Self-healing concrete used to build pompeii in the past
 
A new analysis by MIT researchers reveals that Pompeii’s brick structures still stand because the ancient Romans used self-healing concrete that lasts for thousands of years. In 2023, MIT Associate Professor Admir Masic and his team published a paper explaining how Roman concrete was made, describing a method called hot-mixing. In this process, lime fragments are mixed dry with volcanic ash and other materials, and water is added only at the end. When water touches the dry mix, it creates heat, which traps the lime inside the concrete as small white pieces. These pieces can later dissolve and fill cracks, giving the concrete the ability to repair...

Frank Gehry, a towering figure in the worlds of architecture and design, died at his home in Santa Monica, California, on December 5, after a brief respiratory illness. Over the course of his eight-decade career, Gehry altered the look of modern cities with his ebulliently sculptural public buildings, becoming one of the best known and […]

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‘landscapes’ by laura gonzalez glows in new york
 
Landscapes, a new exhibition by Parisian designer Laura Gonzalez, opens at her Franklin Street gallery space in New York to present a focused dialogue with French artist Fabien Conti. The show, which includes paintings, handcrafted furnishings, and sculptural lighting pieces, introduces a new direction in the designer’s practice which still continues her dedication to material experimentations and crafted interiors.
 
designboom previewed the exhibition ahead of its opening to speak with Gonzalez, who explained the spirit of her work: ‘We opened one and a half years ago. The new exhibition is about landscape — we are exploring the concept of...

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As the year comes to an end, I’m really at a loss for where to start recapping 2025’s top meme-ories. I’d wager that the inhumane detention of immigrants, the dismantling of arts funding throughout the United States, a government shutdown, SNAP benefits dangling by a thread, and the trickling release of Epstein file batches were at least partially responsible for harshing the vibes, but I still have to hold JD Vance and Elon Musk accountable for taking turns in bludgeoning the concept of humor with a spiked baseball bat in the thick of it all.What I can say about 2025 is that humor, especially the derisive sort, is the primary weapon in moments of profound incompetence, ignorance, and injustice far...

The Hammer Museum hosts 28 artists' projects while looking back on a tumultuous year in California’s biggest city

Art Movements, published every Thursday afternoon, is a roundup of must-know news, appointments, awards, and other happenings in today’s chaotic art world.A Big Museum WeekIt's been quite a year for the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, which had several federal grants terminated by the Trump administration in April and dozens of masked Customs and Border Patrol agents swarming its plaza a few months later. But 2025 is ending on a high note for the institution, which has just received a $20 million gift — the largest in its history — from the philanthropic coffers of MacKenzie Scott, easily the only good thing Jeff Bezos has ever been tangentially connected to.Elsewhere, museums are...

As part of a radical “restructuring” to address a $48 million deficit, New York’s New School for Social Research is offering voluntary severance programs to a large group of faculty and staff. A December 3 email laying out the terms of the offer, which ARTnews has reviewed, went to 169 members of faculty and staff, including some forty percent of full-time faculty. The letter named a December 15 deadline to decide on whether to accept the offer. According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the school has indicated that layoffs will ensue if insufficient numbers of employees opt for the voluntary severance. Speaking recently to Gothamist, AAUP called the school’s latest move...

The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (Hear) Act of 2025, passed unanimously in the Senate and now heads to the House of Representatives

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard), in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, has named curator, writer, and educator Hamza Walker the winner of the 2026 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. The honor, presented annually since 1998, recognizes “outstanding curatorial achievements of individuals bringing innovative thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition-making,” per […]

The UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum has named Kathryn Kanjo as its new director. Kanjo, who for nine years has served as director and CEO of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, will be the first leader of the institution, formed this past October when the University of California, Irvine, took over the Orange County Museum of Art and […]

It’s somehow been more than a year already since we launched Colossal’s new site design, and it’s spectacular to hear your feedback about how you peruse and use the site. Whether you click on things of interest in our newsletters or encourage your students to explore thousands of articles about artists, nature, science, and visual culture, we want you to keep coming back—and learning—again and again. That’s why we’re continuing to build out the Colossal Art Glossary! This month, we’ve added 10 new entries: Activist Art Bauhaus Brutalism Community Art / Social Practice Dutch Golden Age painting Land Art / Environmental Art Magical Realism Tondo Vanitas WPA / Federal Art Project Teachers...

Andaz Casa de Playa designed by QBO3 Arquitectos
 
Perched within the lush coastal landscape of Costa Rica’s Papagayo Peninsula, the Andaz Casa de Playa is a masterclass in coastal integration, designed by QBO3 Arquitectos. The beach club is structured around a modular volumetric composition that shapes an environment embodying relaxed elegance. At its core, the design emphasizes spatial clarity and a seamless flow between the central open-air pavilion and the beachfront, ensuring a fluid experience that culminates with uninterrupted views of the Pacific Ocean. a pool area embraced by nature, where sunlight, trees, and calm water define the atmosphere
 
 
costa rica beachfront pavilion
 
The heart of...

For about the price of a good toaster oven that doesn't break upon first use, you might be able to take home your very own Pablo Picasso painting. The auction series 1 Picasso for 100 Euros is back for the third time since 2013, raffling an original Picasso work for €100 (~$117) a ticket to support a charitable organization. This year, Picasso's “Tête de Femme (Head of a Woman)” (1941), a gouache on paper, will be up for sale to benefit research at the Fondation Recherche Alzheimer, France's leading Alzheimer's research organization. The artwork is estimated to be worth €1 million (~$1.17 million). Proceeds from the competition will fund the expansion of research centers for the...

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond has returned 41 terracotta relief fragments valued around $400,000 to Turkey after an investigation led by the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. The works, acquired by the VMFA in the 1970s, were found to have been illegally taken from a Phrygian temple dating back to the 6th century B.C.E. The museum purchased 34 of the reliefs from Summa Galleries in Beverly Hills, California, in 1978, and then received others as gifts from the Chicago-based antiquities dealer Harlan J. Berk as well as Summa Galleries a year later. “The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts takes seriously and responds to all restitution claims for works...

The celebrity style luminaries will preside over the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute's star-filled fundraiser alongside Anna Wintour

The Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands in Amsterdam, announced today that it will partner with the municipality of Eindhoven to build a satellite branch in Eindhoven. The branch will show works from the Rijksmuseum’s collection. With a collection of over one million objects, the Rijksmuseum is famous for its holdings of Dutch art from 1200 to now, including works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Judith Leyster, Frans Hals, Rachel Ruysch, Vincent van Gogh, Karel Appel, and others. In pride of place are such masterpieces of Dutch Golden Age art as Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (c. 1660), Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642), and Hendrick Avercamp’s Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters...

TORONTO — Throughout his long career in photography, Jeff Wall has never been interested in capturing Henri Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment.” For more than four decades, the renowned Vancouver-based artist has treated the camera not as a tool for recording reality, but as a medium for playfully constructing it. But his body of work feels especially relevant — if a tad politically disengaged — right now, as we navigate AI-generated images, deepfakes, and questions about photographic reliability. Jeff Wall Photographs 1984–2023, his first major Canadian survey in over 25 years, fills three floors at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto with his large-scale light boxes and carefully staged...

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For freelancers, artists, and the self-employed, tax season can feel like a looming cloud. Hannah Cole’s Taxes for Humans: Simplify Your Taxes and Change the World When You’re Self-Employed (Wiley, 2025) offers a refreshing antidote: a guide that is as practical as it is empowering. Cole, an artist turned tax specialist and host of the Sunlight Tax podcast, brings empathy and clarity to a topic often shrouded in anxiety and jargon.Cole’s book is not just about crunching numbers — it’s about dismantling fear and reclaiming your agency. With humor and warmth, she walks readers through planning, filing, and even fixing mistakes. As Joe Saul-Sehy, creator of the Stacking Benjamins podcast, puts it,...

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Ceal Floyer, an artist whose spare sculptures charmed and confused in equal measure, died on Thursday at 57. Esther Schipper, the Berlin-based gallery that represented her alongside Lisson and 303, said that she died after a long battle with illness. Floyer received international attention for sleek artworks that consider how meaning is constructed. Working within a long tradition of conceptual art that extends back to the 1960s, Floyer often made sculptures using familiar objects such as ladders, umbrellas, drains, and receipts, pondering what happens to the everyday when it is raised to the status of art. Her work was frequently sly and dryly funny. Her most famous piece, Light Switch (1992–99), featured a...

Post-Fair will return to Santa Monica from February 26–28 for its second edition, bringing 30 galleries—and 31 total exhibitors including the project space Untitled Love—back to the Art Deco former post office that helped define the fair’s early identity. Founded by Los Angeles dealer Chris Sharp, the fair debuted last year as a deliberately low-cost counterpoint to Los Angeles’s increasingly expensive fair landscape. Its inaugural edition offered single-artist presentations at a flat fee and leaned into what Sharp in the Art Newspaper called an “economy of presentation, financial economy and economy of production”—a pared-down model intended to encourage experimentation and reduce the...

Glasgow-born Nigerian artist Nnena Kalu has been named the winner of the 2025 Turner Prize. Considered the UK’s most prestigious award in the field of the visual arts, the prize comes with a £25,000 purse (about $33,000). Kalu, who is autistic and largely unable to communicate verbally, is known for colorful large-scale swirling abstract drawings and for […]

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From sequins, glass beads, rhinestones, plaster, paint, and more, Jorge Mañes Rubio sculpts new narratives from ancient tales. Drawing on the motifs of Spanish illuminated manuscripts, as well as family heirlooms and pop culture, the artist explores the relationship between past and present, reinterpreting religious imagery into unexpected forms like beaded basketballs and other functional objects. One recent work, “La Noche que Desvela una Luz sin Medida,” fashions a black safety glove used by motocross racers into a form that evokes a medieval gauntlet. It’s embellished with flame motifs, twisted cord, glass, and tiny medallions that the artist’s great-grandmother collected at monasteries across...

More than 600 objects were stolen from the collection of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, which closed in 2008

A new vision for Plum Village buddhist monastery in france
 
MVRDV advances a series of projects for the Plum Village Buddhist Monastery in southern Dordogne, France, where construction approval has now been granted for the first components of a long-term collaboration. The work spans two masterplans for the Upper and Lower Hamlets, along with a new nunnery, four guest houses, and a renovated book shop.
 
Developed with Bordeaux-based co-architect MoonWalkLocal, the proposals reflect the monastery’s emphasis on circular materials and sensitive intervention in a rural landscape.
 
The collaboration emerged from extended stays by the design team, who joined daily routines in both hamlets to understand how...

The Aristophil founder faces five years in prison

Gulfshore Opera's vigorous production of Carmen answers a familiar question.

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It would be difficult to find a better description for Ambroise Thomas’s newly-recovered Psyché, recently heard in a new recording from Palazzetto Bru Zane, than the one uttered by her suitors: "Charmante Psyché!"

Dika Design redefines early learning through irregular forms
  Fuzhou ESUO Future Kindergarten by Dika Architectural Design Center in Fuzhou, China, reimagines early childhood education through a playful, irregularly shaped building crowned with a rooftop astronaut sculpture. The structure transforms traditional kindergarten layouts into a three-dimensional exploration system that spans from ground level to corridors and rooftops. Corridors function as all-weather adventure paths, while each floor becomes
an interactive playground. The astronaut sculpture atop the building serves as a visual and conceptual anchor, inviting children to imagine themselves as cosmic explorers while reinforcing the theme of...

Christmas should be over the top, opulent, a little sad, utterly sincere, and ever so vulgar.

Curator Emily S. J. Lee reflects on how ‘Shapeshifters’ rethinks museological conventions, foregrounds opacity and care, and gathers artists whose practices challenge inherited colonial frameworks. Installation view of ‘Shapeshifters: On Wounds, Wonders and Transformation’ (2025) […]

A landmark recognition for the neurodivergent artist whose dynamic sculptures and drawings reshape contemporary abstraction The winner of the Turner Prize 2025, Nnena Kalu, in their exhibition at Cartwright Hall. The winner was announced at […]

A single oak tree can support more than 2,300 species: lichens clinging to bark, birds nesting in branches, butterflies drifting through leaves and a vast underground network of fungi. In Of the Oak, now open at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, acclaimed collective Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) makes this extraordinary biodiversity visible. They have created a “digital double” of Kew Gardens’ majestic Lucombe Oak – one of its oldest trees – using LiDAR, radar and CT-scanning. The resulting immersive video and sound experience is as enchanting as it is educational, showing how energy and carbon flow into the soil, whilst aiming to inspire a renewed connection with the natural world. The piece now travels...

Bart Nelissen is a visual artist whose work explores how we make sense of an increasingly overwhelming digital world. In his Aesthetica Art Prize-shortlisted series Datascapes, Nelissen takes cloud-like digital images and breaks them down into small geometric fragments – tiny squares that act like pieces of data. He layers and recombines these fragments, building new visual structures that reveal hidden patterns, echoing the human effort to find meaning in the chaos of information that surrounds us. Nelissen is fascinated by our instinctive drive for progress and our belief that innovation and technology can solve the problems we face. At the same time, he critically examines the darker side of...

 
From 19 January – 02 April 2026, we’ll take over four floors of the ARB building with work by 120 photographers from around the world, transforming the space and covering the walls with hundreds of images printed by our favourite newspaper print partners Newspaper Club. As an added bonus for 2026, the last two weeks of the exhibition will also see it featured as part of the Cambridge Festival.
© Nicola Di Nella
The selected photographers exhibiting in the Shutter Hub OPEN 2026 are:
Stewart Alexander, Rachel Hope Allan, Alessandro Ascenzi, Chris Avis, Wendy Bagnall, Madina Baymirzaeva, Jan Beesley, Alan Bennett, Sarah Bird, Susan Bittker, Ana Blumenkron, Rick Blumsack, Anton Bou, Victoria Braithwaite,...

Bringing together works that orbit around the sun as image, index, and metaphor, curator Murtaza Vali offers a compelling lens on ten years of experimentation at 421. SUN™ becomes an elemental archive through which the […]

Crossover, la mostra di Anastasia Sosunova curata da Chiara Nuzzi presso ICA Milano, è un laboratorio per la decifrazione e risemantizzazione di codici visivi stratificati e complessi. Temi macroscopici quali la religione, il crollo del blocco sovietico, dei suoi stati satelliti e il conseguente avvento del mito borghese-capitalista, si fondono con fattori microscopici della narrazione storica, come il dato autobiografico e il folklore locale. Attraverso una prospettiva che unisce lo studio delle immagini all’etnologia e all’antropologia, Sosunova elabora una narrazione entro cui si muovono tradizione ed economia di mercato, folklore e produzione, valore culturale e valore monetario, “amore, fanatismo,...

On the familiar comforts of Miami Art Week 2025

For Shuo Hao, finding the proper place is at the heart of her practice. The Chinese artist, who is currently based in Paris, has long been interested in the ancient text Yijing and how it offers a system of understanding for a world perpetually in flux. The cosmological book provides structure through the five elements—earth, water, air, fire, and metal—and also considers the relationships between humans and nature and the order of things, more broadly. Shuo Hao works with antique furniture, typically sourced from auctions and second-hand shops. Wood worn with age is her preferred material, and most objects she selects date between the 16th and 20th centuries. Like much of her practice, choosing these...

Indigo dye, which is derived from Indigofera tinctoria, is deeply connected to craft traditions in cultures where the plant is endemic, such as the tropical regions of Western Africa, the stretch between Tanzania and South Africa, and the Indian subcontinent to Southeast Asia. A laborious process of texturizing and fermentation creates a deep blue dye that continues to be one of the most sought-after natural pigments for textiles and garments. Indigo also fulfills a spiritual and social role in some cultures, like the Yoruba people of Nigeria and Benin or the Manding of Mali, whose dye-makers customarily perform rituals when beginning a new batch. “Dry Season 2” (2025), acrylic on canvas, 200 x 200...

At 72, Elaine Carr is painting with gratitude. They lean towards more positive themes now. Their paintings tend to be a composition of beautiful colors that most times seem animated. Known for their bold colors and sometimes playful themes, Elaine's paintings are colorful compositions of still life, landscapes, and portraiture. They're primarily self-taught, having painted since childhood, but now in their retirement years they paint with a goal of creating works that evoke good emotions....

If there’s a feeling that could sum up the whiplash of living online and off, it might be cognitive dissonance. This deep sense of unease emerges when our actions and beliefs don’t align or when something we’d previously thought true is proven false. Psychology tells us that the constructive way to deal with this unwanted feeling is to incorporate the new information into our lives, instead of pretending it doesn’t exist or continuing to believe something inaccurate. In an era of AI slop and conspiracy theories ruling the highest levels of government, cognitive dissonance will likely be a fixture of contemporary life for the foreseeable future. It’s also an apt title for a new body of work by Los...

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Joshua Dudley Greer’s Website
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Grand Tier Grab Bag highlights La Scala's opening night prima donna Sara Jakubiak with an excerpt of her Chrysothemis recorded last year.

The Turner Prize, established in 1984 and named after the radical Romantic painter JMW Turner, has long reflected the shifting currents of British contemporary art. Each year, the award spotlights those pushing the boundaries of creativity, urging audiences to reconsider both the art world and our modern society. Previous editions have brought early recognition to the likes of Damien Hirst, Lubaina Himid and Laure Prouvost. Now, NNena Kalu joins that illustrious list. The artist was named as the 2025 winner in an awards ceremony in Bradford last night. It makes Kalu the first artist with a learning disability to receive the renowned accolade. The jury commended Kalu’s “bold and compelling work”, praising...

Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination explores the transformative power of photographic portraiture to shape identity, imagination and political consciousness. The exhibition traces how photographers across mid-20th century Africa and its diaspora captured the aspirations of individuals while contributing to broader movements for Pan-African solidarity. These portraits illuminate Africa not only as a physical continent but as a conceptual space, defined by dialogue, creativity and shared possibility. Through the circulation of images across borders, the exhibition demonstrates how portraiture functioned as both witness and catalyst during moments of decolonial transformation, when European...

La fotografia dell’intimità si muove da sempre su un crinale problematico, sospeso in bilico tra il desiderio di preservare la dimensione privata dell’esperienza e la necessità di condividerla attraverso la visibilità pubblica dell’immagine. Al di là delle ragioni autobiografiche, quando un artista decide di fotografare il proprio corpo, i propri spazi domestici e i momenti vulnerabili della quotidianità compie anzitutto un gesto di negoziazione con la propria presenza nel mondo, forzando i confini tra ciò che viene considerato appropriato mostrare e ciò che dovrebbe restare celato e rivendicando il diritto di svincolare la propria rappresentazione dalle imposizioni esterne. L’atto di...

Offenbach's Robinson Crusoé is salvaged from obscurity. 

A Venezia capita spesso che le cose sembrino immobili, come se l’intera città vivesse in apnea tra un’acqua alta e l’altra. Poi succede che qualcuno, all’improvviso, ti metta davanti un’eruzione. Una vera. O almeno la sua versione pittorica. È quello che accade entrando allo Spazio SV, dove c’è Simone Rutigliano che ti guarda come un tipo che ha appena scalato un vulcano e vuole raccontarti cosa ha visto dentro il cratere. La mostra si chiama Magma, e non c’è titolo più onesto: tutto qui parla di qualcosa che preme, ribolle, scalpita. A partire da lui, l’artista leccese trapiantato a Venezia, che sembra aver raggiunto quella fase della vita in cui si capisce che non si può continuare a...

Exploring how classical Italian aesthetics continue to inspire and transform her artistic journey. In this conversation with Clay Artist, Monica Vaccari , she reflects on the enduring influence of classical Italian aesthetics and how they shape her creative practice. Discover the inspirations behind her work and the dialogue she creates between tradition and contemporary artistry. Access the full interview below: Conversation with Clay Artist, Monica Vaccari on classical Influences on...

This winter, exhibitions across Europe, the UK and USA are showcasing influential documentarians, past and present. This list offers a snapshot of what’s on, from iconic 20th-century work by Lee Miller and Ruth Orkin to more expansive definitions of the genre by contemporary figures like Coco Fusco, Hajar Benjida and Naima Green. Together, these shows demonstrate just how wide-ranging documentary practice has become – stretching from wartime photojournalism to performance-driven self-portraiture, politically charged interventions and deeply collaborative portrayals of community. They reveal a field that is constantly evolving, responsive to social change and alive with new approaches to truth-telling....

In conversation with Suzette Bell-Roberts, Adama Delphine Fawundu traces the spiralling currents of Luba, Kongo, and Yoruba knowledge systems, revealing how vibration, memory, and ancestral materials converge in her immersive installation for the 36th Bienal […]

“Creating new characters is a way for me to collect ‘things’ without having to collect actual physical things. Read the full article on Matt Furie by clicking above!
The post Cruisin’ With Matt Furie first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

Lately in the studio, Jalila Bell is fired up clearing space for new work and diving into their steampunk series—where imagination, invention, and rebellion collide. At 50, hitting that milestone has powered them up and made them bolder. They're being pushier with mixed-media materials, mashing together effigy and new worlds. With their new steampunk series, they're breaking rules about what "their art" looks like, bending reality, and letting their imagination lead the charge. What's...

Sayuri Ichida  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Sayuri Ichida’s Website
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