uzbek craft reimagined for an ethereal installation in milan
 
Uzbekistan’s first national exhibition opens during Milan Design Week 2026 as an exploration of how people in the Aral Sea region adapt to their environment through food, shelter, and clothing. Dubbed When Apricots Blossom, the show was hosted at Palazzo Citterio in Brera and was curated by WHY Architecture-founder Kulapat Yantrasast. 
 
While the display includes several disparate elements — an apricot branch sculpture, a lattice yurt structure, and a textile installation which drapes the facade (see designboom’s coverage here) — the central exhibition is discovered within the main gallery.
 
Here, an undulating field is shaped by...

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a joint that adapts to variation instead of standardizing it
 
Omnibite by Eugenio Costa begins in the moment where a branch is cut, held, and turned in the hand before anything is assembled. The project proposes a shift in self-building that moves construction back to the moment of gathering material, where wood is still irregular, unprocessed, and open to interpretation, introducing a three-axis joint with a quick-locking system that connects raw branches without screws, allowing natural elements to become structure with minimal preparation.
 
Rather than standardizing material, the joint accepts variation thanks to its geometry, which adapts to different diameters and angles, holding each branch in place...

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The Bienal de São Paulo has announced the two chief curators for the 2027 edition of the Brazilian exhibition: Amanda Carneiro and Raphael Fonseca. The duo’s theme for the Bienal will be announced in the coming months. Held in Oscar Niemeyer–design Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo in Ibirapuera Park, the exhibition is the largest of its kind in Latin America. “The selection of Amanda Carneiro and Raphael Fonseca for the 37th edition is part of this evolving history,” said Andrea Pinheiro, president of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, which manages the biennial. “For the second time, two Brazilian curators are taking on, together and on equal footing, the artistic leadership of an edition. It is a...

In the past, donors to the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale have proudly announced themselves as patrons of the contemporary art world’s most prestigious event. This year, however, under the thumb of the Trump administration’s State Department, the funding for Alma Allen’s national pavilion remains unusually opaque. Unlike the numerous sponsors that publicly backed Jeffrey Gibson’s monumental 2024 US Pavilion, including the Ford and Mellon foundations, no organizations or individuals have yet to claim any direct funding ties to Allen’s exhibition. Instead, the American Arts Conservancy (AAC), the year-old nonprofit tapped to execute the 2026 pavilion, is fundraising for the exhibition...

Inside the cavernous former train station that now houses Hamburger Bahnhof, 400,000 wooden cubes stack and topple into piles. Conceived by Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė and commissioned by Chanel, “We Make Years Out of Hours” is a large-scale installation that invites the public to remake structures from these 10-centimeter blocks made of pine and spruce. Lapelytė often combines sound and performance and collaborates with both professionals and novices. This participatory work continues the artist’s interest in collective making and caretaking, particularly as it relates to shared authorship and how we might amend and reshape what currently exists. A trio of weekly performances on Tuesdays,...

Two New Jersey residents pleaded guilty to running a years-long counterfeit art scheme that funneled fake works into the legitimate market, defrauding buyers of at least $2 million. Erwin Bankowski, 50, and Karolina Bankowska, 26, admitted in federal court in Brooklyn to wire fraud conspiracy and misrepresenting Native American–produced goods, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. The pair, a father and daughter, now face up to 20 years in prison, along with at least $1.9 million in restitution.  Prosecutors say that between 2020 and 2025, the two consigned more than 200 counterfeit works to galleries and auction houses across the United States, slipping them into...

Arts Collective will open a new arts center in Northampton, England on May 1st with an exhibition from Northamptonshire-born artist Rose Finn-Kelcey. The planned complex is the result of a £5.2m renovation of Northampton’s municipal offices and town hall annex, and will include 17 artist studios, several community spaces, and a new gallery.  The central […]

A Spanish judge has ordered the Museo del Prado in Madrid to hold onto a painting attributed to Diego Velázquez at the center of a divorce dispute between steel magnate José María Aristrain and his ex-wife Gema Navarro, according to El País.  The painting ended up at the Prado through a chain of state intervention. After Navarro filed a complaint alleging the work had been wrongly kept from her, a Madrid judge, acting with the support of prosecutors, ordered Spain’s Ministry of Culture to take custody of it citing its potential importance to the country’s historical heritage. The ministry then designated the Prado as custodian. The work was removed from Aristrain’s Madrid residence and...

Arleene Correa Valencia, "It’s Easier To Leave Before The Sun Rise: It Hurts Less If We Don’t Say Goodbye / Es Más Facil Salir De Madrugada: Sin Despedida Duele Menos" (2025) (image courtesy Fridman Gallery)This story was copublished with Next City, a nonprofit news organization reporting on solutions for more sustainable, accessible, inclusive, and equitable cities.Visitors walking into Manhattan’s Fridman Gallery are instantly met with Arleene Correa Valencia’s four-by-five-foot acrylic and textile composition depicting six figures outlined in thread and fabric. They’re riding in the back of a red pickup truck, and their faces are blank. Toward the back of the space, her 16-foot-long “En El...

The organizers of the Vancouver Biennale have appointed Brazilian artist and documentary filmmaker Marcello Dantas senior curator of the event’s 2027–29 iteration, the Art Newspaper reports. Dantas is currently art director at immersive museum Ster Ik in Tulum, Mexico. He recently cocurated, with Maya El Khalil, the 2024 iteration of Saudi Arabia’s Desert X AlUla. […]

LOS ANGELES — The Box LA, the risk-taking experimental space that nurtured unconventional art forms, is closing after 19 years. Although it was established as a commercial gallery, The Box’s programming often evoked the freedom of a nonprofit, presenting work not typically embraced by the market, especially performance art. Its final exhibition, a retrospective of the mercurial artist Wally Hedrick presented with Parker Gallery, ran through April 4. A closing celebration will take place on June 6, with a fashion show of costumes by Johanna Went, in collaboration with Asher Hartman. “It feels right to end this way, with the kind of work we always existed to support: radical, enlightening, and not easily...

Cover of Performing Chance: The Art of Alison Knowles In/Out of Fluxus by Nicole L. Woods (courtesy University of Chicago Press)In October 1962, Alison Knowles turned the simple act of preparing a salad into a new kind of art. Proposition #2: Make a Salad debuted at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts as part of the raucous Festival of Misfits, an event curated by poet and art dealer Victor Musgrave that introduced the Fluxus group to Great Britain. In the performance, the artist and her colleagues chopped and mixed the fresh ingredients in a pickle barrel on the stage of a small concert hall before plating and serving the dish to the roughly 100 people in attendance. The event was an early example of...

mara bragagnolo designs chairs for ‘incorrect’ postures
 
Bad Posture Chairs is a collection of chairs designed by Mara Bragagnolo to accommodate postures considered ‘incorrect’ and non-conforming. The project comes from the observation that design has historically normalized a single way of sitting, turning any deviation into an error. Many people, particularly neurodivergent individuals, adopt spontaneous postures that traditional seating does not support, often resulting in restriction and discomfort.
 
Each element of the collection originates from research into alternative postures and proposes a structure capable of accommodating them rather than correcting them. Instead of imposing an ideal...

“What does Damien Hirst have to do with McDonald’s? Nothing.” So begins a perplexing Instagram video introducing an installation organized by Nicolas Ballario, founder of a Milan-based communications agency, that was on view as part of Milan Design Week. The immersive installation, “POOL. Ti sblocco un ricordo” (“Pool: I’ll Unlock a Memory for You”), is part of a series of offsite exhibitions collectively called Tortona Rocks, in the Tortona neighborhood of Milan. The centerpiece of “POOL” is a large swimming pool-shaped pit full of hundreds of thousands of colorful balls, like a McDonald’s PlayPlace ball pit on steroids. So, what does the provocative British artist have to do with all of...

Decades ago, as a child, Joe Macken visited the Queens Museum, where he encountered its iconic model of New York City made for the 1964 World Fair. "I'm going to build one of these myself one day," he told a classmate. He didn't get the chance until his 40s, but build he did — now, his 50-foot wood replica of the city is on long-term view at the Museum of the City of New York. Read Monica Uscerowicz's lovely profile of the man with the model below. This week's newsletter is a tale of two scales — what's the opposite of a mini New York? Maybe "Greater New York"? Read our thoughts on the works we loved, the ones we didn't like so much, and what we're still thinking...

Robert Dunlap promised investors a coin backed by works by Dalí, Picasso and other renowned artists

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The controversy surrounding the Russian Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale continues to escalate: according to new reports from Italian news outlets, Russia’s group exhibition “The tree is rooted in the sky” will only be accessible to members of the press and industry insiders during the Bienniale’s preview between May 5th and May 8th. When […]

Republicans in Congress are moving to fast-track funding for Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom, using the weekend attack at a Washington press gala to argue that current venues are too vulnerable. According to the New York Times, Senator Lindsey Graham said Monday that he wants lawmakers to approve roughly $400 million for the project, which would include not just an event space but secure facilities beneath it. The goal, he said, is to keep large, high-profile gatherings on White House grounds rather than sending presidents and guests off-site. “We saw Saturday that America has a problem,” Graham said, pointing to the difficulty of securing major events outside a controlled environment. Other...

The Biennale's five-member international jury announced on Thursday that it would not award prizes to countries “whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court”

TAMPA, FLORIDA—According to a statement released by the University of South Florida, a mass grave containing the remains of victims of the Plague of Justinian (A.D. 541–750) has been identified at the site of Jerash in northern Jordan by a team of researchers led by Rays H.Y. Jiang of the University of South Florida. Hundreds of people were buried within several days in this mass grave dug in the city’s hippodrome. “By linking biological evidence from the bodies to the archaeological setting, we can see how disease affected real people within their social and environmental context,” Jiang said. Examination of the remains from the grave suggests that these individuals lived in different areas across...

The latest announcements of the key players representing their countries at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia

Sanskrit seal HYDERABAD, INDIA—The Times of India reports that researchers led by epigrapher K. Muniratnam Reddy from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) have decoded a Sanskrit inscription written in Brahmi characters on a seal discovered in what is now Pakistan. The translation reads, “Devadaruvane Svami Kotesvarah,” indicating that the fifth-century a.d. seal belonged to a temple dedicated to Shiva, a principal Hindu deity. Reddy and his colleagues explained that the inscription refers to a pivotal story about Shiva set in the Devandaru forest that is recorded in a sacred text called the Skanda Purana. The seal is thought to be the oldest known depiction of the story, Reddy concluded. To read...

“We live with so many hard things,” says Sheila Hicks, “that we’re crying for softness.” The pleasure, simplicity, and tactile qualities of textiles ground a new film from Louisiana Channel, which explores the ways in which fiber art remains both evocative and relevant in this increasingly digital era. “7 Artists on Soft Sculptures” weaves together a variety of distinct approaches to textiles. Nick Cave describes incorporating found plastics, toys, metals, fringe, and more into elaborate suits that mask the wearer’s identity, while Icelandic artist Shoplifter shares her obsessions with brightly dyed synthetic hair, which she transforms into immersive installations. And Kaarina Kaikkonen offers...

The new category was launched with a live sale of works by influencer artist Sophie Tea

By Nancy Spiller Alec Egan's painting "Dawn House," in his show "The 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...

Made in a Florentine workshop set up by Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Renaissance tapestry depicts Dante meeting Virgil in Hell

A coastal ‘cube of change’ between park and shoreline
 
Cube of Change: Meitu Cube Visual Arts Center by OPEN Architecture sits along the coastline of Xiamen, China, between the city and the area’s lush beaches. The building reads as a compact volume from a distance, a pale cube set slightly above the ground, with the sea extending beyond. Its geometry is direct, though the experience shifts as one moves closer.
 
The exterior surface carries a soft, diffused quality through a perforated PTFE skin. During the day, the facade filters light into a muted glow while maintaining visual connection to the surroundings. Toward evening, the building begins to emit light, turning into a luminous surface that...

The Fundação Bienal de São Paulo has named Brazilian curators Amanda Carneiro and Raphael Fonseca chief curators of the Thirty-Seventh São Paulo Bienal, to take place in 2027. The São Paulo–born Carneiro has been a curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) since 2018. Among the exhibitions she has mounted […]

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“The Machine,” David Lamelas’s survey at Dia Chelsea, highlights the varied and timely nature of the peripatetic Argentinian artist’s work. The institution’s deputy director Humberto Moro curated the show, which was realized in close conversation with the artist, who considers each new installation of the work to be an “original,” as it needs to be […]

Broissin Architects suspends a ring to shape an indoor waterfall
 
Between Sky and Water by Broissin Architects is conceived as an interior architecture proposal that constructs a sensory environment through the controlled interaction of water, structure, and material. The project centers on a suspended circular element that generates a continuous waterfall, organizing the space around a single, defining gesture.
 
Positioned within a 312.17 sqm area, the installation introduces a five-meter-diameter ring, supported by a system of slender steel columns and tension cables anchored to cast-in-place foundations. Despite its approximate one-ton weight, the ring is designed to appear visually light, emphasizing...

Barbara Hannigan mesmerizes as both a brilliant vocalist and a proficient opera conductor in a double bill of Strauss and La voix humaine with the New York Philharmonic.

Growing up in the Australian Outback, where he first picked up a camera as a teenager to document his surroundings in the bush, Jon McCormack developed a keen eye for the beauty and subtleties of nature. Throughout his career, he’s stepped foot on all seven continents. Yet the idea for his new book, Patterns: Art of the Natural World, emerged from a period of quieter reflection. Like many of us during the pandemic, McCormack’s travels were limited to his immediate area. He began visiting the same spots repeatedly and “discovered a new way of seeing, using photography to reveal the hidden harmony and symmetry of the natural world,” says a statement. Patterns, forthcoming from Damiani Books, draws upon...

Classical sculptures meet traditional studio portraiture in the work of Åsa Johannesson. The artist’s long-term project The Queering of Photography, turns both traditional genres on their head. The experimental work investigataes the complex relationship between queer identity and photographic representation. The artist creates formal, yet playfully subversive images of human figures, Roman statues and studio props to challenge and reimagine how identity and desire are represented. The project evolved from a series of interconnected works – Looking Out, Looking In; Frame; Figural, Figurative; Turn; and Skin – spanning performative black-and-white studio portraits, studies of Roman statues and...

While refined, Lisa della Casa sings "Four Last Songs" deeply alert to the text and with effortless vocalization that sounds fresh and spontaneous.

In Diana Markosian’s latest body of work, intimacy is framed as an unstable condition, continually reconstructed through absence, repetition and emotional residue, where love persists beyond its apparent ending in altered, shifting forms. Relationships appear less as fixed narratives than as structures in motion, shaped as much by what has disappeared as by what remains visible. Replaced, now on at Gallerie d’Italia, organises emotional experience through cycles of return in which memory functions less as retrieval than ongoing re-authorship. Photography and film work together to stage this instability, allowing scenes to reappear in subtly altered emotional registers, as if slightly out of alignment with...

Tate Modern’s programme is a global cultural barometer – less a sequence of shows than a continuous reconfiguration of how contemporary art is experienced, narrated and absorbed. The recent Tracey Emin: A Second Life survey sharpened this direction, folding autobiography into institutional scale with an intensity that blurred confession and spectacle. It sat in productive tension with earlier landmark presentations such as Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms and Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, both of which recalibrated perception itself as curatorial material. More recently, El Anatsui’s expansive material assemblages and A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography have extended this...

What better way to meditate on nature’s most majestic features than to recreate its details one stitch at a time? Since picking up a needle and thread in 2020, Cassandra Dias has translated rugged cliffsides, neat vineyards, and sun-streaked mountains into lush embroideries. The Southern California-based artist uses a technique known as thread painting, which combines a variety of stitches to create richly textured scenes. Having developed a dreamy, impressionistic style, Dias’ embroideries mimic the pointed and gestural movements of a paintbrush, with the depth of impasto. Whether depicting a single autumnal tree or a wide seascape stretching for miles, the artist’s works direct attention to the...

SUFFOLK, ENGLAND—The East Anglian Daily Times reports that archaeologists from Cotswold Archaeology uncovered traces of a cremation pyre in the East of England, near the coast of the North Sea. The blackened soil and pieces of burnt bone were found within a ring ditch, which had once been covered by a mound that was destroyed by agricultural plowing. Most of the human remains were likely transferred to an urn for burial at another location. The pyre has not yet been dated, but the researchers suspect it dates to the Bronze Age, since another cremation at the site has been dated to that period. Charcoal and burnt plant material in the soil will also be analyzed for more information about the ritual, the...

WARSAW, POLAND—Researchers led by Elena Klenina and Andrzej B. Biernacki of Adam Mickiewicz University and their colleagues identified intestinal parasites in residues taken from four chamber pots recovered from two archaeological sites in the Roman province of Moesia Inferior, which is located in what is now Bulgaria, according to a La Brújula Verde report. Three of the pots in the study were found in a villa located near the Legio I Italica army camp, where high-ranking officials likely stayed when they visited the region. Cryptosporidium, a protozoan that can cause severe diarrhea, was one of the parasites detected in the second-century A.D. pots from the villa. These vessels also contained evidence of...

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...

STRASBOURG, FRANCE—According to a statement released by Frontiers, the protective coatings on a 2,200-year-old Roman shipwreck found off the coast of Croatia were made of pine tar, or pitch, and a mixture of pine tar and beeswax. Beeswax was added to heated tar to make a mixture known to Greek shipbuilders as zopissa, which is more flexible and easier to apply. In addition to analyzing the chemical makeup of the coatings on the ship, archaeometrist Armelle Charrié of Strasbourg University and her colleagues examined pollen trapped in the sticky pitch at the time of application. “Analysis of pollen in the coating made it possible to identify the plant taxa present in the immediate environment during the...

Over the course of two decades, Queens resident Joe Macken meticulously built an entire city from the ground up. In fact, he built New York City—the whole thing—one building, house, and bridge at a time. Now, his expansive scale construction is on view in He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model at the Museum of the City of New York. Macken began working on the 50-by-27-foot model in 2004, first in Middle Village, Queens, before moving to Clifton Park, New York. It comprises 340 individual sections, each built from everyday materials like cardboard and glue, with many of the buildings constructed of balsa wood and detailed with pencil and paint. He completed the structure in 2025, and it’s now on...

Opera Baltimore concludes its season with a piercing semi-staged production of Pelléas et Mélisande.

Enter Art Fair, Scandinavia’s leading international art fair, returns to Copenhagen this August. The event presents a curated selection of leading galleries from across the global contemporary art landscape. Taking place at the iconic Lokomotivværkstedet, Enter Art Fair’s eighth edition offers a vibrant platform for art across all media, generations and geographies. Julie Leopold, Director and Founder, says: “as Scandinavia’s largest international art fair, we are proud to present a curated platform that connects audiences with some of the most exciting galleries and artists working today. The fair is a meeting point for art professionals, collectors and first-time buyers alike – and for 2026,...

Funnily enough, I’m not remotely a Rachmaninov fan, but this performance by Galina Vishnevskaya in her considerable prime always gives me the chills.

Rope, knots and string have a striking presence in contemporary art. Think of Chiharu Shiota’s current exhibition at Hayward Gallery, Threads of Life, where intricate, web-like installations explore memory, consciousness and the fragility of existence. Audiences are invited to walk into a vast network of intricate clusters of red string, often filled with ordinary objects like shoes, keys, beds, chairs and dresses. Meanwhile, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, LR Vandy’s Rise uses the form and texture of rope to consider the textile’s industry’s role in Britain’s industrial history. Perhaps best-known are the performance artists, such as Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic, who turn the act of binding...

Opera San José's La Traviata has all the buzz and energy of a world premiere.

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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...

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To celebrate the cult movie director’s 80th birthday, we bring you our interview with John Waters from Hi-Fructose Isssue 69. You can still get a copy in print of this issue here. Happy Birthday to The King of Puke! ABOVE: Portrait of John Waters, photo by Greg Gorman, © Academy Museum Foundation Early on in the […]
The post Happy 80th Birthday to The Pope of Trash: An Interview With John Waters first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

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By Katherine Kesey In the last few years, Los Angeles's Melrose Hill neighborhood has quickly become one of the city's most walkable arts districts. This past Saturday night, there were nearly ten coordinated openings, and I attended almost all of them. Taken individually, the shows were equally captivating. Together, they were a warm and exciting medley of passionate color, lighthearted mystery, and wry humor. Hannah Tishkoff, Beyond Love There is No Belief. 2026. Acrylic, oil, and pennies...

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