Pope.L brought art to the people, reaching beyond institutions and into the street, putting statements about the condition of Black Americans out into the open. With vivid defiance, Juanita McNeely captured American women’s experiences, making a painting about abortion before the original passing of Roe v. Wade. Vera Molnár propelled us forward with her early usages of computers in her art.

Others left far too soon: Lin May Saeed, whose art encouraged empathy with animals and activist musings, and Vincent Honoré, whose cutting-edge exhibition and criticism championed women and queer artists.

In the case of painter Brice Marden, Barry Schwabsky recalled for Art in America, “It seemed as though Brice Marden had always been there and always would be.” While we may take these continued presences for granted, it’s important to recall the impact that Marden and others have made. As Schwabsky writes, “He managed to make each of us a little bit more an artist.”

Perhaps, then, we ought to remember signs of the people who left us in 2023 will always be with us. Below, a brief look back at the lives of 28 artists, collectors, curators, and more who died in 2023.

The statue depicts the mythical figure Khru Kai Kaeo, a winged demon with fangs and crimson talons who is said to be the teacher of Jayavarman VII, a former king of the Khmer empire. Some also regard Khru Kai Kaeo as a god of wealth.

The statue, which was erected in August, drew criticism because some locals found it to be “un-Buddhist and scary,” according to the Nation Thailand. Aside from startling passersby, it spurred online group discussions of devotion to Khru Kai Kaeo.

In response, a group called the Council of Artists Supporting Thai Buddhism urged the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration to remove the statue. They claimed that the statue’s worshippers were engaging in practices such as animal sacrifice.

On Thursday, the statue was removed from its place in front of the hotel, the Nation Thailand reported. Instead, it will now be sited at the back of the hotel.

For violating the Building Control Act, the hotel’s operator, Suan Lum Night Bazaar Ratchadaphisek, has also been ordered to pay a fine of 1.3 million baht (approximately $37,793).

In some cases only a segment of the finger is missing, while in others several fingers have been lost. Until now, missing fingers have been attributed to artistic license and resulting from medical issues such as frostbite.

“There is compelling evidence that these people may have had their fingers amputated deliberately in rituals intended to elicit help from supernatural entities,” archaeologist Mark Collard of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver told the Guardian.

Dani women from the New Guinea Highlands, for example, “sometimes have one or more fingers cut off following the death of loved ones, including sons or daughters. We believe that Europeans were doing the same sort of thing in palaeolithic times, though the precise belief systems involved may have been different. This is a practice that was not necessarily routine but has occurred at various times through history, we believe.”

Having faced challenges to the theory from peers in recent years, Collard and PhD student Brea McCauley gathered more data. They looked at both prints (a hand with pigment pressed against a wall) and stencils (the painting pigment around a hand pressed against a wall) across four cave sites, Maltravieso and Fuente del Trucho, Spain and Gargas and Cosquer, France.

Looking more globally, four sites in Africa, three in Australia, nine in North America, five in south Asia, and one in south-east Asia also contain evidence of finger amputation.

“This practice was clearly invented independently multiple times,” they argued. “And it was engaged in by some recent hunter-gatherer societies, so it is entirely possible that the groups at Gargas and the other caves engaged in the practice.”

While it may seem radical, Collard noted such rituals as fire-walking, face-piercing, and the hooking of skin for heavy hauls. “People become more likely to cooperate with other group members after going through such rituals. Amputating fingers may simply have been a more extreme version of this type of ritual.”

In November, experts identified that Pingtan Island was home to Austronesian people roughly 3,000 to 7,500 years ago. They also discovered evidence that the inhabitants developed into a complex society between 5,000 and 6,500 years ago with residential homes, as well as buildings for handicrafts, waste removal, and food processing. There, they additionally found remains of the earliest-known rice cultivation.

On another part of the island, archaeologists discovered remnants of communal spaces dating from 3,000 to 4,200 years ago. Through a genetic testing on human remains uncovered, they discovered a match to Austronesian people.

Austronesians were a large ethnic group that started in Taiwan and spread as far as present-day Chile’s Easter Island. The early tribes that once covered most of Southeast Asia, Micronesia, Polynesia, New Zealand, and the US state Hawaii, today has an estimated 400 million descendants.

Until now it has been widely believed that Austronesians originated in present-day Taiwan and started migrating over the last 5,000 years due to population growth. The findings on Pingtan, however, suggest that these origins could be geographically larger than Taiwan and, perhaps, could also include mainland China.

Perhaps some of the most interesting have involved innovative technology that has allowed archaeologists to dig deeper than before, such as the discovery of an ancient temple, now underwater, in a sunken city off Egypt’s coast and an ancient Greek catacomb found below the southern Italian city of Naples. Others, however, have been directly tied to current events, among them, the ancient Greek city Cyrene which emerged after floods devastated Libya.

Some early settlements like a Neolithic monument and a mysterious sanctuary were identified on Scotland’s Isle of Arran and in the Netherlands’ town of Tiel, respectively, offering deeper understandings of their ancient societies. There were also culturally significant treasures revealed like a 3,000-year-old sealed corridor in a massive Chavin temple complex in Peru, sixty mummified bodies that were found in two tombs in the ancient Egyptian city Luxor, and, while not a discovery, the Vatican’s reopening of an ancient Roman necropolis to the public.

While these have all been important, there are a selection that stood out among the rest. Below is a look at the ten archaeological finds that are likely to have an impact not just this year, but on our understanding of human history for years to come.

On Thursday, quotations from eight sets of minutes for meetings held between June and November were published by the Art Newspaper. According to the report, June 1 was the first time that the BP deal was discussed. At this point, certain board members said there were conflicts of interest: George Osborne, chair of the board, is partner of an investment banking firm which is used by BP; two other board members also claimed connections to BP.

On June 29, there was a more detailed discussion regarding the BP deal, in which Osborne didn’t participate. “Some trustees indicated strong personal disagreement about accepting money from companies in the sponsor’s line of business, but resolved that these were not such as to require them to recuse themselves from acting as trustees in the decision to be made,” read the minutes, as quoted by the Art Newspaper.

At other meetings, people on staff at the institution raised the possibility that the collection could become endangered by protests that would result from the BP deal. David Bilson, head of security, cautioned in November that “the risk of an attempt to damage the collection might be heightened following the announcement of the corporate sponsorship under discussion and could not be fully avoided without inhibiting public access to the collection.” There had been a climate protest at the National Gallery earlier that month.

The announcement of the BP deal was made on Tuesday. The funding, which will be released over the course of ten years, will be used for the refurbishment and redisplay of the museum’s permanent collection.

The British Museum has had a longstanding history with BP, which has supported the museum since 1996. Not only did the oil company sponsor exhibitions, but it also funded a theater space at the museum in 2000.

Activists have repeatedly protested BP’s financial ties to the British Museum, urging the institution to drop the oil company as a funder through actions staged within the galleries regularly. In June, reports emerged that the British Museum had finally severed ties with BP, but a museum spokesperson denied this.

Museums funded by BP, such as the Tate, London’s National Portrait Gallery, and the British Museum have been the subject of climate-related protests.

Though Rembrandt didn’t shy away from experimenting with new techniques, the use of a lead-based layer has never been seen before among works by Rembrandt or his contemporaries.

This new discovery comes out of Operation Night Watch, a research and conservation project devoted to the history of the masterpiece. Researchers performed an advanced analysis using computational imaging on a paint sample taken from the work.

A combination of X-ray fluorescence and ptychography were used to identify and visualize the sub-microscale chemical compounds along the canvas’ lower layers. The analysis revealed a lead-rich layer below the quartz-clay ground layer.

Rembrandt used quartz-clay ground layers in not only The Night Watch but in earlier paintings as well, wherein he would paint a first ground of red earth pigments with a second ground of lead white.

It’s possible that Rembrandt needed a cheaper, more flexible alternative to accommodate the size of The Night Watch. Another theory is that he may have been trying to protect the canvas from the humid conditions of the exterior wall of the great hall of the Kloveniersdoelen (musketeers shooting range) in Amsterdam, where the painting was intended to hang.

The results were then compared with a lead distribution map of the entire painting using an X-ray fluorescence scanning. The presence of lead throughout suggests the lead layer was applied using large semi-circular brushstrokes. An imprint of the stretcher bars also show up in the lead distribution map, meaning that the lead layer was preparatory and applied right after the canvas was stretched.

This is König’s second space in Berlin, and one of his first major projects executed following allegations of sexual misconduct in 2022. The fallout from the accusations, first reported by the German outlet Die Zeit, was significant: the gallery lost a number of artists on its roster and was uninvited to several high-profile. König denies all the since launched legal proceedings against Die Zeit, seeking damages.

The former telegraph office-turned gallery, which also boasts a hotel and restaurant, has undergone extensive renovations. Nearby businesses include Google and Fotografiska.

The gallery’s inaugural exhibition will feature the works of painter Karl Horst Hödicke who co-founded the Neue Wilde movement in the early 1980s. The movement was characterized by intense color palettes and broad brushstrokes.

König’s first gallery was located in the former Brutalist church St. Agnes, where it opened in 2015. He also has a space in Seoul and, in February 2024, will open a new location in Mexico City.

The doodle shows younger and older versions of Varda holding different kinds of cameras, as if capturing the essence of one another, forming the two letters O in the famed logo.

Born May 30, 1928, in Brussels, Varda moved to France with her family at the age of 12. She later studied art history and photography, which led her to a career taking photos for magazines and the Théâtre National Populaire.

It was Varda’s experience with photography that inspired her venture into cinema. Her first film, La Pointe Courte, which offers a fictional narrative with documentary-style scenes, was released in 1955. It was her freedom from industry standards that allowed her to help establish the French New Wave, a movement characterized by experimentation and the ultimate rejection of traditional filmmaking. A trailblazer and self-described feminist, Varda was the only woman in the movement.

Throughout her career, Varda directed more than 40 short, feature, and documentary films. Among the most notable are Cleo from 5 to 7, Vagabond, and The Gleaners and I. Throughout her work, she featured many female-driven narratives, including women’s right to choose in the 1977 film L’Une chante, l’autre pas.

These efforts extended beyond the screen, as she signed the Manifesto of the 343, which publicly acknowledged that those who had signed had previously had abortions, and pushed legalization among governing bodies.

Varda continued experimenting with new formats throughout her life, expanding to include worldwide video and immersive art installations in 2003.

She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Lumières Award and an Oscar nomination for Visages Villages (Faces Places), a César Award for Les Plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnés), a Golden Lion for Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond), and an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in cinema.

Varda died from cancer March 29, 2019, in Paris, at age 90, leaving behind two children, daughter Rosalie Varda and son Mathieu Demy.

Previous Google doodles have paid homage to such prolific artists as Rosa Bonheur, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Pacita Abad. They have also marked notable dates, events, and holidays.

Housed at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the display of the 1603 canvas Diana and Actaeon reportedly “disturbed” some students, according to the French newspaper Le Monde.

Cesari’s work, which depicts the hunter Actaeon interfering with the goddess Diana and the surrounding bathing nymphs, was shown on December 7 during a “vie de classe,” a period for general classroom activities in French schools, to 11- and 12-year-old students at Jacques Cartier school in Issou.

Several students from the French school also alleged that the teacher made Islamophobic remarks, which the school administration denies, reported the Art Newspaper. Some parents also complained to the school, according to The Times.

In solidarity with the teacher who showed the Cesari painting, staff members at the school refused to work earlier this week. Additionally, staff noted “acts of slander, a multiplication and aggravation of incidents [against staff] and an attack on secularism” in a December 8 letter to France’s director of national education services that did not specifically mention the incident.

On December 11, the French minister of education Gabriel Attal visited the school and said that the students in question would be reprimanded. The school has since reopened.

This is the second of such controversies to make international headlines in 2023. Earlier this year, the resignation of a Florida principal over the showing of Michelangelo’s nude sculpture David inspired a heated debate over how art history should be taught in the classroom, with the Florida Department of Education forced to declare its “artistic value.”