James McNeill Whistler’s celebrated maternal portrait reminded Vincent of his own mother

Last night's season opening sale of post-war and contemporary art, which started with 11 lots from the late art dealer, set new records for young artists Ding Shilun and Yu Nishimura

Nothing prepared me for the Soviero experience

Abstract mixed-media painter Mary Lovelace O’Neal, who passed away this past Sunday, grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. At that time, cultural institutions like art museums were segregated: Black people were permitted to visit only on certain days of the month. How much has changed since those days — not least thanks to Lovelace O’Neal herself, who was active in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s under the mentorship of the likes of Stokely Carmichael and Jacob Lawrence. “I can mark,” she often said. So she did, in every sense of the word.  —Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editorRonald S. Lauder and Max Hollein (photo courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art)Manhattan’s Neue Galerie to Merge With...

SCULPTURAL AND MATERIAL-DRIVEN OUTDOOR FURNITURE
 
SNOC presents a refined vision of contemporary outdoor living, expressed through calm composition, material sensitivity and a thoughtful dialogue between space, light and perception. Its design language emerges through the interplay of form, light, and tactile nuance, bringing a contemporary point of view to exterior environments.
in the 2026 collection, the designs are brought together through a global design dialogue and grounded in craftsmanship, material excellence, and a calm architectural sensibility | | image © Studio Brinth 
 
 
SNOC AT SALONE DEL MOBILE AND MAISON & OBJET 2026 
 
SNOC’s presence at Salone del Mobile and Maison & Objet 2026...

Gyarados and friends appear inside renovated thermal footbath
 
Overlooking the calm waters of Nanao Bay, a renovated public footbath in Japan welcomes visitors with Gyarados, Poliwag, and Politoed emerging from the steam. The Wakura Pokémon Footbath transforms the existing lakeside facility at Yuttari Park into a playful stop within the historic hot spring town of Wakura Onsen in Ishikawa Prefecture.
 
Developed through the Pokémon With You Foundation, the project brings water-type Pokémon into the architecture without losing the quiet atmosphere of a traditional onsen retreat. Warm timber interiors, open-air corridors, and long wooden benches frame uninterrupted views toward Noto Island, while colorful...

Qiuwen Lyu TRANSFORMS SONIC TRAJECTORY INTO METAL RECORD
 
Interdisciplinary artist and designer Qiuwen Lyu presents A Billion Solitary Universes, a sculptural sound object that reinterprets the legacy of NASA’s Voyager Golden Record through material experimentation and speculative design. Constructed from aluminum, nickel, and cubic zirconia, the work transforms the idea of a message intended for extraterrestrial life into a reflection on human isolation, memory, and collective existence.
 
The project translates sound into a physical artifact through a multi-stage fabrication process. Sampled audio recordings were composed into a continuous sonic sequence and transferred onto lacquer before being...

engaging with art may slow biological aging
 
What if visiting museums, attending concerts, singing in a choir, or regularly engaging with creative hobbies did more than improve mood or reduce stress? A new scientific study led by Daisy Fancourt suggests that arts and cultural engagement may also influence the biological pace at which we age.
 
Published in Innovation in Aging, the new research builds on years of work connecting the arts with physical and mental health outcomes. But while previous studies largely focused on wellbeing, depression, loneliness, or longevity, (find designboom’s previous coverage here) this latest paper moves into far more microscopic territory: epigenetic ageing, the molecular...

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Josh Kline’s recent essay revived a generations-old conversation about the city’s corrosive costs and stresses for artists, but having a foothold in Gotham remains essential for art-market success

The influx to the Lower Manhattan neighbourhood includes three recent arrivals

Various stands at the fair explore textiles' capacity to bring history to the senses

Valie Export, whose groundbreaking work questioned the very nature of art and cinema, all through an explicitly feminist lens, has died at 85. The news was confirmed by Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, which represents her. Her death on May 14 came three days before her 86th birthday, according to AFP. “VALIE was one of the most visionary feminist artists to emerge in Europe in the second half of the 20th century,” dealer Thaddaeus Ropac said in a statement. “Her passing marks the loss of a singular perspective in contemporary art, one that influenced artists across generations. Her pioneering work continues to be of such great urgency.” Over the course of six decades, Export created a body of work that sought...

Massimiliano Malagò imagines Literary narratives as Furniture
 
On the Calculation of Volume examines how literature, domestic space, and urban living conditions informed the renovation of a Greenpoint apartment in New York. Developed by architect Massimiliano Malagò in collaboration with client Kathleen Pongrace, the project translates themes of repetition, storage, time, and permanence into a series of domestic objects and spatial interventions shaped by the realities of contemporary city life. The renovation emerged through conversations surrounding the pressures of inhabiting New York, where increasing housing costs, limited space, and constant urban transformation influence everyday domestic...

Milan-based Filipina designer Mirei Monticelli creates biomorphic lighting fixtures that toe the line between sculpture and utility. Undulating outward and glowing from within, the artist’s works feel as if they are alive, quietly dancing wherever they stand or hang. These gestural, biodegradable structures are crafted with hand-woven Banaca fabric made from Abacá, a fiber that grows abundantly in Monticelli’s native Philippines. The artist’s studio works directly with a community of weavers in the Bicol province at the southeastern end of Luzon, sharing with Colossal, “We’ve developed the material together over time, so it’s not just sourcing, but a relationship.” The laborious act of...

A letter signed by such luminaries as environmental activist Greta Thunberg and artists Tracy Emin and Peter Doig is presently circulating in support of Misan Harriman, chair of the London-based arts organization Southbank Centre, reports the Guardian newspaper. The letter asserts that Harriman is the victim of what it calls a “dishonest smear campaign” by British newspaper the Telegraph and other right-wing news outlets, which accuse him of promoting conspiracies and comparing the British Reform party voters to Nazis. The controversy surrounding Harriman centers on comments he made on social media about two recent incidents in the news. In the wake of a knife attack on April 29, in which two Jewish men...

In a surprise move, cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder's Neue Galerie will merge with the Metropolitan Museum of Art down the street on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. The rare merger will come into effect in 2028, The Met announced in a statement today, May 14. Neue Galerie holds a collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century artworks from Austria and Germany, including its star attraction: Gustav Klimt's gold-leafed "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907). It's also known for its collection of masterpieces by Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, Gabriele Münter, Josef Hoffmann, and others.Lauder and dealer Serge Sabarsky, a collector of Austrian and German art, co-founded the...

London-based artist Anouska Samms has publicly accused the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute for exhibiting a dress that is “something like a counterfeit” of her work in the ongoing “Costume Art” exhibition. In an Instagram post, Samms alleged that the dress, titled Corpus Nervina 0.0, bears resemblance to an earlier Nervina hair dress she […]

Author and activist Zoé Samudzi writes in ArtReview about an exhibition in Ohio that takes a refreshingly political stance on American surveillance and xenophobia:In mid-March a show of paintings by Shiva Addanki and Nikholis Planck opened at No Place Gallery, an artist-run space in Columbus, Ohio. Deriving its title, American Inquisition, from lines written by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in solidarity with then-detained Algerian-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil – ‘No to silence in the face of repression… Freedom for detainees… Down with the American Inquisition courts’ – and its critical nucleus from social theorist Mike Davis’s book Buda’s Wagon (2007), a global...

“I was beginning to feel like there was a spider inside my head”

Mary Lovelace O'Neal (all images courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery New York and San Francisco)Painter, educator, and Civil Rights activist Mary Lovelace O’Neal died on May 10 at age 84 in Mérida, Mexico. Her galleries, Jenkins-Johnson and Marianne Boesky, announced her death yesterday. She is survived by her husband, Chilean-American artist Patricio Moreno Toro, with whom she divided her time between Mérida and Oakland, California. Lovelace O’Neal’s monumental paintings, which move fluidly between abstraction and figuration, are characterized by large gestural marks and explosive energy. She was perhaps best known for her Lampblack paintings, in which she applied layers of loose black pigment to...

The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair is back at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea—just a few blocks from Frieze New York and in the same building at NADA—with more than 20 galleries from the continent and other ports of call for the “ever-expanding narratives of the African diaspora,” as fair director Touria El Glaoui described it. Spirits were high during the opening preview on Wednesday, when an international roster of galleries—including first-time fair participants from Lagos, São Paulo, Nassau, and New York—placed a stated special focus on Brazil and Afro-Brazilian perspectives. Below is a look at the five best booths at the fair, which runs through Sunday.

The Frick Collection in New York has announced a three-year partnership with Louis Vuitton that will see the fashion house sponsor a number of initiatives at the museum. Louis Vuitton will be the lead sponsor of three of the Frick’s upcoming exhibitions: “Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450–1500,” which will look at the Italian city as an epicenter for innovation in bronze during the Renaissance, opening this fall; “Painting with Fire: Susanne de Court and the Art of Enamel,” a survey of the 17th-century French enameler, opening in spring 2027; and a third exhibition that has not yet been announced but will focus on 19th-century paintings and open in late 2027. This curatorial support will also extend...

In 2010, Iris van Herpen, only three years after establishing her eponymous couture brand, sent the first 3D-printed garment down the runway as part of her “Crystallization” collection. A top evoking the skeletal structure of a snake with its ivory-colored coils of 3D-printed polyamide, the piece was a collaboration with British architect Daniel Widrig.“It was a big moment,” says van Herpen, 41, as she contemplates the look on a form in the Brooklyn Museum galleries. “And it was definitely a starting point for me to collaborate with architects on new techniques.”At the time, 3D printing was mostly the purview of architecture and engineers. Van Herpen was the first designer to utilize the...

LOS ANGELES — At a time when racism is on the rise in the United States, with the President himself posting a doctored video of the Obamas as apes and Southern states working to gerrymander Black voices out of mattering in elections, Todd Gray’s exhibition at Perrotin feels particularly pressing. Timed to coincide with the opening of his commissioned installation “Octavia’s Gaze” (2025) at the new David Geffen Galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Portals features several multi-paneled photo assemblages that explore the evolution of Black history and identity through the juxtaposition of images related to slavery with views of European art, architecture, and formal gardens — the...

The Ronald Lauder–owned Neue Galerie, the private New York museum known for its deep collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and Austrian art, is set to merge with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2028. The Neue Galerie, which occupies a Fifth Avenue town house several blocks north of the Met will thereafter be […]

Following last year’s Louvre heist, a new report released by a French parliamentary commission on May 13 sheds light on glaring security deficiencies within the country’s cultural institutions. The commission (overseen by French MPs Alexis Corbière and Alexandre Portier) was formed soon after the Louvre heist in early December 2025, which involved the theft of French […]

Joy Machine is pleased to present Feel Free, a group exhibition featuring new works by Rachel Hayden, Paulina Ho, Hanna Lee Joshi, and Jeremy Miranda. The opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. on May 15, 2026. Attempting to create order and find clarity amid chaos is human instinct. Since time immemorial, we’ve endeavored to make sense of a world in which reason and certainty are never assured. Change, as the saying goes, is the only constant, which means notions of autonomy or control are a subjective fantasy rather than a concrete reality. In Feel Free, we witness four artists grappling with this enduring paradox. Each surrenders to the inevitability of change and focuses on the small instances...

By Lacey Argus It's easy to miss the bite-sized rainbows orbiting around the travertine surfaces of The Getty Center's Main Entrance. Some people breeze by them, eager to visit the various galleries that lie just beyond them. Others dash through them as they rush into a crowded bathroom line. Some briefly glance upward at the towering glass light prisms suspended from the atrium enclosing the space. But not children. If you spend an afternoon amongst these rainbows, you're sure to notice...

"I’ve always challenged the supremacy of sight in the arts"

Faig Ahmed is known for his vibrant textile sculptures that take traditional Azerbaijani ornamental carpets as starting point, often appearing to melt, pool, or glitch. In his current solo presentation at the 61st Venice Biennale, where he is representing Azerbaijan, the Baku-based artist branches out into more conceptual territory, exploring science, alchemy, spirituality, and perceptions of self in a sprawling, maze-like installation called The Attention. Curated by Gwendolyn Collaço, the exhibition expands upon Ahmed’s interest in the dialectic between digital processes and time-honored, hand-crafted techniques. The artist considers how advanced scientific inquiry, such as quantum physics and...

Christopher Corwin surveys the three Traviata casts — led by Lisette Oropesa, Rosa Feola, and Ermonela Jaho — at the Met this spring.

The Bronx Opera's Ariadnes auf Naxos is well worth the subway ride. Plus, two strong premieres at the Brooklyn Art Song Society.

A well-known Met Aïda with a starry cast from 1967 is TildyDiva’s Favorite Verdi Performance

Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris is perhaps one of the world’s most famous burial grounds, home to luminaries like authors Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust, musicians and composers like Frédéric Chopin, Édith Piaf, and even The Doors’ Jim Morrison, among many others. Its family tombs and sculptural headstones are iconic, and when artist Marina Kappos spent time wandering through Père Lachaise during a stay in the city last year, she was intrigued by the sculptures of grieving women she encountered. “They seemed to hold a power in their sadness, but also great beauty and remembrance as they stood guard over many of the tombs,” the artist says. In Piercing the Veil at SHRINE, Kappos’ solo exhibition...

May is an incredibly busy time for migrating birds, as millions flock from their southerly wintertime feeding grounds back to northern climes, where they’ll nest and breed. Chances are, if you look and listen in your back garden or nearby nature preserves, a wide variety of unusual birds may be noticeable around this time as they stop off to refuel during their journeys. So, it’s fitting that Vasilisa Romanenko’s solo exhibition, Flora & Flight at Arch Enemy Arts, continues this month. Romanenko’s detailed acrylic paintings, which range from six to 28 inches tall, set birds within vibrant sprays of blossoms. They’re intimate and inviting, bringing us close to these feathered creatures that, in real...

W hen we connect over Zoom, Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, aka Shoplifter, is in Bentonville, Arkansas preparing to unveil Xanadu, a large-scale, outdoor installation at Format Festival. “It’s going to be like an alien forest that people at the festival roam around in and space out,” says Arnardóttir of the installation, consisting of ten poles ranging in […]
The post The Immersive Hairy Worlds of Shoplifter first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

What do you get when you combine an obsessive urge to create, sleep deprivation, climate change anxiety, and penchant for enchanted nature realms? Amy Casey shows us firsthand, through her infinitely detailed paintings of manmade structures, either clashing or peacefully coexisting with natural environments. In these pieces we might find repetitions of fungi, leaves, and […]
The post Amy Casey: All The World Is Green first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

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Aunia Kahn’s Website
Aunia Kahn on Instagram

Grand Tier Grab Bag hearkens back to the days when Sondra Radvanovsky — who is singing no Verdi at all next season — seemed like the Verdi soprano of reference.

The history of photography has long been shaped by what is seen and, crucially, by what is omitted. New Woman, New Vision. Women Photographers of the Bauhaus enters this contested terrain with force, assembling an expansive body of work that feels at once familiar and newly charged. Bringing together approximately 300 photographs, the exhibition reframes the Bauhaus not as a closed chapter of modernism, but as an evolving site of authorship, experimentation and erasure. It is less a recovery project than a recalibration, asking viewers to look again at images they may think they know. In doing so, it exposes the fragility of the canon itself. What emerges is a complex picture of photographic modernity. From...

As we enter the summer months, there’s a universal desire to get outside. The trees are green, flowers are in full bloom and the sun is shining well into the evening. These five exhibitions are bringing contemporary art into nature, placing sculptures in dialogue with the environment. Each one offers visitors the opportunity to witness art outside of the confined of white walls and gallery spaces, getting up close to creativity on a monumental scale. Major names like Yayoi Kusama, Lynn Chadwick and Henry Moore take up new space, whilst Nic Nicosia and Nicola Turner transform familiar museums into new experiences. Lynn Chadwick Houghton Hall, Norfolk | Until 4 October Houghton Hall presents a new exhibition...

Contemporary art from the Asia Pacific arrives in London with the force of something already long in motion. Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific brings together more than 40 artists from 25 countries, assembling over 70 works that span sculpture, photography, painting, ceramics, weaving and body adornment. Many of these works have never been shown outside the region, and their presence at the V&A immediately shifts the terms through which visibility is negotiated. What unfolds is a profound encounter with interconnected and evolving cultural systems across one of the most diverse regions in the world. Australia, Asia and the Pacific together account for roughly 60 percent of...

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By Melanie Chapman Let the Art (and the Artist) Speak for Itself Outside of the art world, painter Celeste Dupuy-Spencer may not yet be as familiar a name as Jean-Michel Basquiat or Vincent Van Gogh, but to those who followed her artistic growth over the past ten years, she was on her way. Perhaps therein lay the problem. For those who knew Celeste personally and/or had the opportunity to work with her professionally, there is still a profound sense of loss permeating most conversations...

The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh (1967-2025), is now open. It will run until 22 November at the Giardini, the Arsenale and in various locations around the city. Here is Aesthetica‘s run-down of 10 standout national pavilions to discover this year – paying attention to timely themes such as communication, connection, ecology, identity and legacy. Swiss Pavilion | The Unfinished Business of Living Together In April 1978, an episode of the Swiss public programme Telearena aired. The live broadcast debated the “problem of homosexuality”, and, whilst controversial, marked one of the first occasions when individuals from the LGBTQ+ community gained a...

Liberation, modernism and the politics of self-determination form the conceptual spine of Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa, an exhibition opening this July at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It examines how architecture became a critical medium through which newly independent West African nations articulated sovereignty, identity, and futurity in the decades following colonial rule. Rather than treating modernism as a neutral or imported style, the exhibition frames it as a charged and adaptive language, refracted through the urgencies of nation-building and rapid urban transformation. Across Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo, architectural...

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Derek Beck’s Website
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By Coral Pereda Serras Among established and other art spaces in Melrose Hill, sits 1028 N. Western Ave., home to Western Avenue Collective artists studios. This 1922 building hosts 22 artist spaces among which is El Nido, an artist-run curatorial and research space by VC Projects. El Nido, borrowing from its Spanish name, is nested in this distinctly LA courtyard and through "Photography Into Sculpture: An Homage and An Update," emerges as a portal into the imagined memories of a Victorian...

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.

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Orpheus Acosta’s Website
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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.

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...

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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...

 
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...