On Wednesday, Creative Australia announced that it has reinstated Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale. On 7 February, Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino were selected for the Australian Pavilion; five days later, Creative Australia rescinded their selection after some commentators criticised the artist’s depictions of the Hezbollah leader Hasran Nasrallah. Their removal outraged the Australian art community and prompted an independent external review which found that Sabsabi’s removal stemmed from ‘a series of missteps, assumptions and missed opportunities’. Creative Australia has apologised in its statement, while Sabsabi and Dagostino said that their reinstatement ‘offers a sense of resolution and allows us to move forward with optimism and hope after a period of significant personal and collective hardship’.
On Thursday, Congress passed President Trump’s tax and spending bill – one of the largest of its kind in recent history – confirming the reallocation of $40m of funding previously intended for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to Trump’s long-planned National Garden of American Heroes. The implications of the bill are far-reaching. Medicaid and funding for food stamps will be slashed by some $1trn, while major tax cuts, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, will lower tax revenue by $4.5trn.
Tim Blum, the co-founder of the Los Angeles gallery Blum, which represents artists including Yoshitomo Nara and Alvaro Barrington, told Art News on Tuesday that he will ‘sunset’ his galleries in Los Angeles and Tokyo. Blum opened his flagship gallery with Jeff Poe in 1994; its name changed from Blum & Poe after Poe left the business in 2023. Blum’s decision to step away from the gallery follows years of frustration with what he describes as the ‘aggravating’ gallery model. ‘It’s not working. And it hasn’t been working,’ he said, ‘even when it looked like it was.’ Blum will not step away from the art market altogether, saying that he is pursuing ‘a more flexible model’ and will continue ‘buying and selling art’. He is yet to announce any plans regarding the future of a new space in New York scheduled to open later this year.
Heather Gerken will be the new president of the Ford Foundation, the leading US non-profit that regularly supports the arts through grants, reports the Art Newspaper. Gerken joins the foundation from the Yale School of Law. Before that, she clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice David Souter and taught at Harvard Law School. Francisco Cigarroa, chair of the foundation’s board of trustees, said in a statement that Gerken ‘brings a wealth of experience working across the philanthropic and legal sectors that will only help sharpen the Ford Foundation’s operations and grantmaking’. She will begin her new role in November and takes over from Darren Walker, who announced his resignation last July and has since been elected chair of the board of the National Gallery of Art.
Hélio Menezes has been sacked as director of the Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujo in São Paulo after less than 18 months in the role, Art News reports. Menezes announced his firing in an Instagram post on 25 June, which said that ‘confronting decision-making structures shaped by informality, personalism, and a lack of transparency’ led by individuals ‘disconnected from the diversity and Black leadership that the museum represents (or should represent)’ had made the role ‘impossible’. He added that his dismissal came during ‘serious health issues’ and hospitalisation, without ‘adherence to institutional practices that uphold even minimal standards of respect and care’. Before joining the museum, Menezes worked as a curator at the Centro Cultural São Paulo and co-organised the 2023 edition of the São Paulo biennale. His replacement is yet to be announced.
