a familiar typology grows to the scale of a village
 
A broad bamboo roof dips toward the ground around the winning proposal for the 2026 Kaira Looro Architecture Competition, tracing a loose semicircle around an open gathering space. Designed by Greece-based Afroditi Ioannidou and Vladimir Gligorovski of K-Studio, the community center takes its starting point from the traditional impluvium houses of Senegal’s Casamance region, where domestic life is organized inward around a central courtyard that gathers people, light, and rainwater. Here, that arrangement expands from the scale of the home to the scale of the village, all within a structure of rammed-earth.
 
The proposal has been awarded first prize in...

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Two years after an internal audit of the Canadian federal government found that 132 pieces in its Indigenous art collection were unaccounted for, the government has still failed to locate 111 of these objects, per reports. The government’s Indigenous Art Centre relocated its holdings to temporary storage facilities in 2022, a move that exposed the […]

Sir Joshua Reynolds's celebrated "Portrait of Mai (Omai)" (c. 1776) will be displayed at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles beginning on September 14, four years after it was subjected to a 15-month export ban issued by the United Kingdom to protect it from foreign sale. The work has undergone comprehensive technical analysis ahead of its United States debut, revealing new insights about the painter's technique.In a rare move, the Getty and the National Portrait Gallery secured shared ownership of the work in 2023, with each institution paying half of the £50 million price tag ($61 million at the time). Conservators from the Getty and the National Portrait Gallery in London began analyzing the nearly...

A fire broke out at the Kherson Regional Art Museum on August 20, after a Russian first person view (FPV) drone hit the building. There were no civilian casualties as a consequence of the drone hit and fire, but the museum building and some artworks suffered damage, according to reporting by Reuters. Emergency crews worked under […]

Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong announced today that Anne Imhof will debut a suite of new works as part of her solo exhibition opening at the former prison turned art space next month. Related Articles Anne Imhof’s Vapid ‘DOOM’ Performance Has Nothing to Say After 14 Years, Philip Tinari Leaves UCCA for Hong Kong's Tai Kwun Titled “House of Swans,” the exhibition, which marks the artist’s first solo in Asia, will feature “a major commission of monumental new works that construct a powerfulmultisensory experience through atmospheric scenography, installations, paintings and live performances,” according to a release. Curated by Ying Kwok and Tiffany Leung, the exhibition will take...

Two people were convicted in a Hamburg court on Monday of money laundering in a case whose details closely match those of the two children of Serop Simonian, the German art dealer and alleged leader of an Egyptian antiquities trafficking ring that sold items to museums including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The conviction was reported by Arab News, which did not mention the names of the convicted parties or the French museum in the United Arab Emirates. The court ordered the convicted parties to turn over €32 million ($37 million) and pay fines of more than €90,000 ($105,000). The descriptions of artworks and the dollar amounts for which they sold and in the Hamburg...

Last week, rock music photographer Justin Thomas filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against the American painter Elizabeth Peyton, Sotheby’s, and David Zwirner Gallery, as first reported by Copyright Lately. In the suit, Thomas accuses Peyton of willfully copying a photograph he took at an after-party in London’s Earls Court in 1995 of Oasis band members Liam and Noel Gallagher embracing in a rare show of affection, given the brothers’ well-reported animosity. Petyon’s painting from the photograph, titled Earl’s Court (Liam + Noel) (1996), went on to fetch $1,920,000 at Sotheby’s in New York in May. The disputed painting “is just a slavish copy of the...

New York-based artist Gao Zhen has been sentenced to three years in prison for making satirical sculptures of Mao Zedong. The ruling was delivered by the Sanhe City People’s Court in China’s Hebei Province following a closed, one-day trial in March Gao, a 70-year-old Chinese citizen and U.S. permanent resident, has been in detention in China since August 2024. He […]

The Department of State removed Kehinde Wiley's 2015 commissioned painting from the United States embassy in the Dominican Republic this month, claiming that the artist's “violent and racist words and depictions” have no place in the foreign relations agency. In a statement shared with Hyperallergic, a spokesperson said that the department has consulted legal representatives to “ascertain whether the art can be sold.”Leah Campos, the Trump-appointed US Ambassador to the Dominican Republic as of 2025, posted a video of the painting's removal on Instagram on August 11. The post's caption read: “In the Trump Administration and under my leadership we are turning away from globalist...

Supaform’s reinterpretation of the conversation pit
 
Whatever happened to the conversation pit? It’s a question that arises every few years when reinterpretations of the mid-century seating system, carved into the floor of a living room, reappear on the big screen. The 2025 Fantastic Four film features a dreamy powder blue one. Kelly Wearstler and Masastudio created a plush gray one in a California home in 2023, and the Paulin Paulin Paulin seating system (though a standalone couch) is a celebrity favorite that pops up in music videos, fashionable events, and the homes of the tastefully famous. Nevertheless, this particular style waxes and wanes in popularity every few years.
 
At Alcova’s 2026 Milan...

The Trump administration is threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts if it does not get its wish to close it for two years in order to renovate it. In a Monday court filing, the administration describes the building as “dangerously dilapidated, outdated, and decrepit” and argues that, absent its proposed renovation, the building “will be required to be taken down, with a determination to follow on what to build on the site,” noting that “some” unidentified people have “for many years” proposed an outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River. “Such a replacement will fail to adequately honor President John F. Kennedy,” argues the administration in the filing,...

The US State Department has said it is contemplating selling a painting by Kehinde Wiley that it removed from the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic last week, after the director of the department’s Art in Embassies program called it “woke” and “aesthetically terrifying.” The canvas, titled Young Artists after Siamesas 1960, was commissioned in 2013 by the program under the […]

The 70-year-old Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen has been sentenced to three years in prison for his sculptures of communist revolutionary and leader Mao Zedong. The verdict was issued in the Sanhe City People's Court in Hebei Province on Tuesday, August 25, as reported by the New York Times. The three-year sentence falls under an amendment passed by People’s Republic of China (PRC) leader Xi Jinping in 2021, which prohibits any perceived slander of China's deemed heroes and martyrs. Prosecutors pointed to sculptures created between 2005 and 2009, which include depictions of the communist leader repenting, or aiming fire at Jesus. Another is an enlarged bust of Mao with a cartoonish nose and...

In Leslie Wayne’s exhibition The Unintended Blues, large-scale paintings may a first read as photographs. Melting icebergs in the Arctic Circle, the island of Manhattan, harbor construction projects, and coastlines around the U.S. that are vulnerable to rising sea levels take center stage. The closer one approaches, however, the more fluid the imagery becomes, as some shapes and shorelines appear nearly abstract. These latest works follow Wayne’s series titled This Land Is Your Land, in which trompe-l’œil paintings of airplane windows depict aerial views of the American West based on photos the artist snapped while in flight. For The Unintended Blues, she expands this idea beyond the frame and turns her...

The photographer Kwame Brathwaite was best-known during his lifetime for his incisive portraits of the figures who made up the Black Power and civil rights movements, and now, the long-unknown subject of a 1972 photo taken by Brathwaite has been identified.  The photo, which is part of the National Gallery of Art’s permanent collection in […]

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A former member of the protest-art collective Pussy Riot says she was recruited by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) to help spy on the Kremlin’s critics. Rita Flores, whose real name is Margarita Konovalova, sat down in an interview with her lawyer Dmitry Zakhvatov posted on the YouTube channel of Port Media, an outlet created in July 2024 by a group of exiled Russian journalists. In 2020, she was jailed for taking part in an anti-police brutality protest near the Kremlin with Pussy Riot, clad in their synonymous pink balaclavas. Konovalova says she started working for the FSB in 2023 after intense pressure from the government agency and threats to kill her family. As an agent, she was trained on...

The monumental painting was recently deinstalled from the US embassy in the Dominican Republic, with ambassador Leah Campos calling it an example of “globalist and woke ideologies”

I’ve always said that I shed worse than any dog I’ve ever met. Hundreds of my hairs cling to each other on my bedroom floor in lightly tangled clumps at any given moment, evidently undeterred by the might of my thrice-weekly dry-mop routine. That being said, I’m no stranger to hair-related art, and Bengali-American artist Rina Banerjee does a remarkable job of beautifying the visuals of loose hairs in her interdisciplinary practice. She unravels strands of hair from the realm of abjection and presents them as a nexus connecting her hybrid humans to the natural world — clouds, waves, plant roots, and atmospheric energies. To me, it’s just one of multiple familiar elements in Banerjee’s work, which...

SANTA FE — For Seneca artist Mary Jacobs and her daughters Kathryn Hopkins and Samantha Jacobs, beading is a multigenerational family affair. The three award-winning artists shared a booth at the Santa Fe Indian Market this month: Mary, who has shown at the Market for decades, displayed bags, earrings, and other adornments made in the traditional style of Iroquois raised beadwork, while Samantha won a first-prize ribbon for her intricately adorned “Once Upon a Story” box, featuring birds and other flora and fauna of the Northeast beaded over a lush blue velvet backing. Also on view were Hopkins's beadwork earrings that appealed to Gen Z, featuring large rabbit-fur puffs and intricate designs...

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Breakout projects this year highlight a rethinking around tradition, identity and belonging

yujung jung turns digital fortunes pocket-sized
 
With a press of its small button, TOBI offers a single line about whatever might be coming next. Industrial designer YuJung Jung conceived the keyring-sized electronic device around the familiar appeal of horoscopes and tarot readings, pulling that experience away from the phone and giving it a dedicated physical form. Each message arrives at random, so the interaction sits somewhere between prediction and chance, with enough ambiguity for the words to occasionally feel strangely well timed.
 
Unlike a phone, which can lead from a horoscope into another app and another scroll, this little screen has a much shorter conversation in mind. Turn it on by holding...

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From the Tanzanian grasslands around Mount Kilimanjaro to the ever-evolving icy realm of Antarctica and beyond, Swedish photographer Björn Persson captures the majesty of the natural world and its wild denizens. His bold, tonal style of portraiture taps into the drama of running giraffes and a stoic American bison in profile, but he also homes in on family-centric moments as a lioness plays with her cubs, for instance, or a coalition of cheetahs perch calmly atop a knoll. Persson’s emotive photographs meander between intimate, tender vignettes to striking and powerful demonstrations of brute strength and presence. In many cases, the animals look directly at the viewer, as if we’re being stalked. Others...

Showing works by artists including Tracey Emin and Phyllida Barlow over the summer is helping to attract new audiences and bolster income for historic buildings

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ROBERT SMITHSON LOOKED WHERE ARCHITECTURE DIDN’T
 
Robert Smithson had a habit of looking where architecture preferred not to. Vacant lots, pipes, excavations, industrial remnants and apparently inconsequential pieces of infrastructure became material for a practice that questioned why certain landscapes were deemed worthy of attention while others were simply passed by. In his 1967 journey through Passaic, New Jersey, bridges and construction sites were recast as monuments, turning the supposedly banal outskirts of the city into evidence of a landscape already being continuously designed by industry, geology and time. More than five decades later, BEAR Architects finds in that attitude an unexpectedly...

Eight of the Queen frontman's costumes will be exhibited in the free 'Splendid Things' display at the South Kensington museum

EPICENTER FOR BROOKLYN’S CREATIVE SCENE
 
Along Brooklyn’s Sunset Park waterfront, MADE: Bush Terminal is home to a growing community of artisans, designers, and industrial pioneers shaping the future of New York City’s creative economy. To support these urban makers, New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) revitalized the historic public building after decades of restricted access, creating productive workspaces designed to fuel local innovation alongside economic benchmarks – including a projected 165 permanent jobs and 2.6 billion USD in economic impact over 30 years. Designed by nARCHITECTS, the MADE (Manufacturers, Artisans, Designers, and Entrepreneurs) campus provides 140,000...

Rita Flores, in a new video interview, claims she was pressured by FSB agents who threatened to kill her family

Joy Machine is thrilled to present The Peace of Wild Things, a duo exhibition by Chicago-based American artist Emmy Star Brown and San Jose-based Korean artist Danym Kwon. This is Brown’s second exhibition at Joy Machine and Kwon’s third. Drawing its title from Wendell Berry’s often-quoted poem, The Peace of Wild Things is a return to wonder through disparate yet complementary practices. For both Brown and Kwon, color and layering become a means of self-discovery and a way to tap into the emotions, dreams, and memories that might not surface otherwise. Their practices diverge in notable ways—Brown works abstractly, while Kwon turns to surreal representations of care and domestic life—but when...

Drawn to the juxtapositions of urban spaces and desolate regions alike, photographer Luca Battaglia illuminates the distinctive characteristics of places. “I do not claim—nor do I ever say—that I am an architectural photographer,” he says in a statement. “When asked, I say that I am a photographer of places, of voids.” From the expanses of the American Southwest to images of New York City that revel in quietude rather than its signature boisterousness, built environments are a well of inspiration. In his ongoing series Ticket non remboursable (“non-refundable ticket”), Battaglia creates bold portraits of carousels in city squares and parks across Europe. The advent of these iconic amusement...

Meticulously cut wooden panels, semi-precious beads, and layered thread and cordage transform into intricate geometric reliefs by Nosheen Iqbal. The Dallas-based artist draws on her background in product design and illustration to create chromatic works that tap into craft, nature, and ancestry. Taking inspiration from her Pakistani heritage and the immanently ornate forms of Islamic architecture and ornament, Iqbal combines wood, which she might associate with building, with textile-related media like fiber and beads. The resulting compositions are elegant meditations on the power of pattern to connect us to culture, family, and familiarity. “Sarghoshiaan” (2025), wood, cotton fiber, and semi-precious...

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Ibrahim Rayintakath’s Website
Ibrahim Rayintakath on Instagram

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Lou Benesch’s Website
Lou Benesch on Instagram

 
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...

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Masanori Ushiki’s Website
Masanori Ushiki on Instagram

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...

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.

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...

“Danger” is a word often associated with the candy-colored work of Los Angeles artist Kristen Liu-Wong. Her feminine tableaus, often rendered in a bright blend of acrylics, paint pen, and marker, have particularly veered into more menacing territory in recent years. “The world is a dangerous place,” Liu-Wong says, in a June interview. “I don’t […]
The post Dont Tempt Me: the Art of Kristen Liu-Wong first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

On paper, Nathan Reidt’s creatures sometimes reveal themselves through a fog of graphite. He may begin with a “vague, circle-y shape” and shade areas. “Then I just stare at it for a long time and wait for something to pop out and refine that a little and stare at it.” The Philadelphia-based artist explains by […]
The post Personal Growth: the Art of Nathan Reidt first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

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...

 
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...

The Undercurrent Surfaces There are moments in a country’s creative consciousness when the atmosphere tilts. For many of the designers showing at Zurich Fashion Week 2026, the seeds were sown during last year’s pre‑events. And so, after more than twelve months of preparation, this was the week their work stepped fully into the light — an undercurrent now rising into a transformative movement in modern style. As I walked into the Kongresshaus Zurich this February, the first edition of Zurich...