The Ciutat de la Justícia by David Chipperfield Architects, in Barcelona, Spain.
Agefotostock/Alamy
Chipperfield is not interested in creating something iconic or instantly recognisable as his. Instead, he sees architecture as a service, a vehicle for civic and public good.
Large painting of a crocodile attributed to Majumbu along with two child hand stencils.
Photograph courtesy of the Melbourne Museum, object 019930, object size 2.94m by 1.03m
Majumbu’s work sits in the Melbourne Museum, but until now he has not been named as the artist.
The Wellcome Collection gallery in central London.
William Barton
Closing racist exhibitions is a good step, but it doesn’t go far enough to decolonise our museums – an expert explains.
Many NFT creators come from a practice of 3D modelling, graphic design, animation or video game design.
(Shutterstock)
Creators of NFT art are organizing themselves into new art scenes, but they are still searching for cultural legitimacy while museums remain skittish.
The Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza.
Ashy Cat Inc
As the Grand Egyptian Museum begins welcoming visitors ahead of its opening in 2023, one object remains conspicuously absent.
Benin Bronzes: 944 objects looted in the 19th century from the Kingdom of Benin are in the British Museum in London.
Mltz via Shutterstock
Momentum is growing for the restitution of objects, such as the Benin Bronzes, stolen during colonialism. Listen to The Conversation Weekly podcast.
Just Stop Oil via AP
In 1914, suffragette Mary Richardson slashed a painting London’s National Gallery to attract publicity to Emmeline Pankhurst’s imprisonment.
Getty Images
Despite causing hurt and offence, the legality of removing a whale fossil from the West Coast remains unclear. So what rules and laws govern amateur fossil hunting, and should they be strengthened?
Police officers patrol the entrance of the Tate Modern gallery, in London, Oct. 15, 2022, after climate protesters threw soup over glass covering Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ in London’s National Gallery.
(AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)
Climate protesters are destabilizing the idea that public galleries are safe spaces for works of art, held in public trust.
Scientists have used author Henry David Thoreau’s notes to inform studies of climate change in eastern Massachusetts.
Tom Stohlman/Flickr
Journals, museum collections and other historical sources can provide valuable data for modern ecological studies. But just because a source is old doesn’t make it useful.
ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy
It might be provocative but this sort of direct action is important.
An artefact is returned to the king of Benin in Nigeria.
Kola Sulaimon/AFP via Getty Images
Art stolen from African kingdoms is a knowledge system plundered by colonialists, who must take historical responsibility.
View from inside the Great Southern Land gallery at the National Museum of Australia.
Supplied NMA.
The National Museum of Australia has just opened the most significant redevelopment in its history.
Sotheby’s sold a 77 million-year-old Gorgosaurus skeleton for over $6 million in July 2022.
Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images
Derided as ‘toys for the rich,’ the specimens being bought and sold raise broader questions about the relationship between science and capitalism.
Western museums need to meaningfully come to terms with their colonial past and present to fulfil their role as places of knowledge.
(Shutterstock)
Western museums are beginning to re-evaluate how they portray cultures and history and return stolen artifacts. But for change to be meaningful, it needs to be truly inclusive.
National Library of Australia.
Shutterstock
There is not a single historian, publisher or archivist on the review panels whose feedback will help shape Australia’s new cultural policy
The new home of the Mapungubwe Archive.
University of Pretoria Museums/Mapungubwe Archive
The Mapungubwe site offers evidence of precolonial innovation and technology.
A family poses in front of their sod house in Custer County, Neb., in 1887.
Bettmann/Bettmann via Getty Images
The ways Americans talk about firearms is full of contradictions, two communication scholars explain – and that powerfully shapes the country’s approach to gun policy.
A skeleton of an Allosaurus on display at Drouot auction house in Paris, in October 2020. It sold for three million euros, double the asking price.
(AP Photo/Thibault Camus)
The sale of fossils at auction houses reflects a problematic trend of privileging profit over knowledge and education.
The bark painting depicting a barramundi that Namadbara created for Spencer at Oenpelli in 1912 and that he identified in the interview with Lance Bennett in 1967, now in Museums Victoria Spencer/Cahill Collection (object X 19909).
The Spencer/Cahill Collection at Museums Victoria contains approximately 170 bark paintings – and now we can name one of the artists behind them.