The sudden death of the Cameroon-born curator Koyo Kouoh, at the age of 57 and at the height of her career, has shaken the art world. Her passing has left a void in the African arts scene, one which extends far beyond the continent.
Born in 1967 in Douala, she spent her teenage and early adult years in Zurich, Switzerland before returning to the continent and settling in Senegal. She lived in Cape Town, South Africa from 2019. There she was executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz MOCAA museum. It holds the continent’s largest collection of contemporary art.
At the time of her death, she was due to become the first African woman to lead the prestigious Venice Biennale, dubbed the “Olympics of art world”.
She described her practice, as a creative manager of art spaces and exhibitions, as being deeply rooted in:
A pan-African, feminist, ancestral, activist perspective, but also one that is generous, inclusive and welcoming.
Kouoh was unapologetic about her commitment to promoting Africa and Africanness on the global stage. Her decorated career included serving in global roles as curatorial advisor for leadingexhibitions and art events.
As a researcher of modern and contemporary arts of Africa, I first met Kouoh in 2015 when she facilitated a curatorial workshop I attended. I would work with her at Zeitz MOCAA, specifically helping research her landmark show, When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting.
Beyond these achievements, Kouoh mentored countless artists and art organisers, especially women. She leaves a legacy of building sustainable art institutions, critical curating with care, uplifting artists and cultural workers, and educating through art.
My motto has always been, You have to set up your own house and build your own home as opposed to trying to get into someone else’s castle.
One of the lasting legacies Kouoh left is teaching how to build African arts institutions, which help give creatives the chance to be seen and heard, and to make independent decisions free of the demands of funders.
The RAW Material Company that she established in Dakar stands as testimony of that. Through the artist residency and exhibition space, she was able to bring many independent and emerging artists, curators and gallerists to Senegal. There she published books on art from the continent, helping nurture and shift the Africa art ecosystem as it began to play an increasingly visible role in global art markets.
Her role in reviving the unstable ship that was the Zeitz MOCAA at the time she took over and steering it to becoming one of Africa’s leading cultural institutions and a global competitor says a lot about her vision. As she said:
I’m a fixer, I like to take complicated institutions and make them sustainable.
Education
The exhibitions she led were thoroughly researched and tended to generate critical discourse and public dialogue. When We See Us, for example, comes with an education programme that includes a webinar series.
Each exhibition of the show as it tours globally comes with a symposium and a publication with contributions from critical thinkers in the art industry. Even more impressive is how she managed to bring together people from different sectors, including respected academics, cultural workers and captains of industry.
We cannot talk about Kouoh’s contributions to art education without mentioning the Zeitz MOCAA & University of the Western Cape Museum Fellowship Programme, geared to grow “curatorial practice as well as advance scholarship on contemporary art discourse from the continent”. In my tenure, I observed that the museum’s Centre for Art Education and its outreach programme were closest to her heart.
Celebrating African artists
At Zeitz MOCAA, Kouoh was more drawn to research-based solo exhibitions or select surveys which offered in-depth insights into “individual practices, with retrospectives and monographs”. In her time at the museum it shone a spotlight on African artists like Senzeni Marasela, Johannes Phokela, Tracey Rose, Mary Evans, Otobong Nkanga and others.
Through the museum’s ongoing Atelier programme, a studio residency which is open and experimental in nature, audiences gain insights into an artist’s practice, process, thinking and intentions. So far, artists like Thania Petersen, Igshaan Adams, Unathi Mkonto and Berni Searle have shared these processes, which normally remain invisible to those who only see the final work.
She did all this in just over five years in Cape Town.
Uplifting generations
Kouoh believed in people’s potential and saw infinite possibilities in each one of us. This can be seen through the many peers and young talents she mentored and provided space to flourish. The young team of mostly Black female curators she has left in place at Zeitz MOCAA is proof of that. She cared about the welfare of the people around her.
Of the need to elevate women, she stated:
The importance, or rather the urgency, of focusing on women’s voices cannot be highlighted enough.
Curator of the Venice Biennale 2026
Recently appointed as the next Venice Biennale’s artistic director, Kouoh was due to present the exhibition’s title and theme in Venice on 20 May.
Those who have known her practice, as well as her obsessions and values, keenly anticipated the day, knowing African voices would take centre stage. I hope her team will be allowed to execute her ideas to the end.
Legacy
Kouoh belonged to a pioneering generation of African curators who worked hard for the recognition of African voices and creativity on the global stage. Although that recognition started to be earned in the 1990s, she realised a lot more still needed to be done, which is why she never stopped working, even at the most difficult of times.
She shared her vision of building strong independent institutions, encouraging others to do the same. She led in documenting and critically engaging artistic processes, and in producing African knowledge.
May her legacy and her spirit live on. As she said:
I do believe in life after death, because I come from an ancestral black education where we believe in parallel lives and realities.
Currently, getting a yearly COVID-19 vaccine is recommended for everyone ages 6 months and older, regardless of their health risk.
In the video announcing the plan to remove the vaccine from the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule for healthy children and healthy pregnant women, Kennedy spoke alongside National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. The trio cited a lack of evidence to support vaccinating healthy children. They did not explain the reason for the change to the vaccine schedule for pregnant people, who have previously been considered at high-risk for severe COVID-19.
Similarly, in the FDA announcement made a week prior, Makary and the agency’s head of vaccines, Vinay Prasad, said that public health trends now support limiting vaccines to people at high risk of serious illness instead of a universal COVID-19 vaccination strategy.
Was this a controversial decision or a clear consensus?
Many public health experts and professional health care associations have raised concerns about Kennedy’s latest announcement, saying it contradicts studies showing that COVID-19 vaccination benefits pregnant people and children. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, considered the premier professional organization for that medical specialty, reinforced the importance of COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy, especially to protect infants after birth. Likewise, the American Academy of Pediatrics pointed to the data on hospitalizations of children with COVID-19 during the 2024-to-2025 respiratory virus season as evidence for the importance of vaccination.
Kennedy’s announcement on children and pregnant women comes roughly a month ahead of a planned meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a panel of vaccine experts that offers guidance to the CDC on vaccine policy. The meeting was set to review guidance for the 2025-to-2026 COVID-19 vaccines. It’s not typical for the CDC to alter its recommendations without input from the committee.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has removed COVID-19 vaccines from the vaccine schedule for healthy children and pregnant people.
FDA officials Makary and Prasad also strayed from past established vaccine regulatory processes in announcing the FDA’s new stance on recommendations for healthy people under age 65. Usually, the FDA broadly approves a vaccine based on whether it is safe and effective, and decisions on who should be eligible to receive it are left to the CDC, which bases its decision on the advisory committee’s research-based guidance.
The advisory committee was expected to recommend a risk-based approach for the COVID-19 vaccine, but it was also expected to recommend allowing low-risk people to get annual COVID-19 vaccines if they want to. The CDC’s and FDA’s new policies on the vaccine will likely make it difficult for healthy people to get the vaccine.
Will low-risk people be able to get a COVID-19 shot?
Not automatically. Kennedy’s announcement does not broadly address healthy adults, but under the new FDA framework, healthy adults who wish to receive the fall COVID-19 vaccine will likely face obstacles. Health care providers can administer vaccines “off-label”, but insurance coverage is widely based on FDA recommendations. The new, narrower FDA approval will likely reduce both access to COVID-19 vaccines for the general public and insurance coverage for COVID-19 vaccines.
Under the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance providers are required to fully cover the cost of any vaccine endorsed by the CDC. Kennedy’s announcement will likely limit insurance coverage for COVID-19 vaccination.
Overall, the move to focus on individual risks and benefits may overlook broader public health benefits. Communities with higher vaccination rates have fewer opportunities to spread the virus.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on May 22, 2025.Libby Richards, Professor of Nursing, Purdue University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
This screenshot of an AI-generated video depicts Christopher Pelkey, who was killed in 2021.
Screenshot: Stacey Wales/YouTubeNir Eisikovits, UMass Boston and Daniel J. Feldman, UMass Boston
Christopher Pelkey was shot and killed in a road range incident in 2021. On May 8, 2025, at the sentencing hearing for his killer, an AI video reconstruction of Pelkey delivered a victim impact statement. The trial judge reported being deeply moved by this performance and issued the maximum sentence for manslaughter.
As part of the ceremonies to mark Israel’s 77th year of independence on April 30, 2025, officials had planned to host a concert featuring four iconic Israeli singers. All four had died years earlier. The plan was to conjure them using AI-generated sound and video. The dead performers were supposed to sing alongside Yardena Arazi, a famous and still very much alive artist. In the end Arazi pulled out, citing the political atmosphere, and the event didn’t happen.
In April, the BBC created a deep-fake version of the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie to teach a “maestro course on writing.” Fake Agatha would instruct aspiring murder mystery authors and “inspire” their “writing journey.”
The use of artificial intelligence to “reanimate” the dead for a variety of purposes is quickly gaining traction. Over the past few years, we’ve been studying the moral implications of AI at the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and we find these AI reanimations to be morally problematic.
Before we address the moral challenges the technology raises, it’s important to distinguish AI reanimations, or deepfakes, from so-called griefbots. Griefbots are chatbots trained on large swaths of data the dead leave behind – social media posts, texts, emails, videos. These chatbots mimic how the departed used to communicate and are meant to make life easier for surviving relations. The deepfakes we are discussing here have other aims; they are meant to promote legal, political and educational causes.
Chris Pelkey was shot and killed in 2021. This AI ‘reanimation’ of him was presented in court as a victim impact statement.
Moral quandaries
The first moral quandary the technology raises has to do with consent: Would the deceased have agreed to do what their likeness is doing? Would the dead Israeli singers have wanted to sing at an Independence ceremony organized by the nation’s current government? Would Pelkey, the road-rage victim, be comfortable with the script his family wrote for his avatar to recite? What would Christie think about her AI double teaching that class?
The answers to these questions can only be deduced circumstantially – from examining the kinds of things the dead did and the views they expressed when alive. And one could ask if the answers even matter. If those in charge of the estates agree to the reanimations, isn’t the question settled? After all, such trustees are the legal representatives of the departed.
But putting aside the question of consent, a more fundamental question remains.
What do these reanimations do to the legacy and reputation of the dead? Doesn’t their reputation depend, to some extent, on the scarcity of appearance, on the fact that the dead can’t show up anymore? Dying can have a salutary effect on the reputation of prominent people; it was good for John F. Kennedy, and it was good for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
The fifth-century B.C. Athenian leader Pericles understood this well. In his famous Funeral Oration, delivered at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, he asserts that a noble death can elevate one’s reputation and wash away their petty misdeeds. That is because the dead are beyond reach and their mystique grows postmortem. “Even extreme virtue will scarcely win you a reputation equal to” that of the dead, he insists.
Do AI reanimations devalue the currency of the dead by forcing them to keep popping up? Do they cheapen and destabilize their reputation by having them comment on events that happened long after their demise?
In addition, these AI representations can be a powerful tool to influence audiences for political or legal purposes. Bringing back a popular dead singer to legitimize a political event and reanimating a dead victim to offer testimony are acts intended to sway an audience’s judgment.
It’s one thing to channel a Churchill or a Roosevelt during a political speech by quoting them or even trying to sound like them. It’s another thing to have “them” speak alongside you. The potential of harnessing nostalgia is supercharged by this technology. Imagine, for example, what the Soviets, who literally worshipped Lenin’s dead body, would have done with a deep fake of their old icon.
Good intentions
You could argue that because these reanimations are uniquely engaging, they can be used for virtuous purposes. Consider a reanimated Martin Luther King Jr., speaking to our currently polarized and divided nation, urging moderation and unity. Wouldn’t that be grand? Or what about a reanimated Mordechai Anielewicz, the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, speaking at the trial of a Holocaust denier like David Irving?
But do we know what MLK would have thought about our current political divisions? Do we know what Anielewicz would have thought about restrictions on pernicious speech? Does bravely campaigning for civil rights mean we should call upon the digital ghost of King to comment on the impact of populism? Does fearlessly fighting the Nazis mean we should dredge up the AI shadow of an old hero to comment on free speech in the digital age?
No one can know with certainty what Martin Luther King Jr. would say about today’s society.AP Photo/Chick Harrity
Even if the political projects these AI avatars served were consistent with the deceased’s views, the problem of manipulation – of using the psychological power of deepfakes to appeal to emotions – remains.
But what about enlisting AI Agatha Christie to teach a writing class? Deep fakes may indeed have salutary uses in educational settings. The likeness of Christie could make students more enthusiastic about writing. Fake Aristotle could improve the chances that students engage with his austere Nicomachean Ethics. AI Einstein could help those who want to study physics get their heads around general relativity.
But producing these fakes comes with a great deal of responsibility. After all, given how engaging they can be, it’s possible that the interactions with these representations will be all that students pay attention to, rather than serving as a gateway to exploring the subject further.
Living on in the living
In a poem written in memory of W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden tells us that, after the poet’s death, Yeats “became his admirers.” His memory was now “scattered among a hundred cities,” and his work subject to endless interpretation: “the words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”
The dead live on in the many ways we reinterpret their words and works. Auden did that to Yeats, and we’re doing it to Auden right here. That’s how people stay in touch with those who are gone. In the end, we believe that using technological prowess to concretely bring them back disrespects them and, perhaps more importantly, is an act of disrespect to ourselves – to our capacity to abstract, think and imagine.
Nir Eisikovits, Professor of Philosophy and Director, Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston and Daniel J. Feldman, Senior Research Fellow, Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
STM Daily News is a vibrant news blog dedicated to sharing the brighter side of human experiences. Emphasizing positive, uplifting stories, the site focuses on delivering inspiring, informative, and well-researched content. With a commitment to accurate, fair, and responsible journalism, STM Daily News aims to foster a community of readers passionate about positive change and engaged in meaningful conversations. Join the movement and explore stories that celebrate the positive impacts shaping our world.
The California High-Speed Rail project finds itself at a critical crossroads as the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) moves to terminate $4 billion in federal funding agreements. In what has become a high-stakes political and infrastructure battle, the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) has issued a forceful rebuttal, calling the proposed termination “unwarranted and unjustified.”
The Federal Challenge
On June 4, 2025, Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy released a damning 310-page report concluding that California’s high-speed rail project has no viable path forward. The FRA’s assessment cites several critical issues:
$7 billion funding gap that the Authority allegedly lacks a credible plan to close
Missed 2024 procurement deadline for train purchases
Significant cost overruns and project delays
Default on federal grant terms according to the federal review
The report represents the Trump administration’s latest effort to halt what critics have long called a “boondoggle,” with the federal government threatening to pull the plug on agreements that have been in place since 2009.
CHSRA’s Counterattack
CHSRA CEO Ian Choudri didn’t mince words in his June 12 response, delivering what industry observers are calling one of the most comprehensive rebuttals in the project’s controversial history. The Authority’s 14-page response systematically challenges the FRA’s conclusions on multiple fronts.
Key Points in CHSRA’s Defense:
Misrepresentation of Inspector General Report: The Authority argues that the FRA has fundamentally mischaracterized findings from a 2025 Office of the Inspector General report, using selective interpretations to support predetermined conclusions.
Historical Context Matters: CHSRA emphasizes that “information that the FRA had when it chose to enter into cooperative agreements (in 2009) cannot now be a basis for termination.” The Authority contends that the federal government was fully aware of project challenges from the beginning.
Progress Despite Challenges: The response highlights ongoing construction progress and argues that the project continues to meet essential milestones, despite the complex nature of building America’s first true high-speed rail system.
The Broader Implications
This confrontation extends far beyond California’s borders. The outcome could determine the future of high-speed rail development across the United States and signal whether ambitious infrastructure projects can survive changing political administrations.
What’s at Stake:
$4 billion in federal funding that could be redirected to other transportation projects
Thousands of construction jobs currently supporting the Central Valley construction
America’s high-speed rail ambitions and competitiveness with global transportation leaders
State-federal partnership models for major infrastructure investments
Construction Continues Amid Uncertainty
Despite the federal threats, construction work continues in California’s Central Valley. The Spring 2025 construction update shows ongoing progress on viaducts, stations, and rail infrastructure between Merced and Bakersfield. Workers remain on the job while lawyers and politicians battle over the project’s future.
The visual progress stands in stark contrast to the political turmoil, with concrete structures rising from the valley floor and rail systems taking shape. For many observers, this creates a surreal dynamic where physical construction proceeds while the project’s financial foundation faces potential collapse.
The 37-Day Countdown
CHSRA now has 37 days from the FRA’s notice to provide a comprehensive response before potential grant termination. This timeline creates intense pressure for the Authority to not only defend its record but also present a convincing path forward that addresses federal concerns.
The Authority’s initial response suggests they’re prepared for a prolonged legal and political battle, with CEO Choudri’s statement indicating they view the termination threat as politically motivated rather than based on legitimate project management concerns.
Looking Ahead
As this infrastructure drama unfolds, several key questions remain:
Can CHSRA provide a convincing funding plan to close the $7 billion gap?
Will political considerations ultimately override technical project assessments?
How will this battle affect future federal-state infrastructure partnerships?
What happens to the billions already invested if the project is terminated?
The California High-Speed Rail project has survived numerous political challenges, funding crises, and technical setbacks over its 15-year history. Whether it can survive this latest existential threat may depend as much on political will as engineering capability.
For now, the trains aren’t running, but the political machinery is working overtime. The next few weeks will likely determine whether America’s most ambitious transportation project continues toward completion or becomes a costly lesson in infrastructure ambition versus political reality.
What do you think about this ongoing battle between state and federal authorities over high-speed rail? Have you been following the project’s progress, and do you see this as a necessary infrastructure investment or a project that’s gone too far off track? Leave a comment!
STM Daily News is a vibrant news blog dedicated to sharing the brighter side of human experiences. Emphasizing positive, uplifting stories, the site focuses on delivering inspiring, informative, and well-researched content. With a commitment to accurate, fair, and responsible journalism, STM Daily News aims to foster a community of readers passionate about positive change and engaged in meaningful conversations. Join the movement and explore stories that celebrate the positive impacts shaping our world.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here:
Cookie Policy
