‘While money doesn’t talk, it swears’

7/1/2026

A red rectangular abstract by Mark Rothko sold for $85.8 million at spring auction in New York. The seller of the 1957 work, “Brown and Blacks in Reds,” was the estate of art dealer Robert Mnuchin, who paid $6.7 million for the work in 2003. That price was described as “art-becomes-reality” moment after French playwright Yazmina Reza’s comedy of the absurd “Art” won the best play triple crown of awards — the Moliere in France, The Olivier in the UK and The Tony in the U.S.  

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Alice Walton’s 200,000-square-foot museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, is expanding after just 15 years. Walton, 76, introduced architect Moshe Safdie, 87, and their 50-year plan to create a world-class art museum. The hard-to-get-to museum originally hoped to attract 250,000 annual visitors. Four times that many have been coming, even during COVID. 

The new addition resembles the concrete, cedar and copper original. It opened last month, adding 114,000 square feet of new galleries, education and programming space. The architect installed skylights with an elaborate mechanism that funnels sunlight from different directions to create what he described as “a perfect, balanced white light.” Walton said that she and Safdie will be the only designers of their 50-year plan, suggesting that the world’s richest woman and her friend will live another 50 years.

 

New heights for Hamlet

Basketball’s 7-foot 5-inch “All Universe” phenom Victor Wembanyama and his older sister Eve, also a basketball star in Europe, spent the day before game three of the NBA finals in Gramercy Park, one of just two world’s richest woman and her friend private parks in New York City, sketching a statue of Edwin Booth, the legendary 19th-century Shakespearean actor, as Hamlet. What can’t this guy do?

 

July touts

Des Moines-based international band Parranderos Latino Combo will release a new production July 31 with a performance and dance party at Wooly’s in the East Village. The record is a collection of original salsa compositions that have been updated with new vocals, piano and trumpet tracks from current members. The songs were edited and remixed by Carlos Velazquez at Playbach Studio in Puerto Rico. 

Founding member and lead singer Fernando Aveiga explained: “This album is for our fans that love salsa and includes our most streamed song ‘MaryJane & Mihaela’ on vinyl for the first time. We’ve had DJs around the world asking for the song on vinyl, their preferred format. The song has over 2 million streams on YouTube from fans based in Colombia.”

Bronx-based photographer Elle Pérez 2025 series “La Despedida (the world is always ending, the world is always again beginning)” is a series of photographs taken in two gardens: Pérez’s grandfather’s backyard in Puerto Rico, and Claude Monet’s home in Giverny, France. Through Sept. 20 at Des Moines Art Center.

In “Topographies: Mapping Being and Belonging,” mapping serves as a metaphor for the ways artists draw meaning from their surroundings: how they transform our understanding of both the physical world and the societal forces that shape the places we inhabit. Through Sept. 28 at Des Moines Art Center. Gallery talk on July 19, 1:30 p.m.

America’s 250th birthday party gets more respect in Siouxland where “Pasture to Present,” at Sioux City Art Museum is inspired by Grant Wood’s 1926 “Corn Room” murals. The exhibition explores evolving relationships between American art, rural landscapes and the idealized vision of Midwestern life. A second section of the exhibition includes contemporary art that reinterprets agricultural themes. In pairing Wood’s original work with contemporary reflections on rural life, this exhibition considers the ongoing importance of rural America in the nation’s cultural landscape.  

Olson-Larsen Gallery’s annual Sumer Landscapes show plays through July. Artists include Audrey Brown, Joshua Cunningham, Barbara Fedeler, Allison and Jonathan Metzger, John P. Moench, and Joseph Theroux. Through July. ♦

Jim Duncan is a food and art writer who has been covering the central Iowa scene for more than five decades.