Rafael Ferrer Dies at 93; Villena Treasure Trial Opens

Rafael Ferrer, the Puerto Rican, New York-based artist who began his career as a jazz drummer and became one of the most restlessly inventive figures of American art, has died at age 93. The Museo del Barrio announced his death last night.

Ferrer was "a groundbreaking artist whose singular and influential practice challenged boundaries" across multiple mediums and disciplines, the museum stated. His path to visual art ran through Paris, where a 1954 trip brought him into contact with Surrealist artists and writers whose influence stayed with him throughout his career.

He made art from nearly anything. Ferrer drew on paper bags, hung Dada-like assembled sculptures made of calabash gourds and garbage can lids, and built installations from straw, dried leaves, and ice. "The general impression is of someone who would figure out how to make art if confined to a nearly empty room," the New York Times wrote in a glowing review.

In the 1960s and '70s, Ferrer built a reputation for avant-garde ephemeral Process Art installations, showing at major institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art alongside other conceptual artists. Around the 1980s he returned to painting, producing 'faux-primitive' works that often featured tropical homes and people.

Recognition from museums came late. In 2010, the Museo del Barrio presented Ferrer's first major solo museum exhibition, "Retro/Active: The Work of Rafael Ferrer," a survey spanning five decades. The New York Times called the show "almost criminally overdue." It triggered a succession of solo exhibitions at Guild Hall in East Hampton (2011), the Lancaster Museum of Art (2012), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2015). Ferrer received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975 and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 1993, and his works now sit in major museum collections around the world.

Villena Treasure trial opens

In Spain, preliminary court proceedings have begun against the mayor of Villena and the director of the local MUVI museum over alleged negligence that led to the theft of the Villena Treasure, one of Europe's most important Bronze Age gold assemblages, El País reports.

The Association for the Defense of the Rule of Law and the Fight Against Corruption (ADED) filed the complaint, which also names museum personnel responsible for security. The group claims gross negligence of security measures caused the theft, constituting a crime against historical heritage. Because the city owns the museum, ADED has additionally accused left-leaning Mayor Fulgencio Cerdán and another local official of failing to protect the institution. The judge has asked the public prosecutor's office to determine whether the trial can proceed.

The Villena Treasure comprises 66 items — including 11 gold bowls and 28 gold bracelets — totaling roughly 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of gold. On August 27, thieves made off with almost all of it, leaving behind a small handful of silver vessels, one bracelet, ornaments, and one of four crowns, thought to have been dropped during the escape.

The Digest

The city council of Heidenau, Germany, has voted to stop installing new "Stolpersteine" ("stumbling stones"), the small engraved brass plaques conceived as an artwork to commemorate Holocaust victims outside the homes where they once lived. [The New York Times]

Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski's late 19th- and early 20th-century painting Winter – Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow has been restituted to the National Museum in Warsaw by a private owner, after the owner learned it had been looted by the Nazis and hung in an SS officers' club. [Notes from Poland]

Greece and Bulgaria signed a new "Memorandum of Understanding" under which Sofia will return 48 relics looted during WWI to Athens, in exchange for the mortal remains of Tsar Samuel of Bulgaria, who reigned from 997 to 1014 and whose remains are currently housed in a Greek museum. [Voria]

Senator Mike Lee single-handedly blocked a bill Monday night aimed at preventing President Trump from tearing down presidential memorials, notably including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. [The Washington Post]

Patrick Branco Ruivo, director of the company that runs the Eiffel Tower for the city of Paris, will step down at the end of the year, after a major upset and workers' strike over the removal of female workers from the monument earlier in September and their replacement with men to accommodate a religious delegation visit. [Le Figaro]

The Sámi art collective Dáddadállu has won the MUNCH Award, which carries NOK 300,000 ($31,270). [ArtReview]

The Kicker

A new documentary about the life, art, and radical mind of Etel Adnan takes viewers deep into the late artist's poetic universe, ARTnews reports. Adnan being and time (2026), the first feature film by director Marie Valentine Regan, was made during the last five years before Adnan died on November 14, 2021. The film travels between Adnan's home in Paris and Mount Tamalpais, a subject of her poems and artworks over decades of living at its base in Sausalito. Throughout, Adnan reflects on facing history "head on" after a childhood in Beirut; how she "absorbed" the catastrophes witnessed by her Syrian father and Greek mother, including the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the 1922 burning of her mother's native "lost city" of Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey); maintaining a visual art practice "in Arabic"; and what it means to experience "being and time" — the central concerns of her art and writing.