Smithsonian museum plans hit a political wall as Oliver Beer and Jasper Johns take center stage
A long-anticipated Smithsonian museum devoted to American women’s history has been thrown into uncertainty after the US House of Representatives rejected a bill to build it, deepening the pressure on the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The setback comes amid heightened scrutiny and government interference since President Trump returned to power, and it underscores how quickly cultural plans can become entangled in partisan conflict.
In the latest episode of The Week in Art, host Ben Luke speaks with Elena Goukassian, ’s senior editor of museums and heritage in New York, about the bill’s failure and the broader tensions surrounding the Smithsonian. Their conversation places the museum proposal in a larger political frame, where institutional ambition, public memory, and congressional power are now closely linked.
The episode also turns to London Gallery Weekend, which begins on 5 June, where British artist Oliver Beer (b. 1982) will present new paintings alongside sound and video works in The Sky in the Cave at Thaddaeus Ropac. The exhibition grows out of Beer’s Resonance Project: The Cave, in which he brought eight singers into a prehistoric painted cave in the Dordogne, France, to respond to its acoustic frequencies. Among them was singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, who joins Beer in conversation for the episode.
The final segment focuses on Jasper Johns (b. 1930) and Painting with Two Balls, the work selected as this week’s feature piece. It appears in Night Driver, a new retrospective of the American artist at Guggenheim Bilbao, on view from 29 May to 12 October. Ben Luke discusses the exhibition with curator Enrique Juncosa, offering a closer look at how Johns’s work continues to reward fresh attention.
Taken together, the episode moves from institutional politics to artistic collaboration and retrospective reassessment — a reminder that the art world’s most consequential stories often unfold across very different registers at once.
