RIDGEFIELD, Connecticut — Connecticut has been home to a thriving community of artists, including Sol LeWitt, Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns, Barkley Hendricks, Alexander Calder, Yves Tanguy, and Josef and Anni Albers, among many others. But new generations of artists have been making ambitious works in leafy college towns and sleepy suburban enclaves unbeknownst to many of their neighbors.That’s about to change. Over the next six months, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is showcasing 40 artists based in the Constitution State in its inaugural survey, The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me. The museum’s mission has supported artists at different stages of their careers, with a particular...

In Yorùbá culture, it’s said that more than 600 years ago, a hunter discovered a lush grove in southwestern Nigeria carved by a rushing river. His community had experienced drought and eagerly moved to the region, which they quickly learned was under the rule of the goddess of rivers and fertility, Ọ̀ṣun. In exchange for protection and prosperity, the people promised to celebrate the deity, and this pact grounds what’s now known as the Ọṣun-Òṣogbo Sacred Grove. A UNESCO World Heritage site spanning 190 acres, the spiritual sanctuary has long been revered by the Yorùbá people, and in the mid-20th century, a group of artists revitalized the landscape by erecting large-scale sculptures in...

The two principal suspects in the spectacularly disruptive, broad-daylight jewel heist that took place at the Louvre in October of 2025 claimed in statements to judiciary authorities—per Le Monde, which just published a report on the transcripts—that a “mysterious mastermind,” who they refuse to name, orchestrated the theft.  Taxi driver and former motorcycle stuntman Abdoulaye […]

Three major Robert Rauschenberg sculptures have been donated to ARTIST ROOMS by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

US President Donald Trump on July 13 signed proclamations drastically reducing the size of two national monuments. Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, both in Utah, will lose “close to a million and a half acres each,” said Trump. Specifically, the former will be reduced from about 1.87 million acres to roughly 181,500 acres, while the latter will […]

The High Museum of Art's former Chief Operating Officer Brady Lum has pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $600,000 from the nonprofit arts institution.The 59-year-old executive resigned from the Atlanta museum in December after its parent organization, the Woodruff Arts Center, traced institutional “financial irregularities” back to him. According to court documents filed by federal prosecutors in April, Lum used museum funds to purchase personal items, including “luxury guitars” and “woodworking equipment,” over the course of his nearly seven-year tenure at the institution. Lum used his position of power to approve fraudulent reimbursement invoices and took other actions to conceal his...

St. Louis has long served as a center for advanced medical care and pediatric treatment, making it a place where... Read More

Lillian Bassman, photograph by Rouben Samberg, "The Vocabulary of Courage" (1944), collage of gelatin silver prints (© Estate of Lillian Bassman; image courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art)Fashion photography is notoriously artificial. Since its inception as a way to document socialites and celebrities in their finery, it has always been used to project a construct of beauty. The Metropolitan Museum of Art contends with this idea in Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond, a small survey exhibition of the late photographer’s fashion media practice from the 1940s to the 2000s.Bassman began her career in the early 1940s as an aspiring illustrator, working under the tutelage of legendary Harper's Bazaar art...

A Nazi-looted painting that once belonged to Jewish Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, has been identified and will now be returned to his heirs. The painting had been in the possession of Amsterdam resident Robert van der Hoek, who found it in a trash pile in the city decades ago. “I took it with me […]

To paraphrase an infamous quote by former Mayor Eric Adams: New York — this is a place where every day you wake up, you can experience everything from a looted Roman antiquity at The Met to an artist selling the trash outside Taylor Swift's wedding.In fact, The Met recently repatriated said Roman bust, which had been sold to the museum by the notorious gallery Phoenix Ancient Art. You absolutely must read Erin Thompson’s piece following the trail of its co-founder, a convicted antiquities dealer whose artifacts still sit in museums all over the country despite their dubious provenances. Over in Brooklyn, meet Noore Yazigi, an artist lovingly tattooing Arabic calligraphy, ranging from excerpts of the...

Brady Lum, the onetime chief operating officer of Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, pleaded guilty in federal court on July 13 to a charge of theft concerning programs receiving federal funds. Lum is charged with embezzling more than $600,000 from the institution. “Over several years, Lum deceptively plundered the southeast’s premier museum of visual art, […]

Dominique Lévy, one of the dealers behind the blue-chip New York gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan, spoke at length in a new profile about her response to October 7, claiming that she received death threats after publicly denouncing a 2023 open letter in Artforum that called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Published on October 19, 2023, the letter that ran in Artforum described Israel’s war in Gaza as an “escalating genocide” and demanded “an immediate ceasefire and the opening of Gaza’s crossings to allow humanitarian aid to enter unhindered.” It was signed by artists such as Nan Goldin, Tania Bruguera, Kara Walker, and many more. The letter did not mention the October 7 Hamas attack, which killed 1,200 people...

The fever for the 2026 FIFA World Cup tournament, the largest, most expansive in the competition’s 96-year history, has swept North America. Star players like Norway’s Erling Haaland, England’s Harry Kane, France’s Kylian Mbappe, and Argentina’s Lionel Messi have turned in dramatic performances. Americans have fallen in love with visiting teams and foreign visitors have become enamored, of all things, with American-size food portions and ranch dressing.  Now, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced that this historic moment will be memorialized in New York with a set of 12 murals appearing throughout all five of the city’s boroughs, each designed by a local artist.  The initiative is a...

Archaeologists excavating Xultun, a large Mayan site in northeast Guatemala, have identified the name of an 8th-century Mayan astronomer-mathematician who wrote a calendrical formula on an interior wall of a small masonry building. The individual’s name, Sak Tahn Waax, translates to “White-chested Fox,” and the formula (either written by him, or by someone else and attributed to him) calculates the orbital cycles of Mars and Venus. According to a paper published by Antiquity, this is the first and only known example of a Maya mathematician being directly credited for his or her intellectual work. The structure where the formula and signature were found was first excavated in 2010. In addition to...

A suspect has been charged in the wake of what British authorities described as a “high-value burglary” at the Bristol Museum in the UK last September. As reported by the BBC, “Dean Hall, 41, from Redcliffe, Bristol, has been charged with handling stolen goods. He was given unconditional bail and he is next due at Bristol Crown Court on 17 August.” The police said the investigation into the burglary—which involved more than 600 objects from the Bristol Museum’s British Empire and Commonwealth Collection, including military badges, pins from the East India Company, and carved Buddha statues—remains ongoing. This past December, the police appealed to the public in search of information related to...

Sotheby’s reported record first-half consolidated sales of $4.4 billion on Tuesday, up 58 percent from the same period last year, fueled by gains across auctions, private sales, and its growing luxury businesses. Auction sales rose 59 percent to $3.4 billion, while private sales climbed 52 percent to a record $826 million. The company also posted its highest sell-through rate since at least 2010 and a record 4.9 bidders per lot sold. The numbers are undeniably strong. But the more interesting story is the one Sotheby’s is telling the world about itself. Read closely, and this doesn’t feel like an auction-results release. It reads more like an update from a diversified luxury company. Rather than simply...

The Felix Art Fair, a high-profile contemporary art showcase known for its takeovers of the glamorous Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, announced on Tuesday that its 2027 iteration will reinvent its format. Rather than occupying both the Roosevelt’s famous poolside cabanas and the hotel’s upper floor suites, next year, the Felix will restrict its […]

Skip surface prep before spray painting, and you’ll get the same result every time: paint that peels, bubbles, or won’t... Read More

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Jenkin van Zyl premieres Enclosure, a large-scale film and installation set to transform Somerset House Studios

During the medieval and Renaissance periods, baskets were everyday essentials—no plastic bags at the supermarket or even reusable totes. They were also used for all sorts of activities, from handled varieties for produce at the market to decorative vessels holding sewing materials to large versions that could be worn like rucksacks. For Cardiff-based artist Lewis Prosser, a self-described “absurdist basketmaker,” folklore, regional identity, and cultural heritage center a multidisciplinary practice. Through sculptural baskets that can be worn as costumes or displayed like venerable sculptures, Prosser taps into storytelling, masking traditions, and public ceremony and celebration. Welsh communities still...

A circular observation deck in the colonnade below the golden Civic Fame statue opened to the public last month, after a $6m restoration

students Design a Pavilion Around Reuse and Reversibility
 
Developed and constructed by students from Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences in collaboration with the Innsbruck-based collectives Gans Anders and Bonanza, the Gabonsa Pavilion is a temporary structure created for the Gabonsa Music Festival at the Rossau Recreation Center in Innsbruck, Austria. Designed as an exploration of circular construction and material reuse, the pavilion combines simple timber elements, reversible connections, and standard construction materials to investigate how temporary architecture can generate adaptable public space with minimal resources.
 
The project forms part of a broader initiative to reactivate the...

Volkswagen's latest e-bike range brings automotive-inspired safety technology to cycling with radar, rear-view cameras, smart lighting and connected wearables.

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Now part of the joint Artist Rooms collection, the 1980s works will go on show at Tate Modern in September as part of a free Robert Rauschenberg display

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Earlier this month, Karen Harvey announced that Shutter Hub would begin a new chapter under the stewardship of its community, marking the organisation’s most significant evolution to date. It was also one of its most radical acts, placing the future of Shutter Hub into the hands of the people who have helped shape it over the past decade.
Since its beginnings, Shutter Hub has championed a democratic approach to photography, creating opportunities that are open, accessible, and driven by community rather than hierarchy. The creation of a Community Team is a natural continuation of those values, ensuring that the organisation’s future is informed by a diverse network of practitioners, educators, curators,...

the Sports Court Became a vibrant New kind of Playground
 
Sports courts are among the most standardized spaces in the city. Their dimensions are fixed, their markings universally recognized, and their purpose is clear long before anyone steps onto them. Whether in Paris, Accra, Shanghai, or Los Angeles, a basketball or tennis court speaks the same visual language, shaped by painted arcs, boundary lines, circles, and rectangles that have changed remarkably little over time.
 
Over the last decade, artists, architects, and designers have repeatedly returned to the sports court to explore what happens when one of the city’s most ordinary pieces of infrastructure becomes a site for experimentation. Some of...

thoughtful public design as permission to play
 
For more than a century, architecture and design have excelled at telling us how to behave. Benches are for sitting. Squares are for crossing. Museums are for observing. Homes are for efficiency. Public space is governed by an unwritten choreography that rewards productivity over pause. Yet the most exciting designers working today are beginning to write a different script.
 
Rather than creating objects that simply solve problems, they are producing environments that loosen social conventions. A bench becomes impossible to sit on ‘correctly.’ A pavilion refuses to dictate a single programme. A domestic object slows us down through surprise instead of...

inside léa mestres’ imaginative design world
 
In Léa Mestres’ universe, lamps become landscapes, benches resemble dreamlike creatures, and mosaics shape painted skies. The French artist and designer has built a practice around humor, instinct, and irreverence, pushing back against what she sees as an overly serious, and often overly masculine, design culture. Her latest exhibition, Small Car, Big Windows, presented alongside Martin Laforêt at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in London, continues that pursuit through a collection of lighting, seating, and sculptural furniture inspired by long drives between Paris and Brittany, where shifting views of northern France become imagined landscapes.
 
References...

When the idea for a chapter on play first came to me, I had no rigid framework in mind, and no major industry moment to tie it to. It was an intuitive decision, born perhaps from a need to seek out some light while the news gives us so little of it, or from a quieter reflection on what designboom has always been about. Not to look away from the weight of the world, but to remember what makes it worth carrying.
 
This pull toward joy and playfulness brought to mind a favorite Eames expression: ‘Take your pleasure seriously.’ The line sounds like a paradox, since pleasure, after all, is what we allow ourselves once the serious work is finished, if we allow it at all. For the Eameses, though, it was a...

Archaeologists hope that further research of the site will reveal more about the lives of the people who lived in the ancient city of Thebes

Peter Hujar never intended for his contact sheets to go on public view. But at the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan, an exhibition compels us to take a closer look at what was left on the photographer’s darkroom floor — magnifying glass included. Julia Curl considers the implications of approaching Hujar’s contact sheets as “excerpts of a conversation,” one that defined his approach to portraiture and photography.Meanwhile, in our opinion section, Coco Fusco sounds the alarm about jailed Cuban performance artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, whose whereabouts are unknown after his unjust five-year sentence ended on Thursday. The Louvre heist returns to the news, how album covers shape the way...

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Movie about the friendship between the artist and the supermodel gets widespread drubbing from critics

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Discovered alongside unique formulas for the movements of the sun and planets, the attribution proves the importance of such work more than 1,000 years ago

Jeongmin Lee is interested in the ways “memory is carried through craft and repetition.” On traditional Korean mulberry paper, or hanji, Lee draws delicate lines in ink and pigments known as bunchae, rendering rippling textures that whirl across the page. Steeped in local folklore and mythology, the Busan-based artist creates surreal scenes that conjure fantastical tales of life by the sea. “Most of my recent projects begin with reading regional folktales, visiting places connected to those stories, and collecting fragments of history, mythology, and oral traditions,” she says. “I rarely paint a folktale exactly as it’s written; I’m more interested in its symbols, emotions, and the questions it...

“Civilizations are remembered through their monuments, but understood through the things they throw away,” says artist Helena Minginowicz, whose sensitive paintings interrogate our understanding of value. Using airbrushed acrylic, which can be built up in lightweight, translucent layers, the artist takes one of the most quotidian household items as a starting point: paper towel. With its machine-embossed, moisture-wicking patterns, the absorbent paper comprises an instantly recognizable substrate. The precise, textured flourishes are aesthetically pleasing, and yet it’s hard to completely separate them from our associations with mass-produced paper products that are designed for one-time use and...

From the Three Patriarchs of Zion Canyon to the swamps of Louisiana to the immense cascade of Niagara Falls, John Buck’s landscapes evoke the juxtapositions and proportions of dreams. His solo exhibition, Mont Blanc on Wood at Zolla / Lieberman Gallery, draws us to the fuzzy boundary between the familiar and the uncanny. The Bozeman-based artist is known for his eccentric, often life-size wooden sculptures that draw on folklore, personal memory, and daily observations. Figures are sometimes hybridized with other objects, and idiosyncratic drawings on wood panel reveal expansive landscapes populated by anthropomorphized plants and dramatic rock pinnacles. “Lighthouse” (2024), pen and ink on wood, 27 x 36...

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Sara Suppan’s Website
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Pierre Monteux's career defies time.

La scelta di mettere in dialogo Arthur Jafa e Richard Prince potrebbe apparire, a prima vista, come l’ennesima operazione curatoriale costruita attorno al paradigma dell’appropriazione. Helter Skelter, la mostra curata da Nancy Spector per Fondazione Prada a Ca’ Corner della Regina, dimostra invece come questo dispositivo critico possa ancora produrre nuovi significati quando viene sottratto alla semplice genealogia postmoderna per confrontarsi con la crisi contemporanea dell’immagine.
Arthur Jafa, “Viriconium”, 2026. Veduta della mostra “Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince”. Foto di Andrea Rossetti, per gentile concessione della Fondazione Prada
Entrambi gli artisti costruiscono...

A grandly sung revival of The Ballad of Baby Doe at Central City Opera mines poignance from America's past and present.

Daniel Barenboim’s Tristan und Isolde is a performance I keep coming back to, again and again.

Lino Fiorito non ha mai separato davvero la pittura dallo spazio. Anche quando lavora sulla superficie della tela, le sue immagini sembrano già pensate come corpi; quando invece la forma occupa fisicamente un ambiente, continua a comportarsi come un dipinto. È a partire da questa continuità che le due mostre presentate tra 480 Site Specific ed EDICOLA480 possono essere lette come un unico progetto articolato in due tempi, in cui la seconda non rappresenta una conclusione, ma una naturale condensazione della prima.
Lino Fiorito solo show, installation view, 2026, 480 Site Specific, Napoli, courtesy dell’artista e 480 Site Specific, Photo: Danilo Donzelli
La mostra ospitata da 480 Site Specific, a cura di...

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Liang Wang’s Website
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I first experienced the magic of Seiji Ozawa in 1972 when I was 12 years old.

Ho parlato con lo scultore di Zagabria, Vladimir Novak, per diverse settimane questa primavera, culminando in una conversazione, “Tra scultura e città”, organizzata da Residency Unlimited a New York. Il lavoro recente di Novak si concentra su questioni scultoree relative alle risposte fisiche degli oggetti nello spazio in modi sorprendenti. Ciò include meccanismi accuratamente calibrati, come l’uso di piccole macchine leggermente decentrate e posizionate dietro le quinte che animano l’opera e le interazioni con il pubblico che le attivano.
Vladimir Novak, “≈ 30 Steps In Balance”, 2018. © Vladimir Novak, foto di Zvonimir Ferina, per gentile concessione dell’Artista
Qual è il ruolo della...

Ambur Braid's biggest dramatic soprano assignment yet — the Dyer's Wife in Aix — is occasion for Parterre Box to feature her in some of her old repertoire.

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“Identità mutanti”, “Il latte dei sogni”. Il tema dell’identità oltrepassa il secolo scorso, attraversa le Biennali e le riflessioni critiche di FAM, le tendenze Queer e le metamorfosi di Barney per bagnare le rive di Santarcangelo. La 56esima edizione di Santarcangelo Festival, se da un lato deve ancora fare i conti con un corpo collettivo ereditato dalla sua storia, si sofferma su quello individuale. Se il nuovo direttore (Luigi De Angelis) dovrà – tra le altre cose – riportare soprattutto il festival alla sua storia di gratuite pratiche di inclusione cittadina e di coinvolgimento popolare, l’attuale programma dell’edizione diretta da Tomasz Kireńczuk mette al centro il corpo...

Prima ancora di nominare un’origine, origo ne assume la morfologia. Nella sua struttura grafica e sonora, la parola comincia e finisce con una “o”, figura minima del cerchio, della cavità, della soglia. In questa doppia apertura si inscrive una temporalità non lineare, un movimento che non procede verso un punto inaugurale, ma ritorna, ricomincia, si riavvolge incessantemente nella materia. L’origine non appare come un luogo remoto da raggiungere, né come mito pacificato del principio, ma come una condizione di rientro, una possibilità di esporsi nuovamente a ciò che precede il corpo e insieme lo sostiene.
Delcy Morelos, “origo”, installation view at the Barbican, London, 15 May – 31 July...

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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...

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Memory may not be a tape-recorder, but in Sasha Gordon’s work, it serves as a device for the initial transportation. Characters wander this fluxing landscape—be it a drive-through window, a master bedroom, or white suburbia—shifting through the dynamic background of her dream-like haze. As a viewer of Gordon’s narrative paintings, you are intruding on intimate […]
The post Shadow Work: How Sasha Gordon Processes Trauma With Colorful, Yet Intimate Art Works first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

Will Sweeney is a commercial artist based in the UK. With a big reach and an enormous imagination, his illustrations adorn album sleeves, shirts for big fashion brands, toys in Japan, and almost any other sort of wearable or product one could imagine. Recently, we asked Sweeney to describe a bit of the machinations that […]
The post Welcome to the Will Sweeney-verse first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

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...