Red paint was splashed across the front door and windows of Pasternak’s home. Unfurled between two columns was a banner that read: “Anne Pasternak / Brooklyn Museum / White Supremacist Zionist.” Beneath that statement, in a smaller, red font, were the words “Funds Genocide.”

The residences of several Brooklyn Museum board trustees were also reportedly targeted, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said on X.  

“This is not peaceful protest or free speech,” he wrote. “This is a crime, and it’s overt, unacceptable antisemitism. These actions will never be tolerated in New York City for any reason. I’m sorry to Anne Pasternak and members of @brooklynmuseum’s board who woke up to hatred like this.”

Adams added: “I spoke to Anne this morning and committed that this hate will not stand in our city. The NYPD is investigating and will bring the criminals responsible here to justice.”

ARTnews has reached out to the Brooklyn Museum for comment. 

On May 31, a large pro-Palestine march culminated at the Brooklyn Museum, where some 30 activists occupied the lobby for a demonstration, beating drums, waving banners, and calling for the museum to condemn the killing of Palestinians in Gaza. Activists also demanded that the institution disclose its financial ties to Israel and divest from them.

Amid a sizable police presence, approximately 1,000 protestors echoed their calls from outside. Some then climbed onto the ceiling of the museum’s glass pavilion, eventually unfurling a large banner from the museum’s roof that read “Free Palestine From Genocide.” According to Democracy Now, at least 34 demonstrators were arrested.

In the following days, activists decried the excessive force used against the crowd by riot police and members of New York Police Department’s (NYPD) Strategic Response Group onsite. In a statement to Hyperallergic, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn Museum said that “the police brutality that took place [on May 31] is devastating.” The spokesperson said that the museum did not call the NYPD. As the building is city property situated on city-owned land, officers do not need permission to enter the premises. 

The museum stated that it would not press charges against the protestors and promised to work with NYPD leadership to focus “on de-escalation going forward.”

The Brooklyn Museum, like other major art institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, has faced calls from artists, activists, and cultural workers to sever financial ties to Israel and to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. In many cases, activists have also called on these institutions to term Israel’s military actions in Gaza a genocide.

According to local health authorities, more than 37,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7 as a result of Israel’s air and ground campaign.

Protests at the Brooklyn Museum in December called out the institution’s corporate partnership with Bank of New York Mellon, which has investments in Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems and which has supported the Friends of Israel Defense Force Donor Advised Fund. (The Bank told the Financial Times in April that it invests in Elbit “as a result of requirements by its passive index investment strategies.”)

The Association of Art Museum Directors, an industry group for institutional leaders that counts some 240 members, including Pasternak, denounced the vandalism of her home in a statement issued on Wednesday. “We, the members of AAMD, unequivocally and forcefully condemn this antisemitic act,” the group wrote. “As cultural leaders—and also as people of different backgrounds and experiences—we understand the emotion and anger the Israel-Hamas war has wrought.”

“This,” the AAMD added, “does not mean that protestors have unencumbered rights to attack individual persons in pursuit of their cause. Whether at someone’s home or at a museum, this behavior is inexcusable. It does tremendous disservice to discourse and conflict resolution, and the ends simply do not justify the means.”

Also stuck to Yao’s painting was a speech bubble that said, “No cheese, Gromit. Look at all this cruelty on RSPCA farms!” Animal Rising wrote in its social media post: “Find out why King Charles, patron of the RSPCA [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] should ask them to drop the Assured Scheme”, alongside a link to its website.

The RSPCA Assured Scheme is a program intended to raise welfare standards for farm animals throughout the United Kingdom. According to the RSPCA, farms, abattoirs, hatcheries, and haulers must be assessed and confirmed to have met its standards to remain in operation. A RSPCA Assured sticker is used on products to indicate their high quality.

However the Assured Scheme has faced scrutiny from animal rights activists over the exact criteria used to determine whether a farm passes inspection. Shortly before the vandalism, Animal Rising published an investigation into 45 RSPCA Assured farms, whose operations they described as “indefensible” 

In response to the vandalism, the RSPCA said in a statement: “We cannot condone illegal activity of any kind. Our staff and volunteers work extremely hard rescuing, caring for, and speaking up for animals. Animal Rising’s sustained activity is distracting from our focus on the work that really matters—helping thousands of animals every day.” 

According to the RSPCA, its Assured Scheme is “the best way to help farmed animals right now, while campaigning to change their lives in the future”. The statement added that “concerns about welfare on RSPCA Assured certified farms are taken extremely seriously and RSPCA Assured is acting swiftly to look into these allegations. After receiving the footage on Sunday morning, RSPCA Assured has launched an immediate, urgent investigation.”

Philip Mould told The Telegraph that he was “delighted to say there was absolutely no damage” to the portrait after the stickers were peeled off.

The first official portrait of King Charles III since his coronation last year, Yeo’s painting was unveiled at Buckingham Palace last month.

Bernini is renowned as a master of Baroque architecture, and the disappearance of the 18-page manuscript spurred an elaborate sting operation. The suspect allegedly met with Mauro Gambetti, head of administration at St. Peter’s Basilica, on May 27 under the belief that Gambetti was interested in buying the gilded document, which contains details of ornate features Bernini created to decorate the famous canopy rising above the basilica.

Gambetti, however, had secretly partnered with Vatican investigators to ensnare the suspect, who was reportedly accompanied by an unidentified accomplice. After handing the seller a €120,000 ($129,000) check in exchange for the manuscript, Vatican gendarmes arrived and arrested him.

The seller has been identified in Italian media reports as the art historian Alfio Maria Daniele Pergolizzi, who is believed to have stolen the manuscript from the archives of the Fabric of St. Peter’s, an institution established in the 16th century to manage the construction of the basilica and that now oversees restoration of the structure. Pergolizzi served as head of the communications department between 1995 and 2011. Per Reuters, he is being detained in a Vatican prison on charges of attempted extortion. 

Vatican News, the state’s official media channel, reported that Alessandro Diddi, promoter of justice for the Church, will decide this week whether to indict Pergolizzi.

“Richard Serra once said, ‘Sidney prefers to hurry slowly,’ and we think that captured him perfectly,” Felsen’s family said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times, which first reported the news. 

Felsen, his fraternity brother Stanley Grinstein, and Kenneth Tyler founded Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited) in 1966. Since then, the workshop has collaborated with a range of renowned artists, among them John Baldessari, Philip Guston, and Man Ray.

Gemini’s output, as well as the friendly relations its founders fostered between printmakers and artists, ushered in a new era for the medium in the United States, effectively raising it to the status of painting and sculpture.

Josef Albers was the first artist invited to make a print; Felstein was known to mail postcards that acted as cold invitations to collaborate. Soon, Robert Rauschenberg followed, becoming one of the most prolific visitors to Gemini.

Rauschenberg’s Booster, from 1967, was the largest lithograph the artist had made as of then, and Claes Oldenburg’s Profile Airflow (1968) was Gemini’s first multiple edition. (Both publications were included in a 1991 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art dedicated to Gemini.) A 2010 Artforum review of a Rauschenberg show cited how significant the shop was to the artist and his peers, offering an environment that gave them “free rein and seemingly unlimited resources.”  

Under those conditions, Gemini became a clubhouse of sorts for Los Angeles’s emergent artist community—the workshop even reportedly hosted raucous all-nighters. And as its network expanded, Gemini became a landing pad for East Coast scenesters, too. Claudine Ise, writing for the Los Angeles Times in 1999, noted that Felsen made Gemini into “an arterial channel between the Los Angeles and New York art worlds.”

Felsen was born in Chicago in 1924, and moved with his family to Los Angeles as a teenager. A dapper dresser often spotted in a seeksucker suit and straw Panama hat, Felsen first worked as an accountant while taking painting and ceramics classes in the evenings at Chouinard Art Institute (now known as CalArts). 

He was an avid amateur photographer, too, and after founding Gemini would frequently take snapshots of famous artist at work. In 2003, he published a collection of photographs in the book The Artist Observed.

In 2016, to mark the 50th anniversary of Gemini, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hosted a survey exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., of noteworthy Gemini projects from 1966 to 2014, many of which had rarely been exhibited in their entirety. Titled “The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L.”, the show included historic pieces by Johns, Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella, as well as more recent series by Serra and Julie Mehretu.

An exhibition devoted to Gemini G.E.L.’s history is on view now at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Even as recognition mounted, friends and peers said Felsen remained unchanged, soft-spoken and dedicated to Gemini up to his death. “It was innocence,” Felsen told the Los Angeles Times in 2016. “We thought it was gonna be a hobby, that it would be fun to hang around the artists, maybe build up a collection.”

On May 31, the University of the Arts, commonly called UArts, informed its approximately 1,100 students and 700 staffers of the imminent closure. Confusion and outrage immediately erupted, as students scrambled for a means to salvage their in-progress degrees. UArts leadership has promised to provide its students a “pathway” to other Philadelphia schools, such as Temple University or Drexel University, while staffers have grown litigious: Only days after the announcement, nine employees filed a class action lawsuit that accuses management of violating a 1988 law that requires most employers with at least 100 employees to provide a 60-day notice of mass closings or layoffs. 

The United Academics of Philadelphia, the union representing UArts professors, has called the decision to close the school “cruel”.

The Philadelphia City Council passed a resolution on June 6 to conduct hearings about the closure. A day later, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office and state lawmakers announced that they were investigating the circumstances of the closure, as well as “any transfer or loss of assets.” 

“We are looking into holding a hearing and seeing what broader investigative powers we can use in the state legislative committees to investigate,” state senator Nikil Saval said in a statement. “It should wake many of us up to the fragility of the arts infrastructure in Philadelphia, which is extraordinary given how little support it gets.”

UArts is a nearly 150-year-old institution with a formerly respected standing in the Philadelphia art community; its storied alumni roster includes Irving Penn, Alex Da Corte, and Jonathan Lyndon Chase. On May 31, however, the university revealed that it had lost accreditation with the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and that it would not offer classes in the fall. Several days later, UArts’s president, Kerry Walk, resigned.

 UArts leadership has cited low enrollment and a dire financial situation as the cause of the closure, stating, “With a cash position that has steadily weakened, we could not cover significant, unanticipated expenses. The situation came to light very suddenly.” The school has not disclosed the details of its finances, but the Philadelphia Inquirer has quoted a board trustee who said at least $40 million was needed to bail UArts out of its crisis.

The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday in the city’s federal court and accuses the school, commonly called UArts, of violating the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act), a 1988 law that requires most employers with at least 100 employees to provide a 60-day notice of mass closings or layoffs. The plaintiffs also accuse the college leadership of withholding wages for hours worked and unused vacation time, a violation of the Pennsylvania Wage Payment Collection Law.

The United Academics of Philadelphia, the union representing UArts professors, called the decision of the UArts board and management “cruel,” and has demanded the board pay staff for all hours worked and provide a severance package.

“This situation reflects a complete failure of leadership,” Eric Lechtzin, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, told Philadelphia Magazine. “It is incomprehensible how they could announce the closing of the university within seven days, with no prior warning to anyone. In fact, I’ve heard from people who recently left tenured positions at other schools to join the faculty and staff of UArts, only to learn mere weeks or months into their new position that UArts is closing.”

On June 7, the school’s last day of operation, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office and state lawmakers announced that they were investigating the circumstances of the closures, as well as “any transfer or loss of assets,” according to the New York Times. 

“We are looking into holding a hearing and seeing what broader investigative powers we can use in the state legislative committees to investigate,” senator Nikil Saval said in a statement. “It should wake many of us up to the fragility of the arts infrastructure in Philadelphia, which is extraordinary given how little support it gets.”

The Philadelphia City Council passed a resolution on June 6 to conduct hearings about the closure.

UArts, a nearly 150-year-old institution with a storied alumni roster that includes Irving Penn, Alex Da Corte, and Jonathan Lyndon Chase, announced its closure on May 31, to the shock of approximately 700 faculty and 1,100 students. In a statement released that day, the university revealed that it had lost accreditation with the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and that it would not offer classes in the fall. A few days later, UArts’s president, Kerry Walk, resigned.

The school has promised to provide its students a “pathway” to other Philadelphia schools, such as Temple University, Drexel University, and Moore College of Art and Design.

On June 2, the school announced that trustees had approved the closure the day prior and that the school would not reopen. Its final day of operation was June 7. The school cited low enrollment and its financial situation as the cause, saying, “With a cash position that has steadily weakened, we could not cover significant, unanticipated expenses. The situation came to light very suddenly.” 

The school has not disclosed the details of its finances, but according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, a board trustee said it would take at least $40 million to salvage the crisis.

Backlash to the announcement was swift, with faculty and students sharing their shocked reactions over the weekend on social media. In one widely shared Reddit post, a user claiming to be a current student alleged that they had received a tuition bill shortly before the closure was made public.

Meanwhile, local media reports stated that Temple University was exploring avenues of aid, including a possible merger with UArts.

“This is a fluid situation,” a Temple spokesperson said. “We are committed to continuing conversations with UArts representatives to explore all options and possible solutions to preserve the arts and the rich legacy of this 150-year old institution.”

“OMA denies it committed any of the unlawful actions alleged in the Amended Counterclaim and denies De Groft is entitled to any of the relief sought,” reads the museum’s court filings, as first quoted by the Orlando Sentinel.

In August 2023, the OMA filed suit against De Groft, accusing him of introducing a series of paintings falsely attributed to Jean-Michael Basquiat for personal profit. The works were exhibited in the now-notorious show “Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat,” which opened in early 2022 and shuttered that June after an FBI raid of the premises.

The works were seized by authorities amid the revelation of a years-long investigation into their origins. The museum also sued the owners of the artwork, however all defendants but De Groft were later dropped from the suit.

De Groft countersued the OMA in November 2023, claiming wrongful termination and defamation. According to him, the former board chairwoman of the OMA, Cynthia Brumback, and an outside legal team for the museum had given the green light for the exhibition, despite being dealt an FBI subpoena in July 2021 for any documents related to the 25 mixed-media paintings.

He is seeking $314,246.40 plus additional expenses as part of his claim of breach of contract, in addition to unspecified compensation for his defamation claim by the OMA, per court documents. De Groft’s defamation case is supported in part by public statements made by Mark Elliott, chairman of the museum’s board of trustees.

“He abused his position of trust, lied to anyone who questioned the provenance of the artwork, created an environment of fear and hostility amongst the staff, and brought great shame to our community by mounting an exhibition of forged works in which he had a hidden financial interest, as discovered by the investigation commissioned by the OMA Board of Trustees and detailed in our Complaint,” Elliott said earlier this year, as published by local media. “At a time when authenticity and provenance are increasingly questioned, we must continue to stand against those like De Groft, who would abuse the process for personal gain.”

According to the museum, the “statements made by Mark Elliott are true and/or based on truthful information. In the alternative, at the time the alleged defamatory statements were made by Mark Elliott, he believed the statements to be true.”

The London institution has long claimed gave British forces permission for the removal of art from Athens in the early 19th century. According to the Greek newspaper Ekathimerini, the Turkish representative at the UNESCO conference questioned the legitimacy of those documents.

“The British Museum acknowledges Greece’s strong desire for the return of the Parthenon Sculptures to Athens. We understand and respect the deep emotions involved,” a museum spokesperson told the Greek news outlet SKAI TV on Tuesday. The spokesperson added that the museum seeks a “new relationship with Greece.”

Relations between Greece and the British Museum have grown strained over the past two years, with progress on a compromise to the centuries-long issue stalled amid public spats.

In 2023, the British Museum, which has held the sculptures since 1832, confirmed that it had been secretly meeting with representatives of the Greek government over a potential loan agreement. Greek culture minister Lina Mendoni said days later that that Greece would not agree to a deal that affirmed the United Kingdom’s ownership claim. She proposed a trade agreement that would ensure treasures from Greek antiquity—if not the Parthenon Marbles, then those of commensurate worth—would always be on display in London. 

That March, Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, stated that there were no plans for Parthenon Marbles to be returned to Greece, describing them as a “huge asset” to the country. Tensions rose again in November and December after a scheduled meeting in London between Sunak and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was abruptly canceled after the latter reneged on a promise not to use his trip to the UK as an opportunity to advocate for the repatriation of the sculptures. In a subsequent statement to press, Mitsotakis expressed his “annoyance” at the cancelation.

That same year, the debate gained a new dimension after the British Museum revealed that more than 1,000 items from its holdings were missing or confirmed stolen. Many of the items had not been cataloged or photographed by the museum, and a number had been identified to the museum as being for sale on eBay before the scandal broke. 

“Our position is clear,” Mendoni, the Greek culture minister, has said. “Should the sculptures be reunited in Athens, Greece is prepared to organize rotating exhibitions of important antiquities that would fill the void.

In early May, the women entered the Centre Pompidou-Metz in northern France and graffitied the glass pane protecting Courbet’s 1886 painting of a women’s nude torso and exposed vulva. The painting was on loan from Paris’s Musée d’Orsay for the show “Lacan, the exhibition. When art meets psychoanalysis,” which examines theories of the unconscious proposed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who once owned the Courbet painting.

Five other works, by artists such as Valie Export, Louise Bourgeois, and Rosmarie Trockel, were also tagged. A photograph by De Robertis, taken during a performance of Mirror of Origin (2014), in which she poses nude beneath Courbet’s work, was also tagged. Meanwhile, an embroidered piece by the French artist Annette Messager, titled I Think Therefore I Suck (1991), was stolen from the museum.

In a video taken of the action, protesters chanted “Me Too” as they were removed from the premises by museum security. 

De Robertis later claimed to have orchestrated the action as part of performance work, titled You Don’t Separate the Woman from the Artist. The title references the ongoing debate about whether art can be appreciated in isolation from the behavior of its creator.

The slogan #MeToo gained prominence in 2017 as part of a global movement against the sexual violence of women. At the peak of the movement’s momentum, a slew high-profile artists, as well as staff in the gallery and museum sectors, faced accusations of sexual harassment or assault.  

De Robertis told the AFP that the performance at the Centre Pompidou-Metz was staged because “the very closed world of contemporary art has remained largely silent until now.” She had previously made headlines for exposing herself in front of L’Origine du Monde, Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), and the Mona Lisa. 

In a statement shared via Medium on May 13, De Robertis wrote: “I violated museums, from the Orsay Museum to the Louvre Museum to the Pompidou Center. I entered them by force, without consent or permission, to claim my place in history.”

Addressing “collectors, art critics, gallery owners, historians, directors of institutions, art centers and museums,” De Robertis denounced “predators” who leverage their power in the art world to exploit vulnerable women artists. Curator Bernard Marcadé, who co-organized the Centre Pompidou-Metz show, was the only person named in the post.

According to AFP, De Robertis has not been detained, although she is barred by court order from entering exhibitions in the Moselle region, which includes part of France and Luxembourg.

Starting at 4:30 p.m. inside the lobby, a group of cultural workers, artists, and New York City community members brandished banners, beat drums, and blew whistles, calling for the museum to condemn the killing of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as disclose and divest its financial ties to Israel. 

Outside the museum, a hundreds-strong march that began in downtown Brooklyn ended at its glass facade. Barred from entering the museum, some protestors plastered posters to the doors; others  climbed the steps to its exterior mezzanine and upward its glass ceiling, finally unfurling a banner across the museum’s neoclassical cornice that read “Free Palestine From Genocide”.

Police followed the protestors to the roof, while a helicopter circled overhead.

In a statement provided to press ahead of the protest by Cultural Front for Free Palestine, the newly formed advocacy coalition decried the lack of public statements from major art institutions on Israel’s seven-month long military campaign in Gaza, which has—as of publication—resulted in the death of more than 30,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry. The statement paid particular attention to Israel’s ongoing offensive of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where some one million Palestinian had been seeking refuge. (Most have since fled amid the assault, the New York Times and the UN reported earlier this week.)

The statement calls for the museum to publicly recognize the war in Gaza as a genocide, citing evidence put forth by human rights entities such as the International Federation for Human Rights and the UN Special Rapporteur. The Cultural Front said it is also demanding a full disclosure of investments linked to companies that “profit from the arming of Israel” and a subsequent divestment from corporations linked to Israel, in addition to “all arms and surveillance manufacturers.”

“The Museum relies heavily on subsidies from the City of New York, along with the granting of the land it sits on, and so its financial doings should be publicly accountable. That process of accountability should also involve the disclosure of funds from donors and trustees who are heavily implicated in the Occupation,” the statement added.

The Brooklyn Museum has previously been targeted by pro-Palestine demonstrations. On December 8, around 20 protestors affiliated with the activist groups Decolonize This Place and Within Our Lifetime staged a guerilla action inside the lobby, echoing the calls of similar demonstrations to “disclose and divest.” The next day, hundreds of protestors gathered at the museum as the starting point of a planned march that swept across the Brooklyn Bridge and ended at City Hall. Both protests called out the museum’s corporate partnership with Bank of New York Melllon, which has investments in Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems and has supported the Friends of Israel Defense Force Donor Advised Fund. (The Bank told FT in April that it invests in Elbit “as a result of requirements by its passive index investment strategies.”)

Pro-Palestine protestors have also demonstrated at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Famous art schools, such as Cooper Union in New York and the Rhode Island School of Design, have experienced occupations and walkouts by students, faculty, and alumni dissatisfied with a presumed apathy to the war in Gaza. 

“People are assembling in the spirit of reparation and care for communities conquered and looted by colonialism,” the Cultural Front said. “These include far-flung places and neighborhoods just a stone’s throw from here. Land, wealth, and culture are among the historical plunder, and institutions like the Brooklyn Museum are a direct beneficiary.”

On Friday at the Brooklyn Museum, police and museum security staff dispelled protestors inside the museum lobby—no protestors entered the galleries—around 5:20 p.m. By then, the floor was scattered with synthetic red poppy petals, which has been adopted as a symbol of resistance by protestors due to the flower’s indigeneity to Palestine. The protestors, holding banners that read among other slogans, “Silence = Death,” remained peaceful. Several tents had been erected in the lobby by protestors intending to transition into an overnight occupation. 

By 6 p.m. protestors had gradually moved away from the museum entrance — and descended from the atrium roof— though a crowd remained outside. Clad in keffiyehs and waving the Palestinian flag, a group scrawled slogans across Deborah Kass’ OY/YO installation: “Fuck Bullshit Museum” and “NYPD KKK”; arrests were eventually made. Police began removing the banner from the museum (with apparent difficulty) to a chorus of boos. 

The Brooklyn Museum did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.