26 June: a record-breaking heatwave has forced museums and cultural attractions across Europe to reduce their hours or close. In Paris, where temperatures reached 41°C, the Louvre announced it would shut at 4pm from Wednesday to Saturday. In Florence, until 28 June, the Uffizi is open only to those with pre-booked tickets. In London, the British Museum has shut six galleries, while the Young V&A closed completely from Tuesday afternoon, with plans to reopen on Sunday morning. Some museums are coping better than others: the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and the Musée nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris, for example, are offering free admission. ‘This is our way of providing a micro-response to crises’, the latter’s president, Constance Rivière, told Le Monde.
The Netherlands and Germany have agreed to return 2,000 artefacts to Ghana that were removed illegally during the colonial era, Art News reports. Ghana’s foreign minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, announced the returns – which include two war drums and war horns from Germany – during last week’s Next Steps conference in Accra. The conference sought to establish a ‘common framework of actionable commitments’ in response to the UN resolution of 25 March that described the transatlantic slave trade as the ‘gravest crime against humanity’. The German Embassy in Accra said: ‘We cannot change the past. But confronting history honestly is essential if we want to build a better future in which such injustices are never repeated.’
Misan Harriman has resigned as chair of the Southbank Centre. The photographer and film-maker has been in the position since 2021 and will step down this autumn. Harriman’s resignation comes after he was accused of antisemitism because of social media posts he made after the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green, London, in April – a charge Harriman denies. Harriman, who has served as chair for nearly two terms, says he had decided not to seek a third some time ago. A spokesperson for the Southbank Centre confirmed that Harriman informed the deputy chair of his decision to leave in January.
The artist Helen Cammock has asked for one of her video works to be removed from the National Portrait Gallery in London. The 40-minute-work, Persistence (2025), briefly compares Oliver Cromwell’s responsibility for the famines in Ireland to Winston Churchill’s responsibility for the Bengal Famine of 1943. The Conservative peer and Churchill-biographer Andrew Roberts organised a letter signed by more than 50 peers to the NPG’s board calling this observation a ‘barefaced lie’. Cammock has said in a statement: ‘Persistence will have its own life after this: it won’t hide and it won’t be afraid to speak with those who are prepared to sit with it and listen.’
The Box in Plymouth is the Art Fund Museum of the Year. The prize, worth £120,000, was announced on 25 June at a ceremony on the Cutty Sark in London. The Box, which opened in 2020 is owned by Plymouth City Council. Jenny Waldman, director of the Art Fund and chair of the prize’s judging panel, said that the museum is ‘a true jewel in the crown of the South West’. The other shortlisted museums were the National Gallery, V&A East Storehouse, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery and the Fitzwilliam Museum. Each finalist will receive £20,000.
The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia has appointed Connie Choi as chief curator and its first vice president of art and education. Choi, currently a curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, takes over from Nancy Ireson as chief curator in September. In New York, Soyoung Yoon has been selected as the director of the Whitney’s Independent Study Program. The programme has been on hiatus for the past year, after the 2025 cohort accused the museum of censorship for cancelling a performance about Israel’s war in Gaza. Meanwhile, the newly expanded Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas, has named Courtenay Finn as its new chief curator. She joins from the Orange County Museum of Art, where she was chief curator and director of programmes, and takes up her post at the end of August.
