Just in time for this month's theme of filth or dementia, a review of Terrence McNally's Master Class from Central City Opera.

There have been protests and a petition since the archive of Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) was listed among the assets of the insolvent organisation

The strike across the east London museums will occur on 11 and 12 August as Prospect union pledges to step up industrial action across the heritage sector this summer

After 20 long years of delays and allegations of abuse against migrant workers, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi has finally announced an opening date: December 11. Yay? Across the world, another major museum is just gearing up its labor battle. Unionized workers at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s East Storehouse location voted unanimously to strike, alleging insufficient time to use the toilet or drink water. All the world’s an Amazon warehouse, it seems. But not everything trends toward shit. Sometimes the reverse takes its course — as a former military settlement-turned-artist settlement in Taipei shows us. May we all head that way. — Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor How a Former Military Settlement in...

Ma che brutta figura per la lirica!

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Beatriz Morales (Città del Messico, 1981) vive e lavora tra Hidalgo e Berlino. La sua pratica si origina nella pittura, ma ne sottopone progressivamente a verifica i confini, estendendo il gesto cromatico alla fibra, alla scultura e all’installazione. Il passaggio dalla superficie allo spazio non coincide tuttavia con un abbandono del linguaggio pittorico. Il colore continua ad agire come principio strutturante, assumendo consistenza materiale, profondità simbolica e valore culturale. Tecniche tessili, fibre vegetali e pigmenti non sono trattati come semplici risorse formali, ma come depositi di conoscenza. La materia trattiene temporalità, gesti, economie, storie di estrazione e pratiche di trasmissione....

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...

The Bayerische Staatsoper’s summer festival wound down with Lotte de Beer’s darkly effective production of Gounod ’sFaust.

I sort of have a love/hate fascination with countertenors/male falsettists.

How many days of your life have been ruined because of someone else's fragile ego? How many times have so-called "friends" shamelessly stolen your ideas? In this month's Art Problems column, Paddy Johnson tackles an uncomfortable question: Why are there so many toxic people in the art world? Read her tips on how to protect yourself from insecure peers and bad-faith actors. Hope it helps. Speaking of toxic people, President Trump has ordered the installation of content warning signs outside the Smithsonian National Museum of American History to alert the public against the institution's alleged leftist bias. "No other president has seen fit to vandalize taxpayer-funded museums with a billboard...

Karina Gauvin slays for the slayed. Werk Bitch.

Prima istituzione d’arte contemporanea fondata oltre la vecchia Cortina di Ferro, il Ludwig Múzeum di Budapest si conferma un osservatorio geopolitico e culturale imprescindibile per decifrare le traiettorie dell’Est Europa. Nato nel 1989 dalla lungimirante donazione dei collezionisti tedeschi Peter e Irene Ludwig, il museo ha esordito nel 1991 tra le mura storiche del Palazzo Reale di Buda, per poi trovare la sua collocazione definitiva, nel 2005, negli spazi monumentali e avveniristici del Müpa, l’avamposto architettonico del Palazzo delle Arti affacciato sul Danubio.
István Csákány (Sepsiszentgyörgy, 1978), “The Sewing Room / Ghost Keeping”, 2012 (dettaglio dall’installazione). Veduta...

After visiting the New York Art Book Fair in 2011, Adelene Koh was smitten with the world of bookbinding. Her professional training commenced in Japan, then led her to London, and she’s now based in Taiwan, where she runs a studio called dddots. This year, Koh was one of 30 finalists for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, which celebrates innovation across a wide range of artisanship. As a bookmaker and conservator, Koh draws upon the technical precision and heritage of bookmaking to create unique sculptures using paper and thread. Her work “Endless” was included in the prize’s exhibition of shortlisted artists, consisting of a kind of ouroboros-like cylinder of meticulously folded paper and edges...

On December 8, 2025, Instagram permanently terminated the account @nipeople, a project by artist, journalist, and activist Emma Shapiro, instantly erasing years of work and sparking a legal debate over digital freedom. The Instagram account was part of Exposure Therapy, a project begun in 2017 that aims to challenge gender-based discrimination by highlighting the ways society’s sexualization of female-presenting bodies is reflected in various laws. Image after image of female nipples filled the feed, each posing the same question: Is any body inherently pornographic? The conversation was cut short in 2025, when Meta, the parent company of Instagram, suspended the account after Shapiro posted a short video...

In a 2013 essay, author Barrett Swanson asked, “At what point does the aesthetic excellence of the photograph eclipse the depicted event, or, worse, distract the viewer from inquiring into what happened?” With the synchronous explosion of digital news content and unremitting global calamity, it’s a question that strongly resonates today, particularly with photography of protest and social movements. If these images overtly flatter the protestor, they can be accused of fueling performative activism and pulling attention away from the crisis at hand; if they are too beautiful, they might conceal the real risk of violence from the state. Still, if they are too graphic, they can rob the subjects of their...

Juan Garcia, history professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, grew up in South Texas in an established Mexican-American ranching family. When he was around six years old, his father abruptly abandoned his trade and relocated his nine children to Chicago.The reasons his family left Texas were complicated, and the retired professor has since spent his career studying the political headwinds that punctuated the lives of his farmer father and his mother, who lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, as they headed east. Some of the fruits of Garcia's research and excerpts of his family story will be publicly displayed in a forthcoming exhibition at Sacramento's...

President Donald Trump on July 27 showed off pictures on his Truth social account of two freshly gilded equestrian statues near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, opening the floodgates to a variety of opinions. The nineteen-foot-high bronze sculptures, now coated in 23.75 gold leaf, are two of four horse monuments that the Department of the Interior in […]

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered more than 20 funerary stelae depicting human figures at Tell El-Deir, an archaeological site in the Nile Delta. The news was reported by multiple news outlets, including Ahram and La Brújula Verde, following an announcement by Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). The carved limestone grave markers are notable not only for their workmanship but for the engravings on their lateral sides and backs. These include the griffin, a mythological creature of Mesopotamia and ancient Greece; Agathodaemon, the snake spirit associated with good luck in ancient Greek religion; and Isis-Thermuthis, a fusion of the Egyptian goddess Isis and the Egyptian harvest deity...

The closures are the latest mega-gallery real estate downsizes this summer

You know what they say: When the heat, and smoke, and floods go away, New York comes out to play. It's finally time, and you've more than earned it. We've put together a playlist of sorts, one that takes you to islands, beaches — even bus shelters — across all five boroughs. See the city through a different lens via giant kaleidoscopes in Pelham Bay. Have yourself a game of ping-pong on artist-designed tables at Rockaway Beach. Get a little intimate with a massive teddy bear in a courtyard in Queens. Get weird with a neural network's hallucinations in a Midtown sculpture garden. Frolic on Governors Island, my personal paradise. It's the best time of year on the best city on...

The NYC-based music criticism collective on their three picks for August 2026.

Amazon MGM Studios dropped this week the trailer for The Thomas Crown Affair, a remake of the acclaimed 1968 film that will open in theaters on March 5, 2027. Directed by and starring Academy Award–winning actor Michael B. Jordan, the trailer already hints at the art-related plot points for the film. About 12 seconds into the trailer, Jordan’s Thomas Crown faces some built-in bookshelves that slide apart to reveal a hidden room where he stores his stolen paintings. On a metal rack, resembling the sliding vertical racks often used in museum and gallery storage, are four paintings. Crown holds another canvas in his hands to add to his collection of looted masterpieces. By ARTnews’s estimations, these...

The boutique fair is attracting increasingly ambitious exhibitors while leaning into the mountain town's distinctive character

British-born sculptor Tony Cragg will be awarded the European Culture Prize this year at the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on September 4. The award, which has been given out each year since 2012 by the European Cultural Forum, honors pioneering European artists across several disciplines and artistic spheres. Born in Liverpool, Cragg has been a […]

Ivory bird figurines TÜBINGEN, GERMANY—Two tiny bird figurines carved from mammoth ivory have been discovered in southwestern Germany’s Hohle Fels Cave, according to a SciNews report. The two artifacts were uncovered in the same layer of the cave, about five feet apart from each other. Each 40,000-year-old bird sculpture is less than one inch long. The first shows a grouse-like bird in a crouched position, perhaps sitting on eggs. The other, a grouse or perhaps a bird of prey, had outstretched wings and may depict flight, landing, or a display of courtship behavior. Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen thinks that the two sculptures may have been carved by the same person. “The figurines...

Earlier this month, a team of researchers at Santa Clara University in California launched an AI chatbot called AI Provenance Research. The tool is intended to enable anyone to ask questions about Nazi-looted artworks and receive answers based on information culled from a searchable, illustrated online database with over 40,000 entries. The news was recently reported by the Jewish News of Northern California. The group is made up of three business school colleagues: management professor Michael Santoro and analytics professors Haibing Lu and Michele Samorani. The database use AI to corral the vast array of existing provenance data that are spread across different archives, databases, and catalogues, in many...

Inscription reading "Domina Votum," Cova Dones, Spain VALENCIA, SPAIN—Some 120 Latin inscriptions on the walls and ceiling of Cova Dones, an underground cave in southeastern Spain, have been recorded by Virginia Barciela of the University of Alicante and Aitor Ruiz-Redondo of the University of Zaragoza, according to a report in La Brújula Verde. The cave is thought to have been a Roman cult sanctuary used primarily by women for ritual practices. The researchers determined that most of the graffiti dates to the first and second centuries A.D. Women’s names appear in the inscriptions, and many spindle whorls, thought to have been deposited as offerings, have been recovered from the cave. Some of the...

Stephanie Wiles, who’s held the post of Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery since 2018, will retire in the spring next year, according to a statement to the Yale community made earlier this week by university president Maurie McInnis and provost Scott Strobel.  In their letter, McInnis and Strobel acknowledged […]

Lidar image of earthworks at the site of Fazenda Atlântican, Brazil HELSINKI, FINLAND—Live Science reports that a lidar survey of more than 1,700 square miles of the Amazon rainforest in western Brazil has detected nearly 400 earthworks dated to between 600 B.C. and A.D. 850. The geoglyphs were constructed by the Aquiry, a multicultural group made up of as many as three million people, based upon an estimate of 300 people needed to build and maintain each geoglyph. “The cultures and societies that composed the Aquiry shared a common worldview and constructed ceremonial centers in a variety of monumental geometric forms, characterized by deep ditches and high outer embankments, commonly known as Amazonian...

Although no longer involved with Inhotim, Paz appears to be reviving its model of art pavilions in a botanical landscape

“I was incredulous. Really?” That was Kim Sajet’s take when her former Smithsonian colleague, Anthea M. Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, was subjected to hostile questioning during a congressional hearing last week, according to a new interview with The New York Times. “I could see that it was going to become a real witch hunt,” she continued. “I didn’t wish that on my colleagues and I didn’t wish that on the Smithsonian.” Sajet is nearly a year past her decision to step down as director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery after President Donald Trump announced his intention to fire her. She’s in the Midwest instead, having started a new stint as...

Kiaf SEOUL, the largest and oldest international art fair in Korea, will return for its twenty-fifth iteration at COEX, a major convention complex in Gangnam, from September 2–6 this year. The forthcoming edition will include 175 galleries from eighteen countries and territories, and the fair will also feature internal sections that serve to differentiate the […]

Every year, the Central West Astronomical Society (CWAS) of New South Wales celebrates AstroFest, a festival of astronomy during which amateur photographers and scientists from around the globe are invited to submit their best views of the night sky and beyond. This year, the overall prize was awarded to Stefan Buda for his tonal moonscape titled “The Lunar Apennines,” which captures a detailed view of Montes Apenninus. Categories include Deep Sky, Solar System, Wide-Field, Nightscapes, and more, allowing photographers to contribute images of phenomena ranging from distant nebulae and spiral galaxies to the Milky Way and aurora australis, or the southern lights, shining above impressive terrestrial...

Set against uninterrupted backgrounds, the bold, metallic portraits of Kip Omolade float almost deity-like amid vibrant color. Known for his hyperrealistic treatment of chrome-like visages in oil paint, the artist sometimes incorporates spray-painted elements, drawing on the graffiti culture of New York City’s subways during the 1980s and 1990s when Omolade tagged using the moniker “Kace.” The artist also presents the mask-like faces from different vantage points, sometimes with incredible eyelashes, whether peering directly at the viewer or positioned in regal profile. Reflections are typically abstract, showing little indication of the surrounding space beyond perhaps blue skies, the sun, and local...

Entrando negli spazi privati di fondaco in Largo Forcella 8 ad Atri, adibiti a luogo espositivo in occasione della collettiva “Adagio” dei cinque pittori Benyamin Zolfaghari, Enrico Pierotti, Andrea Lucchesi, Lorenzo Di Lucido, Andrea Astolfi, respiro un’aria serena: ad accogliermi c’è uno spazio rimasto fermo nel tempo, intriso di ricordi familiari, una sorta di grotta in mattoni e pietra datata tra Settecento e Ottocento, fatta di cunicoli e scale senza uscita, ampie arcate e nicchie immerse tra luci e ombre, come stanze della memoria o del pensiero umano.
AA.VV., “Adagio”, installation view at fondaco, Atri, 2026, courtesy of the artists
L’artista atriano Andrea Astolfi fa gli onori di casa...

AYDIN PROVINCE, TURKEY—Türkiye Today reports that an excavation conducted by Murat Cekilmez of Adnan Menderes University has uncovered a 2,000-year-old mosaic floor in a bath-gymnasium complex in western Turkey’s ancient city of Tralles. Found under the remnants of a Byzantine workshop, the floor features an image of a hippocampus, a mythical sea creature associated with the sea god Poseidon that has the upper body of a horse and the lower body of a fish. Cekilmez said that the city was known in antiquity for producing scholars and writers. In addition to bathing, the bath-gymnasium complex contained rooms for education, exercise, and socializing, and perhaps scientific study, he concluded. To read about...

From meticulously cut and painted pieces of paper, realistic birds emerge amid foliage and forests in compositions by The Paper Ark. The collaborative practice of Nayan Shrimali and Venus Bird, which focuses on intricate paper reliefs, also centers on ecology by illustrating real species and their habitats around the world. The duo aims to raise awareness of biodiversity and conservation by evoking a sense of wonder akin to how we also often feel in nature. The artists recently exhibited a number of the pieces shown here with Antler Gallery at Seattle Art Fair, and “Great Green Macaws” appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Audubon Magazine. See more on The Paper Ark’s Instagram. “Hyacinth Macaw”...

CAMPECHE, MEXICO—Mexico News Daily reports that a digital reconstruction of a charcoal mural discovered inside a cave-like, arched vault at the Maya site of Calakmul has revealed early examples of calendrical writing. Daniel Salazar Lama of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said that the mural shows Juun Ajaw, one of the mythical Maya hero twins, hunting a creature in water. A symbol corresponding to a day marker in the 260-day Maya ritual calendar cycle is shown next to Juun Ajaw. Salazar said that the date appears to have been added to the main scene at a later time. The mural may represent an episode in the life of Juun Ajaw, or a renewal ritual, and the date may have been...

In 1906, Devil’s Tower in northeastern Wyoming became the first national monument in the U.S., preserving a little more than 1,300 acres around the 867-foot-tall column of igneous rock. Amid the rolling hills of the plains, it can be seen from miles around, and it’s been a sacred site and gathering place for myriad Indigenous American tribes, who refer to it by names like Bear Lodge or Bear’s House. One oral narrative describes how bears attacked a group of seven girls, and the ground swelled up to push the children toward the sky. There, they became the constellation Pleiades, or the “Seven Sisters,” which can be seen over the monument. In other stories, the distinctive striations around the...

Siamo a Villa Marigola, a Lerici, all’interno del Lerici Music Festival, “Musica, Immagini e Parole dall’Acqua” con la mostra I miei orizzonti e tu di Giovanni Ozzola, a cura di Carlo Orsini e in collaborazione con Galleria Continua.
Giovanni Ozzola, vista parziale della mostra “I miei orizzonti e tu”, alla Fondazione Lerici. In primo piano a parete: “Untitled – a fine primavera”, 2026 e “Untitled – with a view”, 2026; sullo sfondo: “Venezia – faro di notte”, 2026. Foto di Fabio Gianardi, courtesy Lerici Music Festival 2026
Nella mostra sono presenti fotografia, scultura, installazione e video concepiti per il contesto del Golfo dei Poeti e con il mare che diviene metafora...

La fotografa Glorija Lizde, che vive e lavora a Spalato, utilizza la sua macchina fotografica per costruire quasi-documentari mirati attraverso le immagini, spesso indagando i membri della propria famiglia attraverso conversazioni difficili e in situazioni di precarietà. Non sorprende quindi che Glorija trovi punti di contatto nell’opera del medico Jean-Martin Charcot, le cui immagini di fine Ottocento, che ritraggono donne alle prese con la malattia mentale, possiedono un intenso peso psicologico e sollevano interrogativi culturali su autorialità, soggettività e ruoli di genere.
Glorija Lizde, “Ritratto di famiglia. Che aspetto aveva il mio viso prima della nascita dei miei genitori”, 2022, foto di...

“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.

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João Daniel Pereira’s Website
João Daniel Pereira on Instagram

Julian Adon Alexander  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Julian Adon Alexander’s Website
Julian Adon Alexander on Instagram

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,...

All images courtesy of CHOI&CHOI Gallery and the artist Sculptor Yu Jinyoung garnered international acclaim for her striking figures, whose bodies are often partially transparent. These are individuals “who wish to become invisible,” she says: “those who exist free from external attention and interference.” These explorations of both intentional isolation and somber loneliness have always […]
The post The Once Invisible Figures of Yu JinYoung first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

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Aaron Agosto’s Website
Aaron Agosto on Instagram

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...

Common Objects brings together the work of 97 photographers from across the globe to explore the role of the image and its ability to shape perception. Organized not by theme or geography but by visual association, the book draws on the logic of the reference catalog—a structure built for sustained, democratic looking. Within it, photographs from vastly different cultures and contexts find themselves in unexpected proximity, generating connections and contrasts that no single image could produce alone. In this format, the photographs enter into a subtle dialogue with one another, revealing how context, sequence, and framing shape interpretation and inform visual experience.  
   
   
   
   
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Claudia Koh  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Claudia Koh on Instagram

Photos by Robert Berg, Gregory Gorman, courtesy of the Donum; with additional photos by Annie Owens Balancing awe and meditative moments, the sculptures of The Donum Collection populate a sprawling vineyard estate, with many works many commissioned expressly to respond to the lush landscape they inhabit. Seventy works of art, ranging from bronze sculptures by […]
The post Field Trip: The Donum Collection & Estate Balances Awe and Meditative moments first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

In the mountains of northern Italy, far from his studio in Madrid, David Oliver was supposed to be resting. It was early 2025 and he had gone with friends to a house in the Dolomites on a retreat to disconnect. Instead, Oliver found himself staring at images on his phone of cities under bombardment in […]
The post Grip Face Mirrors Modern Digital Anxiety With Fresh & Furry Artworks first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

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...

The week of Art Basel is for me the most compelling moment in the city, and this year it reaffirmed its position as the most closely watched annual event in the international art calendar.