“There was a moment when I was walking between forests and mountains in Tepoztlán, Mexico, while dandelions floated across my face,” Alexis Mata says. “In that instant, I experienced a strange sensation, as if I were standing on another planet, in another time, confronted with an entirely new landscape.” As the dainty seeds drifted through the air, Mata began to think about the ways life forms travel and embed themselves in new ecosystems. He was drawn to the idea of landing, of rooting and growing, which quickly became the basis for a poetic exhibition at Thinkspace in Los Angeles. “Lost Landing” (2026), oil on canvas, 160 x 160 centimeters Titled Lost Landing, the show features Mata’s glitched...

René Magritte’s The Castle of the Pyrenees (1959) has gone to the conservation lab at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem after being accidentally damaged by a young museum visitor. A boy visiting the museum with his family punctured the painting with a pinecone before a museum guard could stop him, museum staff told The Times of Israel. Sharon Tager, head of conservation at the museum, told Ha’aretz that repairs would take several weeks. “We’re experienced in conserving paintings and objects that arrive in poor condition, including works that have been stored since the Holocaust period,” Tager told Ha’aretz. “The first stage is treating the base itself because the hole caused the canvas to sag. We...

1RIN turns number 1 into single-stem vases crafted across Japan
 
Developed by Tokyo-based design company KUMAnoTE, 1RIN is a collection of single-stem vases based on the form of the number 1. The project originated from the idea of placing a single flower in a single vessel, using the numeral as a shared design framework through which different materials, regional traditions, and manufacturing techniques could be explored.
 
The inaugural collection brings together three forms of Japanese craftsmanship: Hasami porcelain from Nagasaki Prefecture, Takaoka bronze casting from Toyama Prefecture, and Yakumo wood carving from Hokkaido. While each vase follows the same numerical silhouette, the character of the...

A tenured art therapy professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago is under investigation over course materials that referenced Palestine, becoming the latest flashpoint in debates about eroding freedom of expression on American college campuses, the Guardian reported Friday.  Savneet Talwar was reportedly suspended from teaching and is facing a disciplinary investigation following a student’s complaint about a case study assigned in April. Talwar told the Guardian that the assignment was given in a graduate course titled “Cultural Dimensions of Therapy” and asked students to develop an ethical treatment plan for a hypothetical queer Muslim woman living in the United States. The case study...

The Hong Kong jeweller and sculptor unveils parallel installations at Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo and Santa Maria della Pietà, linking mythology, sacred architecture and cosmology

“Ice burns, and it is hard for the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost,” wrote A.S. Byatt in Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami characterizes ice in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman as a capsule that preserves the past “cleanly and clearly,” but possesses no future. In the ephemeral performance “MIZU,” frozen water takes on the form of a woman in an enchanting and emotive meditation on memory, time, and impermanence. “MIZU” is the brainchild of puppeteer and director Élise Vigneron’s Théâtre de L’entrouvert and Companie Furankaï, which encompasses the work of choreographer and circus artist Satchie Noro. The composition...

Frieze Seoul returns this September with over 125 galleries, two new curated sections, expanded Focus

Good morning! Paris-founded Templon Gallery is closing its Chelsea location and hopes to open a smaller space in New York City. Japan’s Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum sparked criticism for its plans to replace the word “massacre” with the word “incident,” in reference to the Nanjing Massacre. A Dutch court has sentenced three men to nearly four years in prison for the theft of golden Romanian treasures from the Drents Museum. The Headlines TEMPLON TONES DOWN. The Paris-founded Templon Gallery has shuttered its New York space and plans to relocate to a smaller location in Manhattan, reports Artnet News. Established in 1966 by dealer Daniel Templon, the gallery opened its 6,500-square-foot Chelsea...

Matthew Travisano has such doubts about Douglas Cuomo's opera recently seen at Opera Parallèle.

Supported by an ingenious production and strong performances, Antonia Bembo's Ercole Amante makes a successful Paris Opera debut.

the new tools of craft
 
For much of the last century, architecture appeared to be moving steadily away from craft. Industrial production favored repetition over variation, efficiency over ornament, and standardization over local expression. As buildings became increasingly assembled from catalogs of prefabricated components, the figure of the artisan seemed to fade from the architectural imagination.
 
Then came the digital revolution. Early computational design opened up entirely new formal possibilities, allowing architects to generate increasingly complex geometries on screen. As digital tools evolved, attention shifted toward finding new ways to translate those geometries into physical structures,...

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about designboom
 
designboom is one of the most recognized design media brands in the world. We bring together design, architecture, art, and technology to spark creative thought and global dialogue.
 
We’re driven by a simple philosophy: Utopian Optimism and a What If mindset. We believe design isn’t decoration, it’s transformation. One idea, one spark, can outshine the noise and move us forward.
 
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You’ll own the editorial workflow end to end: shaping the calendar, guiding the team’s output, guarding the quality of every piece we...

atelier vens vanbelle renovates antoon de clerck’s former home
 
Located in Aalter, Belgium, this residential renovation by Atelier Vens Vanbelle transforms the former home and studio of painter Antoon De Clerck into a contemporary dwelling informed by the artist’s visual language. Purchased by Ine and Charles following De Clerck’s death, the property presented a deteriorated structure but retained a number of architectural features that reflected the painter’s interest in abstraction, primary colors, and the principles of De Stijl.
 
De Clerck designed the original house himself, incorporating compositions of lines, planes, and color fields that echoed the themes present throughout his paintings....

Penn Station in New York City is notoriously Kafkaesque and claustrophobic. It's an urban nightmare, a transit purgatory, and a place to avoid at all costs. To make matters worse, the renovated station might carry Trump's name and be designed in his favorite neoclassical style, according to reports. More about that below. Also, do you remember the historic strike that brought the Venice Biennale to a halt in May? Italian cultural workers are planning to expand it to the entire country this week. They're not messing around. And there’s more, including a tour inside the newly unveiled Obama Presidential Center, dubbed the “Obamalisk” by locals. —Hakim Bishara, editor-in-chief A First Look...

So much color in this beautifully agile voice.

The “No Ice in the Cup” campaign is using art to protest US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents' planned deployment to the football tournament

prada designs the hidden layer of NASA’s lunar suit
 
Axiom Space and Prada reveal the latest result of their ongoing collaboration for NASA’s Artemis program, shifting attention away from the outer shell of the lunar spacesuit and toward the layer worn closest to the astronaut’s body. The new Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG) is designed to be worn inside the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) (find designboom’s previous coverage here), forming a critical component of the system that will support astronauts as they return to the Moon for the first time in more than half a century.
 
While the AxEMU’s white exterior has become a recognizable symbol of the next era of lunar...

The Serpentine Pavilion is one of the most anticipated events in the international architecture calendar. Since 2000, the annual commission in London’s Kensington Gardens has invited leading architects to design a temporary pavilion on the Serpentine Galleries’ lawn. Its inaugural structure was designed by the late Zaha Hadid, with subsequent contributions coming from the likes of Herzog & de Meuron, Oscar Niemeyer, Sou Fujimoto and others. The project has become a leading platform for experimentation and innovation, offering visitors the chance to experience cutting-edge design in a public setting. 2026 is a landmark year for the Serpentine, marking a quarter of a century since Hadid’s first commission...

Hypha Studios opens its largest project to date in Bankside, transforming an empty office building into a major cultural hub

Ugo Rondinone's MORE LIGHT transforms London through a rainbow installation, fifty-four Bond Street flags and new sunrise and sunset paintings.

Invasive Species at Hypha Studios brings together fifteen women artists exploring memory, sensory experience, psychological dissonance and transformation

COLLISIO, a vibrant exploration of memory, family, nostalgia and material disruption.

Between 2010 and 2023, more than 1,243 council-run youth centres closed, according to UNISON. Meanwhile, one in three people in the UK say their local areas are in decline, with 13,000 high street shops closing in 2024. Across the country, council restrictions, diminishing spaces, gentrification and enduring prejudices see many communities under threat of erasure. Photographer Sophie Green presents a vivid portrait of the communities, subcultures and social gatherings that shape contemporary Britain, forming a vital archive of a changing nation. For over a decade, she has documented how rituals and traditions build connection, belonging and shared identity. From the adrenaline thrill of banger racing, to the...

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art may have opened its 200,000-square-foot facility in Bentonville, Arkansas just 15 years ago, but it is already ready for its first major addition. At the museum’s campus last week, founder Alice Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune and, per Bloomberg, the world’s richest woman at $143 billion, explained that she and architect Moshe Safdie had drawn up a fifty-year plan for the institution, but given their ages and her insistence that no one but Safdie would touch the building, the two decided they’d better get cracking. The addition is in the same style as the original, defined by curves that echo the surrounding landscape and materials including concrete, cedar, and...

CHICAGO — On the sunny morning of Wednesday, June 3, the blue skies and stretches of greenery made the formidably geometric “Obamalisk” building seem almost inviting. Over the last five years, the rolling hills of Jackson Park have been reshaped to accommodate the structures that now make up the Obama Presidential Center, set to open to the public later this month. Spread across the new $850 million campus, the legacy of Barack and Michelle Obama is embodied in educational, recreational, and civic spaces. Below the mammoth stone tower designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, the Home Court, with an NBA regulation-size basketball court, and a new branch of the Chicago Public Library sit among a...

Artist Alma Allen has again accused art publicist David Resnicow of working against Allen’s controversial U.S. Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, after months of criticism surrounding the project. In an Instagram post published Monday afternoon, Allen wrote that “two of the three galleries that withdrew their support for my pavilion informed me that they did so on the advice of David Resnicow,” referring to the veteran art-world publicist whose firm has represented the US Pavilion six times before this year’s edition. “I have never met Mr. Resnicow,” Allen wrote in the post “But his name came up frequently from individuals who told me he had warned them not to support this year’s American...

"Never mind that more and more of these movies look and feel like TV shows"

On June 2, Sotheby’s in New York attempted to stage a private auction for Number 19, 1951, an oil and enamel masterwork by abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, but the sale failed to launch after the auction house wasn’t able to attract enough bidders, according to a report from Artnews.  The asking price for the painting—which is owned by Arne Glimcher, the founder […]

Trump's name will feature prominently in the forthcoming redesign of New York City's Penn Station, according to official renderings released today, June 8. A consortium of developers and designers has released the plans for the future Penn Station — a nearly $8 billion project overseen by the Trump Administration — days after Gothamist first published leaked renderings of the station's patriotic details. Renderings for the forthcoming rebuild echo the president's long-held architectural preference for "classical" styles. They also detail several large American flags along the Beaux-Arts-inspired exterior of the building, gold-colored bronze railings, a terracotta city skyline, an eagle...

The new FotoFocus Center gives the city’s popular photography biennial a permanent presence and an inclusive mandate

Italian labor unions, cultural workers’ associations, and grassroots collectives have joined the call for a national strike across the country's arts and culture sector this Friday, June 12. Strike participants cite unstable opportunities and low wages across the field, as well as public investments into the arms industry and the “conditions that allow institutions to look away from genocide.”The mobilization comes just a month after a historic strike for Palestine and workers' rights at the Venice Biennale on May 8, led by the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA). The global collective has also signed onto this Friday's action, along with cultural labor advocacy groups including Mi...

What is prison for? Touted as both a means of punishment and correction, the U.S. carceral system rarely succeeds at the latter. According to the Department of Justice, more than 650,000 people are released from prison annually, with two-thirds being arrested again within three years. Rehabilitation is the purported justification for locking away more of our residents than most other nations, but clearly, the punitive system seldom accomplishes this goal. A new film by writer Marvin Wade and animator Evan Bode juxtaposes the counterproductive forces of the carceral system with the programs, resources, and true determination that make change possible. Presented by The New York Times‘ Opinion section,...

Cover of Andrew Durbin, The Wonderful World That Almost Was (2026)The late photographer Peter Hujar and visual artist Paul Thek keep showing up these days. From Alex Da Corte’s recreation of Paul Thek’s The Tomb for his excellent show at Matthew Marks’ New York gallery in late 2025, to the 2025 film Peter Hujar’s Day, along with forthcoming shows later this year at The Watermill Center and the Morgan Library, there is clearly a renewed interest in their work. And now we have Andrew Durbin’s thoughtfully rendered dual biography of these lovers and friends: The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek.Dual biographies are not a common thing. Nor is it common for biographies...

A new online platform, Leonardotheka, was launched on Monday that, for the first time in over 400 years, reunites two historically essential collections of writings and drawings by Leonardo da Vinci that were originally separated hundreds of years ago by the Italian sculptor Pompeo Leoni. The online digital archive, which is the result of a […]

The Museo Dolores Olmedo is welcoming visitors again after a six-year-long closure during which plans were floated to relocate its prized collection

Sweden’s minister for culture, Parisa Liljestrand, at a June 8 press conference announced Tone Hansen as the next director of Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Hansen arrives to the institution from Munch, the museum in Oslo devoted to the work of Edvard Munch, where she has served as director since 2022. She previously helmed the Henie Onstad […]

Double can mean many things. It may imply a duplicate, symmetry, a reflection, a twin, a splitting, or even a shadow self. There is an inherent duality that forms around two parts, which may or may not be in concert with one another. Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank was the first to describe the concept in an essay published in 1914, and Sigmund Freud ran with the idea in his 1919 book The Uncanny. For Freud, the phenomenon illustrated how the unconscious is actually a kind of second consciousness. Scottish psychoanalyst R.D. Laing drew on this foundation in his study of schizophrenia in the book The Divided Self, which delves into the nature of “real” and “false” selves. And in a literary sense, the...

Franco-Argentinian artist Julio Le Parc, whose innovations in kinetic and Op art presaged the interactive art of today, died in Paris on May 30. He was ninety-seven. His death was confirmed to Argentinian newspaper La Nación by his son Yamil. Le Parc was the last surviving cofounding member of the pathbreaking Groupe de Recherche d’Art […]

The English musician will co-organise a show at the UK's Hepworth Wakefield next year

June marks Pride Month, a time when communities around the world celebrate LGBTQIA+ identities while reflecting on the history of the movement and the ongoing fight for equality. Its origins are often traced to June 28, 1969, when a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Lower Manhattan was met with resistance from patrons and local community members. The six days of protests that followed, known as the Stonewall Riots, became a turning point in the struggle for LGBTQIA+ rights and helped galvanise a new era of activism. More than five decades later, Pride continues to honour that legacy while creating space for visibility, solidarity and celebration. Art has long played a vital role in this story, offering a...

As Dave Krugman traverses the streets of New York City, camera in hand, he seeks patterns. Throughout his wide-ranging practice spanning portraits, automobiles, tourism, and more, he studies “humanity’s intersection with cities and how people are influenced by their immediate environment,” says a statement. Whether in the countryside or the middle of an urban hub, rhythms and typologies emerge. The Brooklyn-based photographer began documenting windows throughout New York City several years ago, and his aptly named series compiles a cross-section of his captures over the past half decade. Taken at night, these virtually infinite portals into individual lives are illuminated from within. Krugman focuses...

Dearest by Zeinab Diomande is a zine presenting a collection of paintings that, while not a formal series, share a cohesive visual language exploring themes of liquidity and the passage of time, achieved through the use of thinned paint and water. The pieces employ texture as a storytelling device, reflecting the rituals and ceremonies of the artist’s alter egos within imagined worlds.
Zeinab Diomande on Instagram

Opera Theater of St. Louis's summer festival opened last night and Parterre Box is celebrating by launching a new feature: custom travel guides!

Emma Hoffman reports on the glimmers of ecstatic artistry in Lise Davidsen's all-Schubert recital at Carnegie Hall with James Baillieu.

Contemporary art is undergoing a profound shift in how it is made, experienced and understood. At Aesthetica, we are responding to this moment with clarity, ambition and intent. What we are witnessing is not simple progression but a fundamental reconfiguration of how art circulates, gains meaning and operates within wider cultural systems. Across Aesthetica 20, we are building a living framework where exhibition, discourse and publication function as a single connected structure. The Future Now Symposium sits at the centre of this, extending the Aesthetica Art Prize into a space where ideas are exchanged, tested and developed in real time. We are not simply presenting contemporary art, we are interrogating its...

Vivian Maier was born in New York on 1 February 1926. The street photographer spent the majority of her life between France and the USA, working as a nanny for several Chicago families. It was only after her death in 2009 that her 150,000 image archive was discovered. In the same year as Maier was born, across the city, Allen Ginsberg arrived on 3 June. His was a life of fame and notoriety, producing poetry, photography and activism that was foundational in the Beat Movement. His radical literary works left an indelible mark on American counterculture, with his renowned poem Howl becoming the subject of an obscenity trial in 1957. As far as artistic figures go, these two could perhaps not be further apart....

Interior Gallery Photos by and ©Tim Hursley, courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum  As a world-class institution showcasing one of the most impressive collections of American art spanning five centuries, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has firmly placed Bentonville, Arkansas on the global cultural map. And, except for a few major holidays, the museum […]
The post Crystal Bridges Opens Impressive New 114,000 Square Foot Expansion first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By A. Laura Brody What is the language of bat senses and beaver teethmarks? How does water communicate to soil and roots, and how do we translate the paths left by burrowing insects or the markings of trees? These are questions asked by the Journal of Therolinguistics exhibition at Descanso Gardens' Boddy House, on view now until July 5, 2026. Oscar Salguero has curated a fascinating exploration of the expressive worlds of plants and animals brought to life by international artists Aistė...

Benny Young  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Benny Young’s Website
Benny Young on Instagram

For an artist to return to painting after life‑altering injury is to witness the human spirit at its most unguarded. In such a moment, understanding the forces that carry you back to the page becomes all‑important, and in Joel Bradish Nichols’ case, the answers lie in the people and pursuits he had cherished. In a coma for months after a near‑fatal accident, his re‑emergence into artistic practice becomes inseparable from a narrative of devotion and determination — a surrounding spiritedness...

Cindy Bernhard
PLATO is honored to present Broken Vessels, a solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Cindy Bernhard, featuring a new body of paintings that explores spiritual rupture, transcendence and the relationship between the human body and the divine. The public opening is scheduled for Thursday, June 4, from 6 to 8 PM in the gallery’s ground floor space. The show will be on view through July 11. At the center of the exhibition is the metaphor of the vessel: the body as a container for spirit and belief. Drawing from archetypal associations between gold and divinity, Christian mysticism and contemporary existential anxiety, Bernhard’s monumental six-foot paintings depict fractured golden forms that...

By Tm Gratkowski With intent and the will to do it her own way, there is a gallery in the most unlikely of places, off the 210 freeway on Lincoln Avenue in Pasadena. Imagine walking into the parking lot of an old lumber yard, stumbling down a paved area past old materials, equipment, and a small cluster of shed-like buildings. Nothing new, no signs, just your average ubiquitous Southern California lot. As you wander in you notice a little welcoming front porch and tucked away in the corner is...

Grace Dodds
 
 
Grace Dodds’s Website
Grace Dodds on Instagram

Array

By Tatou Dede T: How did you end up here, being an artist today? A: I think it depends on how you define the term artist. I was always in theatre since, maybe, kindergarten. When I was a child I used to produce and direct sort of nonsensical plays for my schools, wherever I was, in Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley. So every year I produced a very bizarre play that, for some reason, every school had me put on. And then I studied with the Berkeley Rep theater. After that I went to UCLA and...

By Melanie Chapman Timed in conjunction with the Taschen publication "My Education," the first book-form retrospective of photographer Bruce Weber's multi-decade career, the new exhibition now on view at Fahey Klein Gallery, Bruce Weber: Try a Little Tenderness, is worth more than one visit. Likely due to Weber's genre-defining success as a fashion photographer for Calvin Klein, GQ, Vogue, etc., particularly at its height in the 1980s and '90s, the line for the recent gallery opening...

By Barbara Patterson Zarina Van Ranzow's debut solo exhibition featuring work from her ongoing series Let it Bleed and Music for Lovers opened on May 8 at STONE/AGE Studios in East Los Angeles. Drawing from archival photographs of the artist's family and portraits of a variety of musicians, the series adapts photographic content into oil and airbrush paintings that pick up where the camera leaves off. Diffusing the harsh, resolute forms that photography's understanding of the subject...

In Perfectly Normal—the exhibition from Dustin Myers that ran at Los Angeles gallery Thinkspace Projects in November 2023—the Southern California artist presented a collection of young characters painted in oils. Posed in the awkward-yet-endearing postures associated with school photographs, the characters’ exaggerated facial features reveal a bevy of emotions. Some are ready for their close-up. […]
The post Dustin Myers is Perfectly Normal first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

“I have a passion for product design; most of the motifs I draw are related to consumer products,” says Shohei Ochiai. The Tokyo-based artist studied at Tama Art University, where he graduated about a decade ago, and is an admirer of the designs of consumer product company Braun, Memphis Group founder Ettore Sottsass, and famed […]
The post SHOHEI Ochiai Flattens consumer products into Surrealistic Childlike paintings first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

ABOVE: Photo of Martha Rich by Andrea Cipriani Mecchi Any artist will tell you one of the greatest gifts they ever earned was the moment they found their style—their singular take on subject, creation, and process. But much harder earned is the gift of confidence, that ability to continue in one’s style, despite all the […]
The post Martha Rich Holds It Together With Nuts & Screws first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.