Activist group stages protest at Whitney Museum

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Activist group stages protest at Whitney Museum | Yesterday afternoon in New York, the activist group Decolonize This Place held a protest at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The demonstration is the latest response to the controversy over the museum board vice chair’s business ties – Warren B. Kanders owns Safariland, the company that produced the tear gas canisters recently used by government officials at the US-Mexico border. Demonstrators burned sage, chanted ‘decolonise this museum’, played music and made speeches. Several banners called for Kanders to be removed from his position at the museum.

DRC to seek restitution of objects in Africa Museum in Belgium | The president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Joseph Kabila, has stated in an interview to the Belgian press that he intends to seek the restitution of works currently in the collection of the African Museum in Belgium. The museum reopened on Saturday, following five years of renovations that were partly intended to present a more ‘decolonised vision of Africa’. The institution’s director Guido Gryseels has said that he would be ‘willing to consider requests for restitution’. Kabila suggested that the request would likely be made by June 2019, in time for the opening of a new national museum in the DRC capital of Kinshasa.

Carol Rhodes (1959–2018) | The Scottish painter Carol Rhodes has died aged 59. She is known for her paintings of imagined landscapes, which can be found in the collections at Tate, the Yale Center for British Art and the Scottish National Gallery. Rhodes was also known in the city of Glasgow for her feminist activism and for the gallery she co-founded with her partner at 42 Carlton Place in 2012. Rhodes was a student and later a teacher at the Glasgow School of Art.