fierce pussy, a collective of lesbian artists, said that its Venice Biennale contribution was censored by the Italian city ahead of the opening of the exhibition today. The collective designed posters for the Biennale that address queer people and trans people. The phrase “Welcome queers and trans people” appears in both English and Italian on one poster that features the beloved Lion of Venice sculpture, which the group rendered as a cat. Another poster features the words “we are queers and trans people” alongside a list of occupations, from “your mortician” to “your favorite newscaster.” The list culminates in the words “we are everyone.” Composed of the artists Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy...

The shapes of Maxwell Mustardo’s ceramic works evoke ancient amphorae, kraters, and, most recently, kylix—a wide Greek cup with handles—although their surfaces feel distinctly organic. Textured growths cloak the vessels with fungal or lichen-esque forms, albeit in color palettes that are bold and otherworldly. Fluorescent oranges, pinks, and greens appear to glow in even the most mundane settings, firmly planting the pieces at the intersection of historic craft, nature, and the uncanny. “I am always tweaking chemistry and application methods to push certain surface effects that I like, that feel organic and grown,” Mustardo tells Colossal. “More recent series of work have tried to blur the...

Curtis Opera and a charming cast of young singers cast a spell with their beguiling production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

Four key takeaways from a new book about the innovative use of canvas in 16th-century Italy

Artist Anish Kapoor called for the United States to be banned from the 2026 edition of the Venice Biennale while also applauding the jury’s recent decision to resign en masse. In an interview with the Guardian, Kapoor called the jury’s decision “courageous” and further criticized the US. “I would hope that [the jury] might have also excluded the United States for its abhorrent politics of hate and its incessant warmongering,” he said. While the jury did not explicitly say it had done so due to the inclusion of Israel and Russia in the exhibition, it had previously released a statement saying it would not consider for awards any national pavilions by countries who currently charged with crimes...

The painter made gravity her collaborator, transforming poured oil paint into one of the defining gestures of late 20th-century abstraction

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. Good Morning! The Headlines WE THE LUCKY FEW? Billionaire Ken Griffin is officially the owner of the only two known surviving copies of the US Constitution in private hands, reports the New York Times . On Monday, Griffin announced that he had acquired an original print of the document via a private sale for an undisclosed amount, and that he would exhibit it in New York for the country’s 250th anniversary. Griffin famously paid $43.2 million in 2021 for another first printing of the Constitution, setting a record for the highest auction sale in that category. The first copy he purchased...

When it comes to art, Trump is an utter vacuum—he makes the Nazis look like great connoisseurs, says author John-Paul Stonard

Lavar Munroe is showing work alongside that of his mentor, the late John Beadle, celebrating the islands' community and carnival traditions

“Young people aren’t interesting these days.” It was this sentiment, heard over again from older groups, that artist Pieter Henket cites as the inspiration for his latest project. Birds of Mexico City is a collection of portraits focusing on young Mexicans who are redefining contemporary expressions of gender, identity, tradition and spirituality. The book is a love letter to the next generation – their fearlessness, self-expression and refusal to compromise. As Henket writes in the introduction: “I thought: how incredible that these kids love and respect themselves enough to step into the world exactly as they are, without worrying what anyone might say. It brought me back to my own youth. I was a...

The best Emin publications, from her searingly honest autobiography to a collection of revealing snapshots—selected by the Tate’s assistant curator Jess Baxter

polish pavilion emphasises communication beyond speech 
 
What if communication was not something we mastered, but something we learned to listen into – slowly, collectively, and across difference? Artists Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski represent Poland at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, with Liquid Tongues, an immersive audio-video installation that rethinks who language belongs to. In a moment shaped by fractured systems and dominant narratives, the project shifts attention toward the quieter, often overlooked forms of exchange that sustain connection.
 
Curated by Ewa Chomicka and Jolanta Woszczenko, and produced by Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Liquid Tongues...

Over a decade ago, I encountered the work of poet, essayist, and artist Lora Mathis, whose photographic series spelled out poignant phrases in letter beads over vintage floral imagery. For Mathis, ‘radical softness’ was a way to recognize the profound power of emotional vulnerability, and the ways deep feeling might combat the rigid friction of a heteropatriarchal capitalist system. While Mathis has since reflected on the complexities of this concept, rightly acknowledging how softness can be coopted or wielded as a shield of privilege, I often find myself returning to this term, wondering how it might translate in today’s context and within the contemporary disciplines we document at designboom.
 
The...

Over the years, I must have written hundreds of them. Letters for people facing serious injustice and violations of their human rights. Through Amnesty International, you write to bring their situation to the attention of those in power. Most of the time, there is no immediate effect. But every now and again, a sentence is reconsidered or someone is released. My letter does not tip the balance; the hundreds, sometimes thousands of them do. 
Miriam van der Lubbe | image by Lisa Klappe
 
 
Small gestures, collective force
 
This logic of small gestures and collective force offers a useful way of thinking about what we might call radical softness. The term can sound personal or abstract, linked to ideas like...

toward a softer infrastructure
 
In place of grand technological fixes, emerging practices are beginning to align with slower, more reciprocal processes by working with living organisms, cultivating attention, and embracing the ongoing labor of maintenance and care. Projects like those developed by environmental design practice ecoLogicStudio imagine environments not as static solutions, but as evolving relationships between human and non-human actors, where even microscopic life becomes an active participant in shaping collective futures.
 
The group’s projects sit close to the idea of a future carried by subtle shifts and ongoing repair. Air becomes the main site of work, and the act of designing...

Anna Tomowa-Sintow, "Ernani Involami," from the MET Centenial Gala, 1983.

Pittsburgh is a hidden art gem, and critic Ed Simon has proof. The Carnegie International — the oldest survey of its kind in the country — brings work by 61 artists from around the world to the Steel City, a hub independent of the New York and LA art scenes. Read his review of this year’s edition, “where the personal is political.”In the wake of the annual “moral shit show” that is the Met Gala — in the words of one protest sign last night — we report on a heavily costumed action against Jeff Bezos blocks away from the museum steps, and a guerrilla projection on the billionaire's penthouse. Read on for Editor-in-Chief Hakim Bishara’s reflections on the Marcel Duchamp show at MoMA, and...

 A former BBC reporter is claiming that the U.K. broadcaster “buried” footage that he captured of Banksy at one of his mural sites in New York City. Nick Bryant, who previously served as the BBC’s New York correspondent, detailed his encounter with the anonymous British street artist and political activist in a recent post on his Substack. After establishing a relationship with Banksy’s team while covering the artist’s residency in NYC in 2013 for the broadcaster, Bryant said he “kept in touch with his PR team.” A few years had passed when “one morning in March 2018, I was awoken by a phone call from Britain. Banksy’s PR team wanted to give me a heads-up. That day, he would unveil a...

INS Studio Organizes Literacy House Around community learning
 
Taobun Literacy House by INS Studio adapts the former residence of a university professor into a community-oriented space defined by reading and learning. Located within an educational district in Makassar, Indonesia, the café-workspace project is surrounded by universities, schools, and kindergartens, situating it within an active academic context.
 
The design is structured around spatial organization. The program supports reading, writing, and creative activities, with a compact library positioned at the center of the plan. This central element establishes a clear focal point and defines the primary function of the space. Surrounding areas...

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There are few figures in the canon of 20th century image-making who require less introduction than Cecil Beaton. A polymath of rare fluency, Beaton moved effortlessly between photography, costume design and stagecraft, shaping the visual language of modern celebrity with a precision that still reverberates today. His lens did not simply capture – it constructed, elevating its subjects into carefully composed myths of glamour and identity. His work defined an era in which appearance became inseparable from performance, and portraiture from spectacle. To encounter Beaton is to encounter the architecture of fame itself. Beaton’s accolades are well rehearsed, yet no less striking for their familiarity. A...

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Mater Ex Mater – Act I, mostra personale di Navid Azimi Sajadi (Teheran, 1982) in corso a Bologna nella giovane galleria di ricerca Studio la Linea Verticale, è la prima configurazione pubblica di un progetto che avrebbe dovuto essere più vasto e che ora nelle sue lacune mostra in concreto le conseguenze distruttive di ogni guerra. La pressione geopolitica ha, infatti, reso impossibile completare il piano originale, e ciò che il pubblico incontra è quanto l’artista è riuscito a portare fuori dall’Iran prima che il conflitto chiudesse ogni varco. Tappeti prodotti sotto la sua supervisione diretta nel distretto di Mozafariyeh (storica area all’interno del bazar di Tabriz, rinomata fin dal XII...

Amy Sherald brought one of her most beloved paintings to life for tonight’s Met Gala, which was held to benefit the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. With the help of designer Thom Browne, Sherald dressed up as the little girl in her 2014 painting Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), the work that won the artist the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Prize and appeared on a New Yorker cover last year. The painting, which is featured in a traveling Sherald survey that opens at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art on May 15, features a young woman holding an oversized teacup and staring at the viewer. Sherald drew her inspiration for the work from Alice’s Adventures in...

As fashion’s elite strutted up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, tinted an eerie, mildewy green for the Met Gala tonight, May 4, a small but rollicking crowd of protesters unfurled its own red carpet just a few blocks away. Orchestrated by the NYC-based advocacy group Rise and Resist, the action drew dozens of concerned, costumed citizens in a show of defiance against the billionaire class and Jeff Bezos, who is co-chairing this year’s event with his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos.“It’s such an exercise in triviality and an ostentatious display of wealth and power a time when so many Americans are under serious, serious threat,” Jay W. Walker, the event’s emcee, told Hyperallergic. The...

PITTSBURGH — When the landmark exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection launched at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, artist Chris Ofili became a major player in the scrum of the culture wars. Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” (1996), a colorful, yellow-toned mixed-media painting of the mother of Christ collaged with images of women’s genitalia excised from pornographic magazines, and supported by a stand composed of two lumps of dried elephant dung, was deemed by then New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani as “sick … disgusting,” and a “desecration of someone else’s religion” (Ofili, like Giuliani, is Roman Catholic). The New York Post, in its indomitable way, covered...

The chaos swirling around the forthcoming 2026 Venice Biennale is showing no signs of slowing down: On Monday, in a statement, Biennale organizers announced that Iran had dropped out and would no longer be exhibiting its planned pavilion. The announcement comes mere days before the exhibition opens to the public, and amid a fragile ceasefire between the […]

If there’s a factory tour on offer in my vicinity, count me in. As the child of two teachers, I developed an abiding fascination with how things are made during family vacations, roadtripping around the South and up to New England, often with educational detours along the way. We toured a cheese factory, a whiskey distillery, a glassblowing workshop, a crayon factory, an ice cream factory, and more. These places offer a taste of what it takes to turn, say, milk into a creamy pint of Cherry Garcia, and a glimpse at the glinting machinery, ingenuity, and labor involved in the manufacturing process.In the Cooper Hewitt’s current exhibition, Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne, you...

Alison Knowles is often regarded as the "first woman" of Fluxus, the intrepid group that took the piss out of art itself. Six months after her death, Lauren Moya Ford examines the only book dedicated to her work and life — the latter of which still remains shrouded in mystery, despite the author's best efforts. Ford considers one of the many questions that plague historians: Can we understand the work if we do not first understand the artist?More books to kick off May, which spiritually if not technically marks the start of summer, including Ed Simon on the qualities that set Hans Holbein's portraits apart and Melissa Holbrook Pierson on a photographer's engagement with the endless landscape...

Manifesta, the nomadic European biennial launched in 1996, is losing its founding director, Hedwig Fijen. Fijen announced that she would depart on October 5. She began working on Manifesta in 1991, when she was commissioned by the Netherlands Office for Fine Arts in The Hague to develop a pan-European platform. The biennial’s first edition took […]

A muscular Englishman in a khaki kilt and black beret hops atop the edge of an old well clad in traditional Spanish tile, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows in what can only be called an act of bravery.  High winds and rain pelt a group of visitors from all directions, and yet, this charismatic performer stands tall above the cobblestone to announce that he’s been living on this vacant island for nearly two centuries. He’s here to give us a tour. “This has been my home for 174 years,” the man says, introducing himself as Captain Horatio Hollingwood. “I arrived in command of a well-known British merchant ship, responsible for transporting goods of every sort. But alongside grain, wool, and oil,...

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced last week that it has received a donation of $23 million from recently elected trustee Jennifer Rubio and her husband, Stewart Butterfield, via the Rubio Butterfield Foundation. Rubio, the cofounder and former CEO of Away luggage, and Butterfield, the cofounder of the workplace team messaging application Slack, also made […]

The organizers of the Venice Biennale have announced that they will this year dispense with the tradition of awarding Golden Lions for Best Artist and Best National Pavilion, Hyperallergic reports. No Silver Lions will be handed out either. Instead, visitors will be invited to vote for their choice of best artist in the main exhibition […]

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Statue of Ganesha looted from a temple in Madhya Pradesh, India NEW YORK, NEW YORK—According to a report in The Telegraph, the United States repatriated 657 artifacts to India in a ceremony held at the Consulate General of India in New York. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said that the objects were recovered in multiple investigations of antiquities trafficking. “The scale of the trafficking networks that targeted cultural heritage in India is massive, as demonstrated by the return of more than 600 pieces today,” Bragg explained. “There is unfortunately more work to be done to return stolen artifacts back to India,” he added. The objects returned in the ceremony include a bronze figure of...

Archival aerial photograph of Las Playas Intaglio, Arizona AJO, ARIZONA—According to a Washington Post report, an intaglio that looks like a fish has been damaged in southwestern Arizona by construction crews building a second wall on the border with Mexico parallel to the first. Waivers issued by the Department of Homeland Security exempted border wall construction crews from laws requiring the protection of Indigenous archaeological sites and the environment. Located inside Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, the Las Playas intaglio, which is estimated to be more than 1,000 years old and measured about 200 feet long when intact, was recorded by archaeologists Richard Martynec and Sandra Martynec in...

Claire Bishop's Review of a Venice Biennale in "interesting times"

Images of a lamb and cross decorate this coin, which was found in Jutland, Denmark. COPENHAGEN, DENMARK—The Viking Herald reports that two rare English “Lamb of God” coins were recently unearthed in Jutland. During the eleventh century, English monarchs undertook various initiatives to try to ward off seemingly unending Viking attacks. Around 1009, King Æthelred the Unready even minted unusual coins in the hope of obtaining divine protection. The objects feature a lamb and a cross on one side—a Christian motif alluding to Christ’s sacrifice—and a dove on the other, a symbol of the Holy Spirit. Not only did these coins fail in their objective, they became somewhat coveted by Viking raiders, who...

In the late 12th century, a nobleman named Count Gerard van Loon commissioned an abbey to serve as his final resting place. Over the next few decades, amid plenty of political tumult, Herkenrode Abbey in Hasselt, Belgium, was converted to the first Cistercian convent for women. It was a site of pilgrimage from the 13th to the 15th centuries, and despite regional wars and economic uncertainty, it stayed the course. During the 16th century, it experienced its heyday thanks to the patronage of a figure named Prince Bishop Evrard van der Marck, seeing the addition of a Gothic church that brimmed with beautiful stained glass windows, textiles, paintings, and more. The Eighty Years’ War paused Herkenrode’s...

During the Victorian era, innovators made huge leaps with optical technologies. It was the period of the stereoscope and an early projector known as the magic lantern, not to mention one in which eyeglasses became more affordable and entering the mainstream. These advances also influenced scientific inquiry, making microscopes more powerful, and the pursuit of microscopy enabled researchers and enthusiasts to discover creatures invisible to the naked eye. One of these enthusiasts was London-based educator and amateur scientist Charles Thomas Hudson. Along with other scholars and aficionados, he participated in interest groups. “As President of the Royal Microscopical Society and a Fellow of the Royal...

The countertenors conquer the day in Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

A restaurant meal on a road trip. A billboard off a highway. A dusty side street in a Texas town. Stephen Shore (b. 1947) captures the seemingly banal moments of life. His photographs of small-town North America captured a society in transition. The mid-20th century works are emblematic of the rapid transformation of the era, both for culture and politics, and photography as an artform. His shots, according to 303 Gallery, “became a bible for young photographers seeking to work in colour, because, along with that of William Eggleston, his work exemplified that the medium could be considered art.” Most celebrated is Uncommon Places (1973 – 1981) series, which were taken over the course of a decade and...

Like probably all of us, there are so many different things I could have submitted for a favorite Verdi performance.

Mentre si avviano alla chiusura le tre mostre allestite alle OGR di Torino, tutte dedicate al rapporto tra arte e tecnologia e riunite nel progetto Visioni Quantiche, Sogni Elettrici, l’uscita recente di una videointervista a Laure Prouvost offre l’occasione per tornare a parlare della sua installazione, We Felt A Star Dying. Commissionato da LAS Art Foundation, organizzazione berlinese che si occupa di sviluppare progetti di ricerca tra arte, scienza e tecnologia, e curato da Samuele Piazza, l’imponente lavoro dell’artista francese ha abitato in questi mesi il suggestivo Binario 1 delle OGR, trovandovi l’ambientazione perfetta.
Laure Prouvost, “We felt a star dying”, 2025. Installation view at...

Michael Spyres talks to Kevin Ng about his winding path as a baritenor, which composer he wants to conquer next, and how he makes Wagner work in his voice — and in his native Ozarks.

Renature, presented at Bildhalle Zürich, explores the shifting relationship between nature, perception and materiality in contemporary lens-based art. Bringing together the work of Adam Jeppesen, Douglas Mandry, Inka & Niclas and Joost Vandebrug, the exhibition questions how the organic world is framed through technology and visual culture, whilst foregrounding the physical materials that shape photography. Together, these artists open a dialogue around nature as something seen, shaped and felt. They are not merely documented, but transformed. Their works reject permanence and perfection, instead embracing fragility, artifice and transformation as essential elements of a contemporary visual language. ...

Dal 12 giugno al 16 agosto 2026, le sale di Villa Badoèr di Fratta Polesine ospiteranno “Fare Scena”, un allestimento prodotto da Fondazione Aida che rende omaggio all’arte di Paolino Libralato e invita i visitatori a entrare nel cuore del suo lavoro. Un tributo a uno dei più importanti scenografi realizzatori italiani, protagonista di una carriera che lo ha portato a collaborare con istituzioni di prestigio internazionale – dalla Scala di Milano al Metropolitan di New York, fino all’Opéra di Parigi – accanto a registi e scenografi come Bob Wilson, Beni Montresor e Jérôme Savary. In oltre quarant’anni di carriera, Libralato ha saputo coniugare la maestria artigianale con la creatività...

By William Moreno The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. Susan Sontag, “On Photography” William Camargo’s current exhibit of twenty-four plus works, dated 2019 through 2025, reads as a mini survey, with photographic images and installations thematically placed throughout the modest gallery. It’s his largest showing of works to date. Early in his career, the Anaheim native considered fashion and product photography, photojournalism and conflict reportage, finding the latter...

This May, exhibitions on display around the world harness photography and installation to interrogate pressing themes, from the importance of proper representation to the future of our natural spaces. They ask questions like: what happens after sea levels rise? What does the world look like 50 years from now? How do we preserve our cultures, traditions and communities in the face of massive uncertainty? They’re some of the most important issues facing our current moment. Each exhibition, hosted at the National Portrait Gallery, VB Photographic Center, ARKEN, Biennale of Sydney and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, explores them with depth and nuance. They do not provide easy solutions, but ask the audiences to hold...

Legitimation of Dust, prima mostra presentata da hui.red dalla sua apertura, introduce a Milano il lavoro di Zhang Meichun, alla sua prima esposizione in Italia. La scelta inaugura una direzione programmatica precisa: portare in Europa pratiche artistiche che operano sul confine tra corpo, dato e percezione cosmica, aprendo un dialogo con una scena contemporanea cinese ancora scarsamente rappresentata nel circuito espositivo europeo.
Zhang Meichun, “The Blind Oracle”, 2024. Courtesy Hui.red
Attraverso il percorso espositivo, Zhang Meichun costruisce un ambiente in cui percezione, tecnologia e cosmologia si intrecciano fino a diventare inseparabili. La mostra, ospitata nello spazio milanese hui.red, segna...

Kim Dacres gravitates toward renewal and care, transforming worn rubber into expressive sculptural portraits. The New York-based artist twists and braids tired treads into sleek buns and rows typical of Black hairstyles, which she embellishes with gear-like crowns and jewelry made of metal bike chains. Spray painting the material to mask marks, Dacres utilizes what might otherwise be deemed worthless to create bold visages. A new body of work extends a series of celebratory busts the artist made to honor those who’ve inspired and influenced her. On view this month at Charles Moffett, Lost on a Two Way Street follows this trajectory, while adding flatter wall works evocative of Victorian-era cameos. “The...

Wheat impression on Neolithic mudbrick, Georgia TBILISI, GEORGIA—Phys.org reports that wheat for baking bread (Triticum aestivum) may have first been grown some 8,000 years ago in Georgia. Genetic studies of modern wheat plants and wild grasses indicate that domesticated wheat and wild goat grass were mixed in the South Caucasus and the Caspian Sea region. This hybrid plant eventually became bread wheat, explained Nana Rusishvili of the Georgia National Museum and her colleagues. They examined charred grains recovered from Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, two Neolithic village sites in Georgia. Because charred grains of bread wheat look similar to durum wheat and other wheat seeds, the team members...

Pieces of the Berlanga Cup BERLANGA DE DUERO, SPAIN—According to a Live Science report, a new study of the Berlanga Cup, a 1,900-year-old bronze vessel discovered in Spain, suggests that its decorations depict Hadrian’s Wall, which is located some 1,200 miles away from where the cup was discovered. “The cup is a small representation of a functional vessel called a Roman trulla—a bronze or clay cup with a handle used to drink water,” said Jesús García Sánchez of the Archaeological Institute of Mérida. “It is not only crafted with metals, but also expensive enamels, and later on customized. It is definitely not an industrial product,” García Sánchez added. The inscription on the cup lists...

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Blake Masi on Instagram

La vita di Franco Ule (Trieste, 1959-2018) si è consumata nell’arco di una sessantina d’anni e ben scarne sono le testimonianze che ne possono tenere in vita la memoria. La sua indole ribelle non gli ha permesso di concludere alcun corso di studi artistici essendo entrato sempre in contrasto con le dottrine che i suoi “maestri” pretendevano di inculcargli. Per esempio, un insegnante che gli chiedeva di tirare linee diritte, mentre lui si ostinava a inseguire le sue pulsioni interiori, arrivò a spezzargli la punta della matita; modo un po’ brusco per dirgli che in quell’aula la sua pretesa espressione artistica legata al segno, al ghirigoro, allo scarabocchio, alla cancellazione, alla pittura...

 
Join us on Sunday 07 June from 1.30pm to celebrate the launch of INTO THE TREES by photographer Jo Stapleton, curated by Karen Harvey and published by Shutter Hub Editions.
INTO THE TREES is an expressionist photographic account of Jo’s interactions with trees and woodland, later remembered and reimagined in the darkroom using a range of alternative processes and techniques.
Drinks and canapés will be served from 1.30pm before the formal launch event at 2pm, including a book signing and interview discussion between Karen and Jo about the making of the book and the role photography has to play in helping to protect our wildlife and green spaces.
To celebrate the launch of the book, Jo has produced a...

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Sylvia Trotter Ewens’s Website
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