled or explicit distaste over the show’s imagery of dark-skinned ancient Egyptians. In response to the backlash, the museum added a note on its website with additional information on its curatorial goals, as well as a warning that any offensive or racist comments posted to its social channels will be deleted.

The painting, View of the Sea from Haut Cagnes (ca. 1910), was originally owned by Jakob Goldschmidt, one of the most influential bankers in Weimar Germany and a major collector of Old Masters and Impressionist art in the 1920s. He was also a major patron of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. Nazi persecution forced Goldschmidt to flee in 1933 to Switzerland, before emigrating to the United States, where he died in 1955.

Some of Goldschmidt’s art collection stayed behind in Berlin, however, as collateral for a loan. In 1941, the Nazis seized the collection, which included the Renoir painting. The work was sold at the Berlin auction house Hans W. Lange later that year. It came up for sale again in 1960 at Galerie Nathan in Zurich. It was later purchased by Fritz Berg, the first president of the BDI association of German industry; after the passing of Berg’s widow, in 1989, their collection went to the Osthaus Museum in Hagen, where it has remained.

The city restituted the painting to the banker’s heirs and then repurchased it so it can remain on view at the Osthaus Museum. The painting will be displayed with information about Goldschmidt.

“The heirs of Jakob Goldschmidt are happy to have reached a satisfactory agreement for both sides in this matter after more than 15 years of intensive discussions,” their lawyer Sabine Rudolph said in a statement. “The restitution of the painting is a recognition of the fact that their grandfather suffered great wrongs under the Nazi regime, including huge financial losses.”

The repurchase was funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the German culture ministry, and the Cultural Foundation of the States.

Earlier this week, Brookfield, by most measures the largest real estate company in the world, unveiled its latest project, Manhattan West, in a ribbon-cutting ceremony that lacked ribbon. What it did have were two major works of public art, a sculpture by Charles Ray and a mosaic piece by Christopher Wool. After all, it’s easier to clap for art than property.

No one is much in the mood to celebrate office buildings these days, in the midst of a seemingly never-ending housing crisis and return-to-office mandates, the continued resistance to which has been rough for commercial real estate, Brookfield being no exception.

In April, the company defaulted on mortgage payments totaling hundreds of millions of dollars on their office buildings around the metro areas of Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, approximately 0.07 percent of its real estate holdings, according to the company. A study from security company Kastle estimated last September that, since the start of the pandemic, office occupancy has tanked from 95 percent to 48 percent (though notably, Brookfield’s properties were not included in that measure). And then, in December, some economists suggested as much as $453 billion in real estate value could be lost if there isn’t a bounce-back.

In New York, at least, Brookfield appears to have been more fortunate. In December, the New York Post reported that the One and Two Manhattan West buildings were nearly 100 and 76 percent occupied, respectively. And, on Tuesday, the company announced that it was raising $15 billion for a new real estate fund. But the company is betting that it can entice workers back to the office, not just with amenities like a landscaped terrace and a wellness center, but also with art. 

Sabrina Kanner, the company’s executive vice president of development, design and construction, told ARTnews that putting aside space and resources for art was a key part of the Manhattan West plan, especially in the context of return-to-office.

“Art is an important component to the public space, which is an important component to the recipe of getting employees to come back to work,” Kanner said. “Pulling people into public space is an important ingredient because the more people you have there, the more successful it is, the better it feels to be there.”

Art, Kanner said, belongs in a category of attractions that real estate companies predict will persuade people to visit commercial areas, along with sustainable design and amenities. When Kanner first began working on the project in the 1980s—when the land on which it and the neighboring Hudson Yards now stand was just a sprawling network of train tracks—she was in her twenties. At the time, she wondered, “Who’s going to want to come here?” But now, even with the train tracks utterly transformed, office towers can feel just as inhospitable.

Fortunately for Brookfield Properties, the head of Brookfield Asset Management, its parent company, is Bruce Flatt, the husband of ARTnews Top 200 collector Lonti Ebers. It was Ebers who suggested that art adviser Jacob King come in to select the artists from whom to commission public art pieces for the Manhattan West project. King’s first choices were Charles Ray and Christopher Wool, neither of whom have any public works on display in New York City and who both accepted the offer.

“At the time, we thought it was a real long shot that either of them would be interested in making work for commercial real estate development,” King said during the unveiling. To his surprise, neither artist expressed any hesitancy. “It was an opportunity to give them a platform and to give something to the city of New York.”

At the unveiling, Ray discussed his sculpture Adam and Eve (2023), a stainless steel work depicting an older couple, a man in suspenders and Toms shoes, and a woman sitting on a log, wearing a pantsuit that signals she is “three or four social hierarchies above” her husband, according to Ray, who said he dislikes Hudson Yards. “So freaking corporate,” he said, “but I do like this, though it wasn’t built then.”

Manhattan West sits just across from the Moynihan Train Hall and, for that reason, the area seems to hold on to some of the aura and gravitas associated with 1950s modes of commuting and essential infrastructure, as opposed to the pure tourist honeypot of malls and Instagrammable architecture that defines major new projects in New York like the Oculus, the Highline, and, of course, Hudson Yards. Beautiful, classic, and unexpected works by artists like Ray and Wool further this sense of dignity and vitality that is missing in those other projects.

But if the commercial real estate crash doesn’t reverse, well, we know a good bit of public art isn’t going to halt market forces in their tracks.

Update, 6/7/2023, 4:40 p.m.: This piece was updated to include additional context around Brookfield’s default, as well RTO figures.

Sorokin hired Audrey Thomas in 2020, after a string of fraud charges against Sorokin led to a conviction for grand larceny and theft of services. According to the complaint, while Sorokin paid Thomas a retainer for appealing her conviction and overstaying her visa, for which she faced possible deportation to Germany, she still owes Thomas more than $152,000 in legal fees.

Thomas also claims that Sorokin has tried to get out of paying the hefty sum by filing her own lawsuit, which alleges that the attorney has been withholding audio recordings of her deportation hearings from her new lawyer and hoarding some of Sorokin’s personal belongings. Sorokin fired Thomas in April 2022 for “lack of progress in her criminal and immigration cases due to Thomas’ lax work habits,” according to the New York Post.

Thomas was disbarred this past November for alleged financial crimes of her own. Court documents claim that Thomas used $630,000 in cash that was held in escrow from the sale of a client’s apartment in order to promote herself as a radio show host and the author of the book Ego Has No Place in the Law. 

In 2019 Sorokin was sentenced to between 4 and 12 years in prison and was released on parole in February 2021. Just over a month later, she was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. She is currently under house arrest in Manhattan’s East Village after being granted a $10,000 bond; she is awaiting the court’s decision on whether she should be deported for overstaying her visa.

In an interview with The Messenger Wednesday, Sorokin said she was “trying to make the best” out of life despite the fact that being under house arrest is “pretty limiting.” 

“Hopefully people will let me grow up and move on,” Sorokin told The Messenger. “I am just trying to focus on what I am interested in these days. I see this as a great opportunity to dive into new people, somebody that I would not know so much about.”

Last year, Sorokin held an art show of works she made while in prison, many of which featured her wearing designer clothes. She reportedly made around $340,000 from the mostly pencil and paper drawings, the proceeds of which helped secure the bond and pay for her Manhattan apartment, which costs $4,250 a month.

Gagosian will be showing a selection of these prints at Art Basel next week, with an exhibition on the artist’s work planned for next spring in New York. Woodman’s estate was previously represented jointly by Marian Goodman Gallery and Victoria Miro Gallery.

The representation comes in partnership with the Woodman Family Foundation, which recently received the totality of Woodman’s oeuvre, much of which was closely guarded by her family and has not yet been seen publicly. The collection includes all the artist’s prints and books, as well as private letters, journals, and notebooks.

“Upon receiving the complete holdings of Francesca Woodman’s work,” Lissa McClure, the foundation’s executive director said in a statement, “the Board of Directors has determined that a different approach and global reach is needed to carry out its goals, for which Gagosian Gallery is uniquely suited.… We remain extremely grateful for the many contributions and accomplishments on Francesca Woodman’s behalf by Marian Goodman Gallery and Victoria Miro Gallery.”

Woodman, who died in 1981, began making pictures at a young age. Born and raised in Colorado, she grew up surrounded by the arts: her mother was the ceramicist Betty Woodman, and her father, George Woodman, was a painter. The majority of her work was made between 1975 and 1978, during her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and in Rome, Italy, in the school’s honor program.

Like her contemporary Cindy Sherman, Woodman was often the subject of her own work. Symbolism and allegory characterized her work, which often utilized decaying exteriors and reflections from glass display cases or mirrors to introduce a narrative element.

She produced one book, Some Disordered Interior Geometries, before her death. This June London-based publishing house MACK will release Francesca Woodman: The Artist’s Books, which will reproduce her eight existing artist’s books, two of which have never been seen before.