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In a shock development that sparked headlines in Bloomberg, the Business Times, and Sing Tao this past week, K11 Art Mall in Hong Kong’s shopping district, Tsim Sha Tsui, received a $1.2 billion offer from CR Longdation, a state-owned Chinese company and a subsidiary of China Resources Holdings Co.

K11 Art Mall is owned by Hong Kong–based property firm New World Development, which was founded by Cheng Yu-tung in 1970. His son, the billionaire Henry Cheng, is its chairman. Cheng’s grandson, Adrian Cheng, currently serves as the company’s CEO and is a familiar face on the annual ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list.

Per Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the family is worth more than $20 billion.

Adrian Cheng launched the K11 Group, which includes various entities such as K11 Craft and Guild Foundation and the K11 Art Foundation. The latter, an internationally renowned foundation, has staged more than 60 exhibitions across China’s major cities and beyond, showcasing works by some of the world’s leading contemporary artists, including Katharina Grosse, Guan Xiao, Neïl Beloufa, Zhang Enli, and Oscar Murillo.

Cheng’s K11 Group also propagated the concept of combining art and commerce with K11 art malls across Hong Kong and mainland China. In Hong Kong alone, there are two well-known malls, the older K11 Art Mall and the expansive, relatively new development K11 Musea at Victoria Dockside.

Speaking with ARTnews, Pascal de Sarthe, founder of de Sarthe gallery in Hong Kong, said, “I have great respect for what K11 has done over the years. They have made a consequential contribution to the development of Hong Kong culture. They are not afraid of taking risks. They have hosted successful solo exhibitions of some of our previously unknown young artists, demonstrating a true passion for art.”

Even as the reports on a bid for the sale of K11 Art Mall emerged, Cheng publicly expressed confidence about Hong Kong, a city with an increasingly saturated fair ecosystem and a struggling gallery scene. This past week, Cheng, who is the committee chair of Hong Kong’s Mega Arts and Cultural Events (ACE) Fund, attended the sudden launch of ART021 Hong Kong. The brand new fair was initiated by the organizers of Shanghai’s ART021, mainly because they were invited to apply to the $178.8 million fund.

Cheng posted about the fair on Linkedln, writing: “With the support from Mega Arts and Cultural committee, yesterday we launched ART021 Hong Kong, one of Asia’s largest Art Fair. With this, we are creating a VIP economy and enhancing Hong Kong’s position as a centre for East-West art exchange while integrating art into daily life.”

The fair saw strong crowds during its opening, but local industry insiders said they were unhappy with the quality of the event and its government funding.  

That statement came on the heels of Cheng’s recent comments, as reported by Bloomberg: “I’m very confident [Hong Kong] will be number one for family office wealth management in the future.”

The possible sale of K11 Art Mall will not be a one-off for Cheng and New World Development.

In March, Cheng announced during an earnings press conference that the developer increased its target for offloading non-core assets from HK$6 billion to HK$8 billion this financial year. Bloomberg reported that this was “part of its plan to improve financial health”.

According to a statement released the same week, New World Development sold all of its interest in D-PARK, a shopping mall, and its parking space in the Tsuen Wan area in Hong Kong to local developer Chinachem Group for HK$4.02 billion ($514 million). The company said it planned to continue to dispose of some of its assets. The company also said it planned to lower operation expenses and repurchase bonds in the future.

Falling property prices and rising interest rates have placed immense pressure on Hong Kong’s top developers. After several Chinese developers defaulted from mid-2021 onward, investors have been dumping New World Development Co. shares and bonds, reportedly because of its high leverage and rapid expansion in China.

In fact, just this July, Hong Kongers turned up in droves for the heavily discounted sale of flats at Pavilia Forest I, a joint project between New World Development and Far East Consortium in the Kai Tak district.

According to at least one source close to K11 Art Museum in Shanghai, “Business brokerage is not doing well right now. A lot of malls are laying off workers or finding other companies to run the malls in such a way to reduce operating costs. There are fewer and fewer companies that still insist on doing their own art parts, and they are all looking for ways to cooperate.”

A spokesperson from K11 Art Foundation told ARTnews that programming is scheduled through 2026 and that the foundation is focused on the launch of K11 Ecoast, a massive cultural-retail complex slated to open on the Shenzhen waterfront in 2025. However, the foundation spokesperson did not respond to queries regarding the possible sale of K11 Art Mall in Hong Kong.

Despite current and former employees’ reluctance to speak on the record with ARTnews, key industry players in Hong Kong and mainland China have speculated about reorganization efforts at New World Development and the K11 Group. There is also the reported sale of iconic works from its art collection. As such, the firm’s offloading of its assets and the reported bid for K11 Art Mall could likely portend a precarious fate for its network of arts foundations and cultural-retail developments, especially since this is an ongoing global financial trend.

Treating the frames of her room dividers as giant looms, designer Nathalie Van der Massen weaves intricate and delicate designs that simultaneously offer privacy and transparency. The collection, named REN, consists of three limited-edition room dividers: a four-panel divider and two two-panel dividers. Using a natural material palette inspired by Belgian textile heritage, Van der Massen harmoniously blends linen, wool, paper, and yarns into unique fabric wefts, ultimately creating objects that tread the line between design, art, and architecture.

The impetus for the collection began when Van der Massen started receiving requests for integrating bespoke textiles into her architectural projects. “I wanted to create. A foundation, a framework for my custom textile designs that is scalable in various ways and can be integrated into different contexts and styles. Something timeless yet adaptable to different projects,” Van der Massen shares. From there, through a journey of research and trial and error, she combines manual and digital techniques to create the fabric wefts, subtracting threads as needed to achieve the intentional areas of transparency. Weaving around the wooden frames, Van der Massen also plays with the tightness of the weaves, which leads to subtle changes in transparency.

The SAN room divider spans across four walnut wood panels and, due to its length, can also be used as a headboard for a bed. Because textiles are woven around and within the frame, the wood becomes a part of the design rather than just a border.

SAI and DAN are both two-panel room dividers that integrate the visibility of the wood frame in different ways. SAI conveys more movement, lightness, and rhythm, with the paper weave moving in and out of the frame. DAN, on the other hand, takes on a simple and minimalist approach that’s more familiar to the classic idea of a room divider.

Each of the designs in the Ren collection has its own unique details that engage with the environment’s light and space. SAI’s panels allow light to flow through while DAN absorbs the light by the fabric. The four-panel SAN does both. While each design is slightly different, all three designs deliver an artful and pragmatic function that instantly elevates a room.

Nathalie Van der Massen

Each design in the REN collection is available in a limited edition of eight pieces at nathalievandermassen.com.

Photography by Senne Van der Ven and Eefje De Coninck.

As the Senior Contributing Editor, Vy Yang is obsessed with discovering ways to live well + with intention through design. She's probably sharing what she finds over on Instagram stories. You can also find her at vytranyang.com.

The Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition Monet and London: Views of the Thames will be the first time an important group of Claude Monet’s London paintings has ever been shown in the city together. Monet (1840-1926) had planned an exhibition for 1905 but, having sold 24 of the works at their acclaimed Paris outing in 1904, he found himself unable to borrow back enough for the London show. Dissatisfied with the Thames canvases he had left over, the notorious perfectionist postponed his London show to work on them some more. In the end, the exhibition never happened.

“The ambition of this show is to recreate the visitor experience that Monet planned,” says Karen Serres, the curator of the Courtauld exhibition. She has done what Monet could not and secured the loans of 18 of the canvases originally exhibited in Paris, plus an additional three from public collections in the UK and Switzerland. The exhibition is as close to the fulfilment of Monet’s 120-year-old wish as is likely to happen.

The show will give UK audiences the chance to assess Monet’s relationship with London. The artist was in awe of the light effects of the capital’s infamous fog, which he had first seen in 1870 while dodging conscription into the French army. Made in the course of three subsequent visits between 1899 and 1901, Monet’s careful studies merged sky, river and architecture into a single, amorphous field. According to Serres, this work paved the way for the celebrated innovations of Monet’s late water lily paintings, cementing his reputation as France’s greatest living artist.

It was not only London’s weather that inspired Monet. By depicting the city’s riverside, he was measuring himself against other notable painters of the Thames, such as James McNeill Whistler and, above all, J.M.W. Turner. “It’s kind of strange because he denied it,” Serres says, “maybe to try to make his project seem more original, but there’s no question that Turner had a big impact on his work.”

Distinctly Anglophile, Monet also admired London for its modernity. Pursuing his customary method of working in series, he painted only three subjects while in the city, all along the Thames: the smoking chimneys of the South Bank; Charing Cross Bridge, smoke billowing from its rail traffic; and the Houses of Parliament. For Monet, these structures were extraordinary novelties that pointed to the future, and he painted them, through the mist and fog, as he saw them.

Visitors to the Courtauld will be in a privileged position to evaluate the accuracy of Monet’s perceptions of the city, as many of the paintings were begun a mere 300m away, in a makeshift studio at the Savoy Hotel, or just over the river by St Thomas’ Hospital. Coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris, Monet and London will be a rare opportunity to appreciate the importance of London for the principal artist of the French movement.

• Monet and London. Views of the Thames, Courtauld Gallery, London, 27 September-19 January 2025

A pair of ancient tombs featuring paintings of Greek mythological characters, in one of the world’s oldest urban areas, will soon be open to the public. Located in the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon, the tombs would have housed the remains of the city’s wealthy and are believed to be at least 1,700 years old. Their wall paintings, the likes of which are rarely found in the region, feature characters like Demeter, goddess of earth and grain, as well as the head of Medusa, the infamous gorgon whose gaze turned her victims into stone.

Also appearing in the paintings are nymphs whose heads are adorned with lotus plant wreaths, pouring out water from pitchers; various birds; deer; children picking bunches of grapes and gathering them into baskets; and a figure playing Pan’s flute.

It has taken a long time for the tombs to be ready for their close-up. The first was discovered in the 1930s, about 1,000 feet from the beach. Excavated by British archaeologists, it was dated back to the 4th century C.E., when Israel was part of the Byzantine Empire. The structure consists of a central hall giving way to four adjacent burial troughs.

The second tomb is older still, dating to the 2nd century C.E. Excavated by Israel Antiquities Authority employee Elena Kogan-Zehavi in the 1990s, its walls are similarly decorated with paintings of animals, plants, and human figures.

Such paintings are rarely found in Israel, and the newly revealed ones have never been seen by the public. Over recent months, conservation experts at the Antiquities Authority have worked to restore the images.

“Ancient wall paintings are usually not preserved in Israel’s humid climate,” Mark Abrahami, head of the Antiquities Authority, said in a statement. “As the paintings were in a relatively closed structure it protected them, to some extent, for decades.”

Elena Kogan-Zehavi, Israel Antiquities Authority, who uncovered one of the tombs about 30 years ago. Photo: Emil Aladjem, Israel Antiquities Authority.

That’s not to say the wall paintings were in perfect condition.

“Naturally, exposure of the centuries-old paint to air and moisture caused fading and weathering,” Abrahami continued. “We had to conduct a long and sensitive process to stop and repair the ravages of time and weathering. Some paintings had to be removed from the walls for thorough treatment in the Israel Antiquities Authority’s conservation laboratories, until they were returned to the site. The other walls of the structure were cleaned, the pigments in the colors of the paintings were accentuated, and the entire building was strengthened and stabilized to preserve it for future generations.”

The new Archaeological Park in Ashkelon. Photo: Emil Aladjem, Israel Antiquities Authority.

The tombs can be found in Ashkelon’s marina, in between residential buildings. As part of an urban planning project, the city turned the site into a public garden, inviting residents and tourists alike to explore remnants of the city’s distant past. In addition to the opening of the tombs (the Antiquities Authority has yet to announce a specific date), the agency has helped restore several other heritage sites in Ashkelon, including a public park in the Wine City neighborhood, a mosaic on Yekutiel Adam Street, and a display of ancient artifacts on Kadesh Boulevard, among others.

The renovation of the tombs is part of a larger project between the municipality of Ashkelon and the Antiquities Authority to redevelop the city’s numerous heritage sites.

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Le Monte G. Booker has been hired as the new president and CEO of Newfields, Indiana’s largest cultural organization, according to a press announcement released today. 

Booker, who previously served as the chief financial officer of the Field Museum in Chicago, will start his new role in October. He will oversee Newfields’ 152-acre campus, which includes the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), the Lilly House and the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park. 

Booker was hired following a six-month search led by a committee of seven members of the Newfields Board of Trustees. He will join Newfields just less than a year after the previous CEO, Colette Pierce Burnette, abruptly left her position.

“I look forward to working with the board, staff and Central Indiana community to continue to meet the mission of enriching lives through exceptional experiences with art and nature at this special institution,” Booker said in the press release.

In the press release, the chair of the Newfields Board of Trustees, Darrianne Christian, praised Booker’s “mindset, temperament, aptitude and leadership skills” and “fresh perspectives.”

“His extensive museum experience gives him a comprehensive understanding of how institutions like Newfields need to operate to thrive,” Christian said. “He has a solid track record of strategically maximizing value for all stakeholders in a thoughtful and inclusive manner.”

In January 2023, Chicago news station WTTW reported that Booker successfully made a case before the Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners for the first increase in admission prices at the Field Museum since 2018.

Under his proposal, prices increased by $1 for non-residents and $3 for all Chicagoans, including children and seniors, in an effort, he said, to “standardize (pricing) tiers.” The proposal was approved, but criticized by a board member who argued that the increase wasn’t fair to Chicago residents whose tax dollars already supported the Field Museum.

Michael Kaufmann, a cultural entrepreneur who has served on several local boards, said that at first glance, he believes Booker’s CFO experience will serve the financial stability of Newfields. In the CEO role, though, he will need to decide what he wants the organization to be so it can effectively work with both donors and the local community.

“The problem is that we have, historically, built our cultural landscape on the idea of the cultural tourist and have neglected our residents,” Kaufmann said. “I think there’s an opportunity to change that … and understand that if you make a great city for residents, people will come to visit.”

Booker is Newfields’ third CEO since 2012

Booker, who also served as interim president and CEO of the Field Museum for two months in 2020, is the third person to hold the full-time president and CEO role at Newfields since 2012. That’s the year Charles Venable was hired.

Venable, who led Newfields for nine years, resigned in February 2021 following a public outcry over a job posting calling for an IMA director who could “attract a broader and more diverse audience while maintaining the Museum’s traditional, core, white art audience.” Venable now works as a management consultant in Miami.

Burnette, formerly the president of Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas, was hired to replace Venable in August 2022. She left Newfields abruptly in November 2023, after 15 months on the job.

She has not publicly spoken about why she left her role, and Newfields has not specified if she resigned or was fired. Burnette now serves on the Board of Trustees at Martin University and is a curator for the 2024 Butter Art Fair.

Last November, about 50 protestors gathered near the large Newfields sign at 38th Street and North Michigan Road, during Winterlights, to demand Burnette’s reinstatement and an explanation from the board. Her exit was followed by the resignation of five members of the Newfields Board of Trustees and four members of the associate Board of Governors.

After Venable resigned in 2021, the Board of Trustees and Board of Governors posted a letter on the Newfields website, saying, “We are ashamed of Newfields’ leadership and of ourselves.” 

They gave an overview of a 30-day action plan that said, “We will engage an independent committee to conduct a thorough review of Newfields’ leadership, culture and our own Board of Trustees and Board of Governors, with the goal of inclusively representing our community and its full diversity.” 

One month later, they released details of the plan that included organization-wide DEIA training; more free and discounted tickets for community members; new appointments to the Board of Trustees that would increase diverse representation from 8% to 25%; the hiring of a senior-level diversity executive; and the establishment of a new community advisory committee, led by Sean L. Huddleston, president of Martin University and also a Newfields Board of Trustees member. Huddleston was one of the trustees who resigned shortly after Burnette’s departure.

Search committee reviewed 200 applications

Last February, when Newfields announced its search for a new CEO, some community members expressed concerns over what they believed was a lack of grassroots representation in the process to hire Booker. No one outside of Newfields served on the search committee, unlike the committee that led the process to hire Burnette. 

[What role will the public play in choosing Newfields’ new CEO?]

The current search committee was chaired by Anne Sellers, a tech entrepreneur who is the vice chair of the Newfields Board of Trustees, and also included the interim president and CEO of Newfields, Michael Kubacki. Kubacki is the retired chairman of Lake City Bank and its holding company, Lakeland Financial Corporation. 

The committee, along with Philadelphia-based search firm Koya Partners, reviewed more than 200 applications before interviewing finalists. They sought input from Newfields staff, docents, volunteers and members, the press release said.

The public was invited to submit email comments about the CEO search to Koya. A Newfields spokesperson could not confirm how many comments Koya received. 

Beyond his experience at the Field Museum, Booker was chief financial officer for the Easter Seals national office and the American Academy of Pediatrics and has served on the Board of Directors of the CPA Endowment Fund and Asian Human Services.

Newfields’ press release added that, “In his spare time, Booker enjoys mentoring underprivileged youths and young adults, hiking in Starved Rock State Park in Illinois, weightlifting, basketball and reading.”

Part of Booker’s leadership team will include Belinda Tate, who became the Melvin & Bren Simon Director of the IMA last November. She was previously the executive director of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in Kalamazoo, Michigan. 

Mirror Indy reporter Breanna Cooper covers arts and culture. Email her at breanna.cooper@mirrorindy.org. Follow her on X @BreannaNCooper.

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Scientists at the University of Edinburgh may have found the world’s oldest lunisolar calendar on the pillars of Gӧbekli Tepe, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic complex in Turkey, according to new research.

The discovery also points to a destructive comet strike as the possible basis for Gӧbekli Tepe’s intended use as the worship site of a religious cult.

A study published in Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture in June examines 12,000-year-old carvings that make up a purported lunisolar calendar with 12 lunar months and 11 extra days, which is said to be the earliest of its kind. 

“​​Overall, it appears that naked-eye astronomical capabilities of ancient people were far in advance of what is generally assumed for this time,” Chemical Engineer Martin Sweatman, the study’s principal author, wrote in an email to Hyperallergic.

The new study revisits and decodes symbols on pillars at the site, originally excavated in 1994 by German archeologists. Megalithic pillars standing at about 18 feet (~5.5 meters) depict both abstract human figures and animals. Sweatman’s study identified 365 V-shaped symbols, representing single days, and square symbols demarcating 29 and a half-day lunar months. The final day on the calendar is marked by a “V” on the neck of a bird figure representing the summer solstice.

Sweatman drew on previous research on these symbols as markers of constellations to identify a prehistoric understanding of solstices.

“[The discovery] suggests the phenomenon known as ‘precession of the equinoxes’ was known at least 10,000 years earlier than generally thought, and used to write the dates of important cosmic events,” Sweatman wrote. Understanding the precession of the equinoxes — or tracking equinoxes by observing changes in constellations — was previously thought to be first achieved by the Greeks starting in 150 BCE. 

Sweatman’s study also identified depictions of a comet impact known as the Younger Dryas that some scientists argue caused a mini ice age around 10,850 BCE, which lasted for 1,200 years. 

After decoding the symbols from the etchings, Sweatman believes illustrations of snakes coming out of the bodies of birds and foxes on the pillars represent a meteor shower.

“On the front face of this pillar are 27 V-symbols, which we interpret to mean the meteor shower lasted for 27 days radiating first from the direction of Aquarius (the fox) and then from Pisces (the tall bending bird),” Sweatman said, adding that renderings of the purported comet strike found at the site support the hypothesis that Gӧbekli Tepe was likely constructed as part of a new religion brought about by the impact. The complex is already widely considered the oldest religious site in the world.

“[These symbols] suggest the Younger Dryas impact could have played an important role in triggering the origin of civilization,” Sweatman said.

One of Claude Monet‘s famous water lily paintings is slated to lead Christie’s first evening sale of 20th- and 21st-century art at its new Asia headquarters in Hong Kong on September 26.

The work is expected to fetch between HK$200 million and HK$280 million ($25 million and $35 million), and if it sells for within that sum, it will become one of the most valuable Western artworks ever to hit the block in the region.

The piece, titled Nymphéas (1897–99), shows the water lily pond at the artist’s home in Giverny, France. According to Christie’s, the painting is among the first devoted to that subject that Monet painted. After his death in 1926, the work stayed in his family for a number of years. It then ended up in a private collection before being consigned to Christie’s.

Zao Wou-ki’s abstract work 05.06.80–Triptyque (1980), which comes with an estimate of HK$78 million to HK$128 million ($10 million to $15 million), will be on the block alongside the Monet.

While Christie’s will debut in the Henderson, a building designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, Sotheby’s and Bonhams will also open new Asia headquarters of their own in Hong Kong later this year. Phillips already expanded to the region establishing an Asia location in West Kowloon in Hong Kong.

As the Western market faces a slowdown, however, it remains to be seen how the Asian market will fare.

What if furniture wasn’t bound by traditional perceptions of placement, calling into question your relationship to the architectural plane? Imagine the untapped potential of banal staircases, thresholds, and edges as they turn the corner. Paddy Pike Studio has pioneered contemporary home furnishings that celebrate and recontextualize these oft ignored liminal spaces as places with the power to pull focus. Paddy, the studio’s eponym, launches the Cresco Rug Collection in his latest exploration of textile applications and functionalities that articulate structure while conjuring ethereal passageways to new interior atmospheres through his brilliant aesthetics.

This release comprises five dramatic, distinct pieces created from hand-knotted wool by artisans in India. The collaborative process is an intriguing mix of Paddy’s subversive approach to the pragmatic tempered by an exercise in traditional craft. Surfaces are rendered such that graphic elements imply flow from the floor to wall to the openings they highlight. And contrasting colors generates great visual interest while retaining a softness from natural textures and the warm hues.

Presented at the architectural scale, their larger-than-life size allows for a fusion with the room and the full integration into any space for which they are custom tailored. While they do dominate their surroundings with an incredible gravity, they also create the opportunity to place complementary elements within their orbit, staging pieces at eye level just as one might consider seating atop whatever rug is underfoot. Designers are provided a fresh approach to aesthetic schemes as the Cresco Rug ascends and cascades across interior vistas.

The collection also represents the coming together of interests Paddy has fostered for nearly a decade. His broader work is a survey of provocative rugs and wall hangings with transformative powers especially for those parts of the home that are grossly underserved and underutilized in many aspects. “Doorways and staircases symbolize exploration and the transition to new, uncharted areas. This mirrors how I feel about the direction my studio is taking,” Paddy says. “Each new idea feels like stepping into an exciting, unknown space. There’s always something new around the corner, and that energy is thrilling.”

To learn more about Paddy Pike Studio and its creative practice, visit paddypike.com.

Photography provided by Paddy Pike Studio.

With professional degrees in architecture and journalism, New York-based writer Joseph has a desire to make living beautifully accessible. His work seeks to enrich the lives of others with visual communication and storytelling through design. When not writing, he teaches visual communication, theory, and design.

The former US first lady Michelle Obama—who addressed the Democratic National Convention in Chicago earlier this week—is breaking into the art world via a partnership between her organisation When We All Vote and the fundraising platform Art For Change.

The aim of the new joint initiative is to boost voter turnout in the US November presidential election, which will pit Democrat nominee Kamala Harris against the Republican candidate Donald Trump. According to a statement from Art for Change, it will see the organisation “donate five percent of the unframed purchase price of sales until 1 December, with a $10,000 minimum commitment, to support When We All Vote’s mission to increase voter participation in this crucial election year,” says a statement.

Participating artists include Aaron Johnson, whose Oh My Heart (2023) shows two figures blending together, and Caris Reid, whose text-based piece simply says “vote”. Rico Gatson’s work Shirley #3 (2023), meanwhile, depicts the eponymous first Black woman elected to Congress, Shirley Chisholm.

Reid tells The Art Newspaper: “My work is very whimsical and dreamlike. I’m fascinated by the blurring of the physical and metaphysical. While I don’t typically use lettering in my work, I wanted to create a ‘vote’ painting that referenced historical works but also conveyed a sense of wonder, possibility, even hope.”

“The When We All Vote collection as a whole creates a narrative that we hope evokes various nuances of America,” Jeanne Masel, the founder of Art for Change, told The Guardian. “Art for Change connects socially conscious art collectors with in-demand contemporary artists and their work,” says the organisation’s website. When We All Vote, meanwhile, “is a leading national, non-partisan initiative on a mission to change the culture around voting and to increase participation in each and every election by helping to close the race and age gap,” says the organisation.

Separately, the illustrator Shepard Fairey has launched a print of Kamala Harris in the style of his celebrated 2008 work Hope, which depicts Barack Obama. The new piece is emblazoned with the word Forward.

“I believe VP [Vice President] Kamala Harris and her VP pick Tim Walz are our best chance to move forward. They are our best chance to push back on encroaching fascism and threats to democracy, and our best chance for creating the world we all desire and deserve,” Fairey says in an online statement. He adds: “This art is a tool of grassroots activism for all to use non-commercially. I was not paid for it and will not receive any financial benefit from it.”

Harris is due to close the Democratic convention today (22 August) with a major speech accepting her nomination.

At the end of the last Ice Age, a land bridge emerged between Siberia and North America offering wandering humans an easier route than their seafaring predecessors. In time, they spread out, carrying tools, technology, and culture southward and across the continent’s great plains.

They were nomadic peoples who foraged for berries, nuts, and tubers and hunted giant armadillos, mammoths, and mastodons—such as the one that has just been excavated in southern Iowa. Mastodons were large elephantine mammals endemic to North America that went extinct around 13,000 years ago, likely due to climatic changes and human hunting.

It’s the first time a well-preserved mastodon skeleton has been discovered in the Midwestern state, an excavation that has been 18 months in the making. It started in late 2022, when John Doershuk, Director at Iowa’s Office of the State Archaeologist, received photographs that seemed to show the femur bone of a giant prehistoric animal.

In 2023, Doershuk travelled to Wayne County, on Iowa’s southern border with Missouri, and met with the landowner to survey the discovery and collect a sample for radiocarbon dating. Soon, Doershuk was able to confirm what the onsite tusk, crania, and bones strongly suggested: it was indeed a mastodon and could be dated to around 13,600 years ago.

What came next was a multi-pronged communal effort. The nearby Prairie Trails Museum in Corydon, Iowa, secured grants and private donations, the landowner offered up the use of heavy machinery, and community members were enlisted as volunteers. Then, over the course of 12 days this summer, Doershuk and his team successfully excavated the remains of the mastodon that was awkwardly located in a creek cutbank 25 feet below the nearest access point.

Mastodon skull and tusk in the creek. Photo courtesy Iowa Archeology.

“Some of the bones are in an excellent state of preservation, others in poor shape, so extraction required plaster casts to protect the bones from falling apart,” Doershuk said via email, noting that despite the extreme heat with temperatures reaching 113 degrees, the stretch of dry weather aided the dig. A thunderstorm could have endangered the process.

Next, the mastodon will be cleaned and consolidated with missing portions of its face filled in with 3D-printed bones ahead of a plan to exhibit it at the Prairie Trails Museum. Through further tests, the team hopes to learn about its diet and, by extension, the environment in which it lived.

The team at work excavating the mastodon in the creek. Photo courtesy Iowa Archeology.

One tantalizing question surrounds whether or not the earliest humans already on the continent might have had contact with this mastodon. “It is likely they witnessed mastodons firsthand and may even have been involved in interacting with this particular animal, perhaps as hunters or scavengers,” Doershuk said. The hope is to find human-made cut marks, or even tool fragments embedded in bone or recovered in the surrounding sediments.

“If we can demonstrate a human connection,” Doershuk said, “it will be a first for Iowa and a significant contribution to the archaeological understanding of the region.”

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Updated Aug. 15, 10:52 a.m.

Ever since news broke late last year about CapRadio’s financial troubles, audience members, staffers and employees of Sacramento State — which oversees CapRadio —  have been hungry for answers about how things went wrong, and who was responsible for the chaos that led to layoffs, a scrapped downtown headquarters project and the cancelation of several music programs.

A picture began to emerge last week when Sac State released the results of a long-awaited forensic analysis of the station. The heavily redacted summary, prepared by the Roseville-based accounting firm CliftonLarsonAllen, found over $760,000 in “unsupported” payments, or payments that couldn’t be backed up with an expense report or receipts. The summary also noted that more than half those mysterious payments – some $460,000 – were made to one CapRadio executive, identified in the report only as Subject #1. 

CapRadio has now confirmed that Subject #1 is Jun Reina, the station’s former general manager. That’s according to a hard copy of the unredacted summary that was reviewed by a CapRadio reporter.

Two other CapRadio reporters have made no fewer than 13 attempts to reach Reina for comment via email and phone numbers associated with his name, but have not received a response as of publication.

When the summary was released, Sac State President Luke Wood issued a statement saying some portions of the report had been “redacted to avoid jeopardizing a related investigation by the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office.” 

A spokesperson for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office confirmed it was investigating Reina, but would not give further details about the basis of the investigation.

(After the redacted summary was posted online and reported by CapRadio last week, Sac State removed the document from its website, citing the need for clarifications. An updated version had not been reposted before this article went live.)

Reina served as CapRadio executive vice president and general manager between July 1, 2020 and June 2023. The Sac State-commissioned forensic examination focused on the same period of time.  

Reina joined CapRadio as chief financial officer in 2007 and was promoted to hold the dual role of chief operating officer in 2012, according to his bio on the station’s website.

“During this time, Jun helped CapRadio maintain financial stability while growing from a 45-person organization to the 118-person organization that it is today,” Reina’s CapRadio bio reads. It also notes that he “played an instrumental role in the planned expansion to a new downtown headquarters.”

In 2023, an initial audit commissioned by the California State University Chancellor’s Office raised significant questions about whether CapRadio could afford to pay for the costly downtown headquarters project. After multiple delays, the project was scrapped this year, according to a CapRadio marketing webpage.

Sacramento State spokesperson Brian Blomster said the university had no comment when asked to confirm if Reina was Subject #1. 

Reina is currently the CEO of Family Support Services, a Bay Area-based nonprofit, according to its webpage.

Former station finance director recalls troubling accounting practices

Rocio de Valk, who served as CapRadio’s Director of Finance from 2021 to 2023, recently told CapRadio reporters that she witnessed several troubling financial practices during her time at the station. De Valk’s tenure as finance director coincided with Reina’s time as general manager; however, she did not use Reina’s name when speaking with reporters. She did identify herself as Witness #1 in the CliftonLarsonAllen forensic examination.

De Valk said that while preparing for an annual audit, she asked CapRadio’s general manager for documentation related to the station’s budget.

“Those schedules were never provided to me,” she said.

De Valk said she grew even more concerned during a cash flow analysis a short time later.

“There were some credit card transactions coming through and I just didn't know where the backups were for those transactions,” she said, without mentioning any colleagues by name. “I kept asking that individual to provide the backups, but it just fell on deaf ears. At that point I didn't know what to do.” 

De Valk said she didn’t immediately report the problems to CapRadio higher-ups due to concerns over job security: “I just felt that if I would have gone to the board … I would have lost my job right away.” 

CapRadio reporters have made attempts to reach several former CapRadio board members, all of whom have declined to speak or did not respond to our requests.

While de Valk knew that CapRadio was an auxiliary of Sac State, she said she wasn’t fully aware that Sac State has oversight of the station’s finances and business practices. For that reason, she said, she didn’t take her concerns to Sac State.

”In my mind it didn’t really register that I should’ve gone to Sac State directly,” she said.

De Valk told reporters she finally brought the unsupported transactions to the attention of Sac State officials in spring 2023, several months after becoming aware of them.

When asked if she’d been contacted by the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office about an investigation into former GM Reina, de Valk said “I can’t comment on that.”

De Valk left CapRadio in September 2023.

Too many titles, not enough oversight

During his 16-year tenure at CapRadio, Reina often held multiple high-level titles at once. For example, he was simultaneously chief financial officer and chief operating officer for approximately three years. Later, he held the dual titles of executive vice president and general manager.

Brian Mittendorf, accounting chair at the Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, specializes in the study of nonprofit accounting. He said it’s not uncommon for nonprofit executives to hold multiple titles — especially at smaller organizations.

“Non-profit organizations that are small tend to run into circumstances where a lot of the decision-making power is concentrated in executives,” he said. “It could just be a single executive who has the day-to-day operations of the organization all under his or her auspices,” he said.

But he said in an organization with more than 100 employees, that starts to change. 

“But if you have 100 employees, it is hard to justify having very different roles — operations and the finance — all under one person's auspices,” he said. “If all of that is kind of centralized to one person, you run the risk of that person exerting too much influence.”

Update: The day after this story published, we received an email from Bird & Van Dyke, Inc., the law firm representing Reina.

Their email stated that the Sac State report “‘does not make any legal claims or reach any conclusions of guilt or wrongdoing’” and that “the issues are under investigation and NO charges have been filed.”

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct which type of audit Rocio de Valk was preparing for when she asked for documentation related to the station’s budget.

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by CapRadio’s Digital Editor Claire Morgan, Insight Host Vicki Gonzalez, Reporter Megan Myscofski, Producer Sarit Laschinsky and edited by Politics Editor Chris Nichols, with assistance from the California Newsroom. 

CapRadio Producer Jen Picard and Reporter Laura Fitzgerald contributed reporting. You can follow our ongoing coverage here.

Following NPR’s protocol for reporting on itself, no CapRadio corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted or broadcast.

Editor’s note: CapRadio is licensed to Sacramento State, which is also an underwriter.