A federal court in Rhode Island has ruled that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)’s policy of ensuring all grants comply with President Trump’s executive order on ‘gender ideology’ is unconstitutional, the New York Times reports. The order, which specified that federal agency grants should not be used to ‘promote gender ideology’, including the ‘false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa’, came into effect in January. In March, several arts and theatre organisations in Rhode Island filed a lawsuit against the NEA that stated that under the new regulations, people who have made or supported art about transgender or non-binary people were ‘effectively barred […] from receiving NEA grants on artistic merit and excellence grounds’. District judge William Smith ruled in favour of the plaintiffs on 19 September, saying that even the NEA’s later amendment, which stipulated that grant applications would be reviewed on a ‘case-by-case’ basis, violated the First Amendment.
A Moscow court has sentenced Maria Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova, the director of the Narva Museum in Estonia, to 10 years in prison in absentia on charges related to the display of banners that labelled Vladimir Putin a ‘war criminal’, reports the Moscow Times. One banner, which hung on the museum’s exterior, showed an image that combined the faces of Putin and Adolf Hitler under the title ‘Putler’; another displayed a mugshot of Putin covered in blood. Russian investigators accused Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova of helping display similar banners in 2023, 2024 and 2025; she was formally charged in January this year.
Nine participants in this year’s edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) have withdrawn in protest against a sponsor’s investment in an arms manufacturer that supplies weapons to Israel, the Architect’s Newspaper reports. A letter sent to the CAB organisers by 22 signatories on 18 September said that the sponsorship by Crown Family Philanthropies, which owns a 10 per cent stake in military contractor General Dynamics, was ‘incompatible with the values of [their] work’, and specified that nine of its signatories would be withdrawing their work from CAB. The letter also said that ‘The realization that an educational program in Chicago is funded with capital which (even if indirectly) comes from the gains made at the expense of the destruction of life and education facilities in Gaza is both contradictory and concerning.’ Signatories also called for the CAB to refuse further funding from Crown Family Philanthropies. Responding to related complaints made in August, a spokesperson for the CAB said that it was ‘not in a financial position to return funds already committed’.
Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum in New York, is retiring after 26 years in the role. Phillips, who joined the museum after working for 23 years at the Whitney Museum of American Art, will leave her post in April 2026. The museum is planning to unveil its 5,600 square-metre expansion at the end of this year. ‘It’s just the right time for me to step down,’ she told the New York Times. In a statement issued by the museum, board president James Keith Brown said that during Phillips’s tenure the museum had ‘grown from a small experimental organization into a major international powerhouse’. He also commended her mentorship of ‘a new generation of top talent in the field’. The board will begin the search for her replacement this month.