For once, Mexico’s president has a political headache that cannot be blamed on the White House.

Claudia Sheinbaum has been dragged into the fate of the Gelman Collection of Mexican modern art, which includes 18 works by Frida Kahlo plus multiple pieces by Diego Rivera among others.

The 160-strong collection created by Jacques and Natasha Gelman was acquired by the Zambrano family in 2023, who signed a management deal with the Spanish bank Santander. It plans to show highlights in the Faro Santander, the bank's new cultural center in the northern Spanish city.

Sheinbaum, who admitted she needed to get up to speed, announced she has tasked Mexico’s culture minister, Claudia Curiel, with contacting the family to make sure the works return to Mexico.

The politicians’ minds have been focused by an open letter signed by more than 350 cultural professionals in Mexico urging the authorities to be more transparent and enforce export permits that allow nationally signficant works to only temporarily leave the country.

Curiel insists the collection will return to Mexico in 2028 and the Mexican newspaper Reforma reported a source close to the Zambranos saying they wanted to show them in the country.

Until May, highlights are on show in Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno. The Faro Santander is due to open in June with the Kahlos the stars of its inaugural show.

Dia will be rolling out the red carpet for a major work by Walter De Maria in its collection.

The artist’s 1981 installation, 360˚ I Ching / 64 Sculptures, will emerge from storage and go back on display at Dia Beach in Upstate New York from November 14.

De Maria arranged 576 white-lacquered rods on a red background into 64 groups, each shaped by the hexagrams of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination text that has inspired numerous artists.

It was first shown in Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1981 and was on display at Dia Beacon from 2016-19.

Dia commissioned some of De Maria’s most significant and ambitious pieces: The Lightning Field (1977) in the New Mexico high desert; The New York Earth Room (1977), and also in Manhattan, The Broken Kilometer (1979).

Teresinha Soares, who has died at 99 in Belo Horizonte, was a pioneering feminist artist who fused sex and politics in 1960s Brazilian Pop art, boldly defying the military dictatorship with provocative work.

Before she took up art, she was the first woman elected as a councillor in her hometown. She went on to participate in three editions of the São Paulo Biennial among other major exhibitions but then abruptly stoped making art in the late 1970s and focused on writing.

MASP in Sao Paulo presented a solo show Who’s Afraid of Teresinha Soares? in 2017 and in 2019 the Museu de Arte de São Paulo organized her retrospective.

Her work was included in Tate Modern’s The World Goes Pop and the Hammer Museum’s Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985.

Her daughter is the Brazilian-American artist Valeska Soares.

The number of years Evian has been bottling the water of the French Alps. The company is celebrating with Jeff Koons-designed limited edition bottles, pink for still and blue for sparkling.

1 - A new gallery in San Francisco, Ruth Asawa Lanier Inc., opens on May 9 with an exhibition of the Japanese-American artist’s work curated by Asawa’s daughters.

2 - The Metropolitan Museum of Art is seeking a new curator of its Native American art after Patricia Marroquin Norby's quiet departure in December, reportedly for health reasons. She faces allegations that she may have over-stated her indigenous ancestry.

3 - Authorities in Beijing have ordered a comprehensive inventory of the collections of all state institutions after artifacts from the Nanjing Museum appeared on the market.

4 - At Beirut’s request, Unesco has provisionally designated 39 cultural sites in Lebanon to give them greater protection under the 1954 Hague Convention amid the ongoing military conflict.

5 - Forget the T-shirt, you can now buy a pair of spectacles inspired by Frank Gehry's titanium-clad Guggenheim Bilbao. The museum and Austrian eyewear company Silhouette have signed a three-year partnership deal with three ultra-thin frames now available.