Tristram Hunt, director of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), is on the receiving end of criticism from the two unions, Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) and Prospect, which have issued a joint statement calling him to the bargaining table. The union is striking over pay, working conditions, and “dignity at work,” and says his absence from the negotiations is shocking and disrespectful. Union members at the V&A East Storehouse voted to strike in July over working conditions, just weeks after the new facility’s splashy reveal. They said workers were not given enough time to use the restroom or even drink water and called for two paid breaks per shift. They joined their counterparts in at...

The High Renaissance master’s “Madonna of St Sebastian” shows off its colours after nearly four years of treatment

The Ministry of Culture in Ukraine has stated that Russian attacks on the country have damaged or destroyed 2,625 cultural infrastructure facilities and 1,990 cultural heritage sites as of the end of July 2026 “Russia is waging a systematic war against Ukrainian culture in an attempt to erase our identity,” Tetyana Berezhna, Deputy Prime Minister […]

The town of East Hampton claims Matt Johnson’s 60ft-tall sculpture is a structure built without proper safety permitting

The distinguished Indian fashion brand Sabyasachi has partnered with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for a new line of jewelry inspired by the institution’s vast collection. Sabyasachi, which was founded by designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee, will unveil the jewelry line on September 15 as part of New York Fashion Week, WWD reports. The line marks the first part of a multiyear collaboration with the Met, “beginning with designs informed by the art and material culture of the Byzantine Empire. While future iterations are expected to extend across jewelry, accessories and clothing, the debut chapter exists solely as high jewelry alongside Mukherjee’s cross seasonal ready-to-wear and accessories...

A 17th-century still life that had gathered dust for decades in storage at the National Museum of Norway is set to resurface in a forthcoming exhibition, where it will be publicly attributed to the Flemish painter Clara Peeters for the first time. Opening October 8, Woman Painter brings "Still Life with small game and grapes on a gilded tazza" (c. 1620) together with the works of 18 other influential yet sometimes overlooked women artists.Originally attributed to Ambrosius Brueghel, the son of the famed Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Elder, the still life was acquired by the Oslo museum as a prized possession in 1845. According to curator Cynthia Osiecki, the painting was shipped off to storage after experts...

A video installation at the center of high-profile controversy at the 2024 Venice Biennale will go on view this winter in New York, marking its US premiere. New York–born, Tel Aviv–based artist Ruth Patir’s video installation (M)otherland was purchased by the Jewish Museum just months after the artist closed the Israeli Pavilion in protest over her country’s war in Gaza. At the time, Patir said the pavilion would open once the war was over, which did not occur during the run of the 2024 Biennale. To create the piece, the artist animated Iron Age female figurines that are often associated with fertility. Initially made with four videos, the piece is based on her experience in the health care industry...

4SPACE reinterprets Equestrian Heritage for Falwa restaurant
 
Within the distinguished grounds of Abu Dhabi Royal Equestrian Arts (ADREA), a captivating new architectural narrative takes shape. Designed by Dubai-based studio 4SPACE for Michelin-starred Emirati Chef Faisal Alharmoodi, Falwa restaurant presents a thoughtful study in how regional identity can be translated into built form without falling into the trap of literal illustration or nostalgic decor. Spanning 450 sqm, the project bridges contemporary regional gastronomy with the UAE’s deep-rooted affinity for the Arabian horse, achieving a fluid, modern spatial language that speaks through form, motion, and tactile materiality.
 
The conceptual...

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has named Anna Katz as its Doris and Donald Fisher Senior Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture. She will be the first person to occupy the role since it was endowed by the Fisher family in honor of Doris and Donald Fisher, whose celebrated Fisher Collection now […]

THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF SIMPLE
 
Some design problems arrive through research, observation, and years of iteration. Others appear somewhere between Christmas and New Year, when nobody quite knows whether it is Tuesday or Saturday. For Ben Ferrick, the latter was enough. His Day Display, created under the appropriately named Stupid Engineering, is a wall-mounted object that answers one extremely basic question: what day is it?
 
Made from precision-milled and bent 2 mm aluminum, the display strips the calendar down to seven interchangeable day cards and a compact wall mount. There is no screen, no app, no synchronization and, crucially, nothing particularly clever happening behind the scenes. Ferrick describes it...

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. Good Morning! The Mamdani administration is expected to abandon city plans to replace Manhattan’s Elizabeth Street Garden with housing.  NYC Culture Club has moved into New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. The Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music in New Jersey is worth a visit.  The Headlines GREEN THUMB. After nearly a decade of legal battles, Manhattan’s Elizabeth Street Garden may finally be saved. The Art Newspaper reports that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration is expected to abandon plans to replace the beloved SoHo sculpture garden with 123 affordable housing...

Our oceans are places of mystery and biological wonders as much as they are essential to communities’ livelihoods. We tap these expansive bodies of water for recreation, food, transportation. From the Atlantic to the Arctic, oceans cover around 70 percent of the earth’s surface, and there is an incredible wealth of life yet to be discovered. As the continuing climate crisis melts ice caps and raises sea levels, and industrial fishing and waste threatens endangered marine animals and habitats, reminders of the oceans’ irreplaceable value and power are ever more critical. That’s where Oceanographic magazine and Blancpain’s annual Ocean Photographer of the Year contest comes in as a catalyst for...

Each year, Siena commissions an artist to hand paint the silk ‘drappellone’, awarded to the museum associated with the race winner

The former director of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona will follow in the footsteps of the late Koyo Kouoh when she takes up her new role in October

The photobook captures two decades of often hilarious, sometimes tragic moments

After Koyo Kouoh died suddenly in May 2025, she left more than an immense void in the hearts of those who knew the visionary curator. Kouoh, chief curator of the 61st Venice Biennale, had also led the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in South Africa since 2019. This week, the Cape Town institution entered a new chapter with the appointment of Elvira Dyangani Ose as artistic director. Starting this fall, the Spanish curator will bring her expertise in modern and contemporary African art and her vision of meeting artists where they’re at. “I’ll go to Johannesburg, or Accra, or Kumasi, or Nairobi,” she said in a 2017 interview. “I will meet the people there and try to understand the context of...

Speaking of dementia in opera, all I can think of is the extraordinary reimagined production of Béla Bartók’s chamber opera Bluebeard's Castle that I saw at Atlanta Opera in October 2022.

A Compact Home on Sweden’s West Coast
 
Hee House, designed by Studio Ellsinger, stands on a flat plot just south of Hamburgsund on Sweden’s West Coast. Framed by pines, weathered rocks, and meadow grass, the vacation home balances a modest footprint with a sense of generous interior scale. The design responds directly to the site’s prevailing coastal climate, using durable materials and careful orientation to protect against wind and rain.
 
From the north, the façade remains closed to shield views from the road and neighboring properties. Toward the south and east, large openings draw in daylight and connect the interiors to the forest edge and open fields. This dual character — introverted on...

FROM CORPORATE FLOOR TO CLASSROOM
 
After the 2025 Palisades Fire destroyed the campus of Village School, a 300-student elementary school serving kindergarten through sixth grade, the community faced a problem considerably bigger than finding a few spare classrooms. Working with the City of Santa Monica and architecture studio OFFICEUNTITLED, the school took over a vacant corporate office floor inside BXP’s Colorado Center, turning an environment built for adult working life into a temporary campus where students could return, gather and begin rebuilding a sense of normality.
 
The first version arrived remarkably quickly. Through an emergency occupancy strategy, students were able to return to school...

a sky full of hope moves above frankfurt
 
Janet Echelman has spent much of her career persuading cities to look up. Her newest public artwork hangs over Konstablerwache, a broad central square in Frankfurt where commuters pass through and a market takes over twice a week. A Sky Full of Hope – Earthtime 1.78 Frankfurt stretches a field of colored fiber more than seven meters overhead, moving with the wind through the day and illumination after dark.
 
More than 3,000 people gathered beneath it for its August 11th unveiling, filling the square and occupying nearly every deck chair by the afternoon. The scene offered an early version of the question Echelman has built into the commission: can a work in the...

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“The wind is my nemesis!” says Jennifer Latour, and rightly so. In her sculptural assemblages, single flowers or small clusters of blooms sprout from tree branches or thick stems, appearing like otherworldly forms standing in the landscape. A soft breeze could topple the Vancouver-based artist’s ephemeral works, scattering their delicate petals and spindly shoots before she has the chance to snap a photo. These fleeting moments are preserved in Latour’s Bound Species series, which she began during lockdown by piecing together objects found around her home into unconventional, ikebana-style compositions. “During this time, I started having a recurring dream of giant flowers growing around me with...

The United States National Committee of the International Council of Museums released a statement Tuesday pledging its “unwavering support” for the Smithsonian Institution, as it faces repeated assaults on its integrity and independence by the Trump administration. In the statement, ICOM-US said that it was speaking out in response to the recent congressional hearings, in which Anthea Hartig, the director of the institution’s National Museum of American History, was grilled over allegations that the institution has failed in its duty to preserve and present the nation’s story. While the statement stops short of rebutting the Trump administration’s claims that the Smithsonian is subject to “extreme...

The San Francisco photography organization SF Camerawork will close its doors after 52 years, the nonprofit announced on Instagram this week. Its last day of operations is set for August 16, concurrent with the closing of John Chiara’s solo show Bay Panel at its gallery space in the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.“Despite the determined efforts of our staff, Board, artists, donors, and supporters to secure a sustainable future, we have reached the difficult conclusion that we can no longer continue operations,” the organization said in its announcement, which cites “rising operating costs, declining public funding, and a changing philanthropic landscape” as factors in their decision.

In a new documentary on Gaza, three humanitarian physicians from the United States navigate the horrors of genocide as they struggle to treat civilians in a buckling, under-resourced hospital in Khan Younis. Screening this week at the Angelika Film Center in Manhattan, journalist Poh Si Teng's debut feature documentary American Doctor (2026) uses the physicians' accounts as indisputable evidence of the cruelty inflicted on Gaza.Urgently produced in one year with on-the-ground footage by the Gaza cinematography company Alef Multimedia, American Doctor premiered at the Sundance Film Festival only weeks after its completion, and has since been acquired by Watermelon Pictures for distribution.The...

LOS ANGELES — The rumbling in a small foyer in the Hammer Museum gave me pause before I entered a gallery where eight boulders hunkered amidst piles of soil. I couldn’t help but look up at the rattling of track lights overhead. Was this my first California earthquake of the millennium?Somewhat reassuringly, nearby wall text explained that Raven Chacon’s sound piece “Study for Vertical Earth” (2026) had translocated underground audio recordings to animate the constructed space of the galleries. This unsettling beginning for the exhibition Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials induces a sense of immersion in a specific place, in contrast to the dozens of standalone, mostly...

In the wake of the Portland Art Museum having completed a comprehensive campus expansion project in 2025, the institution, one of the oldest art museums in the United States, announced on Tuesday that it has appointed a new director: Michael J. Anderson. Anderson, who will become the museum’s new Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Director, has […]

Last Friday, the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) announced that it would be granting staffers at its V&A East Storehouse the changes they had requested regarding the institution’s break policy, marking the latest development in an ongoing struggle between staffers and the museum. Previously, staffers at the V&A’s storage-facility-turned-museum, who are represented by the trade […]

The San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) laid off eleven employees on August 5 in what it described as an effort to remain sustainable in the wake of rising costs and uncertain funding. The cuts affected multiple departments—including exhibitions, development, and programming—and bring SDMA’s total staff count to 118. “Inflation and rising operational costs are increasing overall […]

From materials we normally discard like padded packaging or the mesh sleeves that protect fruit from bruising, Suzanne Jongmans summons elegant and dreamlike Renaissance portraits. The artist drapes models in lush velvet fabrics and typically positions them against deep backgrounds in the vein of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” (1489-91) or Antonello da Messina’s “Portrait of a Young Man” (c. 1470). The settings and the addition of fine garments contrast found plastic detritus with hints of refinement and the figures’ dignified postures, mirroring the solemn, pious expressions of individuals in Renaissance portraiture. Recently, she has also incorporated copper coils extracted from the...

Scientists have long studied how magnetic energy powers solar activity. The constant motion of plasma particles and the sun’s rotation are major contributors to its cycles and events, such as flares and coronal mass ejections, which lob huge quantities of plasma and gas into space. Sometimes these explosions reach the earth’s magnetic field and cause geomagnetic storms, which are when we see some of the most brilliant auroras. But they also disrupt or damage our communications systems, power grids, GPS, and satellites, and researchers want to further understand how the sun builds up its magnetic energy so we better know how to guard against its massive fits of activity. They’ve also been trying to figure...

Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen shows that he's at the top of a crowded pack of countertenors in two recent New York performances with Philharmonia Baroque.

Caleb Stein  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Caleb Stein’s Website
Caleb Stein on Instagram

Alexander Köpeczi, currently plying leading roles in two operas in Santa Fe and, rumor has it, the life of one prominent soprano, is the object of this week's Grand Tier Grab Bag.

Le sculture di Anna Maria Maiolino (Scalea, 1942) si accumulano. Si ammucchiano per ripetizione e sono costruite da gesti infiniti e dal tatto. Ma questi piccoli gesti quotidiani non sono solamente pratica artistica: visualizzano come la vulnerabilità e la sensibilità, il tatto e la cura, possono essere un atto di resistenza. La Galleria Ovale del Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) di Lisbona, Portogallo, racchiude queste sculture create con modalità ripetitiva. La mostra si intitola Poetic Earth. Alcune delle opere sono state realizzate decenni fa, altre sono state create in situ, proprio in questo spazio a forma di foglia.
View of the exhibition “Anna Maria Maiolino. Poetic Earth”,...

Like many kids, I struggled with bedtime. I was a naturally anxious child with a vast imagination and siblings who loved to watch scary movies, leaving me capable of generating an endless array of terrifying things that could happen once the lights went out. To remedy this problem, my mother designated a particular stuffed bear as my guardian, and before retreating to her own room, she would grab its squishy body and infuse it with her protective “power” should I need some comfort and safety during the night. For a time at least, this plush toy was enough to get me to sleep. For Seoul-born, Chicago-based artist Sungho Bae, the meaning and emotion we ascribe to our childhood possessions gets flipped inside...

Ilana Walder-Biesanz reports from The Santa Fe Opera, where Tobias Picker's latest opera falls short, a new Rodelinda scintillates, and sumptuous singing abounds across the entire repertoire.

That this performance of Verdi's Lady Macbeth was recorded and preserved for posterity is beyond the pale.

Ci sono artisti la cui carriera coincide con una lunga ricerca e altri che, raggiunta una determinata soglia, sembrano aver trovato una lingua tanto riconoscibile da poter attraversare qualsiasi soggetto senza modificarne realmente la struttura. È una condizione rara, che appartiene a quei pochi autori il cui immaginario ha ormai assunto la forma di un universo autonomo, capace di assorbire temi, epoche e narrazioni mantenendo pressoché intatta la propria grammatica. Osservando Le Alchimiste, il mastodontico progetto concepito da Anselm Kiefer per la Sala delle Cariatidi di Palazzo Reale, a Milano, a cura di Gabriella Belli, la sensazione è proprio questa: non quella di assistere a una svolta, quanto...

Leonie Bo  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Leonie Bos’s Website
Leonie Bos on Instagram

La pittura contemporanea ha spesso trasformato il ritorno in una narrazione di recupero: un’interruzione superata, una perdita convertita in nuova possibilità. When the Sun Shines Again, la prima grande personale newyorkese di Guimi You presso Lehmann Maupin, usa questa struttura per metterla in crisi. La mostra osserva ciò che accade quando il gesto artistico emerge da periodi di sospensione, quando il fare pittura si intreccia con la cura, l’attesa e forme di vita che tradizionalmente rimangono fuori dalla storia della produzione.
Guimi You, “When the Sun Shines Again”, installation view at Lehmann Maupin New York. Photography by Studio Kukla, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul...

Knokke Art Fair è una delle fiere d’arte più antiche al mondo e la più longeva tradizione internazionale sulla costa belga, un luogo speciale dove l’arte emoziona, giovani e anziani, curiosi ed esperti. Che sia ammirata tra le solenni mura di un luogo deputato o all’aria aperta (con una scultura site-specific), l’arte suscita emozioni, stimola la riflessione e invita al dialogo.
Vista esterna della location di Knokke Art Fair, edizione 2026
Knokke Art Fair è un evento del tutto indipendente, incentrato sulla qualità basata su un’accurata selezione che si svolge prima dell’apertura della fiera, ed è organizzata da Alexander Tuteleers. In questo luogo, il tempo sembra essersi fermato in...

Fino al 30 novembre 2026 il Parco Archeologico di Pompei ospita la mostra Philip Colbert in Pompeii: Pop Mythology. La mostra, curata da Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, espone oltre trenta sculture monumentali dell’artista britannico tra le quali protagonista assoluto è l’astice antropomorfo, alter ego dell’artista e ormai suo marchio riconoscibile.
Philip Colbert, ph. courtesy of the artist studio
Le opere di Colbert sono progettate per risultare subito leggibili e perfettamente compatibili con le aspettative della comunicazione social. Molti lavori si distinguono per l’uso di colori saturi, monumentalità, ironia pop e kitsch con citazioni della classicità ridotte a segni facilmente riconoscibili e nel...

By Betty Ann Brown "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."—Sol LeWitt Dean De Cocker creates richly conceived, exquisitely crafted, and visually delightful artworks that shuttle between abstraction and conceptual representation. He has long been drawn to machines, from bicycles to motorcycles, cars to airplanes, and formal echoes of these devices appear in his current body of work, exhibited at the Visual Arts Center in the small Central California town of Visalia. Welcome to the...

Xiao Hua Yang  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Xiao Hua Yang’s Website
Xiao Hua Yang on Instagram

Alina Bobrova  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Alina Bobrova’s Website
Alina Bobrova on Instagram

A selection of recent work by artist Emma Steinkraus. Based in Lexington, Virginia, Steinkraus  
   
   
   
   
 
Emma Steinkraus’s Website
Emma Steinkraus on Instagram

By Victoria Thomas Photographer and ceramic artist Catherine (Cathy) Opie first shocked and rocked the fine art world with her self-portraits during the late 1990s. Today, her decades of work — often termed confessional — now serve as context for the far more enigmatic Holding Blue installation, on view at Regen Projects through July 3. The Los Angeles-based artist identifies as a leather dyke, lesbian cowboy, an elder, and as "Mama Cathy," with a mustachioed male alter-ego named Bo. Opie is...

By Betty Ann Brown "Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation — I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances."—Henri Matisse Jill sykes by Eric Minh Swenson Jill Sykes creates beautiful paintings of botanical phenomena. Like Matisse, she translates three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional images, occupying the territory between abstraction and representation to achieve balance and equilibrium. From a very early age,...

By Victoria Thomas There's something about a hanging. Whether legal or not, the visual experience seems mythic, supernatural, theatrical, and ritualistic, versus the efficiency of a swift kill. If local authorities greenlight the killing, it's called a hanging. If they don't, the hanging is extrajudicial, and it's called a lynching. Anyone with even the scantiest grasp of American history will know that our country has a sordid romance with lynching — a romance which persists. And unless...

By Betty Ann Brown Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, February 22–June 28, 2026 Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.—Dolores Huerta The Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF, originally the Rebel Chicano Art Front) was an art collective founded in Sacramento in the early 1970s. The visual art members, who focused on printmaking and murals, collaborated with writers, musicians, performers, and teachers. Together, they...

It is credited with ‘democratising photography’ on a global level – and now Shutter Hub is making its most democratic move yet. As of this month, the organisation will pass into the control of the community it was built for, in what founder Karen Harvey MBE describes as ‘a logical next step: to make things more equitable we need multiple perspectives.’ The announcement follows Karen’s decision to remove paid memberships last year, making Shutter Hub ‘fully open-access and available at no cost to all’. It’s a typically altruistic move from the social entrepreneur: also the founder of Toiletries Amnesty, the award-winning NGO. She was made an MBE in 2024 for services to people living in hygiene...

The week of Art Basel is for me the most compelling moment in the city, and this year it reaffirmed its position as the most closely watched annual event in the international art calendar.

The City Series by Shutter Hub is an ongoing publishing project exploring the people, places, cultures, and contradictions that shape cities around the world. Rather than documenting a location as a fixed subject, the series invites photographers to respond to a city as an idea: something experienced, observed, imagined, and interpreted through the photographic eye.
For its second edition, we turn our attention to London in partnership with Battersea Power Supplies, a new museum and gift shop celebrating Battersea Power Station. We invite photographers from across the globe to contribute to a major publication celebrating one of the world’s most photographed, complex, and ever-changing cities. We want to see...

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...

By Tabea Martin ‘Me Myself’ brings together four artists — Anna‑Lena Ruff, Debora Schultheiss, Tabea Martin, and Eva Schick — whose works move across differing styles and energies yet find in this art space an unforced coherence. I sense a shared thread of observation and inner dialogue, and a contemplation of natural female presence. The exhibition is currently showing at the Anja Edith Brinckmann Galerie, Basel. From here, the individual narratives invite a closer reading. By Anna-Lena...