Hiroshi Sugimoto’s redesigned Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden opens this month.
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. will reopen its Sculpture Garden on October 31 following a redesign by Japanese artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto. It’s the most significant rethinking of the space since Gordon Bunshaft designed the museum’s cylindrical building and sunken garden, which opened in 1974. Sugimoto kept the modernist character of Bunshaft’s campus while making the garden more open and flexible. Monumental stacked stone walls divide the site into connected areas, including the East and Central Gardens and West Lawn, and offer a natural contrast to Bunshaft’s concrete. The new layout lets the museum show 50 percent more art outdoors. About 24 major sculptures from Joseph H. Hirshhorn’s founding gift will return, including works by Rodin, Matisse, Henry Moore, Giacometti, and Barbara Hepworth, shown alongside living artists and new commissions rather than in chronological order.
Nine Swiss museums receive federal funding to research 6,300 objects from Cameroon.
Nine Swiss museums have received CHF 100,000 (about $120,000) from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture to research more than 6,300 objects from Cameroon in their collections. Participating institutions are located in Basel, Bern, Burgdorf, Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel, Winterthur, and Zurich, and include the Museum der Kulturen Basel and the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève. The holdings represent more than 320 ethnic and cultural communities across Cameroon. Isabella Bozsa, a researcher at the Museum der Kulturen Basel, said collaboration with Cameroonian partners will take place both in Switzerland and in Cameroon, and those partners plan to involve the communities connected to the objects. Bozsa pointed to a similar project in Germany and to the Benin Initiative Switzerland as models for cooperation between Swiss institutions and source communities.
Dior Beverly Hills to showcase late French artist Louis Cane ahead of Christie’s sale.
Dior Beverly Hills will host an exhibition dedicated to French artist Louis Cane, from October 3–16. The presentation of sculpture, furniture, and decorative works comes ahead of a December 8 tribute sale at Christie’s Rockefeller Center in New York. Cane, who died in Paris in 2024, was a painter, sculptor, and furniture designer associated with Supports/Surfaces, the French movement that emerged around 1969. His early work examined and broke down the traditional canvas before he moved into sculpture and design, working from studios in Paris and Villefranche-sur-Mer. The Beverly Hills exhibit reflects that range, featuring pieces in bronze, marble, parchment, lacquer, and precious woods produced over nearly six decades of collaboration with artisans. Highlights include bronze trees, figurative works, lanterns with playful monkey motifs, and furniture decorated with butterflies.
World Monuments Fund study links heritage funding cuts to long-term economic losses.
Insufficient public funding is now the leading threat to heritage sites worldwide, according to a new World Monuments Fund study. The findings draw on nominations for the 2027 World Monuments Watch, which will be announced in February. The list, published every two years since 1996, received 372 nominations this cycle, nearly double the previous edition. 65 percent of nominators cited funding shortages and economic development as a primary challenge, up from 55 percent last cycle. Lack of technical expertise ranked second at about 35 percent, followed by extreme weather such as floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires at about 30 percent, with the most severe impact in sub-Saharan Africa. The study argues that cutting heritage funding brings short-term savings but larger economic losses over time.
Construction begins on Snøhetta’s Sweetbird North in the Miami Design District.
Construction has begun on Sweetbird North, an eight-story office and retail building designed by Snøhetta in Miami’s Design District. The roughly 120,000-square-foot project will include office space above about 22,500 square feet of ground-floor retail. The building’s defining feature is a custom veil of coiled stainless-steel mesh suspended from a structural frame around its concrete core. The mesh wraps exposed concrete bays and cantilevered terraces that change in length and shape from floor to floor. Combined with impact glazing and reinforced concrete, it is designed to meet Miami’s hurricane requirements. Every office floor will open onto a planted terrace, with tropical plants on the lower levels giving way to flowering species higher up. At street level, metal-clad columns and extended canopies will frame glass-fronted retail across the first two floors.
Attractive Distractions:
Casper Mueller Kneer builds a scaffold-and-fabric arena for Loewe’s Paris runway.
The High Museum of Art draws on the Princeton archive for a new mid-century photography exhibition.
Inside Happy Menocal’s 18th-century farmhouse, where the chandeliers are made of lasagna trays.
Stevie Nicks’ flower crown and Sarah Jessica Parker’s Simone Rocha tulle lead the New York City Ballet fashion gala.
