“We no longer see any prospect of success,” the group said in a statement.

In November 2022, Vienna’s Leopold Art Museum was targeted by the group when members threw black paint onto a glass barrier protecting Gustav Klimt’s painting Death and Life. The demonstration, which created the illusion that the painting’s surface had been damaged, was part of a two-year-long effort to raise alarm over worsening effects of the global climate crisis.

Last month, members of the collective disrupted traffic at several European airports. The act was days after the European Union’s climate monitoring service recorded the highest global temperature documented since 1940, with the daily average reaching 62.87 degrees Fahrenheit.

Scrutiny from Austria’s conservative government stoked public outcry and spurred significant fines. In a statement, Last Generation’s Austrian chapter called the government “incompetent” for what it described as their ongoing failure to implement more stringent climate policy. The group had previously advocated for climate protections to be passed into law under the Austrian constitution.

Austria’s conservative People’s Party (OeVP), which has majority control over the country’s government, lauded the disbandment of what they labeled an “extremist group” of 280 activists. “After numerous court cases, they have finally realized that Austria’s streets are not a legal vacuum and that there is no fundamental right to their sabotage actions,” the party said in a statement.

The group said it will put the remaining funds it has received from donors toward covering outstanding legal costs.

The return comes eight years after members of Heymann’s family filed an initial claim for the drawing, titled Two Female Dancers, in February 2016 through New York’s Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO), an agency that deals with inquiries on works of art displaced during World War II.

“The resolution of this claim was a culmination of the hard work and dedication of the Holocaust Claims Processing Office and its partnership with the Brücke Museum,” said Adrienne A. Harris, the Superintendent of New York’s Department of Financial Services (DFS), a branch that oversaw the return of the drawing to Heyman’s descendants. “This settlement provides a measure of closure and justice for the Heymann family and further preserves Pechstein’s legacy.”

Heymann began collecting Pechstein’s work in 1909. WIth the Nazis having risen to power in Germany, the Heymann family fled the country in 1936, leaving behind their residential property and art collection. The works were later confiscated by German forces and labeled “degenerate art,” a designation that Third Reich officials gave to hundreds of works produced by Jewish artists at the time. The museum purchased the work in 1971 from a gallery in Berlin.

Kendra Heymann Sagoff, one of the Heymann heirs involved in the drawing’s restitution, expressed gratitude for the formalized return. “The HCPO team’s appreciation of the uniquely personal nature of the Heymann Pechstein Memorial collection and their unwavering commitment to justice have resulted in the first restitution of a Pechstein work to the Heymann family in more than 75 years,” she said.

In a joint statement, the Brücke Museum’s Director, Lisa Marei Schmidt, said the successful return is a testament to “ethical, legal solutions” that are often complicated by generational changes and differing policies on restitution.

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Bezos, the founder of Amazon, saw his net worth drop by $15.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. And Ellison, head of software giant Oracle Corp, saw his net worth fall by $4.4 billion.

Arnault, head of luxury conglomerate LVMH, lost $1.2 billion earlier this week. The change puts his net worth at $182 billion, totaling $25 billion in losses this year, according to Bloomberg.

The losses were prompted by a 3 percent drop last week in the Nasdaq 100 Index, which measures the value of thousands of stocks listed on the the Nasdaq stock exchange. Meanwhile, a US jobs report on Friday showed that hiring has slowed and that unemployment was a three-year high.

Arnault and Ellison both oversee their own namesake museums, while Bezos has been reported to collect a few high-value contemporary artists more discretely. They have all appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list.

Generally, when their wealthy peers have faced similar losses, it has done little to impact their philanthropy and collecting. In 2015, when heirs to the Walmart fortune lost more than $40 billion of their combined net worth after the retailer company’s shares fell by 30 percent, Alice Walton, the 19th richest person in the world, continued acquiring works for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, which she opened four years earlier. She even divested from a ranching business to keep the museum’s initiatives growing the same year.

“We have significantly reorganized our digital team,” a gallery spokesperson told ARTnews in a statement. The change to its workforce comes more than four years after the gallery made expanding online a primary goal during the pandemic in 2020. In July of that year, the mega-dealer laid off 20 percent of its staff to make up for a shortfall in sales.

A gallery spokesperson said the team was reorganized after its staffers finished building a custom database and migrated its website to a new platform, a process that took around a year to finalize.

The most recent layoffs, which amount to three percent of the gallery’s workforce, come several months after Zwirner shuffled staff at Platform, a separate Zwirner-financed digital marketplace that partners with smaller galleries. Launched in 2021, Platform laid off two heads of content, and another full-time staffer from its ten-person team last fall, according to two former employees who spoke to ARTnews on the condition of anonymity.

By December, the small startup had trimmed its staff further to a mere five and pivoted its model, launching collectible products like jewelry, tote bags, and sculptural editions by Josh Smith, Raymond Pettibon, and Katherine Bernhardt, some of the biggest artists in Zwirner’s stable, occasioned by a glowing feature in the New York Times Style section.

In May 2021, when David Zwirner launched Platform, it was offering 100 works of art by contemporary artists each month at price points between $2,500 and $50,000. The concept signaled a departure from the conventional gallery model, with Zwirner intending to claim a 20 percent share of each sale on Platform. The dealer’s son, Lucas Zwirner, who spearheaded its creation, told the Times in an interview that the mega-gallery was investing in original editorial content on the site to give emerging artists beyond its roster exposure. It operated as another business, incorporated as a separate entity under David Zwirner Digital, LLC.

A year after the second funding round, the team was struggling to translate its concept into sales. According to internal documentation circulated to Platform’s ten-member team in May 2023 and reviewed by ARTnews, they consistently fell short of achieving the website’s sell-through rate goal of 50 percent, aiming to sell around fifty artworks each month. Monthly sell-through stagnated between 10 to 20 percent, increasing pressure on its managers to capture buyers.

Zwirner, according to a former member of the founding team, initially invested $5 million to launch the platform with Lucas as its creative lead, and in July 2022, a second funding round raised another $5 million from luxury investors to keep the start-up running. (Formerly overseeing editorial work at the gallery as its head of content and splitting his time with Platform, Lucas now serves in a senior position in the gallery’s sales department, according to Zwirner’s website.)

In response to questions about Platform’s staffing changes and new direction, the start-up told ARTnews in a statement that it currently has a staff of seven employees and said it had shifted its “core business,” to selling artist-designed products. It added its current sell-through rate is 89 percent, which would be a significant jump from the 2023 figures.

The recently laid off employees from the gallery’s digital team did not work on Platform’s online channels, a spokesperson confirmed.

Between January and February, the museum, home to a significant collection of 19th- and 20th-century art, parted ways with three full-time employees, including two senior-level staff members. In April the museum conducted a round of layoffs, eliminating nine positions.

The terminations in January and February were of Jill Duncan, the director of finance at the Barnes since June 2021; another staffer, whose role involved managing social media; and historian TK Smith, who served as the museum’s assistant curator for art of the African diaspora.

Among those let go in April were curator Corrinne Chong, a specialist in 19th-century art, and Amy Gillette, a research associate who had been with the museum for six years.

While Duncan revealed on LinkedIn that her position was eliminated, Smith posted a statement to Instagram in April saying that he had been fired from the Barnes by the museum’s director and president, Thom Collins.

In a December 2022 press release announcing Smith and Chong’s hirings, the museum suggested their appointments would be part of a long-term plan for the foundation to “shape” its exhibitions and publications in a progressive direction envisioned by its founder, philanthropist Albert C. Barnes, who collected African art in addition to European painting and sculpture. Smith’s role of Assistant Curator for Art of the African Diaspora was a newly created role, meant to focus in part on Black artists. At the Barnes, he worked on several exhibitions featuring living and dead Black artists, including Lebohang Kganye, William Edmondson, and Isaac Julien.

At the time he was terminated, Smith was the Barnes’ managing curator for the traveling exhibition “Mickalene Thomas: All About Love,” according to the museum’s press materials. The show is scheduled to open at the Barnes in October. (It is currently on view at the Broad in Los Angeles.) The museum has since brought on an independent London-based scholar, Renée Mussai, to serve as the Thomas exhibition’s managing curator. Mussai has not taken over Smith’s position at the museum, which the Barnes told ARTnews it will rehire for.

In an interview, Smith said that his firing came after he requested a contract from the Barnes and London’s Hayward Museum (to which the Thomas exhibition will travel in 2025) to publish his research for the Thomas exhibition, a request that the Barnes denied. Smith said he had grown increasingly mistrustful of the internal handling of his research and felt a contract was necessary to protect his academic credentials. After returning from a Barnes-sponsored residency in Lagos in December, he refused to produce the essay without a written agreement. Smith said he was then warned by Barnes leadership that he would be out of compliance with his role if he failed to file the essay for the exhibition’s book. (The Barnes denied in an email that Smith’s termination had anything to do with the contract request, nor was it a contributing factor.)

Smith told ARTnews that he felt, upon his hiring, that Barnes leadership was unprepared for his arrival and unable to respond substantively to his inquiries about the role’s critical focus, his attempts to define the scope of its diasporic concentration or to provide information about the reason it was created. The position was created in 2020, two years before Smith assumed it.

“It was clear almost from the moment I entered the door that they did not want this position. They had no intentions to fulfill the promises of the position,” Smith told ARTnews. “They sent me to Nigeria to show face.”

A legal representative for the Barnes denied this in correspondence with ARTnews, saying that “Museum staff members maintain regular and open communication with all employees regarding their roles.”

In an internal email from Smith to the Barnes staff at the time of his departure and reviewed by ARTnews, Smith described the role he held as “identity-specific,” offering to assist the museum in defining it for a future candidate—a gesture to help a peer in his field, he later told ARTnews.

The layoffs and terminations represent 6 percent of the museum’s total staff of 206. Unlike other museums in the US, the Barnes says the staff reductions aren’t a result of a worsening financial picture. “We generated a healthy surplus at year end, rather than a deficit – a practice we intend to continue,” said museum spokesperson Deirdre Maher, who described the museum as “financially healthy.”

In a statement to ARTnews, Maher said, “As with every museum, staffing levels shift based on a variety of factors. We make regular adjustments to our operations based on current needs and to ensure our ongoing financial well-being.” Since 2020, the Barnes staff has grown by 15 percent. They reduced it by 4 percent in 2023, Maher said. The museum declined to comment on the reason for the layoffs, or whether the cuts could affect future programming.

The Barnes reported it generated $28.8 million in revenue for the first half of 2023, according to the foundation’s public disclosures. In 2022, it brought in $36.1 million in revenue after benefiting from pandemic-related tax credits and stimulus money. The foundation oversees an endowment of $130.9 million.

Changes at the Barnes come after a string of larger art institutions made staff cutbacks to safeguard their financial stability in the fall. Between October and December, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York laid off 10 employees, citing a strained budget due to rising costs and inflation, while the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Dallas Museum of Art each cut 20 staff positions in response to plunging attendance after the pandemic.

Editor’s Note, 7/30/2024: This article has been updated with additional comment from the Barnes Foundation.

Titled The State of the Arts, the report by the University of Warwick and the Campaign for the Arts gathers data on funding, education and employment in the arts in the country.

Between 2009 and 2023, there were significant cuts to UK state funding for the arts, with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)—the government agency responsible for backing cultural organizations in the UK—reducing its core funding by 18 percent.

England invested 6 percent less in cultural spending per person between 2010 and 2022, falling behind peers like Germany, France, and Finland. Those countries increased their arts spending in that 12-year period by 22 percent, 25 percent, and 70 percent, respectively.

According to the report, UK’s spending of $260 on culture per person was 44 percent lower than the European average spend.

The research shows a stark decline in enrollment in arts education, blaming reduced funding and a broader “marginalizing” of the category in state-funded schools. The report called the issue a “crisis,” noting that standardized test scores in the UK’s school system, GCSE and A-level entries in arts subjects, dropped by 47 percent and 29 percent since 2010.

The report also notes there have been significant reductions in funding by the Arts Council, the primary supporting body of arts organizations in the UK: 18 percent in England, 22 percent in Scotland, 25 percent in Wales, and 66 percent in Northern Ireland.

Though the research focuses on the implications of the more than decade-long decline in public funding in the arts, it omits comparisons to varying levels of private funding that may be making up for some of the gap.

According to a report from the Arts Council England on private investments in the arts published in 2022, money from networks of private funders accounted for £799 million ($1.03 billion) of the sector, 44 percent of which comes from individual donations. 

During the first half of 2023, Christie’s brought in $2.7 billion in live and online auction sales. That figure was already down 23 percent from the $3.5 billion generated during the same period in 2022.

In years past, Christie’s has reported the total revenues of auction and private sales. But this year, the house did not announce its private sales figures. Between 2021 and 2023, private sales had decreased significantly, falling from $850 million to $484 million.

According to Christie’s, 41 percent of their buyers this year were based in the Americas; 38 percent in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; and 21 percent in Asia. The number of Asian buyers decreased by 5 percent from the first half of 2022, dropping from 26 percent to 21 percent. This figure was significantly higher in 2021, at 39 percent.

For the second year in a row, Guillaume Cerutti, the house’s CEO described the market landscape as continually “challenging” during a press conference announcing the results on Tuesday.

The house highlighted one positive metric: 29 percent of its clients are millennials and Gen Z, meaning that these collectors are under 40 years old. This figure is consistent with last year’s percentage, indicating that the 250-year-old business is successfully maintaining the interest of younger collectors.

The Norwegian company had been a backer of the UK museum since 2016, sponsoring its Wonderlab gallery, a space devoted to children’s programming. In a statement published at the end of June, the museum confirmed that its contract with the firm would not be renewed, but praised the company for providing funding aimed at “young potential engineers and scientists.” The museum also said the company failed to reduce carbon emissions as mandated by the Paris Climate Agreement.

Companies like Equinor have been protested by climate activists for using philanthropy to deflect from other kinds of scrutiny.

In September 2023, Equinor became the subject of controversy when regulators approved it to move ahead with developing the Rosebank oil and gas field, a region of waters in the UK continental shelf. It was a step, the company said, toward furthering its goal of becoming a bigger energy player in the UK. The plan for the North Sea oil field subsequently faced legal threats from climate groups, who argued it would see the UK breach compliance with its own climate standards aimed at phasing out fossil fuels.

Equinor’s foothold in Europe has increased substantially over the last two years following Russia’s invasion in Ukraine. Prior to the war, Russia was a major energy supplier to Europe. In 2023 the European Commission reported that Norway had outpaced Russia to become Europe’s biggest gas supplier.

In a statement, the museum’s board chair, Tim Laurence, said that despite the divestment from Equinor, the board “does not agree” with broad calls to “rule out” energy companies as sponsors. “We believe in constructive engagement with companies that will be key in making the global economy less carbon intensive,” Laurence said. 

Other UK museums have reluctantly made similar moves. In June 2023, the Guardian reported that the British Museum had quietly ended a funding partnership with the fossil fuel company BP after 27 years, though museum officials maintained that some benefits would remain intact for the firm. London’s National Portrait Gallery ended its BP partnership in December 2022.

Among researchers and environmentalists, the Science Museum’s move is deemed a victory. In a statement published online, Sara Waldron, Culture Unstained’s codirector, called on the Science Museum’s board to end its existing contracts with BP and Adani, a major coal producer in India, saying, “the museum must now hold these companies to the same standard and stop promoting their toxic brands.”

In September 2021, when Rachel Mijares Fick and Rebeca Laliberte launched the first iteration of Future Fair, they intended it to be a cooperative space where they could minimize the hierarchies so conspicuous at the major fairs. Their first in-person edition, held at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea, featured 34 galleries. For this year’s edition, held at Chelsea Industrial, the number of participating galleries is 60, almost double, and features more than 100 artists.

That expansion reflects the growing popularity of boutique fairs, each of which follows its own model. Future Fair runs on a communal model: the founding galleries adopted a five-year profit-sharing agreement under which 35 percent of the fair’s profits, generated from visitor traffic or sponsorships, are distributed among those galleries that collectively fund the fair.

In the case of hotel fairs like Felix, held during Frieze Los Angeles since 2019, and the Dallas Invitational, which held its second edition during Dallas Art Fair this month, their chief attraction is a chic, fun venue and more modest fees (participation in each runs around $10,000).

But the buzziest alternative model thus far may be Basel Social Club (BSC), which launched in 2022 as a satellite space during Art Basel. Organized by Parisian gallerist Robbie Fitzpatrick, the fair was first held in a 1930s villa; last year, when 90 galleries participated, it took place in a former mayonnaise factory. The atmosphere at both editions was casual, and there were no booths. Participating galleries hung works throughout the space, and films, performances, pop-up restaurants, bars, and a makeshift nightclub kept things lively. The success of BSC inspired others: for Art Basel Hong Kong this year, Hong Kong gallerist Willem Molesworth, together with two other local dealers, put on their own version, called Supper Club, an evening-only salon-style fair including 20 galleries at a 19th-century heritage site. Molesworth told ARTnews in March that he saw the Basel event (and their own) as serving a dual purpose: it was effective transactionally, but also had a fluid element, calling it “a process of hanging out” that felt more organic.

“That’s what contemporary art is all about,” Molesworth said at the time. “It’s about connecting, networking, chatting, and, ultimately, making sales, of course. But, when you’re showing really boundary-pushing stuff, it’s difficult to pull the trigger. You want to learn, you want to chat, you want to talk about it.”

This year, New York will get its own salon-style fair with Esther, debuting in May at the Estonian House in midtown during Frieze. Of some 20 presentations to be shown there, most will be site specific, and some artists will show new works that respond to the site’s 1929 interior. When announcing the launch, cofounders Margot Samel, a Tribeca gallerist, and Olga Temnikova, a Tallinn-based gallerist, cited Basel Social Club as inspiration.

“Something that’s important to us is the social element,” Samel told ARTnews. “What was important for us was creating an environment where galleries can take risks and think about it as a complementary platform versus a more competitive one that fairs tend to be. I feel like, in a lot of ways, it’s an experiment.”

In addition to the social atmosphere, these types of fairs are attractive because they are far more economical, with participation fees a fraction of, say, Frieze or Basel. For Esther, exhibitors paid a $1,500 fee; at Supper Club, the fee was around $3,800. By comparison, booth fees for participation in Art Basel Miami Beach run between $11,000 and $45,000 for the prestigious Nova, Positions, and Survey sections. Booth costs obviously go up from there.

“There’s so many galleries in New York who don’t do any art fairs during Frieze and Armory week because they feel like they’ve already paid the high costs of being in New York, and it just doesn’t really make sense,” Samel said.

Boutique fairs typically cater to emerging galleries unable (or unwilling) to spend on the big events. But as the alternative fair model matures, so too does its exhibitor base and appeal. Laliberte, the Future Fair cofounder, told ARTnews that this year’s fair is no longer meant to be collectors’ first look at new artists. Future’s focus is instead on appealing to New York City’s established old guard collectors interested in finding artists previously unknown to them. There’s a selection committee now that didn’t exist for previous editions, and sales are often in motion via social media months before opening day.

“The goal is to introduce our audiences to the presentations before we even open our doors,” she said.

Samel and Temnikova, meanwhile, aimed to fill Estonian House with a range of galleries from the start, not just emerging firms. Veteran mainstays like Richard Saltoun and Andrew Kreps Gallery sit alongside such new kids on the block as New York’s Someday and London’s Gathering galleries.

What unites the gallerists who show in the alternative fairs, it seems, is a common belief that a better experience for art and art collectors lies outside the convention center.

As part of an ambitious bid to elevate the country’s arts image, the government’s administration has heavily backed into the biennale, as well as Malta’s forthcoming contemporary art museum, Malta International Contemporary Arts Space (MICAS). The museum is set to open in October within a complex in Floriana, a fortified town just outside the capital city of Valetta. Mario Cutajar, chairman of Heritage Malta, oversaw the exhibition’s line-up of heritage sites that were used as venues. Both project share similar aims: to not only reorient Malta’s cultural identity, but to draw it out of its militarized the past.

Biennale organizers gathered 72 artists—including biennial veterans such as Tania Bruguera and Laure Prouvost—from around 30 countries for the first edition and spans twelve historical sites across Malta’s cities. The main exhibition, curated by Sofia Baldi Pighi, is titled “Insulaphilia”, prompting artists to respond to Malta’s reality as a converging point of North African, European and Arab influences, as well as the politics born from its remote location.

There were many concerted efforts by its curatorial team, rounded out by Elisa Carollo and Emma Mattei, to gently interrogate the social conservativism of Malta. In an interview with ARTnews, the three curators said the culture leans heavily misogynistic, and that the biennale was a rare chance for them to dialogue with feminist concepts in a public setting.

On the biennale’s opening day, more than a hundred visitors flooded into Valetta’s Grand Master’s Palace, situated next to the National Library next door. The first of four themed exhibitions, titled “The Matri-archive of the Mediterranean”, centered women. A focal point of it was a video installation produced by Adama Delphine Fawundu, a Sierra Leonean-American photographer, titled A Meditation For the Dispersed. Fawundu traveled to Malta in December, shooting a series of footage that follows a black model lingering out at sea, culminating in the film.

Issues related to migration appeared throughout, as Malta’s position between two major continents as involved it in migrant crisis; according to Italian government data, some 34,000 migrants made the treacherous sea voyage to Malta in 2023. The second day was staged at the Birgu Armory, a 16 century military site in Malta’s Southeast, which staged a work by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. First produced in 2012, it consisted of the European Union flag on the building’s façade, across which the artist also commissioned a graffiti artist to scrawl the phrase: “The poor treatment of the migrants today will be our dishonor tomorrow.” A crowd gathered to watch the performance, which ran for nearly 45 minutes.

Speaking to ARTnews, Pighi described how securing Brugera’s presence there was somewhat of a diplomatic move, as her high-profile status protected her from requests from the Malta government for works to be changed or worse, censored. “With migration in the Mediterranean, I thought that in order to address this very sensitive topic, we needed a big name to do that. In a sense, she’s protecting all the other artists,” said Pighi.

That same day, other internationally established artists drew on the main pavilion’s sea theme. Also at the Birgu Armory was Zineb Sedira, a French Algerian photographer and video artist. Her 2008 work MiddleSea, a single screen video installation, is an eerie sequence that follow a man traveling on a ferry between Marseille and Algiers. In the opening shot, the camerawork vibrates as the man walks across the boat’s floor.

Other moments across the preview’s three-day run were far more surreal. On the third day, a performance piece titled Embassy by Suez Canal Republic, a collective of Italian artists, involved one of the group’s members interacting with a metal exploration rover. The piece produced some head-tilting from onlookers, as they watched a woman loiter alongside the remote-controlled machine as it traveled across a flowered field nestled in the highest point of Gozo, a Citadel that could only be reached by ferry. Another orchestrated by an Italian choreographer found itself competing with a baffling view of the Mediterranean, as dancers lured onlookers to the edge of Ħaġar Qim cliff near a megalithic temple. And one brought viewers underground, with a film by Rosa Barba, titled Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage, installed in a medieval tunnel underneath Valetta’s main tourist center. The only source of light came from Barba’s shots of Cyprus, underwater and across its centuries’ old sites.

With Malta lacking any real arts infrastructure, the biennale offered a few young Maltese curators exposure for their efforts to realize these exhibits.

In the Franco-German pavilion located near the exhibition’s Fort St. Elmo site, Andrew Borg Wirth, a Maltese architect said it was a year-long process working with Berlin-based conceptual artist, Mariana Hahn, to acquire eleven wooden doors from a condemned Valetta fish market owned for her installation. For the piece, Hahn covered three doors with mounds of white salt, a process she said lets the element eventually erode their surfaces.

Before the biennale launched, its artistic director, Sofia Baldi Pighi, told ARTnews that with the backing of Cutajar and an undisclosed Qatari foundation, she planned to bring on Palestinian artists for a national pavilion. At the Venice Biennale, which runs concurrently, Palestine does not have such a stage, as Italy does not recognize it as a sovereign nation. The plan, however, was not realized.

But even without the presence of Palestinian artists, Pighi and other artists were vocal in recognizing the war in Gaza. At the end of a state-sponsored dinner thrown to celebrate the government’s backing of the biennale, Pighi ended her speech with a call for a ceasefire.

In Gozo, the conceptual artist Mel Chin arrived on the remote island unexpectedly, where he unboxed a new set of 18-inch-long drawings: a scrolled penciled rendering of a news image of a Palestinian infant killed in Gaza taken in December by photojournalist Ali Jadallah. Chin placed it next to another drawing, this one of a US-made MK-84 bomb. Chin, speaking to a small room of viewers, said he’s been thinking of the weapon’s aftermath, which can be seen in satellite imagery in the form of cratered.

He explained why he used soil from his North Carolina studio to make the artwork: “I excavated dirt to create this. Using earth to create the piece was necessary.”