Nayland Blake at work (all photos © Nayland Blake, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery)This article is part of Hyperallergic’s 2026 Pride Month series, featuring interviews with queer and trans elder artists throughout June.Nayland Blake kind of looks like an alt Santa Claus, with a septum piercing and a beard that ends in a braid, and this wonderful loud, braying laugh. Their work is cerebral, hilarious, charming, kinky, alarming. See the video “Negative Bunny” (1994) in which a fluffy and toxic stuffed bunny tries to convince you of its negative HIV status and cajole you into having sex with it. Or the installation “Mirror Restraint” (1988–89), a BDSM collar suspended between tilted floor-level...

Outside the 10-15 48th Avenue building, where a fire erupted on the morning of June 8 (all screenshots via Linda Ganjian on Instagram)A fire that broke out in Long Island City on Monday left two Queens artists scrambling to rescue decades of work and look for new studios.Linda Ganjian spent much of the day inspecting and salvaging 20 years of sculptures and mixed-media works from water damage after a fire erupted in the two-story loft at 10-15 48th Avenue where she and sculptor Ilan Averbach had studios, she said. Known for making intricate table-top sculptures that play with West African and American craft traditions and for her murals in JFK Terminals 4 and 8, Ganjian stored many of her works in cardboard...

If you've watched and loved Paris Is Burning, the iconic 1990 documentary about Black and Latinx ballroom culture in Harlem, this is the reading list for you. This month, delve into new books that highlight queer and trans artists — past and present — who have always shaped the realms of visual art and culture. One is a catalog about Vaginal Davis, who recently got a retrospective at MoMA PS1 after decades of influential work as a performer, curator, and filmmaker. Another is a jewel-box compendium of photographs of queer nightlife, from Sunil Gupta's portraiture to the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina's critical trove of images and testimonials. As fascist legislation targets queer and...

Three men have each been sentenced to 47 months in prison for the theft of ancient Romanian gold from a Dutch museum, marking a major development in the 16-month-long case. In the pre-dawn hours of January 25, 2025, a band of thieves blasted open several windows at the Drents Museum in the city of Assen, ultimately absconding with a cache of Iron Age gold artifacts from the exhibition “Dacia—Empire of Gold and Silver” and triggering a diplomatic conflict between Romania and the Netherlands. Among the stolen loot was the prized golden helmet of Cotofenesti, dated to the 5th century B.C., as well as Dacian gold spiral bracelets unearthed in sacrificial pits.  Shortly after the theft, Romanian Prime...

LOS ANGELES — I stepped onto the escalator and descended into a cavernous mirrored space, as dazzling light projections covering the walls, floor, and ceiling morphed into hard-edged cyber-graphics, then branching mycological networks, then color-saturated flowers and trees. A thunderous soundtrack swelled from ambient minimalism to cinematic triumph, peppered with bird chirps and the howls of monkeys. The scent of a damp forest floor wafted through the air, dispersed by a device I wore around my neck. The walls seemed to shift around me, and my heart began racing. It was exhilarating. It was mesmerizing. I felt like I was going to be sick.This was my initial experience of Dataland, billed as “the...

From the beaded phrases of Jeffrey Gibson’s sculptural weavings to Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s canoe series to Raven Halfmoon’s fingerprint-textured tributes, a new exhibition marks the largest presentation of American Indigenous work in the U.K. to date. Opening next week, Hold to This Earth at Yorkshire Sculpture Park features nearly 70 pieces by 38 artists, which in turn represent 35 Tribal Nations. “(The artists) reference and honour ancestral knowledge whilst being steadfastly contemporary, asserting a powerful presence and countering narratives of erasure that too often position Indigenous cultures only in terms of the past,” says a statement from Tia Collection, from which the pieces are drawn....

Danielle Mckinney, "Recess" (2026) (photo Channelle Chevelle Russell/Hyperallergic)I met visual artist Danielle Mckinney at the edge of the world in a place where survival required my invention of a counting game: over the course of nine months, how many Black people did I encounter weekly?Hemmed in by the North Sea on one side and medieval ruins on the other, I was freshly 23, just months into a yearlong master’s program on Scotland’s east coast, and alone — yet even this was not a word big enough. Lonely and desperately so, I spent much of my time abroad, and since then wondering how I might name that inexplicable sense of being a walking, talking open wound: a young Black woman abroad tortured by a...

The 16th Gwangju Biennial, opening this fall in South Korea (Sept 5-Nov. 15, 2026), has announced the names of the 40-some artists and groups who will be included in the exhibition. The list was first published by e-flux. The Biennial’s curator, “fast-rising” Singaporean artist and filmmaker Ho Tzu Nyen, was announced in April 2025. Ho represented Singapore at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and organized the Asian Art Biennial in 2019. The title of Ho’s show, “You Must Change Your Life,” is drawn from the last line of Rainer Maria Rilke sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” The show focus on the continuous practice of change and transformation. The inaugural edition of the Gwangju Biennial opened in...

The Museum of Modern Art has announced a forthcoming exhibition dedicated to Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian’s years in New York—in particular, the influence of the city’s boogie-woogie music scene on his art. The exhibition will bring together 30 of Mondrian’s paintings either made or completed between his move to New York in 1940 and his death there in 1944. A pioneer of 20th-century abstraction, Mondrian began as a figurative painter before co-founding the De Stijl art movement—an international collective dedicated to non-representational art—in 1917. After moving to Paris in 1919, he continued to develop his theories on abstract art, eventually settling on the format for which he is best known:...

King Fahad Stadium prepares for 2034
 
On the eastern edge of Riyadh, King Fahad Sports City Stadium rises with the familiar silhouette of a landmark that has carried Saudi football, concerts, and national gatherings since the late 1980s.
 
Opened in 1987 as the first large-scale stadium of its kind in the region, the venue is now entering a major renovation led by Populous in collaboration with the Saudi Ministry of Sports, as the country prepares to host the FIFA World Cup in 2034.
 
The project looks beyond a simple upgrade of seats and services. It will expand capacity, renew the stadium’s technical systems, and reshape the surrounding site into a mixed-use sports park that can support major...

Victor Wembanyama is much more than a transcendant basketball star. In the hours leading up to a decisive Game 3 victory in the 2026 NBA Finals—the first such game in New York City in 25 years—the 7-Foot-4 Frenchman spent the afternoon in Gramercy sketching. As seen in a viral video posted to Instagram on Tuesday, Wembanyama and his sister Eve, who also plays professional basketball, but in Europe, were spotted in Gramercy Park, one of just two private parks in New York City, sketching a statue of Edwin Booth, the 19th-century Shakespearean actor whose brother, John Wilkes, cemented his place in history by assassinating President Abraham Lincoln. Edwin’s statue, depicting him as Hamlet, was sculpted by...

“There was a moment when I was walking between forests and mountains in Tepoztlán, Mexico, while dandelions floated across my face,” Alexis Mata says. “In that instant, I experienced a strange sensation, as if I were standing on another planet, in another time, confronted with an entirely new landscape.” As the dainty seeds drifted through the air, Mata began to think about the ways life forms travel and embed themselves in new ecosystems. He was drawn to the idea of landing, of rooting and growing, which quickly became the basis for a poetic exhibition at Thinkspace in Los Angeles. “Lost Landing” (2026), oil on canvas, 160 x 160 centimeters Titled Lost Landing, the show features Mata’s glitched...

René Magritte’s The Castle of the Pyrenees (1959) has gone to the conservation lab at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem after being accidentally damaged by a young museum visitor. A boy visiting the museum with his family punctured the painting with a pinecone before a museum guard could stop him, museum staff told The Times of Israel. Sharon Tager, head of conservation at the museum, told Ha’aretz that repairs would take several weeks. “We’re experienced in conserving paintings and objects that arrive in poor condition, including works that have been stored since the Holocaust period,” Tager told Ha’aretz. “The first stage is treating the base itself because the hole caused the canvas to sag. We...

1RIN turns number 1 into single-stem vases crafted across Japan
 
Developed by Tokyo-based design company KUMAnoTE, 1RIN is a collection of single-stem vases based on the form of the number 1. The project originated from the idea of placing a single flower in a single vessel, using the numeral as a shared design framework through which different materials, regional traditions, and manufacturing techniques could be explored.
 
The inaugural collection brings together three forms of Japanese craftsmanship: Hasami porcelain from Nagasaki Prefecture, Takaoka bronze casting from Toyama Prefecture, and Yakumo wood carving from Hokkaido. While each vase follows the same numerical silhouette, the character of the...

Array

The Hong Kong jeweller and sculptor unveils parallel installations at Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo and Santa Maria della Pietà, linking mythology, sacred architecture and cosmology

“Ice burns, and it is hard for the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost,” wrote A.S. Byatt in Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami characterizes ice in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman as a capsule that preserves the past “cleanly and clearly,” but possesses no future. In the ephemeral performance “MIZU,” frozen water takes on the form of a woman in an enchanting and emotive meditation on memory, time, and impermanence. “MIZU” is the brainchild of puppeteer and director Élise Vigneron’s Théâtre de L’entrouvert and Companie Furankaï, which encompasses the work of choreographer and circus artist Satchie Noro. The composition...

Frieze Seoul returns this September with over 125 galleries, two new curated sections, expanded Focus

Matthew Travisano has such doubts about Douglas Cuomo's opera recently seen at Opera Parallèle.

Supported by an ingenious production and strong performances, Antonia Bembo's Ercole Amante makes a successful Paris Opera debut.

Array

the new tools of craft
 
For much of the last century, architecture appeared to be moving steadily away from craft. Industrial production favored repetition over variation, efficiency over ornament, and standardization over local expression. As buildings became increasingly assembled from catalogs of prefabricated components, the figure of the artisan seemed to fade from the architectural imagination.
 
Then came the digital revolution. Early computational design opened up entirely new formal possibilities, allowing architects to generate increasingly complex geometries on screen. As digital tools evolved, attention shifted toward finding new ways to translate those geometries into physical structures,...

Role: Managing Editor
Location: remote
Reports to: Editor-in-Chief
 
 
about designboom
 
designboom is one of the most recognized design media brands in the world. We bring together design, architecture, art, and technology to spark creative thought and global dialogue.
 
We’re driven by a simple philosophy: Utopian Optimism and a What If mindset. We believe design isn’t decoration, it’s transformation. One idea, one spark, can outshine the noise and move us forward.
 
the role
  We’re looking for a Managing Editor to run the daily heartbeat of our newsroom.
You’ll own the editorial workflow end to end: shaping the calendar, guiding the team’s output, guarding the quality of every piece we...

atelier vens vanbelle renovates antoon de clerck’s former home
 
Located in Aalter, Belgium, this residential renovation by Atelier Vens Vanbelle transforms the former home and studio of painter Antoon De Clerck into a contemporary dwelling informed by the artist’s visual language. Purchased by Ine and Charles following De Clerck’s death, the property presented a deteriorated structure but retained a number of architectural features that reflected the painter’s interest in abstraction, primary colors, and the principles of De Stijl.
 
De Clerck designed the original house himself, incorporating compositions of lines, planes, and color fields that echoed the themes present throughout his paintings....

So much color in this beautifully agile voice.

Array

The “No Ice in the Cup” campaign is using art to protest US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents' planned deployment to the football tournament

The Serpentine Pavilion is one of the most anticipated events in the international architecture calendar. Since 2000, the annual commission in London’s Kensington Gardens has invited leading architects to design a temporary pavilion on the Serpentine Galleries’ lawn. Its inaugural structure was designed by the late Zaha Hadid, with subsequent contributions coming from the likes of Herzog & de Meuron, Oscar Niemeyer, Sou Fujimoto and others. The project has become a leading platform for experimentation and innovation, offering visitors the chance to experience cutting-edge design in a public setting. 2026 is a landmark year for the Serpentine, marking a quarter of a century since Hadid’s first commission...

Hypha Studios opens its largest project to date in Bankside, transforming an empty office building into a major cultural hub

Array

Ugo Rondinone's MORE LIGHT transforms London through a rainbow installation, fifty-four Bond Street flags and new sunrise and sunset paintings.

Array

Invasive Species at Hypha Studios brings together fifteen women artists exploring memory, sensory experience, psychological dissonance and transformation

COLLISIO, a vibrant exploration of memory, family, nostalgia and material disruption.

Between 2010 and 2023, more than 1,243 council-run youth centres closed, according to UNISON. Meanwhile, one in three people in the UK say their local areas are in decline, with 13,000 high street shops closing in 2024. Across the country, council restrictions, diminishing spaces, gentrification and enduring prejudices see many communities under threat of erasure. Photographer Sophie Green presents a vivid portrait of the communities, subcultures and social gatherings that shape contemporary Britain, forming a vital archive of a changing nation. For over a decade, she has documented how rituals and traditions build connection, belonging and shared identity. From the adrenaline thrill of banger racing, to the...

"Never mind that more and more of these movies look and feel like TV shows"

On June 2, Sotheby’s in New York attempted to stage a private auction for Number 19, 1951, an oil and enamel masterwork by abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, but the sale failed to launch after the auction house wasn’t able to attract enough bidders, according to a report from Artnews.  The asking price for the painting—which is owned by Arne Glimcher, the founder […]

The new FotoFocus Center gives the city’s popular photography biennial a permanent presence and an inclusive mandate

What is prison for? Touted as both a means of punishment and correction, the U.S. carceral system rarely succeeds at the latter. According to the Department of Justice, more than 650,000 people are released from prison annually, with two-thirds being arrested again within three years. Rehabilitation is the purported justification for locking away more of our residents than most other nations, but clearly, the punitive system seldom accomplishes this goal. A new film by writer Marvin Wade and animator Evan Bode juxtaposes the counterproductive forces of the carceral system with the programs, resources, and true determination that make change possible. Presented by The New York Times‘ Opinion section,...

A new online platform, Leonardotheka, was launched on Monday that, for the first time in over 400 years, reunites two historically essential collections of writings and drawings by Leonardo da Vinci that were originally separated hundreds of years ago by the Italian sculptor Pompeo Leoni. The online digital archive, which is the result of a […]

The Museo Dolores Olmedo is welcoming visitors again after a six-year-long closure during which plans were floated to relocate its prized collection

Sweden’s minister for culture, Parisa Liljestrand, at a June 8 press conference announced Tone Hansen as the next director of Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Hansen arrives to the institution from Munch, the museum in Oslo devoted to the work of Edvard Munch, where she has served as director since 2022. She previously helmed the Henie Onstad […]

Double can mean many things. It may imply a duplicate, symmetry, a reflection, a twin, a splitting, or even a shadow self. There is an inherent duality that forms around two parts, which may or may not be in concert with one another. Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank was the first to describe the concept in an essay published in 1914, and Sigmund Freud ran with the idea in his 1919 book The Uncanny. For Freud, the phenomenon illustrated how the unconscious is actually a kind of second consciousness. Scottish psychoanalyst R.D. Laing drew on this foundation in his study of schizophrenia in the book The Divided Self, which delves into the nature of “real” and “false” selves. And in a literary sense, the...

Franco-Argentinian artist Julio Le Parc, whose innovations in kinetic and Op art presaged the interactive art of today, died in Paris on May 30. He was ninety-seven. His death was confirmed to Argentinian newspaper La Nación by his son Yamil. Le Parc was the last surviving cofounding member of the pathbreaking Groupe de Recherche d’Art […]

The English musician will co-organise a show at the UK's Hepworth Wakefield next year

June marks Pride Month, a time when communities around the world celebrate LGBTQIA+ identities while reflecting on the history of the movement and the ongoing fight for equality. Its origins are often traced to June 28, 1969, when a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Lower Manhattan was met with resistance from patrons and local community members. The six days of protests that followed, known as the Stonewall Riots, became a turning point in the struggle for LGBTQIA+ rights and helped galvanise a new era of activism. More than five decades later, Pride continues to honour that legacy while creating space for visibility, solidarity and celebration. Art has long played a vital role in this story, offering a...

Dearest by Zeinab Diomande is a zine presenting a collection of paintings that, while not a formal series, share a cohesive visual language exploring themes of liquidity and the passage of time, achieved through the use of thinned paint and water. The pieces employ texture as a storytelling device, reflecting the rituals and ceremonies of the artist’s alter egos within imagined worlds.
Zeinab Diomande on Instagram

Opera Theater of St. Louis's summer festival opened last night and Parterre Box is celebrating by launching a new feature: custom travel guides!

Emma Hoffman reports on the glimmers of ecstatic artistry in Lise Davidsen's all-Schubert recital at Carnegie Hall with James Baillieu.

Contemporary art is undergoing a profound shift in how it is made, experienced and understood. At Aesthetica, we are responding to this moment with clarity, ambition and intent. What we are witnessing is not simple progression but a fundamental reconfiguration of how art circulates, gains meaning and operates within wider cultural systems. Across Aesthetica 20, we are building a living framework where exhibition, discourse and publication function as a single connected structure. The Future Now Symposium sits at the centre of this, extending the Aesthetica Art Prize into a space where ideas are exchanged, tested and developed in real time. We are not simply presenting contemporary art, we are interrogating its...

Vivian Maier was born in New York on 1 February 1926. The street photographer spent the majority of her life between France and the USA, working as a nanny for several Chicago families. It was only after her death in 2009 that her 150,000 image archive was discovered. In the same year as Maier was born, across the city, Allen Ginsberg arrived on 3 June. His was a life of fame and notoriety, producing poetry, photography and activism that was foundational in the Beat Movement. His radical literary works left an indelible mark on American counterculture, with his renowned poem Howl becoming the subject of an obscenity trial in 1957. As far as artistic figures go, these two could perhaps not be further apart....

Interior Gallery Photos by and ©Tim Hursley, courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum  As a world-class institution showcasing one of the most impressive collections of American art spanning five centuries, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has firmly placed Bentonville, Arkansas on the global cultural map. And, except for a few major holidays, the museum […]
The post Crystal Bridges Opens Impressive New 114,000 Square Foot Expansion first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By A. Laura Brody What is the language of bat senses and beaver teethmarks? How does water communicate to soil and roots, and how do we translate the paths left by burrowing insects or the markings of trees? These are questions asked by the Journal of Therolinguistics exhibition at Descanso Gardens' Boddy House, on view now until July 5, 2026. Oscar Salguero has curated a fascinating exploration of the expressive worlds of plants and animals brought to life by international artists Aistė...

Benny Young  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Benny Young’s Website
Benny Young on Instagram

For an artist to return to painting after life‑altering injury is to witness the human spirit at its most unguarded. In such a moment, understanding the forces that carry you back to the page becomes all‑important, and in Joel Bradish Nichols’ case, the answers lie in the people and pursuits he had cherished. In a coma for months after a near‑fatal accident, his re‑emergence into artistic practice becomes inseparable from a narrative of devotion and determination — a surrounding spiritedness...

Cindy Bernhard
PLATO is honored to present Broken Vessels, a solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Cindy Bernhard, featuring a new body of paintings that explores spiritual rupture, transcendence and the relationship between the human body and the divine. The public opening is scheduled for Thursday, June 4, from 6 to 8 PM in the gallery’s ground floor space. The show will be on view through July 11. At the center of the exhibition is the metaphor of the vessel: the body as a container for spirit and belief. Drawing from archetypal associations between gold and divinity, Christian mysticism and contemporary existential anxiety, Bernhard’s monumental six-foot paintings depict fractured golden forms that...

By Tm Gratkowski With intent and the will to do it her own way, there is a gallery in the most unlikely of places, off the 210 freeway on Lincoln Avenue in Pasadena. Imagine walking into the parking lot of an old lumber yard, stumbling down a paved area past old materials, equipment, and a small cluster of shed-like buildings. Nothing new, no signs, just your average ubiquitous Southern California lot. As you wander in you notice a little welcoming front porch and tucked away in the corner is...

Grace Dodds
 
 
Grace Dodds’s Website
Grace Dodds on Instagram

Array

By Tatou Dede T: How did you end up here, being an artist today? A: I think it depends on how you define the term artist. I was always in theatre since, maybe, kindergarten. When I was a child I used to produce and direct sort of nonsensical plays for my schools, wherever I was, in Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley. So every year I produced a very bizarre play that, for some reason, every school had me put on. And then I studied with the Berkeley Rep theater. After that I went to UCLA and...