The long-delayed Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has lost its second senior member of staff in less than a year with the filmmaker appointing himself in her place.

Staff at the Los Angeles institution, which recently announced it will open on September 22 next year, were told chief curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas is leaving this week.

The LA Times reported staff were told there were "no immediate plans" to replace her and the museum's founder, Star Wars filmmaker George Lucas, would "oversee curatorial content and direction".

The $1 billion museum, set up by Lucas with his wife Mellody Hobson Lucas, has been more than a decade in the making with early plans to site it in San Francisco and then Chicago falling through.

The loss of Rivas comes nine months after director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont stepped down.

The museum will draw on a collection including work by Jack Kirby, Carrie Mae Weems, Diego Rivera and Norman Rockwell as well as items from the history of comics such as a 1934 Flash Gordon strip, early Peanuts cartoons and original Black Panther pages from 1968.

A new exhibition at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum will trace the history of photographic fakery from its earliest days.

More than 50 images from the museum's collection will go on show in Fake which will run from February 6 to May 25.

It will show how AI image manipulation is the latest version of a trend that began using scissors and glue.

Other shows announced today for 2026 include works inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses featuring Titian, Caravaggio and Magritte among others, a show of sculptor Carel Visser and a major Willem de Kooning exhibition.

The Cambodian government has asked to see records kept by a former Denver Art Museum consultant in its attempt to track down stolen treasures.

The late Emma Bunker worked for many years with disgraced dealer Douglas Latchford who was charged with fraud for falsifying the origins of traded antiquities before his death in 2020.

A lawyer acting for the Cambodian state told the Denver Post it believed her notebooks could provide "a crucial piece of our investigative work as we continue to unravel what we consider one of the largest art crimes in history".

He said her family had not responded to the request.

The museum distanced itself from Bunker in the last two years after allegations emerged of her involvement in the trade of stolen artifacts. In 2023, it removed her name from its Southeast Asian gallery wall and returned a six-figure donation to her family.

The museum also handed over multiple pieces she donated to its collection to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to be returned to Southeast Asia.

1 - The Perez Art Museum Miami has received two major donations to support its Caribbean Cultural Institute. The Mellon Foundation gave $2 million with another $5 million coming from the Green Family Foundation set up by former ambassador to Singapore, Steven J. Green, and his wife Dorothea.

2 - Two major museums in Japan and South Korea are hosting a joint show to mark 80 years since the end of World War II and the 60th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic relations between the countries. Work by artists including Paik Nam June will be on show in the exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art from Saturday before it moves to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea in May.

3 - New York City has announced Stephen Kwok, Ifeoma Ebo and Mauricio Higuera as its three latest artists-in-residence. They will each receive $40,000 and spend 12 months based in different parts of the city government.

4 - Maurizio Cattelan has provided visitors to Art Basel Miami Beach with one of the photo opportunities of the fair. His work Bones, which shows an eagle crashing head first into the ground, is attracting a lot of attention to the Gagosian stand where it takes pride of place.