Anna Tomowa-Sintow, "Ernani Involami," from the MET Centenial Gala, 1983.

Pittsburgh is a hidden art gem, and critic Ed Simon has proof. The Carnegie International — the oldest survey of its kind in the country — brings work by 61 artists from around the world to the Steel City, a hub independent of the New York and LA art scenes. Read his review of this year’s edition, “where the personal is political.”In the wake of the annual “moral shit show” that is the Met Gala — in the words of one protest sign last night — we report on a heavily costumed action against Jeff Bezos blocks away from the museum steps, and a guerrilla projection on the billionaire's penthouse. Read on for Editor-in-Chief Hakim Bishara’s reflections on the Marcel Duchamp show at MoMA, and...

Our pick of the latest gifts and purchases to enter institutional collections worldwide

 A former BBC reporter is claiming that the U.K. broadcaster “buried” footage that he captured of Banksy at one of his mural sites in New York City. Nick Bryant, who previously served as the BBC’s New York correspondent, detailed his encounter with the anonymous British street artist and political activist in a recent post on his Substack. After establishing a relationship with Banksy’s team while covering the artist’s residency in NYC in 2013 for the broadcaster, Bryant said he “kept in touch with his PR team.” A few years had passed when “one morning in March 2018, I was awoken by a phone call from Britain. Banksy’s PR team wanted to give me a heads-up. That day, he would unveil a...

Legal proceedings—begun by the museum began to demand more public funding for a renovation—have now been postponed

INS Studio Organizes Literacy House Around community learning
 
Taobun Literacy House by INS Studio adapts the former residence of a university professor into a community-oriented space defined by reading and learning. Located within an educational district in Makassar, Indonesia, the café-workspace project is surrounded by universities, schools, and kindergartens, situating it within an active academic context.
 
The design is structured around spatial organization. The program supports reading, writing, and creative activities, with a compact library positioned at the center of the plan. This central element establishes a clear focal point and defines the primary function of the space. Surrounding areas...

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...

This year’s Austrian pavilion echoes the science-fiction film “Waterworld”, with a side order of body horror

The self-styled “grandmother of performance art” is the first female living artist to exhibit at the Gallerie dell’Accademia—and she wants everyone to join in

Our guide to the themes and strands of this year's international exhibition, and some of the key artists on display

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Audio Bricks® Applies Construction Systems to Sound Design
 
Audio Bricks® by Paolo Caviglia proposes a modular audio system that reinterprets standard building bricks as functional electronic components. The project integrates amplification, power management, and signal control into a construction-based logic, where each element connects through a single, repeatable action.
 
The system is based on a series of patented adapters that link brick geometry to dedicated printed circuit boards. These adapters accommodate specific functions, including amplification, digital-to-analog conversion, switching, and volume control. Each module is designed as a discrete unit that can be assembled, removed, or replaced...

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Amy Sherald brought one of her most beloved paintings to life for tonight’s Met Gala, which was held to benefit the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. With the help of designer Thom Browne, Sherald dressed up as the little girl in her 2014 painting Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), the work that won the artist the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Prize and appeared on a New Yorker cover last year. The painting, which is featured in a traveling Sherald survey that opens at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art on May 15, features a young woman holding an oversized teacup and staring at the viewer. Sherald drew her inspiration for the work from Alice’s Adventures in...

The annual Met Gala has become such a global pop-culture phenomenon that many probably forget—or maybe never knew!—that the event functions as a lucrative fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the branch of the museum dedicated to all things fashion. Last year’s event raised $31 million, and this year’s raised $42 million, Met director Max Hollien announced on Monday morning. Controversially, the Met named Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos honorary chairs, a move that has led to widespread protests. (The two are reported to have given the Met Gala $10 million.) The gala always precedes the opening of the Costume Institute’s spring show, which...

As fashion’s elite strutted up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, tinted an eerie, mildewy green for the Met Gala tonight, May 4, a small but rollicking crowd of protesters unfurled its own red carpet just a few blocks away. Orchestrated by the NYC-based advocacy group Rise and Resist, the action drew dozens of concerned, costumed citizens in a show of defiance against the billionaire class and Jeff Bezos, who is co-chairing this year’s event with his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos.“It’s such an exercise in triviality and an ostentatious display of wealth and power a time when so many Americans are under serious, serious threat,” Jay W. Walker, the event’s emcee, told Hyperallergic. The...

In AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted, sending a cloud of ash and hot gas sweeping through the Roman town of Pompei. The writer Pliny the Younger—whose uncle, Pliny the Elder, died in the eruption—watched the catastrophe unfold from a vantage point across the Bay of Naples, later describing how inhabitants had tied pillows over their heads to protect themselves from falling debris and carried torches to find their way through the darkness. In 2024, archeologists discovered the skeletons of two of the volcano’s victims, likely killed as they tried to reach the sea, just outside Pompeii’s southern gates. The first skeleton was of a young man, who is thought to have died in a pyroclastic surge—a rush of...

PITTSBURGH — When the landmark exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection launched at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, artist Chris Ofili became a major player in the scrum of the culture wars. Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” (1996), a colorful, yellow-toned mixed-media painting of the mother of Christ collaged with images of women’s genitalia excised from pornographic magazines, and supported by a stand composed of two lumps of dried elephant dung, was deemed by then New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani as “sick … disgusting,” and a “desecration of someone else’s religion” (Ofili, like Giuliani, is Roman Catholic). The New York Post, in its indomitable way, covered...

The chaos swirling around the forthcoming 2026 Venice Biennale is showing no signs of slowing down: On Monday, in a statement, Biennale organizers announced that Iran had dropped out and would no longer be exhibiting its planned pavilion. The announcement comes mere days before the exhibition opens to the public, and amid a fragile ceasefire between the […]

inside the new galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of art
 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens Costume Art this May in New York, inaugurating the new Condé M. Nast Galleries with a show that puts fashion in direct dialogue with the museum’s wider collection.
 
designboom attended a preview of the exhibition where architects Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich of Peterson Rich Office gave a tour of their new galleries. Their design frames the show as a continuous spatial sequence. Here, garments and artworks share the same platforms, materials, and sightlines. Rusticated plaster bases extend from the permanent architecture into the display plinths to create a consistent ground plane that links objects...

If there’s a factory tour on offer in my vicinity, count me in. As the child of two teachers, I developed an abiding fascination with how things are made during family vacations, roadtripping around the South and up to New England, often with educational detours along the way. We toured a cheese factory, a whiskey distillery, a glassblowing workshop, a crayon factory, an ice cream factory, and more. These places offer a taste of what it takes to turn, say, milk into a creamy pint of Cherry Garcia, and a glimpse at the glinting machinery, ingenuity, and labor involved in the manufacturing process.In the Cooper Hewitt’s current exhibition, Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne, you...

Alison Knowles is often regarded as the "first woman" of Fluxus, the intrepid group that took the piss out of art itself. Six months after her death, Lauren Moya Ford examines the only book dedicated to her work and life — the latter of which still remains shrouded in mystery, despite the author's best efforts. Ford considers one of the many questions that plague historians: Can we understand the work if we do not first understand the artist?More books to kick off May, which spiritually if not technically marks the start of summer, including Ed Simon on the qualities that set Hans Holbein's portraits apart and Melissa Holbrook Pierson on a photographer's engagement with the endless landscape...

Manifesta, the nomadic European biennial launched in 1996, is losing its founding director, Hedwig Fijen. Fijen announced that she would depart on October 5. She began working on Manifesta in 1991, when she was commissioned by the Netherlands Office for Fine Arts in The Hague to develop a pan-European platform. The biennial’s first edition took […]

A muscular Englishman in a khaki kilt and black beret hops atop the edge of an old well clad in traditional Spanish tile, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows in what can only be called an act of bravery.  High winds and rain pelt a group of visitors from all directions, and yet, this charismatic performer stands tall above the cobblestone to announce that he’s been living on this vacant island for nearly two centuries. He’s here to give us a tour. “This has been my home for 174 years,” the man says, introducing himself as Captain Horatio Hollingwood. “I arrived in command of a well-known British merchant ship, responsible for transporting goods of every sort. But alongside grain, wool, and oil,...

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced last week that it has received a donation of $23 million from recently elected trustee Jennifer Rubio and her husband, Stewart Butterfield, via the Rubio Butterfield Foundation. Rubio, the cofounder and former CEO of Away luggage, and Butterfield, the cofounder of the workplace team messaging application Slack, also made […]

A gold-leafed statue of Donald Trump is now standing at his Trump National Doral golf club in Miami after a drawn-out payment dispute. The 15-foot bronze sculpture, which rises to about 22 feet with its pedestal, was finished with gold leaf after the artist, Ohio-based sculptor Alan Cottrill, proposed the upgrade. “It [was] like pitching ice water to a man dying of thirst,” Cottrill told the Daily Beast.  The addition helped push the cost of the project, commissioned by a group of cryptocurrency investors to promote their $PATRIOT meme coin, from $300,000 to $360,000. Cottrill also demanded compensation for the group’s use of images of the statue to market the token before his payment had been...

The organizers of the Venice Biennale have announced that they will this year dispense with the tradition of awarding Golden Lions for Best Artist and Best National Pavilion, Hyperallergic reports. No Silver Lions will be handed out either. Instead, visitors will be invited to vote for their choice of best artist in the main exhibition […]

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Statue of Ganesha looted from a temple in Madhya Pradesh, India NEW YORK, NEW YORK—According to a report in The Telegraph, the United States repatriated 657 artifacts to India in a ceremony held at the Consulate General of India in New York. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said that the objects were recovered in multiple investigations of antiquities trafficking. “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,” Bragg explained. “There is unfortunately more work to be done to return stolen artifacts back to India,” he added. The objects returned in the ceremony include a bronze figure of...

Archival aerial photograph of Las Playas Intaglio, Arizona AJO, ARIZONA—According to a Washington Post report, an intaglio that looks like a fish has been damaged in southwestern Arizona by construction crews building a second wall on the border with Mexico parallel to the first. Waivers issued by the Department of Homeland Security exempted border wall construction crews from laws requiring the protection of Indigenous archaeological sites and the environment. Located inside Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, the Las Playas intaglio, which is estimated to be more than 1,000 years old and measured about 200 feet long when intact, was recorded by archaeologists Richard Martynec and Sandra Martynec in...

Claire Bishop's Review of a Venice Biennale in "interesting times"

Images of a lamb and cross decorate this coin, which was found in Jutland, Denmark. COPENHAGEN, DENMARK—The Viking Herald reports that two rare English “Lamb of God” coins were recently unearthed in Jutland. During the eleventh century, English monarchs undertook various initiatives to try to ward off seemingly unending Viking attacks. Around 1009, King Æthelred the Unready even minted unusual coins in the hope of obtaining divine protection. The objects feature a lamb and a cross on one side—a Christian motif alluding to Christ’s sacrifice—and a dove on the other, a symbol of the Holy Spirit. Not only did these coins fail in their objective, they became somewhat coveted by Viking raiders, who...

ENESS turns social media into a physical AI experience
 
Inside the medieval halls of Kalmar Castle, ENESS presents The Cloud Utopia Machine, a new interactive installation staged as part of the expanded exhibition Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness, on view until November 1st, 2026. Set within the 800-year-old Swedish fortress, the work invites visitors to hand over their smartphones to a moving conveyor system where the devices travel through a sequence of cloud-shaped chambers filled with miniature speculative worlds. The installation turns the logic of social media into a physical experience, reflecting on artificial intelligence, digital dependency, and the architecture of online...

In the late 12th century, a nobleman named Count Gerard van Loon commissioned an abbey to serve as his final resting place. Over the next few decades, amid plenty of political tumult, Herkenrode Abbey in Hasselt, Belgium, was converted to the first Cistercian convent for women. It was a site of pilgrimage from the 13th to the 15th centuries, and despite regional wars and economic uncertainty, it stayed the course. During the 16th century, it experienced its heyday thanks to the patronage of a figure named Prince Bishop Evrard van der Marck, seeing the addition of a Gothic church that brimmed with beautiful stained glass windows, textiles, paintings, and more. The Eighty Years’ War paused Herkenrode’s...

During the Victorian era, innovators made huge leaps with optical technologies. It was the period of the stereoscope and an early projector known as the magic lantern, not to mention one in which eyeglasses became more affordable and entering the mainstream. These advances also influenced scientific inquiry, making microscopes more powerful, and the pursuit of microscopy enabled researchers and enthusiasts to discover creatures invisible to the naked eye. One of these enthusiasts was London-based educator and amateur scientist Charles Thomas Hudson. Along with other scholars and aficionados, he participated in interest groups. “As President of the Royal Microscopical Society and a Fellow of the Royal...

derrick adams arrives in venice
 
A new public work by Derrick Adams has appeared in Venice, floating over the city’s network of canals in the heart of the Biennale. Titled Heavy is the head that wears the crown, the piece takes the form of a large-scale portrait of the late curator Koyo Kouoh, installed as a banner on the facade of the Palazzetto dello sport Giobatta Gianquinto in Castello. Facing the Rio della Tana, the image meets visitors as they move between the Arsenale and the surrounding streets.
 
The project, curated by Francesco Bonami, runs from May 4th through September 24th, 2026. Its placement is significant. The facade reads as a flat plane stretched across a busy edge condition, and Adams...

The countertenors conquer the day in Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

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...

Like probably all of us, there are so many different things I could have submitted for a favorite Verdi performance.

Michael Spyres talks to Kevin Ng about his winding path as a baritenor, which composer he wants to conquer next, and how he makes Wagner work in his voice — and in his native Ozarks.

I realize Igor Gorin did not sing much Verdi except for a few Papa Germonts, yet this performance of the famous baritone aria from Attila I claim is well-night perfect singing.

Renature, presented at Bildhalle Zürich, explores the shifting relationship between nature, perception and materiality in contemporary lens-based art. Bringing together the work of Adam Jeppesen, Douglas Mandry, Inka & Niclas and Joost Vandebrug, the exhibition questions how the organic world is framed through technology and visual culture, whilst foregrounding the physical materials that shape photography. Together, these artists open a dialogue around nature as something seen, shaped and felt. They are not merely documented, but transformed. Their works reject permanence and perfection, instead embracing fragility, artifice and transformation as essential elements of a contemporary visual language. ...

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...

This May, exhibitions on display around the world harness photography and installation to interrogate pressing themes, from the importance of proper representation to the future of our natural spaces. They ask questions like: what happens after sea levels rise? What does the world look like 50 years from now? How do we preserve our cultures, traditions and communities in the face of massive uncertainty? They’re some of the most important issues facing our current moment. Each exhibition, hosted at the National Portrait Gallery, VB Photographic Center, ARKEN, Biennale of Sydney and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, explores them with depth and nuance. They do not provide easy solutions, but ask the audiences to hold...

Kim Dacres gravitates toward renewal and care, transforming worn rubber into expressive sculptural portraits. The New York-based artist twists and braids tired treads into sleek buns and rows typical of Black hairstyles, which she embellishes with gear-like crowns and jewelry made of metal bike chains. Spray painting the material to mask marks, Dacres utilizes what might otherwise be deemed worthless to create bold visages. A new body of work extends a series of celebratory busts the artist made to honor those who’ve inspired and influenced her. On view this month at Charles Moffett, Lost on a Two Way Street follows this trajectory, while adding flatter wall works evocative of Victorian-era cameos. “The...

Wheat impression on Neolithic mudbrick, Georgia TBILISI, GEORGIA—Phys.org reports that wheat for baking bread (Triticum aestivum) may have first been grown some 8,000 years ago in Georgia. Genetic studies of modern wheat plants and wild grasses indicate that domesticated wheat and wild goat grass were mixed in the South Caucasus and the Caspian Sea region. This hybrid plant eventually became bread wheat, explained Nana Rusishvili of the Georgia National Museum and her colleagues. They examined charred grains recovered from Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, two Neolithic village sites in Georgia. Because charred grains of bread wheat look similar to durum wheat and other wheat seeds, the team members...

Pieces of the Berlanga Cup BERLANGA DE DUERO, SPAIN—According to a Live Science report, a new study of the Berlanga Cup, a 1,900-year-old bronze vessel discovered in Spain, suggests that its decorations depict Hadrian’s Wall, which is located some 1,200 miles away from where the cup was discovered. “The cup is a small representation of a functional vessel called a Roman trulla—a bronze or clay cup with a handle used to drink water,” said Jesús García Sánchez of the Archaeological Institute of Mérida. “It is not only crafted with metals, but also expensive enamels, and later on customized. It is definitely not an industrial product,” García Sánchez added. The inscription on the cup lists...

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Systems of power, cultural identity and “the fragile boundaries between perception and reality” are the ideas that drive Lucia Shuyu Li, a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, performance, painting and sound. They’re also some of the most relevant themes of our times, emerging from a contemporary era defined by misinformation, political polarisation and an endless news cycle. Li draws on her Chinese heritage and time spent in the US to create her works, which express her “experiences as an individual navigating the complexities of contemporary society.” The trio of paintings Judge Me, I Am Dead Therefore I Was Alive and Who Cried Walking Home are perhaps her most personal, and...

Home might be a mutable concept, but some objects retain the aura of belonging and comfort even outside the walls we reside in. For Monica Rohan, those items are patterned fabrics and bentwood dining chairs, which venture outdoors in her vibrant oil paintings. The Brisbane-based artist has long depicted the supple folds and bright motifs of textiles, which tended to swaddle her characters or hide their faces among natural landscapes. Upholstered loungers and carved wood seats have similarly appeared in unusual spots, precariously holding a figure while nested in a slim hedge or slumping down a small hill. “Draped Clover” (2026), oil on board, 70 x 100 centimeters In recent years, though, Rohan’s...

 
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...

Sylvia Trotter Ewens  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
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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...

Matthew Walton is an emerging artist based in Toronto. He holds a B.A.A. (Hons.) in Animation from Sheridan College. His mixed-media practice combines drawing and painting, often merging the human form with a distinct graphic sensibility. The result is figurative compositions that strike a distinct textural contrast between softness and hardness. Embracing gestures and mannerisms once repressed, his work is also a celebration of authentic self-expression.
Froot Loops features Matthew’s mixed-media-work-on-paper series highlighting the quiet charm of everyday queerness. Each piece reimagines a separate mundane moment, transformed by Matthew’s bold, graphic approach to figuration and his vibrant technicolor...

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“What I am advocating for is a type of grace,” says Matthew Hansel. “Both in the way we see ourselves and in the way we see others. I am celebrating the impossible mix of contradictory things that make us human, including the parts of ourselves we hide from the world.” Hansel’s tour of our hidden […]
The post Matthew Hansel’s Hidden Demons first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Jorge Rodriguez-Jimenez Gustavo Rimada is showing his third solo show and largest to date at Thinkspace Projects. The show, titled “Rhythmic Sequence,” brings together his masterfully vivid acrylic paintings and his newly found love for ceramics. Offering mugs with faces that both haunt and delight, Rimada, who was born in Mexico and raised in California, is blending his Mexican heritage and his California lifestyle to create bold and culturally stunning works of art. Rimada’s ceramic work...