We went to sleep in New York last night, and woke up in Habibi City this morning, according to New York Magazine. I welcome the celebration of this cultural SWANA-sance, but it comes with the realization that I’ll probably never be able to get another ticket to Laylit again. Aside from the looming threats of rain, this week brings plenty to the table — shall we start with some oysters? On Governors Island, Mohawk artist Alan Michelson (Six Nations of the Grand River) challenges the erasure of the Lenape in New York City by invoking shell middens. With almost a million oyster shells from Manhattan restaurants, Michelson’s “The Oyster” (2026) represents both Indigenous futurity and the mollusk’s...

In 1976, Helen Levitt photographed a child balancing between a lime-green car and the sidewalk curb above a stream of runoff in New York City, her birthplace and the subject of most of her six-decade career. Levitt's practice encapsulated the quiet politics and visual poetry that photography can offer us. The recent news of Steidl Verlag's close call with bankruptcy throws into vivid relief the importance of independent photo book publishers, and our editors and critics have several suggestions for anyone looking for a place to start. Choose your own adventure: Walter Chandoha's endearing photos of family felines, Hal Fischer's archive of queer fashion, Sophie Rivera's portraits of...

recycled 3D printing waste turns into a distributed sound field
 
Ninefold: A Distributed Resonant Field transforms recycled 3D printing waste into nine large-scale resonant forms that shape sound, light, and spatial experience. Developed by architect Hyojin Kwon, founder of Pre- and Post-, percussionist, composer, and multimedia artist Jeremy Muller, and architect and material researcher Misri Patel, the installation brings together architecture, music, computation, and digital fabrication. The project works with discarded PLA collected from fabrication laboratories. The material is shredded into pellets, combined with virgin material, and reprinted into nine large-scale artifacts using pellet-based additive...

The art market is a tough place to survive these days, with even megagalleries like Gagosian and Pace shuttering locations and cutting loose artists, and every day seeming to bring news of another art gallery calling it quits.  So maybe, counterintuitively, this is the perfect moment for the BBC to launch a new reality show that aims to incubate the next great art-dealing duo. The Big Deal with Steph McGovern, which debuts this week, sees “seven pairs of aspiring art dealers battle it out for the chance to win £50,000 [about $67,500] worth of British art.” The series aims to “pull back the curtain” on the art market, says BBC Arts head Suzy Klein, offering “a fresh insight into how art is...

Steven Nelson, the former head of the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts has accused the museum of “soft censorship,” regarding its hushed relocation of a symposium last year titled “Color Lines Across the United States and Mexico.” In an essay published in the academic art history journal October, Nelson […]

Just six months after celebrating its 100th anniversary, the San Diego Museum of Art laid off 11 employees last Wednesday, August 5, citing "rising operational costs" and funding uncertainties.

Archaeologists working near the Incan citadel of Machu Picchu have identified more than 1.5 miles of pre-Hispanic roads, as well as what researchers think could be agricultural terraces and platforms, hidden in the Andean cloud forest. The news was first reported by Heritage Daily, following an August 10 announcement by Peru’s Ministry of Culture. The structures were discovered using LiDAR—an advanced remote sensing technology that can detect man-made features concealed by vegetation cover—during preliminary survey work conducted in July. Notable among the findings is a road at least ¾ of a mile long with features, including a zigzagging route, characteristic of Inca construction. Archaeologists believe...

French Culture Minister Rachida Dati asked senior British culture official Chris Bryant to get on his knees and “propose” that France loan the Bayeux Tapestry to England, the New York Times reports. Dati reportedly made the request at a May 2025 meeting between the pair that took place at a hotel in Cannes, during the […]

Russian missile attacks have damaged or destroyed 1,990 cultural heritage sites and 2,625 cultural infrastructure facilities in Ukraine as of July 31, according to a statement from Ukraine's Ministry of Culture. The affected sites include 196 arts education institutions, 141 museums and galleries, and historic sites on UNESCO's World Heritage List. Cultural institutions across 24% of Ukrainian territories and nearly half of the country's community cultural centers have been damaged during Russia's prolonged and deadly campaign.

“I can't help but be astonished by the class of people who erected things like this”

For decades, if you wanted to talk about Japanese prints, the conversation usually began and ended with Hokusai’s Great Wave. That may be starting to change. This September, Christie’s will begin selling more than 600 prints from the collection of Alan Medaugh, an American businessman who spent half a century chasing the finest impressions he could find by Utagawa Hiroshige, Hokusai’s great rival and one of the towering figures of Japanese printmaking. Specialists say the collection ranks among the finest ever assembled. The first auction, on September 15 in New York, will include more than 180 prints. The timing might be ideal. The market for Japanese prints has quietly become one of the auction...

Like many kids, I struggled with bedtime. I was a naturally anxious child with a vast imagination and siblings who loved to watch scary movies, leaving me capable of generating an endless array of terrifying things that could happen once the lights went out. To remedy this problem, my mother designated a particular stuffed bear as my guardian, and before retreating to her own room, she would grab its squishy body and infuse it with her protective “power” should I need some comfort and safety during the night. For a time at least, this plush toy was enough to get me to sleep. For Seoul-born, Chicago-based artist Sungho Bae, the meaning and emotion we ascribe to our childhood possessions gets flipped inside...

two generations of BMW meet in inka orange
 
For Kith’s 15th anniversary, Ronnie Fieg turns to two BMW coupes separated by exactly 15 years. A 1972 BMW 3.0 CSi E9 and a 1987 BMW M6 E24 have been stripped down, rebuilt, and finished in Inka Orange, an archival BMW shade introduced on the 02 Series in 1971.
 
The pair marks the automotive centerpiece of Kith and BMW’s fourth collaboration, which continues a series shaped around colors pulled from the automaker’s history. Cinnabar Red opened the sequence. Later chapters added Kith-developed Vitality Green and Techno Violet. Here, the orange lets the same color move across two eras of BMW grand touring, from the slim pillars and chrome of the E9 to the...

In Sicily, a recent outdoor installation of photographs of a forest damaged by wildfire by the Italian artist Stefano Cerio was nearly destroyed by a real-life blaze, per a report from Artribune. The work, entitled The Redemption of Nature, consists of a series of photos that show the aftermath of a fire that took place […]

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Amid a broad crisis in higher education in the US resulting from demographic trends and a combative Trump administration, enrollment at New York’s School of Visual Arts (SVA) is down some 34 percent since 2019, and the school faces a $22 million structural budget deficit, “the largest in its nearly 80-year history,” according to a previously unreported July 1 email to faculty and staff from interim president Christopher J. Cyphers. The school’s annual operating budget is around $200 million. SVA is largely dependent on tuition; full-time tuition is $55,270 annually for the coming school year. The drop in enrollment is partly due to the so-called demographic cliff, a plunge in enrollment resulting from...

This year, the United States semiquincentennial converges with BlackStar Film Festival’s 15th edition. At a moment when the nation contends with competing ideas of truth, BlackStar marked this milestone by doing what it does best: serving as a leading platform for experimental nonfiction and polyphonic storytelling. Held in Philadelphia from August 6 to 9, this year’s festival included 91 films and foregrounded stories from Haiti, alongside Haile Gerima’s five-part epic on Ethiopian resistance against Italian colonialism, unraveling the constructs of historical, present, and future.Founded in 2012 by filmmaker and curator Maori Karmael Holmes, BlackStar began as a film festival centered on the work and...

A 7.4-magnitude quake caused a tower to collapse at the beloved Manizales Cathedral

Provenance is everything in the art world. Auction houses spend years tracing the ownership history of a painting from one collector to the next. But for some of humanity’s oldest works of art, the provenance goes cold tens of thousands of years ago. Who painted the bison on the walls of Altamira? Who pressed a hand against damp limestone before blowing red pigment around their fingers? Archaeologists have spent generations trying to answer questions like those. A new study suggests genetics could finally provide part of the answer. Researchers working in caves across Spain and Portugal have recovered ancient human DNA directly from cave walls, opening a new way of studying the people who created—or at...

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Described by its anonymous creators as “the largest search engine for museum art,” The Last Museum is a veritable trove of the the world’s great works. It currently includes pieces by more than 290,000 artists, which are held across 4,903 museums and represent 304 cultures and nationalities. A lot of the works are in the public domain, such as a 19th-century beaded bag attributed to the Lakota, thousands of ancient Etruscan artifacts, and objects spanning thousands of years in places like Germany, Spain, India, and Egypt. Clicking on any artifact will any available information about the artist, title, and date, plus a link to the museum collection it belongs to. If there’s copyright attached to the...

After a decade in business, South London–based Sid Motion Gallery has announced plans to shut down at the end of October. In a press release, Sid Motion, the gallery’s eponymous founder, said that the gallery is “stopping while we are ahead, while my artists are properly serviced and the quality of the programme remains high.” […]

A new book details the obsessive quest to find the sunken ship and, following its discovery, the various claims to the ship's billion dollar cargo

The late artist’s ‘pyrite radios’ feature alongside works by his friends, students and collaborators at the Maine College of Art & Design

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In elegant, meditative paintings by Meghann Stephenson, the inner lives of women are illuminated through subtle symbolism. The Los Angeles-based artist is known for her figurative paintings and still-lifes emphasizing repetition, reflection, and mystery. Often, we encounter a puzzle-like quality to her work in the form of knots, mazes, or duplicates. Next month, a show of nine paintings at Half Gallery continues her exploration of the relationship between inner states and societal constraints. Queen of the Neighborhood! will include a suite of new paintings that correspond to the nine circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, the 14th-century narrative poem in which each concentric level of the underworld is...

Rikky Hype organizes Kyiv retail space around material contrast
 
Designed by Temp Project, led by Anastasiia Tempynska, Rikky Hype’s flagship store occupies 160 sqm within a postwar building on Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main street. Located opposite the historic Bessarabian Market, the showroom responds to its urban context through an interior organized around material contrasts, reflective surfaces, and a sequence of retail spaces.
 
Large storefront windows connect the interior with the surrounding city, framing views toward one of Kyiv’s active public areas and its mix of creative communities, office workers, and market vendors. Instead of providing a neutral setting for the fashion collections, the...

Ilana Walder-Biesanz reports from The Santa Fe Opera, where Tobias Picker's latest opera falls short, a new Rodelinda scintillates, and sumptuous singing abounds across the entire repertoire.

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From a contested Richard Prince to the disputed Veroneses, Venice remains one of the best places to see works of art formerly at the centre of legal controversies

A fictionalised account of an essayist’s exploration of the writer tells us more about contemporary women than the star quality of its protagonist

For Copenhagen-based illustrator and designer Radhika Chitalia, an interest in memories, psychology, and emotions drives a practice centered around connections. From imbuing product design with a bit of humanity to using natural pigments and motifs inspired by Indian folk traditions, she’s drawn to the dynamics of community and relationships. One particular bond stands out in a recent personal project. “After my father passed away, his expired passport remained tucked away for years,” the artist says. “Rather than throwing it away, I began painting every page with gouache—working over visas, immigration stamps, and empty pages as a way to not just cope with the grief but fill up the pages that he...

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a house that keeps you on your toes
 
Inside Bioscleave House in East Hampton, the kitchen sinks into the center of the room while the living floor rises and dips around it like rough ground. Vertical poles offer something to grab when balance slips. Windows land at unfamiliar heights, and the bedrooms sit around the central space at odd angles. Crossing the house asks for a little concentration. Cooking does too. Tokyo-based duo Arakawa and Madeline Gins wanted even the simplest domestic movements to resist becoming automatic.
 
They also believed the house could help its inhabitants live longer. Completed in 2008 and subtitled Lifespan Extending Villa, Bioscleave was the first built example of the pair’s...

Do Ho Suh’s fabric houses rethink architecture through memory
 
Across apartments, staircases, corridors, kitchens, and entire homes, Do Ho Suh repeatedly reconstructs the spaces he once inhabited using translucent polyester stretched over delicate steel frames. In his fabric houses, every door handle, light switch, radiator, and window frame is measured with remarkable precision before being painstakingly stitched into place. His installations possess the scale and logic of architecture, remaining impossibly light, as though buildings had shed their weight and become memory suspended in space.
 
The translucent walls appear solid enough to define a room yet soft enough to dissolve into light. Doorways...

That this performance of Verdi's Lady Macbeth was recorded and preserved for posterity is beyond the pale.

Ci sono artisti la cui carriera coincide con una lunga ricerca e altri che, raggiunta una determinata soglia, sembrano aver trovato una lingua tanto riconoscibile da poter attraversare qualsiasi soggetto senza modificarne realmente la struttura. È una condizione rara, che appartiene a quei pochi autori il cui immaginario ha ormai assunto la forma di un universo autonomo, capace di assorbire temi, epoche e narrazioni mantenendo pressoché intatta la propria grammatica. Osservando Le Alchimiste, il mastodontico progetto concepito da Anselm Kiefer per la Sala delle Cariatidi di Palazzo Reale, a Milano, a cura di Gabriella Belli, la sensazione è proprio questa: non quella di assistere a una svolta, quanto...

Unlike the coasts, Midwestern culture is synonymous with the manual labor of blue-collar jobs, resilience necessary in harsh winters, and a certain friendliness that lends itself to a deep-rooted sense of community. These humble tenets grounded Melissa Joseph’s childhood in Saint Marys, a small, rural city in Pennsylvania, where she was born to a mother with Irish heritage and a father from Kerala, India. The melange of biracial life, Midwestern niceties, and gendered fiber art traditions are woven through Joseph’s artistic practice, which translates family photos into tender needle-felted scenes. In her forthcoming solo exhibition, Casserole Culture, the New York-based artist echoes the warmth and...

Leonie Bo  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Leonie Bos’s Website
Leonie Bos on Instagram

Richard Lynn would like to bring some operatic podcast episodes of The Sewers of Paris and Die Primadonnen to your attention.

Dementia and filth in the same clip!

La pittura contemporanea ha spesso trasformato il ritorno in una narrazione di recupero: un’interruzione superata, una perdita convertita in nuova possibilità. When the Sun Shines Again, la prima grande personale newyorkese di Guimi You presso Lehmann Maupin, usa questa struttura per metterla in crisi. La mostra osserva ciò che accade quando il gesto artistico emerge da periodi di sospensione, quando il fare pittura si intreccia con la cura, l’attesa e forme di vita che tradizionalmente rimangono fuori dalla storia della produzione.
Guimi You, “When the Sun Shines Again”, installation view at Lehmann Maupin New York. Photography by Studio Kukla, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul...

Shakespeare Opera Theatre presented two American operas exploring themes of hypocrisy and deception — in a church!

Knokke Art Fair è una delle fiere d’arte più antiche al mondo e la più longeva tradizione internazionale sulla costa belga, un luogo speciale dove l’arte emoziona, giovani e anziani, curiosi ed esperti. Che sia ammirata tra le solenni mura di un luogo deputato o all’aria aperta (con una scultura site-specific), l’arte suscita emozioni, stimola la riflessione e invita al dialogo.
Vista esterna della location di Knokke Art Fair, edizione 2026
Knokke Art Fair è un evento del tutto indipendente, incentrato sulla qualità basata su un’accurata selezione che si svolge prima dell’apertura della fiera, ed è organizzata da Alexander Tuteleers. In questo luogo, il tempo sembra essersi fermato in...

Fino al 30 novembre 2026 il Parco Archeologico di Pompei ospita la mostra Philip Colbert in Pompeii: Pop Mythology. La mostra, curata da Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, espone oltre trenta sculture monumentali dell’artista britannico tra le quali protagonista assoluto è l’astice antropomorfo, alter ego dell’artista e ormai suo marchio riconoscibile.
Philip Colbert, ph. courtesy of the artist studio
Le opere di Colbert sono progettate per risultare subito leggibili e perfettamente compatibili con le aspettative della comunicazione social. Molti lavori si distinguono per l’uso di colori saturi, monumentalità, ironia pop e kitsch con citazioni della classicità ridotte a segni facilmente riconoscibili e nel...

By Betty Ann Brown "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."—Sol LeWitt Dean De Cocker creates richly conceived, exquisitely crafted, and visually delightful artworks that shuttle between abstraction and conceptual representation. He has long been drawn to machines, from bicycles to motorcycles, cars to airplanes, and formal echoes of these devices appear in his current body of work, exhibited at the Visual Arts Center in the small Central California town of Visalia. Welcome to the...

Xiao Hua Yang  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Xiao Hua Yang’s Website
Xiao Hua Yang on Instagram

Nell’estate del 1896, durante l’Esposizione panrussa di Nižnij Novgorod, Maksim Gorkij assiste a una delle prime proiezioni del cinematografo Lumière e prova a raccontare un’esperienza che ancora non possiede un linguaggio. Del cinematografo scrive poco, della novità tecnica ancora meno. Il suo sguardo si sposta subito altrove. A colpirlo è qualcosa che continua a sfuggire anche oggi, quando le immagini in movimento fanno ormai parte della nostra quotidianità.
Janis Rafa, “Baby I’m Yours, Forever”, 2026 in “Canicula”, Fondazione In Between Art Film presso Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venezia, 2026. Courtesy dell’artista e Fondazione In Between Art Film. Foto © Marco Cappelletti e...

Alina Bobrova  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Alina Bobrova’s Website
Alina Bobrova on Instagram

Skeletons, tombstones, and serpents. These are just a few of the iconic images pre-v ailing throughout the works of Morgan Sorensen—all relating to the themes of struggle, sadness, pain, and death. While anyone might agree that these graphic designs would all make for killer band T’s, there’s quite a bit of depth surrounding the artist’s […]
The post Future Relics: The Art of Morgan Sorensen first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

The body is an obsession for Monica Piloni. Whether it’s a hollowed face in the Samieses series or the eerie dolls depicted in “Ilegais”, a majority of Monica Piloni’s sculptures confront the human form. And while consistently returning to the body may seem confining to some, it’s a pursuit marked by liberation for the Brazilian […]
The post The Disconcertingly Honest Self-Portrait Sculptures of Monica Piloni first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 42, which is sold out. See Matthew Grabelsky’s new solo show at Thinkspace gallery here.  Matthew Grabelsky had studied tradition in Florence, lived in the cultural nuclei of Europe, but hadn’t yet found the idea that would set him apart as an artist living in the twenty-first century. […]
The post Human/Nature: Animals Go Underground In the Paintings of Matthew Grabelsky first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

A selection of recent work by artist Emma Steinkraus. Based in Lexington, Virginia, Steinkraus  
   
   
   
   
 
Emma Steinkraus’s Website
Emma Steinkraus on Instagram

By Victoria Thomas Photographer and ceramic artist Catherine (Cathy) Opie first shocked and rocked the fine art world with her self-portraits during the late 1990s. Today, her decades of work — often termed confessional — now serve as context for the far more enigmatic Holding Blue installation, on view at Regen Projects through July 3. The Los Angeles-based artist identifies as a leather dyke, lesbian cowboy, an elder, and as "Mama Cathy," with a mustachioed male alter-ego named Bo. Opie is...

Luke Rosing  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Luke Rosing’s Website
Luke Rosing on Instagram

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

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

By Betty Ann Brown "Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation — I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances."—Henri Matisse Jill sykes by Eric Minh Swenson Jill Sykes creates beautiful paintings of botanical phenomena. Like Matisse, she translates three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional images, occupying the territory between abstraction and representation to achieve balance and equilibrium. From a very early age,...

By Victoria Thomas There's something about a hanging. Whether legal or not, the visual experience seems mythic, supernatural, theatrical, and ritualistic, versus the efficiency of a swift kill. If local authorities greenlight the killing, it's called a hanging. If they don't, the hanging is extrajudicial, and it's called a lynching. Anyone with even the scantiest grasp of American history will know that our country has a sordid romance with lynching — a romance which persists. And unless...

By Betty Ann Brown Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, February 22–June 28, 2026 Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.—Dolores Huerta The Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF, originally the Rebel Chicano Art Front) was an art collective founded in Sacramento in the early 1970s. The visual art members, who focused on printmaking and murals, collaborated with writers, musicians, performers, and teachers. Together, they...