From the moment Martin Parr’s work gained international attention, it challenged conventional ideas about documentary photography and how audiences engage with the everyday world. Parr turned his lens to the overlooked: seaside holidays, domestic rituals, fast-food wrappers, souvenirs and the subtle routines of daily life. Across his career, he elevated the ordinary into the extraordinary, capturing scenes that were simultaneously humorous, absurd and revealing. The exhibition Very Modern and Rather Ugly at Foam, running from 3 April to 12 August, encapsulates this legacy, bringing together the vibrancy, wit and sharp social observation that defined his practice. Visitors encounter a world that feels...

April exhibitions from DESIGNBOOM RADAR
 
April opens with a global array of exhibitions which trace how artists and designers engage with systems in flux, from ecology and technology to language and space. In Milan, Fondazione Prada presents Cao Fei’s Dash, a multimedia exploration of smart agriculture and its social and environmental implications. In Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof hosts Shilpa Gupta’s What Still Holds, where fragmented language and participatory works question truth, censorship, and collective memory.
 
Major retrospectives revisit the role of art across time and scale. At Fondation Louis Vuitton, Calder: Dreaming in Balance brings nearly 300 works by Alexander Calder into dialogue with...

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I LISTEN TO PODCASTS on the train, while washing dishes, sometimes while walking around. It’s hard to think of a more passive medium, engineered for split attention—the thought of dedicating one’s attention fully to a podcast is as antithetical as listening to drive-time radio over a hi-fi system at home. Yet on a beautiful Saturday morning in late […]

The manuscript pages, prints and calligraphy had been seized by Canadian authorities as they arrived in Vancouver from Istanbul

The Pérez Art Museum Miami announced this week that it will host an exhibition bringing together about 10 works by Jean-Michel Basquiat that are owned by Kenneth C. Griffin, one of the world’s top collectors. Titled “Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols,” the exhibition will feature nine paintings and one sculpture by the artist and concentrate on his “implementation of classic themes such as portraiture and the figure, script and language, and his conceptual amplification of color, form, and composition,” according to a release. “Figures, Signs, Symbols” is curated by PAMM director Franklin Sirmans, who was a cocurator of a traveling show on the artist that debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2005,...

Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment (BS&E), the parent company of Barclays Center in Brooklyn, has announced “Brooklyn Art Encounters,” a multiyear program aimed at bringing art to the arena’s public, digital, and surrounding spaces. It has named Conceptual artist Paul Pfeiffer, renowned for his uncanny works centering sports figures, as its inaugural artist-in-residence. Pfeiffer, who per […]

Two people finished their terms on the institution’s Board of Regents in early March and have yet to be replaced

Three weeks after Easter in 1961, at Glasgow’s red-brick, resplendent, rococo Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, a 22-year-old man took a rock to Salvador Dalí’s enigmatic 1951 painting “Christ of Saint John of the Cross.” At a red museum in a green corner of a gray city, out of a surfeit of zealous religious conviction, a vandal had torn an eight-foot gash in the body of Christ. It would not be the only act of vandalism perpetrated against the Dalí painting, for a little less than two decades later, another aspiring iconoclast took an air rifle to the canvas, though this time curators had seen fit to seal it behind a thick layer of clear acrylic in preparation for precisely this possibility. In an...

Weronika Gęsicka mines encyclopaedias for their trap entries
 
Weronika Gęsicka’s Encyclopaedia is a photographic project and artist book project that turns the idea of authoritative knowledge on its head. The visual artist presents a collection of several hundred fictitious entries sourced from real encyclopedias, dictionaries, and lexicons, including Wikipedia, each illustrated through manipulated stock photographs and AI-generated imagery. These so-called ‘trap entries’ are deliberately false records planted by editors to detect plagiarism. If another publication reprinted the content verbatim, the fake entry would appear as proof.
 
What Gęsicka has done is excavate them, give them form, and...

The appointment of new trustees for the Smithsonian Institution has been delayed due to Trump’s efforts to intervene at the organization, the New York Times reports. The trustees, which at the Smithsonian are among the Board of Regents, are traditionally first approved by Congress and then subsequently signed off on by the president; Trump, however, has indicated that he’s […]

CHICAGO — When I learned that an exhibition by Leah Ke Yi Zheng, curated by Myriam Ben Salah and Karsten Lund, would be coming to the Renaissance Society, I timed an engagement I had in Chicago so I could see her work. My only regret was that I did not have enough time to go twice, as I did with her New York debut exhibition at David Lewis Gallery in 2023, which I reviewed. I also realized that I am still learning how to see Zheng’s work, which is one of the great pleasures of looking at art. As much pleasure, intellectual stimulation, and self-reflection as I got from her work, and its engagement with Western oil painting and Eastern ink painting, I feel Zheng is at the beginning of something momentous...

Paris-based Lebanese filmmaker and artist Ali Cherri has formally accused the Israeli military of committing a war crime for a bombing that killed his parents inside their Beirut apartment in 2024.In the hours before a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel was set to take effect on November 26, 2024, Cherri’s parents, Mahmoud Naim Cherri and Nadira Hayek, were killed by an Israeli bomb that struck their 12-story residential building. The strike also killed the couple’s employee, Birki Negesa, and at least four others. Cherri, represented by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), filed a war crimes complaint against the attack’s perpetrators in France’s War Crimes Unit yesterday, April...

Florence’s famed Uffizi Galleries have revealed that they were the victim of a February cyberattack but have denied that the security systems protecting their collection were compromised. Corriere della Serra reported that hackers allegedly stole access codes, internal maps, and information regarding placement of CCTV cameras and alarms, subsequently issuing a ransom demand via phone […]

The Human Rights Foundation has submitted a complaint to a United Nations body that reviews detention cases on behalf of Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen, seeking a finding that his prolonged detention is arbitrary under international law. Gao, 69, was arrested in China in 2024 on “suspicion of slandering China’s heroes and martyrs,” a charge tied to his longstanding sculptural practice repurposing art historical icons to challenge official narratives and mythmaking. That year, more than 100 artworks were seized during a police raid on his studio in Sanhe City, China, including ones such as Miss Mao, Mao’s Guilt and The Execution of Christ, which critique the Chinese Communist Party’s...

Misato Sano’s studio is replete with piles of wooden offcuts, heavy lumber, woodworking equipment, and flowing natural light. The Miyagi-based artist has been sculpting charismatic dogs for several years, steadily adding more distinct characters to her growing pack. Self-portraiture remains a consistent theme within Sano’s practice. Each dog evokes a different emotion mirroring the artist’s personality, ranging from shy and skittish to excited and silly. “Visualizing my inner self through expressions and gestures full of charm and humor has also become an opportunity to deepen my self-love,” she shares. “I Got a Good Idea!” (2025) Sano’s distinctive woodcarving techniques are exemplary of the...

How do you operate a museum or cultural center without any full-time staff? The nonprofit Museum Hue surveyed institutions founded and led by people of color (POC) across the Northeastern states and found that over a third of respondents lacked a single full-time employee. In the new report, 18 of 38 survey participants are described as smaller-budget institutions (with an annual operating budget of $500,000 or less); 67% of these spaces reported not having any full-time staff. In fact, some of them operate on less than $100,000 annually, requiring heavy reliance on volunteer work. This is one of several tough realities that POC-oriented museums and cultural centers face in an effort to serve their communities...

South Seas, a resort located on Captiva Island, off the coast of Florida, is the buyer of Robert Rauschenberg’s famed 22-acre property on the island, which had been home to one of the country’s top artist residency programs following his death. The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the steward of the namesake artist’s legacy, had announced last year that it would sell the property, which also includes about 1,000 feet of beachfront property and Rauschenberg’s 8,000-square-foot studio which he built in 1992. The foundation said the cost to maintain the property had grown beyond what it could manage while still maintaining the other parts of its mission, citing a sustainability assessment that “confirmed...

A painting by Raja Ravi Varma has set a new auction record for the work of an Indian artist, signaling continued strength at the top end of the market. Yashoda and Krishna (ca. 1890s) sold for $17.9 million at Saffronart in Delhi on April 1, surpassing the previous benchmark for Indian painting at auction, held by M.F. Husain’s Untitled (Gram Yatra), which sold for $13.8 million at Christie’s New York last year and was purchased by ARTnews Top 200 Collector Kiran Nadar. The result also comfortably eclipses Varma’s prior record of $4.5 million, set in 2023 The buyer was pharmaceutical billionaire Cyrus Poonawalla, founder of the Serum Institute of India, according to Artsy.   Characterizing Varma...

As we gleefully exit an extreme winter on the East Coast, April weather is a poignant reminder to remain spirited amid fluctuating moods and unstable times. As the first spring flowers burst forth with their promise of eternal beauty despite all, a lively round of exhibitions around Upstate New York brings elegance to match. Tyte Gallery presents dynamic mixed-media work by three artists, while an exhibition at 68 Prince Street Gallery is an all-out celebration of abstraction by six powerhouse painters. A group show at Yellow Studio explores ideas around female representation, while Daniel Giordano, Davana Robedee, Kathy Ruttenberg present a magical orchestration of ceramics and sculptural artworks at Catskill...

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The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, home to one of the world’s most well-known collections of Italian Renaissance art, is denying a report that a recent cyber attack gave hackers “access everywhere” in the museum. The article, published on Apr. 3 in the Italian daily newspaper Correre della Sera, said that the hackers infiltrated the museum complex’s IT network, demanded a ransom directly from museum director Simone Verde, and threatened to sell information stolen from the Uffizi’s servers on the dark web. However, a report in Reuters several hours after the Correre della Sera news came out cites a statement from the museum explaining that while the Uffizi was indeed targeted in a cyber attack on Feb. 1,...

FORT COLLINS, COLORADO—People living in western North America more than 12,000 years ago played games of chance, according to a Live Science report. Robert Madden of Colorado State University identified and examined more than 600 sets of dice, or binary lots, recovered from 45 different archaeological sites in the western United States, on both sides of the Rocky Mountains. The artifacts date from 13,000 to 450 years ago. The objects can be either curved or flat, and are marked on one side while the other side is blank. Tossing a binary lot is similar to flipping a coin, Madden explained. “This is the first evidence we have of structured human engagement with the concepts of chance and randomness,” he...

The Brooklyn Museum will undergo the development of a $13 million, 6,400 square foot exhibition space to house and reimagine its collection of African art, Hyperallergic reports. The extensive renovation and design project will kick off this summer, and the galleries are expected to open in the fall of 2027.  To make way for the new space, the 200-year-old museum […]

The airstrike killed seven people in a residential building in central Beirut that independent researchers have found to have no clear military function

BOWLING GREEN, KENTUCKY—According to a Phys.org report, a team of researchers led by Jean-Luc Houle of Western Kentucky University explored two Late Bronze Age mounds in Mongolia known as khirigsuurs for evidence of feasting. Khirigsuurs, found in Mongolia and parts of southern Siberia, usually contain human burials and are surrounded by deposits of horse skulls. These are sometimes accompanied by horse neck vertebrae and hooves, and the burned bones of sheep or goats. Houle and his colleagues looked for the rest of these horses and evidence of butchering at khirigsuur ZK-956, which has been dated to between 1054 and 906 B.C. A well-preserved winter settlement has been found near this mound. The second mound...

A crewmember's shoe recovered from the Dannebroge wreck COPENHAGEN, DENMARK—The Guardian reports that debris from the Danish flagship Dannebroge has been discovered at the bottom of Copenhagen Harbor. The 157-foot warship was commanded by Commodore Olfert Fischer and sunk by Admiral Horatio Nelson during the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801. Denmark’s navy had formed a blockade outside the harbor when Britain’s navy attacked. Cannonballs hit the Dannebroge’s upper deck before shelling set the vessel on fire and it eventually exploded. Morten Johansen of Denmark’s Viking Ship Museum and his colleagues have recovered two cannons, uniforms, insignia, shoes, bottles, and a human jaw from the bottom of the...

sculptural ping pong tables show up in park in france
 
Architecture and design agency Exercice installs four geometric ping pong tables in Ingré, France, serving as interactive public sculptures to the nearby residents. Commissioned by the Région Centre-Val de Loire, each design comes in a different shape and surface geometry, resulting in a playful collection of functional tables. While they’re different in the forms, they share the same stainless steel legs that taper outward at the base and anchor into circular floor plates bolted to the ground. 
 
The leg configuration of the sculptural ping pong tables change depending on the surface shape, but the material and the anchoring method are the same....

The works of Chile’s most famous folk artist, singer and composer return to the Violeta Parra Museum, which now has enhanced security

One of the many reasons artists like Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Cy Twombly, and other mid-20th-century pioneers of painterly abstraction were so innovative for their time is the use of the deliberate yet loose brushstroke. Pollock intuitively dribbled and splattered paint on surfaces spread across the floor of his studio, and Kline created bold, monochromatic paintings with just a few deceptively simple, gestural strokes of a large brush. It’s this visceral approach to visual rhythms and color that continues to awe us today. (A major retrospective highlighting both Krasner and Pollock’s work is slated for The Met later this year.) For artist Liza Lou, the calculation of brushstrokes, color,...

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Christophe Leribault, the former director of the Château de Versailles, faces a “derelict” infrastructure at the Paris museum and the fallout from last year’s devastating theft

a village remembered with a modern museum
 
Lahdelma & Mahlamäki Architects shapes this Lost Shtetl Jewish Museum as a tranquil space among a sloping meadow in Šeduva, Lithuania. The museum has been realized in honor of a village and its Jewish community that vanished in August 1941. It draws its meaning from the execution of 664 residents in nearby forests and from the disappearance of a culture that had shaped the town for generations.
 
Rather than reconstructing Šeduva in literal terms, the architects assemble a cluster of abstract houses with hip roofs. Each volume approximates the scale of a single family dwelling. Together they form a compact settlement that suggests a village, or ‘shtetl’,...

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Britt Lucas Bennett’s Website
Britt Lucas Bennett on Instagram

The surprise of turning onto a street to see a vibrant mural—or the joy of viewing several in progress during popular festivals like Nuart Aberdeen—is essentially an ephemeral experience. Murals may be designed to last several decades, or they may be temporary installations that address a particularly interesting bit of local history or urgent social issue, but either way, the experience is brief as we walk by. Always vulnerable to the elements and new development, these pieces don’t always last long. That’s where Art UK’s archive comes in. As a digital platform, Art UK connects viewers to public collections around the nation. There are about a million artworks on the site, drawn from around 3,500...

Renowned photographer Martin Parr once described the photobook as the “supreme platform to disseminate work.” Since the very first iteration – widely acknowledged as Anna Atkin’s Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843) – publishing images have been a way to give them life outside of the gallery. As Magnum Agency’s website states: “the essential role of books is to get the work out, to have the work seen. Practically, books have a wider readership than fairs; they can cover diverse geographies.” Throughout the 20th century, the medium became integral to the artistic landscape, with titles like Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment and Eve Arnold’s The...

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Gearing up FOR MILAN DESIGN WEEK 2026
 
Milan design week 2026 is just around the corner, and designboom returns with it to guide you through this year’s most exciting events, exhibitions, and must-see installations! From April 20th to 26th, 2026, the world’s biggest design event is set to transform the streets of Milan into a celebration of creativity and promises an electrifying mix of design, architecture, and innovation spread across the city.
 
To make sure you don’t miss a thing (and know where to go!), we have once again curated a selection of must-see events, talks, exhibitions, and experiences that will ensure you leave Milan full of powerful new insights and lasting impressions. Chief among...

The song recitals I remember most vividly were, unsurprisingly, the most vivid ones.

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When the Bulls Fest—a raging celebration of the iconic and famed NBA team—first happened at Chicago’s United Center in 2022, Kyle Cobban was one of the contributing artists to The Art of the Game exhibition. It’s a piece that encapsulates Cobban’s aesthetic vision. Working with graphite and paper, the Chicago-based artist makes small, detailed drawings […]
The post Kyle Cobban Draws From The Unknown first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

Living in a high-rise apartment or a house with a small yard comes with the disadvantage of not having access to garden space. Fortunately, fine wallpaper manufacturer Astek has a way to bring beautiful blooms indoors. The company’s collection of dreamy floral mural designs called Eterna Nouveau reinterprets the Art Nouveau movement of the early 20th century, which historically flourished in Europe and emphasized nature-inspired motifs like flowers and birds. Eterna Nouveau’s arching, sinuous stems and leaves nod to its namesake style’s characteristic “whiplash” lines. “Aquavita,” for example, features lilies and other water plants and illustrates life both above and below the surface. And...

Private Tupper's record of burial in the 'Burial Registers for Military Posts, Camps, and Stations, 1768-1921' reads: 'Buried inside the Fort / Tupper, Geo. N. / 1 U.S. Arty [1 st U.S. Artillery] / Oct 6, 1873' MONROE COUNTY, FLORIDA—MLive reports that more information has been found about a burial site inside Fort Jefferson at Dry Tortugas National Park. The grave belonged to Private George Tupper, who died of yellow fever on October 6, 1873. Historical records indicate that Tupper had been buried in a lime pit within the fort, but his body was later exhumed and likely reinterred at Fort Barrancas National Cemetery in Pensacola, Florida. “Locating Private Tupper’s original grave allows us to honor him...

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND—Archaeologists led by Anne Mayor Anne Mayor of the University of Geneva uncovered an iron smelting workshop at the site of Didé West 1 in eastern Senegal, according to a SciNews report. The workshop was used for some 800 years, between the fourth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D. “The iron-smelting workshop at the Didé West 1 site in Senegal sheds new light on the emergence of iron metallurgy in West Africa,” said Mélissa Morel of the University of Geneva. The team discovered about 100 tons of slag; 30 tuyeres, or clay pipes used to channel air into a furnace, that had been arranged in a semicircle; and 35 small, circular furnace bases. These furnaces were likely used to...

For our fourth annual Photo Awards, supported by Format, we selected 5 winners for the following categories: Colour, Nature, Portrait, Street, and Student. It is our pleasure to introduce the winner of the Portrait category: Sima Choubdarzadeh.
Originally from Iran and now based in Berlin, Sima is an award-winning documentary photographer with a background in philosophy. For the past decade, her work has focused on migration, identity, and resistance, often centering people living through tension and change.
This year’s awards were sponsored once again by Format, an online portfolio builder specializing in the needs of photographers, artists, and designers. With nearly 100 professionally designed website...

Through atmospheric, black-and-white photographs, Yamamoto Masao explores the emotional connections between image and memory. His intimate, otherworldly gelatin silver prints evoke dreamlike archival footage that has been somehow unyoked from the normal rhythms of time. His subjects vary, although he often focuses on landscapes and natural subjects, including a number of owls that roost in trees near his home in Japan. Ten Owls at Yancey Richardson marks the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery, showcasing intimate portraits of the nocturnal birds. No larger than 10 inches on the longest side, these images are intended to be viewed up close in a way that brings these elusive creatures much...

Parterre Box acknowledges Riccardo Muti's 600th performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by highlighting two of his favorite singers — under a different conductor.

The staggeringly great Ukraine-born Jewish bass Mark Reizen sings "The Ebullient Kura Swirls" a/k/a "The Persian Love Song" by Moldova-born Jewish composer Anton Rubinstein.

 
FEELING SEEN is guest curated by Jenna Eady as part of our Curate for the Community series.
Our sense of feeling goes beyond the physical – it’s emotional, atmospheric, and relational. It’s through these feelings that we connect with one another on a deeper level.
FEELING SEEN is about exploring how photography can express both internal and external sensations – whether it’s the rush of anticipation, the dis/comfort of the body, nostalgia of memory or tension of conflict. This project believes in photography’s power to evoke real emotional resonance. Its about creating the space for others to feel something.
The project aims to amplify diverse voices and create opportunities for new perspectives...

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Greta Kresse’s Website
Greta Kresse on Instagram

Madama Butterfly confronts anime, virtual reality, and weeaboos in Matthew Ozawa's bold production at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Parterre Box is announcing a formal partnership with Kalshi Inc. 

Authenticity and connection are two core values that drive Tina Simakova, a London-based portrait photographer. “I believe the most powerful images are born in trust and honesty,” she says. The artist is a master of natural light and minimal settings, using them to create atmospheric portraits rooted in intimacy and vulnerability. In one shot, a sliver of illumination – perhaps from a doorway, or an open window – slices through the darkness, brightening only the subject’s eyes. In another, the sitter’s side profile balances on the edge of a plush sofa, bathed in the glow from yet another unseen source. Its warmth complements their auburn hair. Elsewhere, chiaroscuro – where deep shadows engulf...

 
A figure shades her face from bright headlights, shining through a front window. Another character lies on a green velvet bedspread, quietly examining a pocketknife. Elsewhere, a woman clutches a portrait, its face obscured by rays of sunlight. These are compositions by Chrissy Lush, a visual artist born in New York and based in Nashville. Her staged works centre on moments when “composure begins to give way.” Often set within domestic and suburban environments, Lush’s figures appear to respond to external pressures that remain just outside the frame. “These are moments of slippage, when a controlled exterior falters and something unguarded briefly surfaces,” Lush says. The work explores tensions...

 
Stockholm-based Linda Westin left photography to pursue a PhD in neuroscience, specialising in super-resolution fluorescence microscopy – a group of imaging techniques that allows scientists to illuminate the structures inside cells by making them glow under specific wavelengths of light. When returning to the medium, she began to apply what she had learned, and started to look at forests, rocks, plants and stars with a newfound sensitivity. Now, Westin brings methods from neuroscience into artworks. These pictures present forest canopies as if they were neuronal dendrites, the branching extensions of nerve cells that receive signals. In the following pages, far-off mountains are framed by lush, layered...

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In the process of painting someone, artist Jenny Morgan reveals not only what shows, but what doesn’t show. Her vibrant and emotional oil paintings of figures hover in a place that is between realism and abstraction, where many of her subjects confront their viewer with an electric stare that braves against the vulnerable moment in […]
The post Very Strange Days: The Paintings of Jenny Morgan first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

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Growing up as a queer kid in the ‘80s, I was well aware from an early age that I was different, and that different was not okay, especially living in Missouri,” says New Mexico artist Anthony Hurd, who recently shifted away from abstracts, to delve into what may be deemed “controversial” figurative work. Not only […]
The post Boy Howdy! Anthony Hurd Embraces the Personal first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

The 78th Issue of Hi-Fructose includes a cover a feature on Nieves Gonzalez, the art of Grip Face, The landscapes of Jennifer Nehrbass, the soft sculptures of Ela Fidalgo, the stitched urban landscapes of Laura Ortiz Vega, the art Jeffrey Gibson, Yu Jin Young’s once transparent figures, and the paintings of Fatima De Juan.  Plus […]
The post Hi-Fructose issue 78 is Coming! first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.