piano piano turns a narrow corridor into an inhabitable spine
 
El desfile de la Puri is a residential renovation by Piano Piano Studio that reconfigures a narrow, elongated dwelling in Valencia, Spain. The spatial strategy is based on geometry, circulation, and continuity between interior and exterior environments. Located in a mild climate, the project prioritizes outdoor living by establishing a closer relationship between the house and its terrace.
 
The existing layout was defined by an irregular geometry and a long corridor lacking right angles, resulting in a fragmented spatial organization. The intervention introduces a custom grid aligned with the building’s original inclinations, allowing the...

Did you know that between 1976 and 2011, admin jobs at American universities grew by a staggering 369% while full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty grew by only 23%? That’s because of the “administrification” and financialization of institutions of higher learning, writes art professor Hakan Topal in an important opinion piece today. As a result, we get disgruntled professors who are stretched thin, students who are treated like paying customers, and administrators whose primary job is to manage discontent. What does this mean for the future of art schools, and what can be done about this crisis? Read Topal’s thoughts below and let us know what you think in the comments section.—Hakim Bishara,...

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

Ambitious art projects abound across the streets—and islands—of Venice

A new book about the history of the art trade highlights how some outsiders became insiders, while others slipped through history's cracks

MEDICLINICS’ BABY CHANGING STATION HONORED WITH GLOBAL AWARDS
  Traditionally, baby changing stations in public restrooms have been treated as purely utilitarian, often clashing with the architectural intent of the space. However, Mediclinics’ Babymedi reinterprets this essential facility through a design-driven approach that prioritizes seamless integration into contemporary environments like airports, shopping centers, and cultural facilities. Recognized with three of the most prestigious international design awards, including the iF Design Award and the Red Dot Award in 2026, the design moves away from conventional fold-down plastic units in favor of a fully recessed solution that reduces visual impact...

castor place opens in piraeus as a transformable cultural venue
 
Andreas Kostopoulos of Manhattan Projects New York City (MPNYC) reactivates a 19th-century warehouse into Castor Place, a multi-use cultural venue in Piraeus, designed to host an evolving spectrum of events. Conceived under Manhattan Projects New York City, the project reframes the historic masonry shell as a flexible, open-ended environment for lectures, exhibitions, performances, and gatherings, balancing preservation with a forward-looking spatial strategy.
 
The original 1850s fabric of the building is rearticulated through a process of subtraction. Andreas Kostopoulos, former associate director at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, removes layers...

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...

a structure that makes participation visible
 
A mobile voting booth designed by architecture students at Frankfurt UAS stands outside the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt as part of World Design Capital 2026 (see more here). Built at full scale, the structure positions democratic participation as a spatial condition, translating abstract principles into something that can be entered, climbed, and experienced.
 
The project begins with a direct question of access. Who participates, and under what conditions, becomes legible through the arrangement of platforms, thresholds, and partial enclosures. The booth’s timber structure is expressed and serves as a symbol, making the act of assembling and occupying...

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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...

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a light-touch resort by Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura
 
Set along the mountainous coastline of Dhërmi, Albania, The Veil by Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura proposes a resort that recedes into its setting. Conceived under the direction of Pablo Bofill with design principals Hernán Cortés and Alborz Mohammadi, the project navigates a sensitive ecological context where dense deciduous forests meet steep coastal terrain. Here, architecture operates with restraint, preserving the character of the site while minimizing disturbance.
 
Distributed across two plots, the development comprises 366 apartments and 77 villas organized into sixteen typologies. Rather than reshaping the land through...

Following intense criticism, calls for boycotts, and the European Union's official warning about the intent to terminate millions in funding, it appears that Russia's return to the 61st Venice Biennale will employ several workarounds to comply with international sanctions. Reports from Italian news outlets indicate that the Russian Pavilion will only be physically accessible during the Biennale's pre-opening vernissage dates of May 5–8, when some of the included artists in the The tree is rooted in the sky exhibition will stage performances for the press and other industry professionals. From May 9 onward, the building will remain closed, and multimedia documentation of the performances will...

Brooklyn’s latest experimental art space is more fun than a trip to the office. On the fourth floor of a former Prospect Heights automobile service station that was converted into creative industry offices a decade ago, an intentionally misspelled sign reading “The Gallry” greets inquisitive visitors.At first glimpse, The Gallery: WeWork (oralmoral) resembles a quirky incarnation of a millennial co-working space. There’s a jaunty painting of a whale by Michael Egan opposite Anna K.E. Tamada’s enormous satellite speaker with a sound installation at the entrance. A handful of artists tap away on their laptops on tables in a large common area as the aboveground Franklin Avenue Shuttle rumbles past.The...

The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), which administers the Istanbul Biennial, has tapped artist and curator Liu Ding and art historian Carol Yinghua Lu to lead the nineteenth edition, set to run from September 18 through November 14, 2027. The exhibition will be free to the public, as it has historically been. Liu, […]

A newly excavated Roman-era tomb found at Al-Bahnasa, site of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, offers insights into Egyptian funerary practices during the Greek and Roman periods (332 BCE–641 CE). The find, announced by the Egyptian Tourism and Antiquities Ministry, was made by a team of Egyptian and Spanish researchers led by archeologists Esther Pons of Spain’s National Archaeological Museum and Maite Mascort of the University of Barcelona.   Among the contents of the tomb were several mummies elaborately wrapped in decorated linen; alongside them the team found three gold amulets shaped like tongues and one made of copper, objects that would allow the dead to speak in the afterlife. The archaeologists...

The Box, the influential Los Angeles gallery known for its nonprofit-style program of experimental work, has announced its closure. Its last exhibition was of the late California painter and Beat Generation figure Wally Hedrick presented in collaboration with Parker Gallery; it ended at both venues April 4. A closing event is planned, comprising a fashion […]

In a faculty meeting last year at Purchase College in New York, a colleague in the administration referred to students as "consumers." It was a casual statement, and I pushed back. The exchange was brief, but it has deeply bothered me ever since. Not because the intention was sinister. Because their statement was precise. Once you call students consumers, you have already restructured every relationship on which the university depends.Definitions matter. Terms like participant, member, student, client, user, customer, citizen, and constituent carry distinct social logics. A participant or member belongs to a shared institution. A buyer or subscriber belongs to a market. Students are not buyers or consumers....

At the Oakland Museum of California we often say: “Keep doing the good work.” We need to be clearer about what the work is and how we commit to it

The Sharjah Art Foundation has announced the programming for its 2027 Sharjah Biennial, the seventeenth edition of the exhibition since 1993. The biennial centers around producing large installations and commissioning performances and films from artists around the world. Sharjah Biennial 17, which will be curated by Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento, will be titled “What […]

"Untitled" by featured artist Lyudmila Razumova (image courtesy the artist)A young woman with a dejected countenance gazes behind her. Before her, a listless, faceless crowd inches towards an unnamed facility enclosed by barbed wire. The flapping wings of crows dot the cloudy sky overhead.This is “Untitled,” a blue pen sketch on yellowed paper by Lyudmila Razumova, a photojournalist and artist who was arrested by the Russian State for anti-war graffiti in 2022 and is currently serving a seven-year sentence. Razumova produced the piece from her prison cell, hence the modest materials.In the drawing, a smiling kitten with meditative eyes rests at the woman’s side, a brief moment of levity rendered nearly...

A lawsuit involving art publisher Michael McKenzie who got close to the artist Robert Indiana towards the end of his life in 2018 has come to a conclusion: A Manhattan jury ruled that McKenzie created unauthorized or adulterated versions of Indiana’s work, the New York Times reports. As a result, McKenzie is on the hook […]

The top half of a large statue of the ancient Egyptian king Ramses II was discovered in northeastern Egypt at an archaeological site called Tell El-Faraoun. The fragment weights over 5 tons and is about 7 feet tall. Ahram Online reported that the monument was likely part of a group of three statues that once adorned a temple, though likely not the one at Tell El-Faraoun, where it was uncovered. Rather, it is believed to have initially been carved for a temple in Per-Ramesses, an ancient capital city built by Ramses II in the 13th century BCE. Hisham El-Leithy, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said in a statement, “The find provides valuable evidence of how statues were relocated and...

An exhibition at Delta House Gallery in London was cancelled after the group UK Lawyers for Israel raised concerns over drawings described by the Telegraph newspaper as “dripping with Jew-hate.” That appraisal ran in a review of a previous version of the show in Margate, where the artist Matthew Collings showed his work in an exhibition titled “Drawings Against Genocide.” As reported by the Jerusalem Post, “The drawings in the collection are graphic. One depicts the owner of Sotheby’s, French-Israeli businessman Patrick Drahi, eating babies alive. Multiple depict Jews as devils with horns or standing on skulls with messages like ‘we love death.'” The Margate iteration of the show was a source a...

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...

Revisiting Gary Indiana and Chantal Akerman's 1983 interview

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...

How do you know when a painting is finished? It’s a question asked of so many painters, many of whom struggle to come up with an answer. When I posed it to Archie Rand during a conversation in his Brooklyn studio, he stood up from his lounge chair and walked toward an easel on which sat a half-finished work. In it, a dapper street vendor sells ceramics from a wooden board balanced on his head. Two children watch him from behind while, in one sliver of the background on the top left side of the picture, a blazing red sunset overruns the sky. “You know what the most important part of this painting is?” he asked. “This, right here.” He pointed to the top of left of the picture, where the building that...

The Sharjah Art Foundation has announced the title, curatorial framework, and artist list for the 17th Sharjah Biennial, set to run from January 21, through June 13, 2027. Titled “What remains, sits restive,” the exhibition will bring together 109 artists across sites in the emirate, including Sharjah City, Al Dhaid, Khorfakkan, and the Kalba Ice Factory. The edition is co-curated by Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento, who have structured the project around themes of unrealized social projects and the capacity of the past to animate the present. According to a statement from the foundation, the curators will present related but distinct perspectives. Harutyunyan, a professor of contemporary art and...

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...

Vogue alumni Edward Enniful will curate Tate Britain's autumn blockbuster 'The 90s: Art and Fashion'

One of the most common sights in cities is birds perched on power lines, although it rarely elicits a second look. Starlings chortle, pigeons coo, and the occasional hawk perches on a pole to scan the ground for its next meal. And yet, as normal as this seems, there’s nothing natural about it. Instead of trees, these feathered creatures rely on whatever infrastructure is around them, from wires and pylons to fences and rooftops. For Ohio-based artist Rachel Mentzer, nature’s resilience is central to a practice focused on sustainability and environmental renewal. Her work “invites viewers to reflect on the interplay between human activity and the natural world, emphasizing the adaptability and fragility...

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,...

Major conservation funding, sponsored by Bank of America, has been granted to London's National Gallery as well as 17 additional projects at other international institutions

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...

What does it mean for an exhibition to resist closure, to exist instead as an unfolding constellation of relationships, memory and shared artistic practice? Ongoing | Tilda Swinton arrives at Onassis Ready in Athens as a proposition that moves beyond retrospective structure, presenting instead a network of encounters that continue to develop in real time. Cinema, performance, fashion and installation are positioned here as intersecting forms rather than separate disciplines. Within the industrial space, authorship shifts into dialogue, and biography becomes distributed across collaborators, long-term friendships and partnerships. The exhibition resists final resolution, favouring duration, recurrence and...

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

With youthful abandon, Ms. Feola interprets an old chestnut.

“Play is how we give permission,” says Vitor Freire, co-founder of the Amsterdam-based studio Imagination of Things. “Permission to challenge what’s fixed, rehearse what doesn’t exist yet, and close the distance between people who wouldn’t otherwise meet.” Freire and co-founder Monique Grimord take play seriously and, in a new project, their studio created a vast repository of 169 artworks, designs, games, and more that have offered an unexpected encounter with imagination and joy. From Rael San Fratello’s award-winning “Teeter-Totter Wall” to the healing Wind Phone project to a 12-foot puppet walking the world, Unruly Play is a multi-decade archive of participatory projects, public spaces,...

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Kelsey Shwetz’s Website
Kelsey Shwetz on Instagram

When we consider that enormous metropolises like New York City and Chicago have only come into being within the past few hundred years, it’s impossible not to stand in awe of ancient cultural sites that have existed for millennia or geological features that expose millions—even billions—of years of the planet’s natural history. For Navid Baraty, the contrasts and tensions of contemporary urban life and timeless landscapes merge in otherworldly photographs. Baraty’s series The Time Between juxtaposes cityscapes with dramatic terrain, from desert dunes to snow-capped mountains. The project revolves around images in which two distinct digital photographs converge in a composite, drawing on the film...

“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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Dorian Tocker’s Website
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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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Nahanni McKay’s Website
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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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John Sanderson’s Website
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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...

In a world not so unlike our own, during a time not that long ago, a mother wolf sits comfortably upon an abandoned tree stump in a clearing in the woods. Surrounded by carefully rendered flora and fauna, the creature is positioned upright with impeccable posture and human-like mannerisms. Her hind legs are crossed at […]
The post The Drawings of Femke Hiemestra Depict Fairy Tales with Looming Consequences first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Kristine Schomaker The work hits immediately. Not one piece — all of it, simultaneously. Large sculptural assemblages covering the walls, a freestanding sculpture in the middle of the room, a piece suspended from the ceiling. The whole gallery feeling like its own solar system, each work a satellite orbiting something enormous and unspoken. Last night, four humans splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after flying around the Moon for the first time in more than fifty years. Artemis II...

ABOVE: “Spatial Awareness”, 54″ x 250″, hand-knit with wool, 2025, photo by Chris Rettman From her dining room table in Oklahoma City, Kendall Ross knits brightly colored, intricately patterned sweaters and vests—some so large that referring to them as wearables is a bit misleading. Her textile pieces are often emblazoned with diary-like messages that speak […]
The post Kendall Ross Comments Directly on the Craft Vs. Art Debate first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

In 2019, Kayla Mahaffey reached a turning point with her art. The Chicago-based artist had a solo show at Line Dot Editions in April of that year. Titled Off to the Races, the series of paintings centered around children ready to hit the road. Some sat with their growing legs crouched in tiny cars or […]
The post Child’s Play: The Paintings of Kayla Mahaffey first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

San Juan Capistrano Library #1 Amir Zaki No Dust to Settle Diane Rosenstein Gallery April 4 - May 9, 2026 by Jody Zellen The saying "waiting for the dust to settle" might refer to when things will calm down and return to normal. It could be said that "the dust never settles" and there is no state of definitive calmness because everything is in flux, both in life and in art. This might be taking the personal into account by reading too much into the title of Amir Zaki's current exhibition, his...