The Tate has launched an endowment fund to try to raise £150m by 2030 to secure its long-term future. The announcement was made by its chair of trustees, Roland Rudd, at a celebration of Tate Modern’s 25th anniversary on Wednesday. The Tate Future Fund has already raised £43m through donations from individuals, foundations and Tate trustees. Donors include Jorge M. and Darlene Pérez and Bloomberg Philanthropies. The move comes amid a funding squeeze. In its 2023–24 annual report, Tate trustees approved a deficit budget, drawing on reserves built over the two previous financial years. Earlier this year, Tate cut 40 roles across its venues in London, Liverpool and Cornwall.
Vancouver Art Gallery will make some 30 staff members redundant in what a spokesperson says is the ‘difficult but necessary process of reducing its operating budget’. The cuts, which will reduce the number of unionised staff members by 20 per cent, come months of instability, reports the Art Newspaper. Anthony Kiendl stepped down as director and CEO of the gallery in March after plans for a new Herzog & de Meuron-designed building were cancelled because of spiralling costs. Warren Williams, president of the CUPE 15 union, which represents many of the gallery’s staff, said in an online notice that the gallery intends to offer severance packages to the affected employees, the terms of which are still being negotiated.
Xavier F. Salomon will be the new director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. Salomon has served as the deputy director and chief curator of the Frick Collection in New York since 2014, where he oversaw the renovation of its recently reopened galleries. Before joining the Frick, Salomon – an expert in Paolo Veronese and baroque art – was curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Before that, he worked at the British Museum and the National Gallery in London before joining the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2006 as chief curator. At the Gulbenkian, he will take over from António Filipe Pimentel, who has led the museum since 2021 and is retiring at the beginning of next year. The museum is currently closed for renovations and will reopen in summer 2026.
Nick Merriman has resigned as chief executive of English Heritage after 18 months in the role, the Art Newspaper reports. Gerard Lemos, chair of the charity’s trustees, said in a statement that Merriman’s departure was due to ‘personal reasons relating to family health’. Earlier this year, Merriman’s restructuring of the charity, which involved the dismissal of seven per cent of its staff – amounting to some 189 roles – and the reduction of opening hours at 40 of its 400 sites, was met with widespread disapproval, the Guardian reports. Geoff Parkin, who has worked with English Heritage for the past year on a pro-bono basis, will be the interim chief executive.
In Belgium, Ostend city council has cancelled the artist Hew Locke’s project to ‘recontextualise’ a controversial statue of King Leopold II, Art Net reports. The equestrian statue, which was erected in 1931, depicts the king being thanked by Congolese subjects for ‘saving them from Arab slavers’. Leopold II founded the Congo Free State in 1885 and ruled it as his own personal possession until 1908. The council sought to acknowledge the exceptional brutality of this period by commissioning a work to respond to the monument. Locke’s proposal, chosen in November 2024 from 11 finalists, comprised five pillars topped with golden statues, including one depicting the king’s severed head. In an Instagram post he shared on 18 June, Locke said he was ‘really disappointed’ by the cancellation, which he was told was due to a lack of ‘public consultation’ in the selection process.
