IED MASTERS of arts EVOLVE PRACTICE THROUGH DESIGN X COMMONS
 
Marking an evolution in how design intervenes within contemporary society, the Master of Arts programs at Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) treat the discipline as a mediator between communities and common goods. Grounded in the understanding of commons as the material and immaterial resources that multiple communities engage with as the collective heritage of humanity, the overarching theme of Design X Commons elevates these graduate thesis projects past formal styling exercises and traditional product development. Combining research alongside speculative design strategies, the emerging designers confront climate vulnerability, urban...

Rough Brick and GRC Create a Layered Street Facade
 
Kawamura Electric’s new headquarters in central Nagoya brings together workplace, culture, nature, and social interaction within a seven-story building. Designed by KIAS as a new base for the company, whose origins are in Seto, Aichi Prefecture, the project accommodates offices alongside an art gallery and a multipurpose hall for approximately 110 people. The building is organized as a hybrid workplace intended to connect employees, clients, and the wider community.
 
The exterior is composed of two contrasting material systems. The lower volume facing the street is clad in rough, heavily textured bricks manufactured in Hekinan, while the upper volume is...

2,977 LIGHTS RETURN TO THE NEW YORK SKY
 
Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, 2,977 individual lights rose above New York Harbor to reconstruct the Twin Towers at full architectural scale. Unveiled on September 9, 2026, 2,977 Lights Over New York Harbor is a commemorative public artwork developed in dialogue with families of victims, survivors, and first responders. Rather than recreating the buildings as solid volumes, the installation draws them temporarily in light: one point for each of the 2,977 people who lost their lives on September 11, 2001.
 
The aerial composition begins as a moving constellation. The 2,977 lights gather into a helix, circling upward through the night before...

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Re:Concrete Gives Buried Infrastructure a Second Life
 
Re:Concrete transforms precast drainage pipes, elements typically buried beneath the city, into an open civic room on Mumbai’s coast. Cut, rotated, and suspended at different heights, the reclaimed concrete cylinders become walls, thresholds, seating elements, and circular light wells. The competition-winning proposal explores whether concrete can enter a second architectural life without first being crushed back into aggregate.
 
Re:Concrete received an Honorable Mention in Buildner’s international Concrete Pavilion Competition, which invited architects and designers to reconsider the architectural, environmental, and expressive potential of...

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Los Angeles’s Getty Center closed early on Wednesday after a fire broke out along the 405 Freeway. Per the Los Angeles Times, the fire was reported to the city’s Fire Department at 4:30 p.m.; it has already burned five acres. The Fire Department has issued an evacuation warning for an area that includes the Getty Center, a complex that includes museum buildings host to Renaissance and Old Master paintings, the Getty Research Institute, and a Robert Irwin–designed garden. According to CBS News, the Getty Center asked visitors to exit through the parking garage and closed the museum at 4:45 p.m. “The Getty Center is closed due to a nearby fire,” reads a notice on the museum’s website. It was not...

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a colorful world outside Mexico city
 
Quetzalcóatl Park, located about an hour outside of Mexico City, is the sprawling, serpentine creation of Javier Senosiain Aguilar. Although started years ago in 2007, the park is still a work in progress. The water fixture, mosaiced and shaped like the head of a snake, spews water into a small reserve. A greenhouse is bathed in a shattered rainbow of light coming through a stained-glass roof. Its grassy mazes create vertiginous paths where visitors can lose themselves in the Mexican architect’s spiraling, psychedelic, and lush garden.
Quetzalcóatl Park, located about an hour outside of Mexico City, is the sprawling, serpentine creation of Javier Senosiain Aguilar |...

In 2003, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin successfully defended a dissertation based on meticulous research across French, Spanish, and English. Kevin D. Roberts’s Slaves and slavery in Louisiana: the evolution of Atlantic world identities, 1791-1831 articulated an argument about how enslaved people resisted bondage by forming alternative social and cultural structures, contending that Black Americans “employed a variety of tools — cultural traditions, secret and overt resistance, and a distinctive ideology of politics ‘from the ground up’ — to tweak, alter, and challenge” white supremacy. Like most dissertations, it wasn’t necessarily groundbreaking but rather an example of...

The third edition of the Counterpublic Triennial, Coyote Time, has expanded significantly across five main sites and opens tomorrow, Thursday, September 10, in St. Louis. But as artistic director and co-founder James McAnally explains, this expansion moves beyond mere scale, aiming to support artistic practices rooted in real change. The triennial frames itself as an invitation to experience public space differently, guided by core concepts such as accountability, access, climate, infrastructure, agency, and Native sovereignty.Unlike traditional biennials, Counterpublic relies on a curatorial "ensemble" rather than a team, balancing individual authorship with a collective voice to present multiple...

In Memoriam is published every Wednesday afternoon and honors those we recently lost in the art world.Jean-François Leroy (1956–2026)French photographer who founded an influential photojournalism festivalHe co-founded and directed the leading photojournalism festival Visa Pour l’Image, bringing attention to world conflicts and environmental disasters and bolstering the careers of photographers. He was also a photographer in his own right, and edited Photo Magazine during the late 1980s. Lucien Smith (1989–2026)Fixture of NYC's downtown art sceneArtist Lucien Smith (1989–2026) (photo Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)The abstract painter and nonprofit founder channeled the community...

How does one write an art history of testicle-shaped disco balls? Does one begin with the most recent iteration of disco balls and trace their way back, through the raucous hollers and blacklit rooms of a Southern Californian gay bar, and a fine-dining restaurant in Norway? Or does one draw a line from the first depictions of testicles in Paleolithic cave art to “the day disco died” in 1979 and the unrelated spate of humorous genital-themed art born in the decades since?They say no time is like the present, especially in this case — because, presently, the Grammy-winning country music star Kacey Musgraves is perching herself on a giant suspended testicle-shaped disco ball night after night in front of...

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) preemptively closed three of its London locations last Friday, September 4, as its unionized staff went on a planned, two-day strike that weekend. Making up over half of the organization's workforce, some 700 workers organized under the Prospect Union's heritage division and the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) took part in the strike. The strike led the V&A to close the East Museum, the East Storehouse, and the Young V&A (its children's museum in Bethnal Green) through Saturday, September 5. Many staff members rallied outside the three locations throughout the action, equipped with punny and confrontational signs calling for fair pay and access to...

The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, has named Kathleen V. Jameson as its next director. She officially began in the role on Tuesday. She replaces Raphaela Platow, who stepped down last year at the end of a four-year contract.   A scholar of late 19th- and early 20th-century American art, with an emphasis on photography and works on paper, Jameson was most recently the executive director of Pennsylvania’s James A. Michener Art Museum, a role she held from 2018 to 2019. Previously, she was president and chief executive of the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, from 2010 to 2017. While there, she led the development of a strategic plan for the institution, which included the creation of a...

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, the newly inaugurated institution spearheaded by collectors George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, may finally have opened to the press and founding members after $1 billion in costs and more than a decade of bureaucratic wrangling, but a new lawsuit alleges that the museum should’ve faced yet more hurdles during its construction. The Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday that the museum is currently the subject of four lawsuits by contractors, one of whom is J.E. Snyder Electric, which worked on the museum as a subcontractor for Siemens Industry, Inc. and not directly for the Lucas Museum. Per the LA Times report, J.E. Snyder Electric’s lawsuit centers on whether the Lucas...

The D. Daskalopoulos Collection announced a donation of 51 artworks to four museums across Greece and Scotland. The majority of the works will be spread across the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOMUS), and the National Gallery of Greece, all in Greece, with three pieces heading to the National Galleries of Scotland. The donation continues the collection’s “commitment to making contemporary art accessible to wider audiences,” the announcement stated. It added, “This initiative seeks to ensure the long-term preservation of the works while sustaining an ongoing dialogue with the art of the future.” The National Gallery of Greece will receive 29 modern artworks by...

The Freelands Foundation has awarded £100,000 (approximately $135,000) of unrestricted funding to three organizations annually for the next five years, totaling £1.5m (roughly $2 million). The recipients are Wolverhampton Art Gallery, selected for its youth art incubator; Burton Futures, an educational outreach project from the North Devon gallery Burton at Bideford; and Signal, an arts charity in the remote town of Barrow-in-Furness […]

As deep swells from an offshore hurricane were further empowered by king tides in Southern California over the past several days, residents experienced firsthand the impacts of human-generated climate change. Erosion is an innate process along coastlines, where waves and wind constantly shift the sand and gnaw away at bluffs. Infrastructure projects and residential development over the last several decades have also meant changes to the natural coastline, and beaches are regularly refilled with tons upon tons of sand. Even so, in just a couple of days, some of the region’s beaches virtually disappeared. This example is just one in an increasing array of low-lying places where our oceans, which continue to...

A hoard of thousands of silver coins was unearthed by an amateur metal detectorist in southern Finland. Experts at Lahti Museums believe it’s the largest Viking-era coin hoard found in the country, Heritage Daily reported. Kalle Lappinen made the find with a metal detector near Sysmä church village on September 3. Archaeologists have since inspected the site and recovered a trove of almost 10 pounds of silver coins, with individual pieces still to be cleaned, separated, and counted. The silver hoard was discovered inside two straw containers nearly 18 inches below the ground and about 40 feet apart. It includes coins, a fragment of silver, a bracelet, a clasp, and a bead. Each object will undergo...

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth has announced Robert Stein as its new executive director and CEO. Stein joins the institution from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where he has served as chief information officer since 2023. He succeeds Andrew J. Walker, who departed in August 2025 after […]

Although Karla Wong has always been passionate about drawing, it was her degree in law that ultimately spurred her current practice. The Mexican artist spent her adolescent and early adult years in Oaxaca, where she attended university and eventually became a forensic and witness sketch artist for the local justice department. Rendering a figure’s likeness based solely on a description is a deeply imaginative process and one that continues to inform the artist’s practice today. In Journeys of Being on view now at Chicago’s Intuit Art Museum, Wong presents a vibrant body of work that entwines her Oaxacan roots with her Chinese heritage and experiences as a trans woman living between the U.S. and Mexico....

Although there’s no official count, the amount of World War II bunkers, battery platforms, and other structures found along European coastlines probably number in the tens of thousands. The structures were typically made of concrete, and many are located along what’s known as the Atlantic Wall, an extensive coastal network of defenses built by the Nazis between 1942 and 1944 in anticipation of attacks by Allied forces. Disused now for decades, they’re a blight on the landscape, but one that The Wa sees as a blank canvas for something much more playful and bright. In his series A Kid Could Do It, The Wa transforms otherwise nondescript structures into jubilantly youthful drawings, literally scribbling in...

The Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, will close permanently at the end of the month, citing low attendance and rising costs. Its last day open to the public with regular hours will be Sunday, September 27.⁠ In a letter to the academy and Drexel communities, Antonio Merlo, president of Drexel, and Suzanne Biemiller, chair […]

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Parterre Box offers an (almost) comprehensive introduction to the sopranos headlining Mozart productions in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco this fall.

The voluntary programme will allow consignors to contribute a portion of the hammer price to artists, which Bonhams will match

Many experts are worried that parts of the so-called One Big Beautiful Act could seriously stymie access to art schools

Architect Daniel Libeskind, whose past projects include the Jewish Museum in Berlin, was also a winner of one of this year’s Praemium Imperiale awards

Wolverhampton Art Gallery, The Burton and Signal are the inaugural recipients of the Freelands Award

This season marks the third annual visit of The English Concert to American shores, this time with a production of Handel’s Alessandro.

“If Emmett Till Lived”, curated by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, draws from the collection of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography to visualise a possible narrative of Till’s life had he not been murdered at age 14

Following surveys of butterflies, birds, oceans, and trees, the editors at Phaidon have settled on their next topic of inquiry: fungi. This October, the publisher will release an expansive tome gathering more than 200 photographs, artworks, historical objects, and more all devoted to the vast diversity and creative potential of mycology. Fungi: The World of Mushrooms spans more than 200 pages and several millennia, compiling a breadth of imagery from ancient history to the present day. Included are the uncanny costumes shot in-situ by Riitta Ikonen and Anni Koponen, Hima af Klint’s delicate illustrations, and Carsten Höller’s disorienting installation of suspended toadstools. Fungi is slated for release...

Lucien Smith, an artist whose career spanned painting, public projects, and restaurants, has died at the age of thirty-seven. His death, news of which circulated widely on social media, was first reported by Art News. No cause has yet been publicly revealed. Originally known for his contributions to the abstract painting boom of the 2010s, Smith […]

The Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University hosts free-to-the-public exhibitions and programs inviting a journey across multiple centuries and continents titled The Otherworld is Home. Inspired by the Yorùbá proverb, “Life is a journey, the otherworld is home” (ayé l’àjò, ọ̀run n’ilé), the museum-wide presentation explores themes of personal reclamation, cultural identity, spiritual passage, and connection across Africa’s many diasporas. The three simultaneous exhibitions below offer opportunities to explore the enduring resonance of African artistic traditions and their continued influence on contemporary life. These exhibitions are activated with a full slate of programming that may...

Historian Lonnie G. Bunch III, who has served as secretary of the Smithsonian since 2019, has announced that he is leaving the institution. Bunch was the first African American person to occupy the post. The Smithsonian in a statement said that he planned to depart by the end of the year.  Bunch’s exit comes more […]

In eclectic productions of Carmen, Ariadne auf Naxos, and Così fan tutte in Salzburg, A.J. Goldmann finds vindication for Markus Hinterhaüser at the end of the intendant's final Festival.

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George Saunders’s unforgettable novel about the greatest sorrow known to humankind—surviving the loss of a child and letting go—work as sung theater by Missy Mazzoli.

Evgeny Titov, locally infamous for his production of Salome where the titular heroine wears a paper mask for the entire performance, returns with Szymanowski's shimmering King Roger.

For three decades, Harriet Mena Hill has been a resident of South East London. This area is known in the art world for its schools, such as the esteemed Camberwell College of Arts. But Hill and others who lived there for some time remember it as a historically working-class and, at times, impoverished area of […]
The post Harriet Mena Hill Brings Crumbling Concrete Back To Life first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

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Marigold Santos’s spectral forms are as layered with detail as they are with metaphor. Swirling amid marbled backgrounds in a feverish dance, they serve as critical examinations of cultural injustice. Their textures materialize their celestial properties as they become fierce teachers of colonial violence, problematic histories, and forgotten ancestry. Covertly, her haunting figural silhouettes aim […]
The post Celestial Stance: The Art of Marigold Santos first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

 
Exploring the people, places, and cultures that shape cities around the world, The City Series showcases images that respond to place not as a fixed subject, but as an idea shaped by experience, observation, and interpretation.
100 images of the city. Welcome to Cambridge.
Published by Shutter Hub Editions, and with a foreword by Alice Ryan, this beautiful collection of 100 images of Cambridge is a portrait of the city through the eyes of international photographers.
Order THE CITY SERIES: CAMBRIDGE here.
   
The photographers featured in THE CITY SERIES: CAMBRIDGE are: Zaklina Anderson, Robert Barcia, Viktor Barkhatov, Catherine Breslin, Tara Bucklow, Tiina Burton, Alison Carter, steven chandler, Alice...

Skeletons, tombstones, and serpents. These are just a few of the iconic images pre-v ailing throughout the works of Morgan Sorensen—all relating to the themes of struggle, sadness, pain, and death. While anyone might agree that these graphic designs would all make for killer band T’s, there’s quite a bit of depth surrounding the artist’s […]
The post Future Relics: The Art of Morgan Sorensen first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

The body is an obsession for Monica Piloni. Whether it’s a hollowed face in the Samieses series or the eerie dolls depicted in “Ilegais”, a majority of Monica Piloni’s sculptures confront the human form. And while consistently returning to the body may seem confining to some, it’s a pursuit marked by liberation for the Brazilian […]
The post The Disconcertingly Honest Self-Portrait Sculptures of Monica Piloni first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 42, which is sold out. See Matthew Grabelsky’s new solo show at Thinkspace gallery here.  Matthew Grabelsky had studied tradition in Florence, lived in the cultural nuclei of Europe, but hadn’t yet found the idea that would set him apart as an artist living in the twenty-first century. […]
The post Human/Nature: Animals Go Underground In the Paintings of Matthew Grabelsky first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

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...

 
Join us on Sunday 07 June from 1.30pm to celebrate the launch of INTO THE TREES by photographer Jo Stapleton, curated by Karen Harvey and published by Shutter Hub Editions.
INTO THE TREES is an expressionist photographic account of Jo’s interactions with trees and woodland, later remembered and reimagined in the darkroom using a range of alternative processes and techniques.
Drinks and canapés will be served from 1.30pm before the formal launch event at 2pm, including a book signing and interview discussion between Karen and Jo about the making of the book and the role photography has to play in helping to protect our wildlife and green spaces.
To celebrate the launch of the book, Jo has produced a...

In the forest nothing stands still. Time layered through thoughts and feelings, leaves kicked and crunched as we walk. The trees talk to each other, sending mycelium messages, carbon gifts, and warnings of drought or illness. From ancient wisdom to popular culture, it’s all here.
If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, did it make a sound? Of course it did. And if Jo Stapleton was there to capture the moment, there would be a visual symphony of light, shape and form to follow.
Published by Shutter Hub Editions, this beautiful collection of 100 images by Jo Stapleton is an expressionist photographic account of her interactions with trees, forest and woodland, later remembered and...

Limited Edition print by Gerhard Wichler It’s been a distinctly textured start to the year at THE GAZE, where invigorating artistic narratives emerge across forms and disciplines, threading their way through an unsettled climate. I’m delighted to share the completion and publication of a candid, close‑range interview with abstract artist Gerhard Wichler—an exchange that brought a refreshing clarity amid the mayhem of today’s world. You can read our fascinating interview here. We also mark an...