jr and fondazione bonotto unveil monumental tapestry of care
 
For the 61st Venice Biennale, artist JR has unveiled ‘Il Gesto,’ a multidisciplinary project that activates both the exterior and interior of Palazzo Ca’ da Mosto (The Venice Venice Hotel). The intervention begins on the building’s facade, where a large-scale temporary installation of ultra-lightweight panels transforms the Veneto-Byzantine architecture into a public stage visible from the Grand Canal. While these external figures appear to lean out from the windows to engage with the city, the project finds its permanent and definitive form inside the palace: a monumental tapestry created in collaboration with master weaver Giovanni...

A survey by the federal Government Accountability Office shows that a majority of the nation’s museums lack the resources to maintain their buildings, putting collections at risk

The dictionary definition of Kuntenserven.

Journalist Omar El Akkad’s viral aphorism, “one day, everyone will have always been against this,” hangs solemnly over the art-world Olympics. At this week’s Venice Biennale previews, so far, the protests are louder than the art — as is the silence of those who choose not to speak up.Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hakim Bishara reports from a roaring rally outside the Israeli pavilion, where South African artist Nolan Oswald Dennis tells him that protesting is "an artist's duty." Avedis Hadjian covers a pink smoke-filled Pussy Riot and FEMEN action against Russia’s participation, and Staff Reporter Rhea Nayyar has the latest on the Biennale jury’s sudden decision to resign.Stay on top of...

CLIMATE-RESPONSIVE AND MATERIAL DESIGN THROUGH NATURAL FIBERS
 
Caneplexus translates natural fibers such as bamboo, rattan, and seagrass into active elements across hospitality and residential architecture. The natural ceilings, partitions, and shading elements become tools for shaping nature-friendly atmospheres, functioning as breathable layers within a space. This work reflects strong acceptance from the community of architects and designers, and makes the company a key partner for climate-responsive and material driven design.
 
Within a minimalist design approach, Unda Hotel, designed by Ixnos Architects, incorporates an extensive use of natural materials, such as stone, timber, and woven cane. These...

The artist, who was born in Zanzibar, describes Britain as having "all the hallmarks of safety and calm, but has an underlying loathing of the Other"

Fiona Pardington is showing her towering portraits of the country's endangered and extinct bird life

24 sculpted trees arranged as a set of colored pencils
 
‘Deus sive Natura’ (God or Nature) is a land art installation composed of 24 sculpted trees arranged as a set of colored pencils. Developed by artist Strijdom van der Merwe in collaboration with property owner Michael Silver and arborist Lloyd Dambuza, the project examines the relationship between intervention, growth, and environmental transformation.
 
The title references a central concept from Baruch Spinoza’s 17th-century work Ethics, in which ‘God or Nature’ describes the idea of nature and divinity as a single, unified substance. This philosophical framework informs the installation’s treatment of landscape as both material and...

The artist’s geologically based works are the ideal choice as the US celebrates 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, says Jeffrey Uslip

The new mother may have upstaged some of the artwork on show

After a thirteen-year hiatus, the Bahamian Pavilion has returned to Venice with a proposition that is as much educational as representational: that the Caribbean nation can be reintroduced to the world through its contemporary artistic inheritance. To do so, the pavilion turns to the late master John Beadle and his former student Lavar Munroe, framing their work through one of the Bahamas’ defining cultural touchstones — Junkanoo — the whistling, crepe-costumed procession that floods the islands twice a year and persists as a visual philosophy of resiliency and reverence. For Venice, this takes shape in the transformation of the San Trovaso Art Space in Dorsoduro, where large-scale sculptural works are...

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Children’s Drawings Rethink the Birdhouse
 
Birdhouse by Kids is a workshop-based project in which children’s drawings and free-form ideas are used as a basis for rethinking conventional birdhouse design. The initiative explores how intuitive visual expression can inform small-scale architectural objects intended for non-human use.
 
The project builds on a previous workshop, Chair for Kids, and extends its focus from designing objects for children to designing for other species, birds. It shifts attention from human-centered design toward alternative perspectives, using children’s interpretations as a starting point for new forms of habitat.
a scene where nature and children’s imagination come...

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Artist, writer, editor, and cultural organizer Steven Durland died on March 11 at the age of 75 after a brief illness. His longtime collaborator and life partner, Linda Frye Burnham, confirmed his death in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, his home base of three decades. Durland was born in 1951 in Long Beach, California, and raised in South Dakota. Over the course of his early life, he lived in Massachusetts and New York before returning to the West Coast in the early 1980s. In 1993, together with Burnham, he relocated to Frog Pond Farm in Saxapahaw, where they lived alongside dogs, cats, chickens, and geese.Durland is best known for his work as editor of High Performance magazine, founded by Burnham in 1978, from...

New revelations that Israeli pavilion artist Belu-Simion Fainaru issued legal threats against the Venice Biennale may shed light on the awards jury’s sudden decision to step down from this year’s event. According to the Italian news agency Adnkronos and as independently confirmed by Hyperallergic, Fainaru filed legal warnings outlining allegations of antisemitism and nationality-based discrimination shortly after the jury initially stated that it would not consider countries accused of human rights crimes, disqualifying Israel and Russia. The women-led jury, which included Elvira Dyangani Ose, Zoe Butt, Marta Kuzma, Giovanna Zapperi, and Solange Farkas (who served as the chair), stated its intent to omit...

On April 28, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., announced the return of 657 trafficked antiquities to the people of India. The items, valued at nearly $14 million, were recovered in the course of ongoing investigations by the D.A.’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit and Homeland Security Investigations. The items were formally returned at a ceremony in New York, which was attended by representatives from the D.A.’s office and the Consulate General of India. “The scale of the trafficking networks that targeted cultural heritage in India is massive, as demonstrated by the return of more than 600 pieces today,” said District Attorney Bragg. “There is unfortunately more work to be done to...

As robust May flowers bloom in all directions, we embrace the vibrant energy of Primavera. Amid increasing global chaos, art endures as the ultimate stronghold of free expression against tyranny. This month, the Hessel Museum of Art presents the annual showcase of dynamic exhibitions by recent graduates of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. September Gallery features dreamy explorations in camera-less photography by Daniele Frazier and empowered mixed-media works by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo. Art Omi features Onnis Luque’s pointed artistic investigation into the ongoing exploitation of natural resources in Mexico, while the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College features a series of...

Construction workers racing to build the Trump administration’s border wall between the US and Mexico accidentally damaged a two-hundred-foot-long work of Indigenous Land art thought to be over a thousand years old, according to the Washington Post. Satellite imagery near Ajo, Arizona, showed what appeared to be bulldozer tracks cutting a path approximately sixty to […]

The Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), an international group of culture workers that was formed in order to call for the exclusion of Israel from the Venice Biennale, announced via press release this week that they are planning a 24-hour strike for Friday, May 8 in tandem with the previews for this year’s international exhibition.  […]

In the fall of 2026, Chanel will officially launch an annual, one-year fellowship in collaboration with the Guggenheim. The fellow will be hosted in New York, and then in Venice at the Peggy Guggenheim collection, and will be someone “dedicated to advancing collection studies and curatorial research” at the MA and PhD level, the luxury […]

the holy see pavilion proposes listening as a contemplative act
 
Tucked behind the walls of Venice’s Giardino Mistico dei Carmelitani Scalzi, the Holy See Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia invites visitors into a quiet, deeply contemplative experience shaped through sound, nature, and attentive listening. Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers, The Ear is the Eye of the Soul responds directly to the late Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial framework, In Minor Keys, transforming listening into an act of contemplation, care, and spiritual attention.
 
At the Giardino Mistico location, the experience starts by receiving a pair of headphones and a map identifying the...

In Memoriam is published every Wednesday afternoon and honors those we recently lost in the art world.Doris F. Fisher (1931–2026)Arts patronThe co-founder of clothing retail company The Gap, she, and her husband, Don, amassed one of the country's largest modern and contemporary art collections. The couple pledged more than 1,000 works to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2009. A portion of that collection consiting of nearly 250 works by 35 artists is currently on view at the museum, including exhibitions on Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Alexander Calder, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, and others. Stephanie Chernikowski (1941–2026)Photographer of punks and starsA self-portrait by...

ABOVE: Installation view, Jeffrey Gibson, boshullichi / inlvchi – we will continue to change, Kunsthaus Zürich, 2025, photo by Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich Jeffrey Gibson was far more open about the act of dreaming and the beliefs that make-up spirituality than I expected. I started our conversation saying that I like to keep things loose, […]
The post Jeffrey Gibson: More Colors than The Eye Can See first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

A visit to Lincoln Park or the Garfield Park Conservatory is one of the outings Chicagoans rarely pass up, particularly when we need some reprieve from all the concrete and steel. Two beloved green spaces in the city, these spots boast oases blanketed in verdant foliage even in the depths of winter and house an array of specimens not native to the Midwest. For artists Merryn Omotayo Alaka and Sam Frésquez, the immersive nature of a conservancy, with plants above and below and all around, became a central point for a collaborative project. Your Birth is My Birth presents the duo’s synthetic hair sculptures, which suspend from the ceiling of Jane Lombard Gallery and splay across the wooden floor like organic...

Nearly eighty Mexican cultural figures have signed an open letter decrying the installation of Pedro Reyes’s Tlali in the plaza of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new David Geffen Galleries. The group says that the monolithic 2026 work—described by writer William Poundstone as a “ready-made backdrop for social media posts”—reprises a proposal for […]

The head of the Venice Biennale has a simple defense for one of the most contentious decisions of this year’s exhibition: it’s not a courtroom. Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the Biennale’s president, made the remark on Wednesday this week as backlash mounted over the return of Russia to the Giardini. The country is reopening its pavilion for the first time since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a move that has drawn criticism from European officials and triggered threats to pull roughly $2.3 million in EU funding.  “The Biennale is not a court; it is a garden of peace,” Buttafuoco said, arguing that the exhibition should remain a place for dialogue rather than exclusion. “This whole world born of ​the...

MOTZA, ISRAEL—According to the Greek Reporter, new research indicates that the ancient inhabitants of the site of Motza, Israel, had surprising mastery of a complicated flooring technique thousands of years earlier than previously expected. During highway construction west of Jerusalem, archaeologists uncovered a late Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlement consisting of more than 20 building complexes dating to between 7100 and 6700 b.c. These structures contained around 100 plaster floors. Closer analysis of these surfaces revealed that some of them were actually made from dolomite lime plaster as opposed to the more common limestone plaster. Dolomite has advantages over limestone, which is a similar type of...

Construction crews building a barrier between the United States and Mexico damaged a 200-foot-long etching of a fish embedded in the land that is thought to be 1,000 years old, according to a report in the Washington Post. As part of President Donald Trump’s contentious $46.5 billion border-wall project, workers destroyed a 60-to-70-foot portion of the artwork known as an intaglio, according to Richard Martynec, a retired archaeologist who currently surveys the area as a volunteer. As the Post report notes, “The construction is not abiding by environmental laws and other protections, alarming advocates, national park staff and Native Americans.” Satellite imagery from April showed a disturbance crossing...

CHERINGTON, ENGLAND—DNA testing has finally revealed that two mysterious individuals—a young boy and a teenage girl entombed together in a rare Anglo-Saxon double burial—were brother and sister, according to a report by The Independent. The pair initially drew attention two years ago when they were discovered in Cherington, Gloucestershire, because of the unusual way they were laid to rest. Both children had been placed gently on their sides. The young girl faced her brother and had been propped up in a way, perhaps on pillows, that made it look like she was watching over her younger sibling during his eternal rest. The boy was still grasping a sword, while the girl was buried with a workbox. Experts...

At the German Pavilion, Naumann’s posthumously-completed project is a triumph.

“To me, being a visual activist means I only illustrate stories that resonate with me deeply, by giving voice to minorities or social situations that need to be addressed,” says Fatinha Ramos. “It is the only way I can truly connect with others.” Based in Antwerp, the Portuguese artist and illustrator is well-known for blending analog and digital techniques to create rich, emotive compositions. Collaborating with clients like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Tate, and Scientific American, among many others, Ramos has cultivated a keen eye for storytelling through her distinctive visual language. Recent partnerships include the Anne Frank Museum and MoMA, the latter of which commissioned the...

The Palestinian ambassador to the UK has called on the government to aid in getting the British Museum to reinstate the word “Palestinian” in its wall texts. Husam Zomlot, the ambassador, raised his complaint to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, a ministry of foreign affairs, according to the Guardian. In that Guardian report, Zomlot called the removal of “Palestinian” from the labels a form of “erasure.” In February, the Telegraph reported that the group UK Lawyers for Israel had lobbied the museum to strip the word from its didactics, claiming that using the word “Palestinian” “erases historical changes and creates a false impression of continuity.” The word had appeared on maps of the...

When it comes to photo drops, NASA has upped the ante. The organization has added thousands of snapshots from the Artemis II mission to the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth archive. The album now holds 12,217 images by cosmic travelers Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen during their more than 250,000-mile, 10-day flyby mission around the moon. According to PetaPixel, a couple of Nikons and an iPhone 17 were the cameras of choice for the journey. And even though many of the thousands of recently uploaded images are very similar—some are even quite blurry—scrolling through them gives the impression of being seated right next to the “Moonfarers” as they marvel at Earth...

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Orpheus Acosta’s Website
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A joint Beethoven-Adams program conducted by Dima Slobodeniouk suggests a way forward for the embattled Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Parterre Box features the Met's current Eugene Onegin, Iurii Samoilov, in a performance of Rossini ahead of a return to Pesaro this summer.

In 1945, WWII was in its waning months. Allied forces entered Nazi occupied territories, liberating concentration camps and revealing the true extent of the horrors of the war for the first time. Adolf Hitler committed suicide on 30 April, and Victory in Europe Day was officially celebrated on 8 May. At the same time, John Baer was serving with the 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion, a unit of the US military. Here, he got a Leica camera from a captured German soldier. His earliest photographs were taken of his fellow soldiers in France and Germany, weary from war. Baer’s collection is a moving portrait of Europe and New York City in the decade after WWII. Now, almost a century on, a debut book demonstrates his...

When I was a fledgling opera enthusiast, professors at a small-town Wisconsin college routinely travelled to Chicago for Lyric Opera performances.

Portrait(s), the annual photography festival in Vichy, returns as a curatorial proposition that treats portraiture less as a genre than as a system for understanding how images construct identity, power and attention. The programme brings together David LaChapelle, Paul Graham, Yohanne Lamoulère, Julia Gat and Patrick Tournebœuf, each working through different models of portraiture: staged spectacle, documentary observation, social space and architectural trace. It positions photography as a field where historical memory, institutional frameworks and contemporary image saturation intersect. At its centre, LaChapelle anchors a major solo exhibition that sits alongside documentary, archival and pedagogical...

At some point, I realized I didn’t want to choose between the past and the present. I was interested in allowing them to coexist,” says baroque-style painter Nieves González, who distorts trappings of traditional portraiture to exalt modern day women. Her recent portrait of British pop star Lily Allen, for example, places contemporary attitude—and fashion—within […]
The post Baroque-style Painter Nieves González distorts trappings of traditional portraiture to exalt modern-day women first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

Humor and happenstance take the front seat in Polish photographer Janusz Jurek’s wry images. Working as a graphic designer and commercial photographer by day, he finds the greatest creative freedom in the candid and incidental—the things he notices as he moves about town, travels, and attends festivals and other events. These are the places where he observes some of the most unique individuals and the quirkiest coincidences. “The less commercial and more bizarre, the better—people are more authentic then, less in control of what they’re doing,” he tells Colossal. Jurek is drawn to situations that happen outside of the mainstream, often turning his back on whatever the present attraction is in order...

CADIZ, SPAIN—El País reports that the so-called Delta II shipwreck uncovered during harbor infrastructure work in the Bay of Cadiz has now been identified as a vessel that sank during a famous 1587 raid by explorer and privateer Sir Francis Drake. The sixteenth-century wreck was recently determined to be the Genovese merchant ship San Giorgio e Sant’Elmo Buonaventura. It dates to a time when tensions between England and Spain were rapidly increasing, culminating in the defeat of the Spanish Armada off the English coast in 1588. A year prior to that, as the Spaniards were preparing their invasion, Drake caught the Spanish by surprise in Cadiz, sinking 30 to 35 ships belonging to them and their allies. The...

Cereal stems recovered from Roque Bentayga BENTAYGA, CANARY ISLANDS—Archaeologists uncovered the earliest known evidence of cereal harvesting in the Canary Islands, according to a report in La Brújula Verde. The discovery was made at the C008 cave complex at the Roque Bentayga rock formation on Gran Canaria. The site was likely used as a granary, for plant processing, and, later, as a burial ground by the ancient Canarians, a people of Amazigh, or Berber, origin, between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries. Excavations within the caves yielded over 200 lithic artifacts. Microscopic analyses of wear patterns on some of the objects, particularly a small basalt knife, determined that they were consistent...

YORK, ENGLAND—According to a statement released by the University of York, researchers have identified rare traces of dyed purple textiles in two Roman infant burials. Known as Tyrian purple, the extremely costly colorant was manufactured by crushing thousands of murex marine sea snails and was typically reserved for use by emperors, royalty, and members of the aristocracy. However, experts were able to detect its presence on garments wrapped around two small children who died and were buried around 1,700 years ago. Their remains are held in the collections of the York Museums Trust. The dye was identifiable through chemical analysis because liquid gypsum had been poured over the shrouded young bodies in...

When Adrienna Matzeg embarked on a trip to Kyoto, Tokyo, and Seoul in July 2025, she encountered intense midsummer heat and humidity, which led her to exploring some of the cities’ nooks and crannies in the dark, when it was cooler. Illuminated storefronts and signage characterize the artist’s late-night runs to convenience stores, markets, and other features of these hubs’ sprawling urban fabric. “In her textile embroidery work, however, the energy of the city falls away,” says a statement from Abbozzo Gallery, which presents her forthcoming solo exhibition, After Hours. “What remains are quiet scenes that left an imprint, tactile snapshots as a record of those summer nights.” “Late Night...

By Lorraine Heitzman Erik Otsea's show, Clever Animals & Static at Alto Beta is a menagerie of a different sort. His tabletop ceramic sculptures are quirky but solemn hand-built industrial shapes that suggest machine parts found in abandoned factories or as models for obscure patent applications. They conjure Soviet-style brutalist architecture and futuristic inventions, all simple geometric forms that hint at a bygone time when we believed that life could be improved through industry. So...

Curtis Opera and a charming cast of young singers cast a spell with their beguiling production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

“Young people aren’t interesting these days.” It was this sentiment, heard over again from older groups, that artist Pieter Henket cites as the inspiration for his latest project. Birds of Mexico City is a collection of portraits focusing on young Mexicans who are redefining contemporary expressions of gender, identity, tradition and spirituality. The book is a love letter to the next generation – their fearlessness, self-expression and refusal to compromise. As Henket writes in the introduction: “I thought: how incredible that these kids love and respect themselves enough to step into the world exactly as they are, without worrying what anyone might say. It brought me back to my own youth. I was a...

A restaurant meal on a road trip. A billboard off a highway. A dusty side street in a Texas town. Stephen Shore (b. 1947) captures the seemingly banal moments of life. His photographs of small-town North America captured a society in transition. The mid-20th century works are emblematic of the rapid transformation of the era, both for culture and politics, and photography as an artform. His shots, according to 303 Gallery, “became a bible for young photographers seeking to work in colour, because, along with that of William Eggleston, his work exemplified that the medium could be considered art.” Most celebrated is Uncommon Places (1973 – 1981) series, which were taken over the course of a decade and...

There are few figures in the canon of 20th century image-making who require less introduction than Cecil Beaton. A polymath of rare fluency, Beaton moved effortlessly between photography, costume design and stagecraft, shaping the visual language of modern celebrity with a precision that still reverberates today. His lens did not simply capture – it constructed, elevating its subjects into carefully composed myths of glamour and identity. His work defined an era in which appearance became inseparable from performance, and portraiture from spectacle. To encounter Beaton is to encounter the architecture of fame itself. Beaton’s accolades are well rehearsed, yet no less striking for their familiarity. A...

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By William Moreno The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. Susan Sontag, “On Photography” William Camargo’s current exhibit of twenty-four plus works, dated 2019 through 2025, reads as a mini survey, with photographic images and installations thematically placed throughout the modest gallery. It’s his largest showing of works to date. Early in his career, the Anaheim native considered fashion and product photography, photojournalism and conflict reportage, finding the latter...

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Blake Masi’s Website
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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...

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Sylvia Trotter Ewens’s Website
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By Nancy Spiller Alec Egan's painting "Dawn House," in his show "Groundskeeper" at Vielmetter Los Angeles, is tender, serene, and calm — a lavender and peach sky sheltering the triangular top of a house flanked by two palm trees and the tip of a cypress. In its companion painting, "Night House," the sky takes a sinister turn with layers of dark blue, sunset orange, and a roiling strip indicative of flames mixed with what might be smoke. It hints at something of what Egan, his wife, and two...