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The Headlines
TRUMP, REDACTED. The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery quietly removed wall text mentioning President Donald Trump’s two impeachments after putting a new portrait of him on display in its “America’s Presidents” exhibition, the New York Times reported. The original label pointed to several of Trump’s political accomplishments, including his appointment of three Supreme Court justices and what it called a “historic comeback in the 2024 election” after his loss to Joe Biden four years earlier. It also noted that Trump had been impeached twice, for abuse of power and for inciting an insurrection after the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The text added that he was acquitted by the Senate both times. That reference to the impeachments had reportedly been a sore spot for the Trump administration for years. It is not the first time that Trump has targeted the National Portrait Gallery in particular: he claimed last year that to have fired Kim Sajet, then the gallery’s director, who continued reporting to work before resigning.
A PAINTER OF MEMORY. Latin America lost one of its most important artists when Colombian painter Beatriz González died this past Friday at 93, ARTnews reports. She gained recognition during the 1960s and ’70s for paintings that remade historical works by artists such as Raphael and other Old Masters, this time in a garish color palette. Those works were a commentary on the mass reproduction of images, and though some later claimed she was a Pop artist because of these pieces, González said she was not a part of that movement. Then, during the ’80s, González pivoted, making paintings based on pictures related to political upheaval in her country. In the past decade, her art has been seen widely, including at Documenta 14 in 2017 and in a traveling retrospective due to make its way to the Barbican Centre in London this February.
The Digest
The Bayeux Tapestry’s rare journey from France to the British Museum in London is officially in the planning stages, with the fragile linen set to travel in a bespoke, climate-controlled crate fitted with advanced vibration-dampening technology. [The Times of London]
“Mammoth” bones kept at the University of Alaska’s Museum of the North for 70 years turned out to be from an entirely different animal. [Science Alert]
Dylis Blum, a longtime curator of fashion at the Philadelphia Art Museum, died at 77, having served 38 years at the institution. [WHYY]
The sudden closure of Cape Town’s cherished Irma Stern Museum last year has ignited public outrage and suspicion. [The Art Newspaper]
The Digest
ESCAPE FROM SUBURBIA. David Bowie’s childhood home in London is about to undergo some serious ch-ch-changes. The modest terraced house at 4 Plaistow Grove, where Bowie (born David Robert Jones) lived from the ages of eight to 20, has been acquired by the Heritage of London Trust and will open to the public next year, the Standard wrote. It was here, in a tiny bedroom above a former railway worker’s cottage, that Bowie wrote early songs and began plotting his escape from suburbia. Faithfully restored to its early 1960s look, the house will trace the moment an ordinary schoolboy started becoming extraordinary.
