They were found at a residential development project at Calthorpe Gardens, on the outskirts of the historic market town Banbury in southern England. The contractor Orbit Homes, which is overseeing the development, announced the find in a press release.

A group of Mesolithic flint tools dating from 10000 BCE to 4000 BCE were among the oldest artifacts found.

The remains of a small settlement from the Late Bronze Age or the Middle or Late Iron Age was also unearthed, as was an Anglo-Saxon cemetery from the early Medieval period. There, the remains of 52 people have been identified, along with a variety of such goods as beaded necklaces, pendants, and weapons. Among those items was a gold pendant with an intertwined serpent design.

“This is a once-in-a-decade site … with once-in-a-lifetime kinds of finds that are coming up—it’s incredible,” BA field archaeologist Hayley Parsons said in video released by Orbit Homes.

“I think the potential of the site is to show people were here over a very long period of time, doing different things at different times,” McLeish said. “We’ve been so lucky at Calthorpe Gardens, we’ve been totally spoiled with the finds that have been recovered.”

Stefanie Hessler, director of the Swiss Institute in New York, curated this year’s iteration, and it focuses on themes of circulation and transformation. As fairgoers wander the city streets in search of the Parcours installations, it behooves them to pay close attention to distilleries, shops, and bridges for such art interventions.

To learn more about her approach to curating Art Basel’s public art sector, ARTnews spoke with Hessler ahead of the fair’s opening.

ARTnews: I know this is your first time curating Parcours, which was previously overseen by Samuel Leuenberger. What was your approach to curating Art Basel’s public art sector?

Stefanie Hessler: Yes! Parcours is accessible to the public without a ticket to the fair. And it really—this year, especially—will engage a lot of locations in the city along Clarastrasse, the street leading from the fair building toward the river Rhine. Alongside it, there are 22 projects in all sorts of different venues and locations, from empty storefronts—a former pharmacy, a former bakery, an empty restaurant, and a shop in a shopping center—to a functional hotel, a food court, a car ramp leading underneath the Congress Center, and a bunker, as well as some outdoor locations such as a public park and flags on the bridge leading over the river. It’s really interesting to think about public space in a way that is more expansive and about how people perceive artwork differently when they visit it in non-art spaces.

How has the public sphere influenced your curatorial approach?

For this project, in particular, it was important for me to have artworks that respond to the sites. There are certain challenges that come with exhibiting works in non-art spaces, but also really exciting challenges that make us engage and interact with art differently than we normally would.

Tell me about some of the most notable projects.

All of the works engage the sites they’re shown at. For example, Alvaro Barrington is creating a structure inspired by his grandmother’s house in Grenada and the Caribbean where he grew up. This “distracter” will, on the outside, be clad with paintings that he’s making for this occasion, and on the inside it will house the products that are usually on sale in the shop. There will also be an artwork in the window and large wallpaper in the back of the shop. Outside of this project, the shop is called tropical zone, and it specializes in importing products from Africa to Basel, Switzerland.

Rirkrit Tiravanija is making flags with pirate symbols that are going to line the bridge leading over the Rhine. He is of course interested in communication structures and how different symbols change meaning over time as they transfer from one culture to another. The pirate symbol has been, in the Western imagination, this symbol of a romantic outlaw, but it’s also been appropriated by the fashion industry. The pirate skull and crossbones, as well as lesser-known symbols, are printed on flags, with newspaper article backgrounds. This, combined with its location on the Rhine, which has played such an important role in the history of Europe, refers to travel and the circulation of information.

Another one that I’m really excited about is by Ximena Garrido-Lecca, who is an artist from Peru researching the oil-rich coastal town of Lobitos, known for petroleum extraction. In recent years, there has been a discussion about whether this town will be turned into a tourist resort. And Ximena made these sculptures from ceramic and steel, combining a traditional material and technique also used in pre-Columbian cultures with steel used in industrial processes like petrol extraction. There are also references to Minimalism. These sculptures are installed inside an artisanal distillery in Basel, creating a beautiful connection between the distillation processes for liquor and oil.

This is a pretty big undertaking, with a lot of moving parts. What are some of the biggest challenges that you faced?

It’s been such a joyful process thinking about these projects in all of these very diverse spaces. It’s like a puzzle finding the right match between the artists, galleries, and venues. Many of the artists also came for site visits so that we could have direct conversations, and look at potential places where their works could make sense and how they would be installed. We visited so many sites and offer such amazing selection for the 22 projects. Most people were really excited about partnering with us.

There are some really unique pairings. What are you most looking forward to?

I’m excited about Parcours night on Wednesday, where we’ll have three performances from 8 pm until midnight. The first performance is a major new commission by Madeline Hollander, a former choreographer and visual artist, who has taken inspiration from the Carnival tradition in Basel. During my visits to the city, I came across these spaces used by the Basel Carnival crews to practice their instruments and so on, some of which are in bunkers underneath the city. Madeline was inspired by the invisible forms of circulation underneath the city, and she made a connection between the people practicing for Carnival underground and the sewer system—these hidden infrastructures and performances [happening below the city]. For Parcours, she cast seven manhole covers to be passed back and forth by 14 dancers, while they’re leading a procession from the fair to the Rhine, in Basel’s cleaning crew outfits and masks made out of confetti, which the cleaning crews have to clean up after Carnival each year.

That performance will be followed by a karaoke bar night at the Merian Hotel, organized by Wendy’s Wok World, the alter ego of Sam Lui, an artist who’s been interested in the principles of Cantonese cooking. She’s collaborated with the Savory Project, which is a bar in Hong Kong, to create three specialty cocktails that will be available during the night. Visitors can perform two songs chosen by Wendy that reflect some of the works and concepts in her practice. There’s also a performance by Chuquimamani-Condori, hosted by Jan Vorisek and Mathis Altmann.

At the end of April, a critical report from France’s court of auditors, who assess the use of public funds, revealed that the Centre Pompidou‘s economic model is unsustainable. The report outlines the financial strain on the museum caused by its forthcoming renovation, as well as its establishment of a new branch in Massy, France.

According to the report, costs have increased since the project began. The court estimated that this undertaking will cost €358 million ($383 million), nearly €100 million more than the French government’s initial estimate of €262 million ($282 million). An additional €207 million ($223,000) has been requested from sponsors by the museum’s chairman Laurent Le Bon to account for the difference.

Per the court, the institution must raise the money itself by the beginning of 2025 at the latest. As of now, it has raised €39 million ($42 million). Of the €39 million, €20 million ($21.5 million) came from Seoul’s Hanwha Culture Foundation. Centre Pompidou leadership has “very little time left” to raise the necessary €168 million, the court has warned.

Le Bon’s fundraising campaign has focused on individual American sponsors, as well as countries including Saudi Arabia. Le Bon has agreed to share program plans this month and finalize it before the start of the new year.

According to the Art Newspaper, Le Bon has admitted that he may have to “adapt his plans according to the funds collected.”

The 86-square-foot sacrarium features painted blue walls decorated with female figures depicting the four seasons of the year, along with allegories of agriculture and shepherding. The room’s color is notably rare, and would have demarcated it as a place of importance for ritual activities and storing sacred objects.

“Pompeii is truly a treasure chest that never ceases to surprise us and arouse amazement because, every time we dig, we find something beautiful and significant,” Italian culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano told Euro News.

In the room were 15 transportable amphorae and a bronze set of two jugs and two oil lamps.

Also found at the site were construction materials that were ready for renovations, including the remains of oyster shells, which would have been crushed and added to plaster and mortar mixes.

The discovery is one among many in an ongoing excavation in Regio IX in the city’s center. In its heyday, it was a residential area believed to include more than 13,000 rooms among 1,070 housing units.

Experts are trying to improve on the “protection of the vast Pompeiian heritage” and to make the site “more effective and sustainable,” the culture ministry told CNN.

This is just the latest in a string of notable finds made in the ancient city. Recently announced at the House of the Chaste Lovers was the identification of violent children’s sketches of gladiators and hunters, along with the remains of two people, presumably a couple, discovered outside of the nearby House of the Painters at Work. Also recently found was an unusual small painting of a hooded boy believed to be the deceased son of the building’s owners.

In the same area, a banquet hall with black frescos depicting the Trojan War was discovered earlier this spring.

Bernardo Bellotto’s The Marketplace at Pirna (ca. 1764), which has been part of the MFA Houston’s permanent collection since 1961, was once owned by the German department store magnate Max J. Emden, who lost much of his wealth due to Nazi persecution.

A panel of three judges for the US Fifth Circuit court of appeals affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of a claim brought by some of Emden’s heirs, the Art Newspaper reported.

The legal dispute stems from a misidentification by a foundation established by the Dutch government, which sent the wrong painting — the Bellotto — to a Nazi loot claimant after the end of the war. In 2021, three of Emden’s heirs filed a lawsuit based on the misidentification.

An earlier 2022 ruling by a judge in US District Court for the Southern District of Texas in Houston declared that, despite the mistake, the Dutch restitution was “a sovereign act” and that the decision to dismiss the case was based on the district court’s inability to determine the “invalidity” of “proceedings” related to a “foreign nation.”

The ruling, however, did not determine the painting’s rightful owner.

Emden was allegedly forced to sell three Bellotto paintings under duress below market value to German dealer Karl Haberstock in 1938 during the Nazi regime. Around the same time, German art dealer Hugo Moser, who owned a reproduction of Marketplace at Pirna “after Bellotto” painted by an anonymous artist, fled to the Netherlands and left the painting with an art restorer in Amsterdam. Both versions were seized by the Nazis and were intended to be included in Adolf Hitler’s Führermuseum.

At the war’s end, the Monuments Men and Women recovered Emden’s three paintings from an Austrian salt mine, as well as Moser’s copy from another storage facility. Both versions of Marketplace at Pirna were sent to the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP).

Later, the Dutch Art Property Foundation received a claim for the “after Bellotto” copy of Marketplace at Pirna from Amsterdam’s Goudstikker Gallery to the MCCP. Emden’s Bellotto was inadvertently shipped to the Netherlands. Before Goudstikker took possession of the work, however, Moser filed a competing claim and the original Bellotto was send to Moser.

Even though the Monuments Men and Women recognized the error in 1949, it was already out of the Dutch Art Property Foundation’s control. Moser sold the Bellotto to the American businessman and collector Samuel Kress three years later. Kress loaned it to the MFA Houston in 1953 and subsequently gifted it to the museum.

Since the mistake was made by the Dutch government, the Fifth Circuit judges ultimately ruled that “it is not our job to call into question the decisions of foreign nations”.

The stunt was carried out by a member of Riposte Alimentaire (Food Response), a group of environmental activists and defenders of sustainable food production in response to the climate crisis. The group has been targeting museums across Europe for years, including most recently a protest at the Louvre last month.

A video on X showed the activist sticking an adhesive barren red landscape on top of Claude Monet’s 1873 painting Coquelicots, saying, according to the Guardian, “this nightmarish image awaits us if no alternative is put in place”.

The French Impressionist’s work depicts people with umbrellas roaming through a blooming poppy field. Unlike works like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, which has been the subject of much backlash, it was not protected by glass.

Rinehart, who is the richest person in Australia and a major donor to the National Gallery of Australia, previously requested that a painting of her by Aboriginal artist Vincent Namatjira, on view with nearly two dozen other portraits as part of the “Australia in Colour” retrospective, be taken down.

Namatjira was the first Indigenous artist to win the Archibald Prize, a prestigious Australian award for portraiture, in 2020, and is greatly revered.

Rinehart is currently chairwoman of Hancock Prospecting. In the past, she has made national headlines in Australia for a number of controversies, most notably her decision to stop funding a netball team in 2022 after an Indigenous player asked to have the company’s logo removed from her uniform.

On Friday, according to a Senate estimates hearing, the gallery’s board was processing the approved portrait gifted by Rinehart.

The portrait by Alix Korte was donated in 2019. Korte is a realist artist and the wife of the chief executive of Rinehart’s company, Hancock Prospecting, Garry Korte, who is believed to have gifted the work to the billionaire.

Though the Korte portrait was donated before calls to remove the one by Namatjira, it has yet to be accepted by the gallery, due to conditions that came with the piece.

“There were some conditions that came along with that gift that meant those conditions are currently under negotiation,” portrait gallery director Bree Pickering said at the hearing. “Because of those conditions, we haven’t been able to formally accept … the work into the collection.”

The institution has seen a 24 percent uptick in visitor attendance since Rinehart first expressed her distaste for the Namatjira portrait, the Guardian reported.

You have a rigorous research-based art practice. How did that begin?

The earliest works in the show begin in 2014 when I was a student, with explorations into employing research-based methodology. I’ve always been asking questions and trying to visualize language and relationships. At the time, I was experimenting with researching histories of American school desegregation. In particular, I was focused on the cases that led to the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954. As a student at Yale, I had access to the law library. I spent a lot of time trying to understand the many cases of this landmark legislation. Anyone who uses interstate travel, public education, or public broadcasting is a direct beneficiary of this legislative package.

I found myself with lots of questions about public-school transportation and a long legacy of devaluing the lives of children of color and public space, as well as defunding and depriving public schools of resources after the Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools. I had faith that if I focus on an area of research or a particular question that something is going to come of it. I didn’t know what the work was going to look like. I didn’t know what the solution was going to be. But I just started reading the cases.

How did you become interested in public spaces and resources?

I’m from Southern California. Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, I was very impacted by the prominence of murals and narratives painted in public spaces. There’s this part of me that I can’t really shake: a desire to inquire about issues of public concern and embed them into a process by which new material is produced. The first works start there.

I was exploring the perception of color and its impact on the value of life in public space. As an adult, I was able to again study Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color, which I had first learned in elementary school. This work gave me an opportunity to start exploring color relationships chromatically and societally. I realized that the impact of color perception and optical illusions initiated by interactions of particular colors which make us see things that aren’t really there. I saw an echo in the case law that I was reading.

Subsequent bodies of work follow this methodology, with site-specific research on such topics as the relationship between public transportation and voting referenda in Atlanta, for example, as well as a comparison between the contemporary use of third-party transfer programs seizing paid properties and the historic property dispossession of people of color in New York. Let’s talk about some of your latest works, which were produced during an artist residency in Boulder, Colorado.

There are three new pieces in the show that use marble dust from the nearby Yule Mountain Quarry, which produced the marble for the Lincoln Memorial and most—if not all—of the great monuments in Washington D.C.

Not unlike your earlier works, you employ a rigorous material process that alludes to the history of abolition and democracy in America. How do you create these multi-layered surfaces?

Before I know what the image is going to be, I’m building a surface with material that is symbolic to me of a place in some way. The material used for Here at the Western World…, for instance, is made of a quilting liner. I spent a lot of time in southern Colorado, outside Denver in the San Luis Valley, and I made friends with people who gave me such textiles. I attached the quilt liner to a piece of raw canvas. I used paper bags, which I separate from the handles. Over many days, I soaked the paper and unfolded it carefully, before laminating it into the surfaces of the work. The pieces become kind of like animal hides that are stretched onto the wall and cured in anticipation of stretching them onto awning style frames. The surface of the piece was then encrusted with sand from southern Colorado and marble dust from the Yule quarry.

There are additional layers and images constructed on top of that surface as well.

The halftone line image that’s projected on the surface in yellow hues is an image of a particular classroom from This Is Not Who We Are (2002), a documentary film about Black communal experiences in Boulder from the 1800s to more recent years. The catalyst of the film, which questions Boulder’s standing as what some have called the happiest place to live in the U.S., is a controversy over excessive police force used against a Black student at Naropa University in 2019. I included an image from the film of Professor Wyndham’s classroom.

Printed on the pink vinyl is a still that I created of a very quick moment from 1972 home video footage of the choir from the Second Baptist church—the only black congregation in Boulder for many years—singing, which resonated with my own experiences going to church growing up in Los Angeles. These places historically in the United States and other colonized countries are where people of color gather for respite and liberation. There are these moments that happen where people are trying to get closer to freedom by gathering together for release and for mutual exaltation.

Titled Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, it was recorded in Staten Island, New York, and produced in Marrakech between 2006 and 2013. It includes the nine surviving members of the group, and features Cher and Game of Thrones actress Carice van Houten. There is only one CD in existence.

The revolutionary hip-hop band, formed in Staten Island in the early 1990s, is known for their violent and sexually explicit lyrics conveying the trauma of African American experience with levity. Believing that online streaming and piracy has cheapened the value of music, Wu-Tang Clan decided to create an album as a unique commodity.

Once Upon a Time in Shaolin includes an ornate hand-carved nickel box and a leather-bound manuscript, complete with lyrics and a certificate of authenticity. The piece comes with the legal condition that the 31 included tracks cannot be released by the owner for 88 years.

As part of Mona’s “Namedropping” exhibition, small listening parties will be able to listen to a 30-minute curated sample of the album.

“Every once in a while, an object on this planet possesses mystical properties that transcend its material circumstances,” Mona’s director of curatorial affairs Jarrod Rawlins told the BBC. “‘Once Upon a Time in Shaolin’ is more than just an album, so… I knew I had to get it into this exhibition.”

Until now, only a handful of people had heard some of the songs on the album, including a group of potential buyers and media when the album was up for sale in 2015.

Disgraced drug firm executive Martin Shkreli bought the album for $2 million and streamed snippets on YouTube to celebrate the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016. In 2018 the album was handed over to US prosecutors after Shkreli was convicted for defrauding investors. Digital art collective Pleasr purchased and still owns the album.

Mona has produced a number of provocative exhibitions, including its “Ladies Lounge,” which has since become the subject of an antidiscrimination case.

Local Liverpool creatives came together to make 11 art installations inspired by her studio albums. Highlights include a playable moss-covered grand piano inspired by Evermore, a “red room” honoring the Red album, and a Fearless mural based around the singer’s lucky number, 13. At College Lane, there will be a mural to celebrate Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department. Additionally, in the city center, in front of St. George’s Hall, there will be “Taylor” banners.

A series of craft workshops dubbed Liverpool Loves Taylor (Craft Version) will also be held throughout the city. Origami pieces made by fans will be added to the main art installations. Fans can also create homemade T-shirts, collages, and cupcakes. A “Tay Day” free symposium for academics, students, and fans will also be held at the University of Liverpool.

“One of the biggest stars on the planet is coming to the birthplace of pop,” reads a notice from the Liverpool City Council. “And to mark this musical moment for the ages, there are plans in place to give Swifties a proper scouse welcome.”

Every city where Swift has performed has seen a boost in business across retail, food and beverage, and hotels. The Eras Tour alone has generated a total economic impact that likely exceeded $10 billion in the United States, according to the US Travel Association.

Though the Eras Tour has been sweeping the globe since March 2023, Liverpool’s homage to Swift is hardly the first of its kind. For the singer’s kickoff show in Glendale, Arizona, for example, the town temporarily changed its name to “Swift City.” In Rio de Janeiro, a Swift-inspired T-shirt was projected onto the Brazilian city’s statue of Christ the Redeemer.

The trail was made possible by Liverpool Council’s culture team and social enterprise Make CIC.

Claire McColgan, Liverpool’s Director of Culture, told the BBC that using “incredible art” as installations was the “right thing to do” to bring back the “Eurovision sparkle.” She added, “Her team will know what we are doing and it’s important when you get an artist of her scale that the city embraces it.”