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A traveling blockbuster exhibition featuring the treasures of King Tutankhamun, the famed boy pharaoh, may have breached Egyptian laws meant to protect antiquities.
In a new documentary, BBC News Arabic investigates the legality of the show, billed as the largest collection of King Tut’s treasures ever to leave Egypt. It was organized with the help of Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, formerly Egypt’s minister for antiquities, and a controversial figure in the field of archaeology.
“Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh” is the work of Exhibitions International, an events company that specializes in sports, entertainment, and fashion. The show, which celebrates the 100th anniversary of the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, debuted at the California Science Center in Los Angeles in March 2018 as part of a 10-city tour. Following a stop in Paris, it was most recently on view at the Saatchi Gallery in London.
When the show was planned, Egypt’s Antiquities Protection Law permitted the international exhibition of ancient artifacts provided they were “not unique” and were “exchanged with states, museums, and scientific institutions”—but not commercial companies.
Tutankhamun’s Wishing Cup in the Form of an Open Lotus. Image courtesy Laboratoriorosso, Viterbo, Italy.

The law was amended in 2018, allowing Egypt’s council of antiquities to approve international artifact loans without restrictions. But Exhibitions International signed its contract with the government in September 2017, before the legal amendment.
An Egyptian lawyer, Sayed Said, has filed a lawsuit against the country’s ministry of antiquities over the exhibition, arguing that the show contains unique artifacts that have been unlawfully lent to a commercial business.
IMG, the parent company of Exhibitions International (and Frieze Art Fair), told the BBC that the artifacts in the King Tut show were not unique, but part of a series. Hawass says that “these touring artifacts aren’t of any importance,” a claim that directly contradicts a promotional quote he offered for the show in 2017, in which he claimed that “each object is unique.”
Gilded Wooden Bed (Reign of Tutankhamun 1336-1326 B.C.E.)© Laboratoriorosso, Viterbo/Italy

There is precedent for shutting down international exhibitions of Egyptian artifacts. In 2011, a court in Cairo found that Cleopatra exhibition in Ohio, also organized by Exhibitions International, was unlawful, and demanded the artifacts’ return. (The Cleopatra show took place prior to IMG’s purchase of Exhibitions International in 2018.)
The London show, originally scheduled to run through May 3, 2020, has been closed indefinitely since March. It will not reopen, according to the Art Newspaper, and subsequent stops on the tour have been suspended indefinitely.
The show attracted 1.4 million visitors in Paris and 580,000 in London, and brought in approximately $57 million. Los Angeles attendance figures were not available. Admission ran as high as £37.50 ($46) at Saatchi, which is normally free.
Colossal Statue. Image courtesy of Laboratoriorosso, Viterbo,  Italy.

At the tour’s end in 2024, the 150 artifacts are slated to return to Egypt, where they will go on permanent display at the long-delayed Grand Egyptian Museum near the Pyramids of Giza, where construction underway. The museum, which has struggled financially, is slated for completion in 2021—which means it will debut without the works in the international exhibition.
The touring show is supporting the $1 billion new museum, with contractual earnings of at least $5 million in each city, and bonuses to be paid out after 400,000 visitors at each stop. IMG has reportedly paid the Egyptian government $20 million to date.
Mostafa Waziry, the secretary general of Egypt’s antiquities ministry who approved the current show, told the BBC that “holding exhibitions abroad yields huge results, not just economic, but political and touristic results.”
As head of the council of antiquities, Hawass previously coordinated Exhibitions International’s 17-city blockbuster “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” on tour between 2004 and 2011 and featuring 50 artifacts. (Venues included the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Chicago’s Field Museum, and Discovery Times Square in New York.)
Gold Inlaid Canopic Coffinette of Tutankhamun Dedicated to Imseti and Isis(Reign of Tutankhamun 1336-1326 B.C.E) ©Laboratoriorosso, Viterbo, Italy

King Tut’s first international outing was the famed “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibition that ran from 1972 to 1981, fueling an Egyptomania craze. The show, which contained 55 pieces from Tut’s tomb, became an international sensation, including stops in seven US cities.
The current exhibition includes 60 works that have never before left Egyptian soil. King Tut’s tomb, the only pharaoh’s burial site found intact, had over 5,000 objects.
John Norman, the head Exhibitions International, told the BBC he was not concerned about a legal challenge to the show.
“We have legal documents that were done by the government,” he said.

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As galleries and art institutions around the world begin to reopen, we are spotlighting individual shows—online and IRL—that are worth your attention.

“Catherine Opie: Rhetorical Landscapes”at Lehmann Maupin, New Yorkthrough July 26

What the gallery says: “This exhibition, featuring large-scale photography and stop motion animations, examines our current climate, both political and ecological, through digital collages of magazine clippings and photographs of the Okefenokee swamp land. Taken together, these works create a portrait of contemporary America—plagued by the divisive and violent rhetoric used by our current administration and facing looming ecological destruction due to climate change, which is especially threatening for the wetlands Opie features here.
One of the most significant American photographers of her generation, Opie has produced over two decades of work that examines and often exposes the ideals and norms surrounding American identity and the concept of the “American Dream” while giving visibility to communities overlooked within those narratives. She first gained recognition during the 1990s for her series of studio portraits titled ‘Being and Having,’ in which she photographed gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals drawn from her circle of friends and artists. Opie has also traveled extensively across the country exploring the diversity of America’s communities and landscapes, documenting quintessential American subjects including LA’s freeway system, high school football players, the 2008 presidential inauguration, and US National Parks. In her portraits and landscapes, Opie often establishes levels of ambiguity—of identity and place—through manipulating the focus of her images through cropping, blurring, intense close ups or distance shots, and playing with orientation, often swapping landscape and portrait formats.”
Why it’s worth a look: At first glance, it might seem strange that photographer Catherine Opie’s new body of work focuses on swamps. After all, Opie is best known for her intimate and unflinching portraits that challenge stereotypes of beauty and gender. But upon closer examination, Opie is traversing similar territory here, taking as a subject something that is often misunderstood: the swamp, which is riddled with negative connotations (“drain the swamp,” for instance, one of President Trump’s favorite rallying cries). For Opie, though, swamps are necessary and under-sung ecosystems that the current administration is literally threatening with its changes to the Environmental Protection Agency.
In these large-scale photographs of Okefenokee swamps throughout southern Georgia and northern Florida, Opie turns her lens on a diverse community of creatures—owls and alligators appear hiding amid the dense foliage—and exposes its raw beauty. Juxtaposed with the swamps are a suite of Opie’s self-described “political collages,” stop-motion animated films based on cut-out images from contemporary magazines. The films are projected on hand-painted grids, harkening back to Opie’s series “The Modernist,” and riffing on the actual politics of landscapes in cities across America.
What it looks like:

Installation view, “Catherine Opie: Rhetorical Landscapes” at Lehmann Maupin. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

Catherine Opie, Untitled #3 (Swamps) (2019). © Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.

Catherine Opie, Untitled #2 (Swamps) (2019). © Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.

Catherine Opie, Untitled #7 (Political Collage), (2019). © Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.

Catherine Opie, Untitled #8 (Political Collage), (2019). © Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.

Installation view, “Catherine Opie: Rhetorical Landscapes” at Lehmann Maupin. Photo: Elisabeth Boernstein.

Catherine Opie, Untitled #1 (Swamps) (2019). © Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.

Catherine Opie, Untitled #4 (Political Collage), (2019). © Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.

Installation view, “Catherine Opie: Rhetorical Landscapes” at Lehmann Maupin. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

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In 1981, actor Ben Vereen was invited to perform at a gala to celebrate the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan. His act was an homage to renowned vaudevillian Bert Williams, the first Black man to have a lead role in a feature film.
The two-part performance began with a minstrel show featuring Vereen in blackface, followed by a critique of such racist acts and a tribute to Williams’s perseverance. But as artist Los Angeles-based Edgar Arceneaux explains in an exclusive interview with Art21, that’s not what Americans saw when it aired on live television.
“ABC edited out that second part,” Arceneaux explained in the 2016 interview. The station “only showed him doing a minstrel show for Ronald Reagan and 25,000 white Republicans.” In short order, Vereen’s friends and peers abandoned him for what they saw as an unforgivable act. But Arceneaux wondered, even if they had seen the second part of the show, would they have understood?

Production still from the “Chicago” episode of “Art in the Twenty-First Century,” Season 8. © Art21, Inc. 2016.

That question is at the heart of a play Arceneaux staged called “Until, Until, Until,” commissioned for Performa 15 and based on Vereen’s original performance. Arceneaux told Art21 that ambiguity like that at the center of the Vereen controversy is the fuel that drives his art practice.
“The power of what art is, which is distinctive from other fields, is its unruliness,” he said. “Art is not inherently good. It’s not inherently bad. But it is inherently contradictory. Its nature is to ask new questions.”
Before he staged his rendition of the tragically misunderstood 1981 performance, Arceneaux spoke to Ben Vereen himself. “I was brought to tears during the call,” Arceneaux said, imagining how Vereen must have felt having his work so taken out of context. “I could sense from [Vereen] that, he knows there’s people out there that care now about what he tried to do 30 years ago. Maybe now is that time.”

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below. This week, Performa is re-broadcasting the play “Until, Until, Until” online. 
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.

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“Painting With Light: The Photography of Ming Smith”Online at Pippy Houldsworth GalleryThrough July 25 What the gallery says: “Containing works from the start of the 1970s to the present day, including a number of never-before-seen archival prints, the exhibition explores the painterly quality of Ming Smith’s photographic work. From photographs taken in the New York neighborhoods […] More

It is a shocking and unforgettable image: a Black man crosses the street with an angry mob in pursuit. A brick flies through the air toward the man’s head. The traffic light is green, as if the angry mob has the go-ahead. Activists are petitioning the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main to take down […] More

“Gordon Parks: Part One”through August 1, 2020Alison Jacques Gallery, London What the gallery says: “Born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, Gordon Parks was a humanitarian with a deep and life-long commitment to social justice. He rapidly developed a deeply personal style of photography with a focus on race relations, poverty, civil rights, and […] More

What is more powerful: beauty, or ugliness? Artist Fred Wilson, who is known for his interventionist artworks, in which he takes objects from museum collections and rearranges them, decoding and recontextualizing their meaning, was focused on just that question in an exclusive interview with Art21 filmed in 2014. In the interview, Wilson discusses beauty, ugliness, and meaning […] More

“Yale Painting and Printmaking MFA 2020”Online at Perrotin, through July 18 What Yale Ph.D candidate Alexandra M. Thomas says: “These artists take us elsewhere: to the bar with friends; the electricity of queer nightlife; a crowded swimming pool on a sunny day; the affective space of nostalgia for girlhood; the fashion catwalk. We witness earthly pleasures: […] More