In 2026, a museum dedicated to AI art feels inevitable. And on June 20, one will open in Los Angeles. DATALAND—tag line: Where human imagination meets the creative potential of machines—was announced in the fall of 2024, and will open in the Grand LA, a mixed-use complex in downtown Los Angeles designed by Frank Gehry.

DATALAND was co-founded by Refik Anadol, the digital art pioneer who came to fame in 2022 thanks to his wildly popular generative art installation Underpervised in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art, and Efsun Erkılıç, a painter and art producer. Both artists are Turkish, but have lived and worked in LA for years; they co-founded Anadol’s studio in the city in 2014.

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 “LA is the center of creativity,” Anadol said in a statement. “It is a city that defines the future of art, music, cinema, architecture, and more, and we can’t wait to open DATALAND’s flagship location in our adopted home.”

The museum will include five gallery spaces that will cover 25,000 total square feet; an additional 10,000 square feet are set aside for the technologies and hardware required to run the type of cutting edge digital art that will be on view at DATALAND.

DATALAND’S first show, naturally, is a Refik Anadol Studio project. “Machine Dreams: Rainforest” will utilize artificial intelligence (in this case, a model trained on various ecological datasets) to “translate the intelligence of the natural world into interrelated sensory experiences.” The show will be on view through Jan. 31, 2027. There will even be a version of Anadol’s long-running Infinity Room, but instead of Kusama-style mirrored rooms filled with lights and spherical objects, DATALAND visitors will hear a 1987 recording of the now-extinct Hawaiian bird species and smell AI-generated scents.

There is no ticketing information available on the DATALAND website, just the option to sign up for presale information. Membership starts at $350/year.

Excavations at Kolona, an archaeological site on the Greek island of Aegina, have uncovered a trove of gold jewelry dating to the Middle Bronze Age. The discovery was made inside a large stone building near a defensive wall built during the ancient settlement’s expansion, just outside what is generally considered the site’s inner area.

The site, located near Aegina’s modern northwest harbor, was under continuous excavation last year, with the jewelry hoard marking one of the season’s highlights, according to the Greek Ministry of Culture.

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Among the discoveries was a variety of gold ornaments: disc-shaped pendants, some double-sided and others featuring biconical elements; delicate gold plaques; and beads of carnelian—a reddish-orange chalcedony quartz, also known as “sunset stone,” which was associated with courage in ancient Rome. All together, the items likely comprise a single piece of jewelry, likely a necklace or pendant.

Archaeologists noted that some of the unearthed gold bears similarities to objects associated with the so-called Aegina Treasure, a Minoan gold hoard reportedly discovered on the island of the same name. The collection has been part of the British Museum since 1892. Kolona itself has a long history of occupation by various civilizations and was also an ancient site of worship. Its best-known ruin, a temple of Apollo dating to the 6th century BC, represents just one layer in successive settlements at the site that reaches the Byzantine era.

The latest excavation is overseen by Alexander Sokolicek of the University of Salzburg, in collaboration with the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Athens and under the auspices of Greek heritage authorities. The discovery was first reported by Heritage Daily.

Artists ranging from Mickalene Thomas to Tammy Nguyen are banding together to sell more than $1 million in art at Sotheby’s next month, with all the funds going toward Yale University’s MFA art program, among the most esteemed ones of its kind in the country. All of the works will appear in a contemporary art day sale during the marquee auctions.

The most expensive piece of the bunch, a 2005 Richard Prince photograph of a clothed, adult Brooke Shields from his “Spiritual America” series, has a $500,000–$700,000 estimate. That may be a fraction of Prince’s $9.7 million auction record, but if the photograph sells at the low end of its estimate, the intake could still be enough to pay the tuition for 10 MFA students for one year. The Prince piece comes to auction from a committee that includes Yvonne Force and Leo Villareal, Iwan and Manuela Wirth, Esther Kim, Carol LeWitt, Linda Macklowe, Yana Peel, Komal Shah, Thomas, Josef Vascovitz and Lisa Goodman, and Lucas Zwirner.

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Speaking by phone with ARTnews, Kymberly Pinder, the dean of the Yale School of Art, said she was hoping to raise somewhere between $1 million and $2 million through the Sotheby’s sale. “It will definitely increase how much I can give to students who are in need,” she said.

When she was hired in June 2021, Pinder set out to find a way to wipe the cost of tuition for Yale’s MFA art program, as the university’s graduate drama program would do that month through a $150 million donation from David Geffen. “The word ‘ethical’ came into my head,” Pinder said. “I was like, ‘This is just not ethical.’ It should be an ethical MFA. People are giving so much time and resources toward something for two years that it shouldn’t be a punishment when they leave. They shouldn’t be saddled with so much debt.”

Annual tuition for the Yale School of Art currently stands at just under $50,200—a tough barrier to clear for most aspiring artists looking to attend a program that still acts as a feeder for many New York institutions and galleries. In order to pay that price, artists often take out large loans. This led artist Josh Kline to remark, in a recent essay for October, that the Yale School of Art is “powered by student debt,” just like many other university-run programs of its kind.

Pinder said she had already raised $11 million toward meeting her goal for making tuition for Yale’s graduate art program free, though she declined to state an exact number, saying that the economic and political climate had shifted it since she began the initiative. Still, she said, “we’re pretty far from making the school completely tuition-free.”

The works headed to Sotheby’s include an array of works by Yale alumni. Some of those alumni are historical—for example, Walker Evans and Josef Albers. Others, however, are more recent: Dominic Chambers has a painting of the artist Shikeith with a $40,000–$60,000 price tag, while Thomas has a glittery painting of the dancer Josephine Baker pegged at $250,000–$300,000. Also included are works by Elaine Reichek, Barkley L. Hendricks, and Howardena Pindell.

Do Ho Suh, a Yale MFA alum who will have a Tate Modern survey last year, donated $200,000–$300,000 work on paper composed of thread arranged to form staircases. Suh described consigning the piece as a natural extension of his longtime support of the Yale School of Art. “I started to make small donations as soon as I graduated, because I wanted to give something back to the school, even though I was struggling young artist,” he said in a phone conversation.

The Korean-born artist said he loved his time at Yale, but because he was born abroad, he struggled. “Because of all the expenses, it was very difficult for me—I couldn’t have any financial aid because the grants were only for Americans,” he said. “So, it was really challenging. And my understanding is it’s getting harder. That’s one of the reasons I decided to donate this work, to support young talent.”

The Box in Los Angeles announced this weekend that it would close after 19 years in business.

Its final show was a two-venue collaboration with Parker Gallery for the late California artist Wally Hedrick, which ran through April 4. The gallery said they would mark the closure with a fashion show for Johanna Went, done in collaboration with artist and playwright Asher Hartman on June 6.

“While this decision has been brewing for some time, it has landed with urgency, shaped by a set of circumstances that made continuing impossible,” gallery founder Mara McCarthy wrote in a statement sent to its email listserv and posted on Instagram. “It feels right to end this way, with the kind of work we always existed to support: radical, enlightening, and not easily contained by the commercial marketplace.”

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Located at 805 Traction Avenue in downtown LA, The Box opened in June 2007 with a multichannel video installation by Spandau Parks. In her statement, McCarthy described the impetus behind creating The Box as a collaboration with her father, the iconic LA-based artist Paul McCarthy. Though active since the 1970s, Paul did not reach wider acclaim until the 1990s with his inclusion in the landmark 1992 exhibition “Helter Skelter” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.

Calling it an “artist-formed space” since its beginning, Mara said The Box “was shaped as a response to his market success, which arrived late in his career,” with the aim of uplifting the work of Paul’s peers, like Barbara T. Smith and Simone Forti, who had not yet achieved success. “The Box formed to help fill this void,” Mara wrote.

The gallery would dedicate its third exhibition to Smith, presenting two monumental works by the artist made in the mid-1960s and early ’70s. Subsequent exhibitions would be for Forti, Hedrick, Paul McCarthy, John Altoon, Naotaka Hiro Stan Vanderbeek, Judith Bernstein, and Leigh Ledare. Through this exhibition program, which shed a light on a generation of LA artists, The Box quickly established itself as a venturesome gallery and one of the most important in the city.

“While our program has often resembled what a nonprofit art space might embrace, we made a deliberate choice to engage the marketplace as a for-profit gallery, with the capacity to actively shape a presence for experimental artists whose work had otherwise gone unrecognized,” Mara wrote in her statement. “The truth is that our program has been sustained in large part by the generous support of McCarthy Studios, and by my mother and father’s steadfast vision to seed the type of arts community and economy they hoped to see bloom. But the market has not always readily embraced the work we champion.”  

She attributed the decision to close in part to the changing economics around support for her father’s work, as well as the fact that every member of her family lost their homes in the Eaton fire that ravaged Altadena and other parts of the San Gabriel Vallery in January 2025.

The Box is the latest in a wave of gallery closures that have affected several commercial enterprises around the world, but particularly in Los Angeles. Earlier this week, Marian Goodman Gallery announced it would close its LA space, while last year, Tanya Bonakdar announced it would close its LA outpost. LA Louver, which had been in business for 50 years, closed its doors in September, shifting to private dealing, while the summer also saw dealer Tim Blum close his LA gallery after 30 years.

On Instagram, the post had garnered nearly 2,000 likes and over 300 comments by Saturday morning. Clara Kim, the chief curator of MOCA LA, wrote, “Sending much love and respect, Mara. Thanks to you, Robert and The Box for an incredible run of thoughtful, provocative shows, championing artists and art scenes from the past and present. We have all been better for it. What a major loss for LA.”

Stuart Comer, chief curator of media and performance at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, added, “Mara, you moved the needle in ways very few can, have, or will again. Sending so much love to you and your family. ”

In her statement, Mara McCarthy added, “As a woman, a curator, and someone who long ago understood the power of art to alter the course of a life, I will not stop being present in this world, and I will not stop advocating for the artists I believe in. It has been among my deepest joys to exhibit and foster their work. Over the years I have come to understand that supporting artists takes many forms, and exhibitions are only one of them. What many artists need most is conversation, presence, and genuine engagement, and that will not stop for me.”

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Good morning!

The Headlines

RUSSIA ROW. The organizers of Venice Biennale and the Russian Pavilion commissioner discussed plans to open the latter’s exhibition during the Biennale’s vernissage and then close it to the public once the international exhibition debuts on May 9, according to multiple reports in Italian media. The “reduced” participation appears to have been a solution for complying with European sanctions that prohibit financial support or direct collaboration with state-backed Russian entities, according to Italian media Open, which first published emails between the Biennale Foundation president Pietrangelo Buttafucoco, Biennale general director Andrea Del Mercato, and Russian Pavilion commissioner Anastasia Karneeva. Those messages outline a project to have Russian artists perform in the pavilion from May 5–8 and then install multimedia documentation of those performances, to be seen from windows outside the closed pavilion. The messages date back as early as June 2025 and suggest the Biennale organizers worked to help Russian artists obtain visas. In an Il Giornale  report yesterday, Biennale organizers insisted they “acted in strict compliance with applicable national and international laws and within the limits of its own powers and responsibilities. No prohibition of European sanctions were circumvented, as stated by journalistic reports…We are therefore astonished that such distorted reports emerged from the review of internal documents.”

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GOUDEAU AT THE GOLDEN GATE. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has just hired Matthew Goudeau as the city’s executive director of arts and culture, a job that didn’t exist until now, reports KQED . The newly created, “complex” position will entail serving as the mayor’s “principal advisor” on arts and culture policies and overseeing the city’s three public art agencies: the SF Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, and the Film Commission. Goudeau is the current chief development officer for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The announcement comes amid painful closures of arts institutions and schools around town. “Our arts community has been holding a lot of anxiety because of many uncertainties in the sector, largely centered on the city’s role in the arts ecosystem. This hire was among the top concerns, and now we can cross it off our list,” said Rachelle Axel, executive director of Artists for a Better Bay Area, speaking to reporters yesterday.

The Digest

After the attack at a press gala in Washington D.C. on Saturday, Republican leaders are calling for the swift approval of President Trump’s planned White House ballroom, due to safety reasons. [The New York Times]

North Korea has built a “Memorial Museum of Military Operations Abroad and Combat Successes” in honor of the country’s soldiers who died fighting with Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. [State news agency KCNA]

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s 25-foot sandstone Buddha sculpture, in homage to statues destroyed in Afghanistan by the Taliban, has opened on New York’s High Line Plinth. [ArtDependence]

Artist and curator Liu Ding and art historian Carol Yinghua Lu will curate the 19th edition of the Istanbul Biennial, running September 18 to November 14, 2027. [Artforum]

Philippe Fouquié, co-founder of a beloved multi-disciplinary art space La Friche la Belle-de-Mai in Marseille, has died at 82. [Le Monde]

The Barjeel Art Foundation has begun construction on a new modern and contemporary art museum in Sharjah, UAE, with plans to open by January, 2028. [ArtAsiaPacific]

The Kicker

BROKEN MIRRORS. Tehran-based sculptor Aref Montazeri’s career was on an upward trajectory until bombs began to fall around him nearly two months ago, reports the Wall Street Journal . The 39-year-old artist was finally gaining recognition abroad for his contorted, geometric sculptures made of thousands of hand-cut mirror shards reaching as high as 27 feet. Now, however, simply getting art supplies is a challenge, as his life and career have been upended by the regional war. A planned exhibition at New York’s Leila Heller gallery has been indefinitely postponed, and his own travel is severely restricted. But the artist says he has not given up. “I always arrive at the studio early in the morning,” he said. “Nothing, not even war, should prevent us from pursuing what we aim for.” He later added: “I may not be able to control everything, but the studio remains a place where I can hold on to hope.”

A newly excavated Roman-era tomb found at Al-Bahnasa, site of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, offers insights into Egyptian funerary practices during the Greek and Roman periods (332 BCE–641 CE). The find, announced by the Egyptian Tourism and Antiquities Ministry, was made by a team of Egyptian and Spanish researchers led by archeologists Esther Pons of Spain’s National Archaeological Museum and Maite Mascort of the University of Barcelona.  

Among the contents of the tomb were several mummies elaborately wrapped in decorated linen; alongside them the team found three gold amulets shaped like tongues and one made of copper, objects that would allow the dead to speak in the afterlife. The archaeologists also noted traces of gold leaf on some of the mummies, suggesting elaborate funerary rituals.

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In a statement, Sherif Fathy, Egypt’s Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, said the discovery adds to a growing list of important finds at the site; other Greco-Roman-era objects unearthed at Al-Bahnasa by the same team have included terracotta statuettes of Isis-Aphrodite, a form of the Egyptian goddess Isis that incorporates features of the Greek deity Aphrodite.

The area around Al-Bahnasa is known for yielding papyri dating from Greek and Roman times; found buried with one of the mummies was a papyrus containing a passage from the section of Homer’s Iliad known as the “Catalogue of Ships,” which lists the Greek forces that fought in the Trojan War. According to Hisham el-Leithy, Secretary-General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, the discovery “adds an important literary and historical dimension to the site.”

The Venice Biennale has revealed the members of the five-person jury that will decide the Golden Lions for the 2026 edition. The president of the jury is Solange Oliveira Farkas, who will be joined by Zoe Butt, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Marta Kuzma, and Giovanna Zapperi.

Farkas founded the Videobrasil Biennial in São Paulo in 1983, serving as its artistic director until 2004. Farkas is currently the founder and artistic director of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, which supports the biennial. From 2007 to 2010, she was the director and chief curator of the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia. She has organized solo shows for artists like Isaac Julien, Joseph Beuys, and Sophie Calle, as well as the 2024–25 exhibition “Videobrasil. Needs no Translation” at the GES-2 in Moscow.

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Dyangani Ose is the former director of MACBA, Barcelona, who resigned in February after the museum ruled that her role as artistic director of the 2027 Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial was a conflict of interest. She previously served as director and chief curator of the Showroom in London, senior curator at Creative Time in New York, and curator of international art at Tate Modern. She is a co-curator of the traveling exhibition “Project a Black Planet – The Art and Culture of Panafrica,” which is currently on view at MACBA.

Kuzma is a professor of art at the Yale School of Art and served as its dean from 2016 to 2021. As the director of Office for Contemporary Art (OCA) Norway, she served as a curator of Norway’s 2011 and 2013 pavilions and commissioner for its 2009 pavilion. She was a member of the curatorial team for Documenta 13 in 2012, and she was the founding director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv. More recently, for the NGO Ribbon International, she curated “Faktura 10,” which focused on “artist practices evolving within the immediacies of the war and its aftermath” and was staged in the Ukraine and internationally in 2025.

Butt is an independent curator and writer who is the founder of in-tangible institute, the curatorial platform focused on Southeast Asian art. Zapperi is a full professor of contemporary art history at the University of Geneva; she is a co-curator of the 2019–20 exhibition “Defiant Muses. Delphine Seyrig and Feminist Video Collectives in France, 1970s–1980s,” which opened at the Reina Sofía in Madrid.

For each edition of the Art Biennale, the jury votes on the winners for two Golden Lions: best pavilion (officially called the “Golden Lion for Best National Participation”) and for best artist in the main exhibition (officially “Golden Lion for Best Participant in the International Exhibition”). The jury also awards a Silver Lion to a “promising young participant” in the main exhibition. They can also award one special mention to a second national pavilion and up to two special mentions to two artists in the main exhibition, though they are not required to.

Typically, the jury is selected by the Biennale’s curator, which for 2026 is Koyo Kouoh. However, Kouoh passed away in May 2025, weeks before the title and curatorial theme for her exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” was to be announced. The Biennale decided to move forward with the realization of Kouoh’s exhibition, with a team of five curatorial advisers executing it on her behalf.

Because Kouoh also did not select a jury for the Biennale, the appointment was instead done by Biennale’s board of directors, which is led by the Biennale’s president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, who is appointed by Italy’s culture minister. The board’s other three members include Luigi Brugnaro, the mayor of Venice and the board’s vice president; Tamara Gregoretti, an Italian journalist who serves at the culture ministry’s representative; and Luca Zaia, the former president of Italy’s Veneto region, of which Venice is the capital.

In addition to the in-competition Golden Lions, the Biennale’s curator often selects a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, which historically has been announced ahead of the artist list being revealed. Because Kouoh died before selecting the lifetime achievement awards, this edition of the Biennale will not have any.

Outside of Kouoh’s exhibition, the Biennale has also faced controversy and scrutiny by both the art world and European and Italian politicians in the past month since the national pavilions were confirmed, due to the inclusion of Israel and Russia. Alleging that Russia’s participation could be a violation of European sanctions over the country’s ongoing war in Ukraine, the EU has threatened that it would cut its €2 million grant to the 2028 Biennale,. It confirmed that it would do so during a press conference this week.

Gregoretti reportedly did not inform the culture ministry that Russia, who has not participated since 2019, would be included in the official line-up. Last month, Italian culture minister Alessandro Giuli called for her resignation.

When the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., launched Across the Nation last spring, it wasn’t clear how long the initiative to lend artworks from its collection to regional American museums would last. At the time, the NGA—with financial support from billionaire art collector and museum trustee Mitchell Rales—committed to lend up to ten artworks to ten partner institutions in in Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Utah, and Washington, covering expenses related to travel, installation, insurance, and marketing.

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Now, Rales has stepped up with an additional $116 million donation to endow Across the Nation in perpetuity. (Rales and his brother, Steven Rales, founded the science and technology company Danaher Corporation in 1984.) Rales has been collecting contemporary art since the 1980s, much of which makes up the collection at Glenstone, a private museum in Potomac, Maryland, that Rales founded with his then-wife, Emily Wei Rales, in 2006.

The gift is timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the founding of America. “I have long admired the National Gallery’s commitment to national service and sharing artistic excellence with all people,” Rales said in a statement.

Rales has been a trustee of the National Gallery since 2006 and served as president of the board from 2019 to 2024.  “We have an incredible asset base in the form of 160,000 works of art, most of which end up in storage for long periods of time, because you just can’t show it all,” Rales told the New York Times. “And so I started to say, ‘What do we need to do to put the word “national” into the National Gallery of Art?’”

The first cycle of Across the Nation’s two-year loans—which brought, for example, paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko, and Nancy Graves to the Anchorage Museum of Art and a portrait by Rembrandt to the Denver Art Museum—will wrap up in 2027; the next cycle will run from 2027 to ’29, with new partner museums to be announced.

The removal of a controversial artwork in the exhibition “Storage Room,” which was curated by art students Erik Siegel and Angeles Juarez-Ruiz, is causing quite the stir beyond the walls of Dartmouth College’s Black Family Visual Arts Center (BFVAC). The art center opened on Dartmouth’s campus in 2012, thanks to a $48 million gift from billionaire financier and art collector—and 1973 Dartmouth alum—Leon Black and his wife Debra, whose friendship and business dealings with Jeffrey Epstein are well documented.

Black stepped down as the board chair of the Museum of Modern Art in 2021, after three years in the role. He has remained on the museum’s board, however, and as recently as in March of this year, former MoMA director Glenn Lowery referred to Black as a “solid trustee.”

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The artwork in question, titled Something Rotten and attributed to Siegel and fellow art student Roan Wade, is made up of 20 moldy beef sticks arranged into a smiley face formation over the art center’s dedication wall, which acknowledges Leon and Debra Black and four other Black family members, two of whom (Benjamin and Alexander) also graduated from Dartmouth, in 2006 and 2011, respectively.

Something Rotten was removed on April 14, one week after the show opened, according to The Dartmouth. The artwork’s wall label includes the phrase “Ah man, the guy loved jerky. You didn’t know?” A search of the Epstein Files reveals over 300 references to “jerky.” The Dartmouth quotes an email from Epstein with the subject line “Leon Black’s office address,” sent on Nov. 16, 2012 (two months after the BFVAC opened): “Jojo is here and will walk the jerky over to Jeffrey. . . Please you just go on your own to Leon’s office. Melanie is Leon’s assistant. I will alert Melanie you are coming to see Jeffrey. Reply back please! :)”

Roan Wade, one of the two artists responsible for the installation, identifies as an anti-capitalist artist and activist on their website. They told The Dartmouth that Something Rotten is meant to call attention to a “pervasive culture of sexual violence and gender-based violence at Dartmouth that has existed long before Leon Black was a student here and long after.”

Tricia Treacy, chair of Dartmouth’s studio art department, said that the problem was the location of the piece on the BFVAC’s dedication wall rather than in the center’s Nearburg Gallery, where the other artworks in “Storage Room” were on view. It is, however, hard to image the piece having the same impact on a blank gallery wall. The Dartmouth was unable to confirm if a photograph of the work in situ is in fact now on view in the Nearburg Gallery.

The artwork is part of an ongoing effort—by both current students and alumni organizations—to remove Black’s name from the art center, an idea the college’s board of trustees says it will begin to address at its next meeting in June, according to the Valley News.

Many groups, however, feel that merely committing to study “naming across campus” is too slow and tepid a response. “Regardless of whether Epstein held an official title, files confirm that within his capacity as director and personal consultant to Black, Epstein advised and planned Black’s donations to Dartmouth,” said the college’s Student Government Association and the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault. “Those donations are a financial scar on this institution.”

Another day, another setback for Berlin‘s long awaited Berlin Modern, as moisture damage in the building’s shell and microbial contamination in other parts of the structure have forced the postponement of the museum to 2030.

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation announced the delay earlier this week, according to Monopol, after the Berlin-Brandenburg Broadcasting Corporation broke the story on the issues.

The latest delay adds approximately eight months to the construction timeline for the Herzog & de Meuron-designed building, which was originally scheduled to open this year as the Museum of the 20th Century.

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“All available measures were taken to repair the damage as quickly as possible, and construction did not have to be halted,” an SPK spokesperson told Monopol. The Neue Nationalgalerie plans to begin exhibiting art in the building before its official opening, as that institution can only display a portion of its collection at its current premises.

The museum has faced multiple setbacks and criticism over its design since groundbreaking began in December 2019. At the time, completion was scheduled for 2026, but was later pushed to 2028. During the topping out ceremony last October, the museum said the date was being pushed again to 2029.

As ARTnews reported in 2022, the museum project has drawn considerable scrutiny from architecture and conservation critics since groundbreaking, with many pointing to flaws in the construction plan and unsustainable design choices, like the use of a concrete and an energy-intensive ventilation system. The cost of the project has ballooned as well, from an original projection of €200 million to €507 million, according to recent estimates.

The building project, an extension of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, officially began in 2019 when German officials unveiled plans to build an exhibition space that would hold a large collection of art produced by European artists in the 20th century, including works by Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

Herzog & de Meuron, the Basel-based firm behind the Tate Modern, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, won the architectural commission in 2016 after a competitive design process. The Museum has said that the idea of the building’s design is to serve as “an open and connecting element in the Kulturforum,” integrating with the area’s existing cultural institutions.