Sometimes, all it takes is the prospect of a new book to pull me out of a reading slump. Elizabeth Alexander’s forthcoming essay collection did the trick, as did Layli Long Soldier’s book of poetry and visual art. They’re two of 15 art books my colleagues and I are itching to read this fall, which brings a particularly exciting slate of biographies, satirical art-world novels, and titles that don’t fit neatly into a single genre. I’m increasingly drawn to those latter books, the ones in between.Art historian Jennifer Higgie masters that nebulous form in Bedlam, a fictional account of Richard Dadd’s itinerant life and tragic struggles with mental health, reissued by Verso in July. Claudia Ross...

Following surveys of butterflies, birds, oceans, and trees, the editors at Phaidon have settled on their next topic of inquiry: fungi. This October, the publisher will release an expansive tome gathering more than 200 photographs, artworks, historical objects, and more all devoted to the vast diversity and creative potential of mycology. Fungi: The World of Mushrooms spans more than 200 pages and several millennia, compiling a breadth of imagery from ancient history to the present day. Included are the uncanny costumes shot in-situ by Riitta Ikonen and Anni Koponen, Hima af Klint’s delicate illustrations, and Carsten Höller’s disorienting installation of suspended toadstools. Fungi is slated for release...

I sipped the last dregs of summer collecting at the bottom of my (discreet) Tom Collins this holiday weekend, taking in the beloved sights of prancing dogs with frisbees and determined children working together to climb an oak tree at Prospect Park. “They must not have iPads,” I told my friend while we watched the group of 10-and-unders arrange some stripped and fallen branches against a trunk and hold them in place, creating a precarious semblance of a ladder that reached the tree’s lowest arm. A handful of them tried their hand at getting to the branch, working impressively well as a team and taking heightened tumbles in stride. I thought it was a really endearing way to spend the last day of summer...

In challenging the opprobrious history of misogyny within visual art and broader culture, feminist critics can at times dismiss the delights of femininity itself. As independent scholar Sophie Lewis puts it, “when certain feminists first turned against girly things, it was a giant error in Western women’s liberation history.” Lewis’s new book Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe (2026) aims to redress the strains of feminism that frame adornment as inherently frivolous. Engaging and embracing the “femme” impulses that abound in visual art, literature, and pop culture, Lewis celebrates what she deems the “liberatory,” rather than patriarchal, powers of...

The steadfast historian leaves the institution after 38 years, the past couple of them marred by political tensions with the Trump administration

This article is part of a series focusing on underrepresented craft histories, researched and written by the 2025 Craft Archive Fellows, and organized in collaboration with the Center for Craft.There are words that sit comfortably in the mouth.Kozo is not one of them.Every time I hear it used as the universal shorthand within East Asian papermaking, something in me tightens. Not because the word is incorrect. Not because Japanese papermaking is undeserving of admiration. I use the word myself. I teach it in workshops and have spent years working with the fibers, histories, and technologies associated with Japanese papermaking. My unease comes from somewhere more difficult to articulate. It comes from the...

A joint Spanish-Egyptian archaeological mission has found a well-preserved tomb dating to the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt’s Old Kingdom (2494–2345 BCE), reports the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The find was made during the mission’s 2026 excavation season in the area known as the Mariette Necropolis, north of Egypt’s Saqqara archaeological site. The tomb consists of a mastaba containing two funerary chapels. One chapel belongs to a man named Yunmen, a high-ranking official under the Pharaoh Djedkare Isesi (late 25th to mid-24th century BCE) whose positions included judge, court administrator, and chief scribe responsible for reviewing petitions and complaints. The second chapel is that of...

learning to live with fire
 
In the days after the Palisades and Eaton fires swept through Los Angeles in January 2025, some of the strangest photographs were of the houses still standing. A home built by Chansen Architecture in 2024 sat almost untouched beside burned lots in Pacific Palisades. In Malibu, a concrete beachfront house remained above a field of debris.
 
Together, the two fires destroyed more than 16,000 structures, which made these isolated survivors look almost impossible. They were quickly treated as examples of architecture beating fire, though their survival came down to a far messier combination of design, wind direction and firefighting. 
 
Still, look closely at the houses that...

A mold used to create a clay figurine during the First Temple Period was discovered earlier this summer on the grounds of the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum. The excavation, at Kishle, a former prison and military base that is now part of the museum, was overseen by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). “Although many figurines from this period have been uncovered in Jerusalem, this is the first time that a mold used to manufacture them has ever been found in the city,” said IAA researchers in a statement. Archaeologists have long wondered if these ubiquitous figures, dating from the 8th to the 6th centuries BCE, were manufactured locally or imported; they now know that at least some were created within...

The legendary photographer spent nine months documenting the cleanup in Lower Manhattan to complete his series “Aftermath”, which is currently on view at Florida’s NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale

David Rubenstein, the former board chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, has purchased Joel Shapiro’s "Blue" (2019) just days after the National Park Service deinstalled the iconic sculpture from center grounds.The agency began removing late artist Joel Shapiro's 24-foot-tall sculpture from the Kennedy Center's REACH (Renew, Experience, Activate, Create, and Honor) campus on September 2, leaving its future to the Joel Shapiro and Ellen Phelan Foundation. Amid renewed attempts to stamp Trump's name on the Kennedy Center facade and grounds, the seemingly nonsensical removal of "Blue" prompted condemnation from artists, cultural workers, and organizations like Hands Off...

The Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University hosts free-to-the-public exhibitions and programs inviting a journey across multiple centuries and continents titled The Otherworld is Home. Inspired by the Yorùbá proverb, “Life is a journey, the otherworld is home” (ayé l’àjò, ọ̀run n’ilé), the museum-wide presentation explores themes of personal reclamation, cultural identity, spiritual passage, and connection across Africa’s many diasporas. The three simultaneous exhibitions below offer opportunities to explore the enduring resonance of African artistic traditions and their continued influence on contemporary life. These exhibitions are activated with a full slate of programming that may...

Eight paintings from the collection of Clive Davis, the famed record producer who died this past June, will head to Christie’s during the November sales in New York. They are some of the first major consignments to those sales, and they are worth a total of more than $35 million. (Christie’s has not yet released individual estimates for each work.) Those eight works include a ca. 1986 painting of Andy Warhol painting of Aretha Franklin, the singer whom Davis befriended and supported professionally; a 2009 landscape by David Hockney, who once painted Davis’s portrait; and a 1992 abstraction by Joan Mitchell. There are also works by Frank Stella, George Condo, and Robert Motherwell. “Clive Davis had the...

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Eccentric Lenses Turn Bali’s Landscape into a Kinetic Optical Field
 
With Eccentric Lenses, Vincent Leroy transforms the Balinese landscape into a shifting optical field. Composed of a constellation of Fresnel lenses, the kinetic sculpture responds to the wind, continuously reframing, fragmenting, and displacing its surroundings. Set against Bali’s lush vegetation and distant mountains, the lenses introduce a new layer of movement into the landscape. Each element rotates around an off-center axis, following an eccentric trajectory that makes its movement appear less like a mechanical rotation than a slow drift through space. Activated by the wind, the mobile is never entirely still and never repeats the...

Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III will retire at the end of this year, according to the Washington Post, amid a historic confrontation with the Trump administration over how the museum consortium historicize the United States.  Bunch, who assumed leadership in 2019, has faced extraordinary pressure from the White House over the past 18 months to comply with President Trump’s ideological intervention in the Smithsonian, which has had its exhibitions targeted for including references to gender diversity, racism, and class equity. A seasoned museum administrator, Bunch had largely resisted the White House’s encroachment, once defending the Smithsonian against a 162-page executive report that accused...

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50 chairs arrive at christie’s beverly hills
 
Christie’s Beverly Hills will fill with chairs later this month, though very few of them resemble the kind you would casually pull up to a table. Basic.Space has assembled 50 pieces for 50 Chairs at Christie’s, bringing together familiar names from 20th-century design with contemporary furniture that stretches the category into stranger territory. The exhibition opens by appointment from September 25th through 30th, and every chair will be available to buy.
 
The range becomes pretty clear from the first few works announced. Charles and Ray Eames’ LCW appears in a rare calfskin edition produced in 2002 for a Christie’s auction, contributed here by the...

Tarot, pop culture, and personal narrative converge in the maximalist, mixed-media paintings of Maria Yolanda Liebana. The New York-based artist opens her first institutional solo exhibition at Montclair State University’s George Segal Gallery this month. Titled A Place to Be Held, Liebana’s show revolves around a fantastical, Eden-like garden exploding with an extravaganza of rainbows, flowers, clouds, cosmic phenomena, and more. “The exhibition imagines a matriarchal world where chance, identity, and desire are always in motion,” says a statement. “The Aleph’s Seduction” (2024) Liebana incorporates a wide range of materials into her vibrant works, including wallpaper, mirror tiles, pearls,...

Lucien Smith, a onetime market darling who more recently focused on supporting emerging artists, has died at 37. The news was confirmed to ARTnews by dealer Bill Powers, who had showed Smith early on. No information has been released about the cause or place of his death. “Lucien lives in a wordless place inside us now,” Powers told ARTnews. “I loved him and I’m happy knowing he found some serenity later in life,” artist Joel Mesler told ARTnews via text, adding a heart emoji. “Lucien Smith was our friend and his death is tragic,” artist Andrew Kuo wrote on X. “This is a loss for our community. Damn. Rest in peace, Lucien.” “When we met Lucien right after he graduated, in 2011, he was the...

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Zehua Zhang Rethinks the Civic Destination on Roosevelt Island
 
At the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, between Manhattan and Queens and overlooking the East River, New York-licensed architect Zehua Zhang proposes a different model for the civic destination with Roosevelt Island Cultural Plaza. Conceived as an inhabitable landscape rather than an isolated architectural object, the project brings architecture, public space, landscape, culture, and everyday life into a continuous urban experience.
 
Roosevelt Island occupies a distinct position within New York City. Connecting two boroughs while retaining its own identity, the island reflects successive layers of the city’s development and sits within the...

“There is the world, and there is the photograph. The photograph is not the world, it’s a completely different thing,” Henry Wessel (1942-2018) said in a “TateShots” short on the occasion of Tate Modern’s display of his Incidents series in 2014. Today, an exhibition of more than 65 prints titled Henry Wessel — Photographs and Books opens at The Grolier Club, a historic society celebrating the world of books and the graphic arts. Wessel was a New Jersey native who, after borrowing a Leica camera during his studies at Pennsylvania State University, fell headlong into photography. He rose to prominence in the early 1970s for his black-and-white compositions that plumbed the possibilities of...

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Thieves took two further works but dropped them as they fled, the mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer says

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The planned SANAA-designed museum for Budapest’s City Park has been cancelled, leaving the future home of Hungary’s national collection undecided

Institution at the University of Oxford will return 39 pieces of remains, primarily skulls, to the Indigenous Naga people of the Indian subcontinent by the end of the year

BIG’s Hanna Johansson on the future for housing in Athens
 
Set within the vast transformation of Athens’ former international airport, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)’s Park Rise is conceived as a residential landmark for The Ellinikon (find designboom’s previous coverage here). The 50-meter tower will anchor Little Athens, a residential neighborhood within the larger coastal masterplan, bringing 88 homes together with gardens, communal amenities, and expansive views across the Aegean Sea, the Metropolitan Park, and the mountains of Attica.
 
For BIG, the project presented an opportunity to work simultaneously across multiple scales. In conversation with designboom, Hanna Johansson, Associate in Charge at...

New Zealand inspires with its landscapes, natural beauty, and remoteness. This clearly influences its residents, as evidenced by the large... Read More

A gallery opening rarely gives a neutral first look. In Canada, a Thursday evening preview can set the tone before... Read More

The digital exhibition is usually discussed as a substitute, and judged accordingly. Measured against a room, it loses. Scale collapses:... Read More

Sophia Süßmilch talks female rage, naked bodies, suffering and why performance art doesn’t always need pain to test its boundaries.

Shawne Brown  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Shawne Brown’s Website
Shawne Brown on Instagram

Alexis Bamforth puts £1 million in a London gallery — then gives it away £1,000 at a time in an exhibition asking what we really value.

In the Oscar-winning film American Fiction, the irritable protagonist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison describes his work as follows: “I just invent little people in my mind and make them have conversations with each other.” The film, which director Cord Jefferson adapted from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, grapples with stereotypes and the ways we’re asked to perform our identities. For Monk, this turns into a satirical quest to write a “Black” book under a pen name, which plunges him into an outlandish world of tropes. American Fiction layers farce upon farce and is one of the more searing considerations of the contemporary impulse to leverage identity for nefarious (and capitalist) purposes. In...

For three decades, Harriet Mena Hill has been a resident of South East London. This area is known in the art world for its schools, such as the esteemed Camberwell College of Arts. But Hill and others who lived there for some time remember it as a historically working-class and, at times, impoverished area of […]
The post Harriet Mena Hill Brings Crumbling Concrete Back To Life first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

Chiemeka Offor  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Chiemeka Offor’s Website
Chiemeka Offor on Instagram

By Barbara Patterson Trans femme artist Pau Pescador's latest exhibition, Amor Prohibido, at Tyler Park Presents explores the volatility of becoming visible in a public space that criminalizes the existence of queer people. As anti-transgender legislation increases and security technologies evolve, the visibility of gender-nonconforming individuals becomes more precarious. A 2015 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology describes how "intruders" in gender-segregated areas...

Maude Corriveau  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Maude Corriveau’s Website
Maude Corriveau on Instagram

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Marigold Santos’s spectral forms are as layered with detail as they are with metaphor. Swirling amid marbled backgrounds in a feverish dance, they serve as critical examinations of cultural injustice. Their textures materialize their celestial properties as they become fierce teachers of colonial violence, problematic histories, and forgotten ancestry. Covertly, her haunting figural silhouettes aim […]
The post Celestial Stance: The Art of Marigold Santos first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Betty Ann Brown "What is Art, monsieur, but Nature concentrated?"—Honoré de Balzac "Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning."—Miguel de Unamuno Hiroko Yoshimoto's paintings concentrate nature into radiant and dynamic beauty, distilling visual sensation into poetic and environmental significance. Throughout the 2020s, Yoshimoto has worked on two series of paintings about nature: Biodiversity and Of Infinite Variety. Both series are based on observation of the natural...

Raul Guillermo  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Raul Guillermo’s Website
Raul Guillermo on Instagram

By Julie Faith There is something strange about returning to a place you once knew well after being away for a long time. You recognize the architecture before you recognize what the years have done to you. As I passed through the gate at Corey Helford Gallery, crossed the lot, and headed up the stairs, I felt ridiculously, wonderfully giddy. Kid-in-a-candy-store giddy. I have been away from the gallery and much of the Los Angeles art world, but somewhere between the gate and the stairs, I...

By Victoria Thomas Altadena-based artist James Griffith greets me at his studio, located in a refurbished 1920s firehouse diagonally across the street from the gleaming silver lagomorph of the restored Bunny Museum, by saying "Hi, I just started putting a galaxy in the armpit of a penguin." Great cities announce their identities through their monuments. New York City has the Statue of Liberty, St. Louis the Gateway Arch, Chicago the Cloud Gate, Philadelphia the original LOVE sculpture. And...

 
Exploring the people, places, and cultures that shape cities around the world, The City Series showcases images that respond to place not as a fixed subject, but as an idea shaped by experience, observation, and interpretation.
100 images of the city. Welcome to Cambridge.
Published by Shutter Hub Editions, and with a foreword by Alice Ryan, this beautiful collection of 100 images of Cambridge is a portrait of the city through the eyes of international photographers.
Order THE CITY SERIES: CAMBRIDGE here.
   
The photographers featured in THE CITY SERIES: CAMBRIDGE are: Zaklina Anderson, Robert Barcia, Viktor Barkhatov, Catherine Breslin, Tara Bucklow, Tiina Burton, Alison Carter, steven chandler, Alice...

By Betty Ann Brown "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."—Sol LeWitt Dean De Cocker creates richly conceived, exquisitely crafted, and visually delightful artworks that shuttle between abstraction and conceptual representation. He has long been drawn to machines, from bicycles to motorcycles, cars to airplanes, and formal echoes of these devices appear in his current body of work, exhibited at the Visual Arts Center in the small Central California town of Visalia. Welcome to the...

Skeletons, tombstones, and serpents. These are just a few of the iconic images pre-v ailing throughout the works of Morgan Sorensen—all relating to the themes of struggle, sadness, pain, and death. While anyone might agree that these graphic designs would all make for killer band T’s, there’s quite a bit of depth surrounding the artist’s […]
The post Future Relics: The Art of Morgan Sorensen first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

The body is an obsession for Monica Piloni. Whether it’s a hollowed face in the Samieses series or the eerie dolls depicted in “Ilegais”, a majority of Monica Piloni’s sculptures confront the human form. And while consistently returning to the body may seem confining to some, it’s a pursuit marked by liberation for the Brazilian […]
The post The Disconcertingly Honest Self-Portrait Sculptures of Monica Piloni first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 42, which is sold out. See Matthew Grabelsky’s new solo show at Thinkspace gallery here.  Matthew Grabelsky had studied tradition in Florence, lived in the cultural nuclei of Europe, but hadn’t yet found the idea that would set him apart as an artist living in the twenty-first century. […]
The post Human/Nature: Animals Go Underground In the Paintings of Matthew Grabelsky first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

It is credited with ‘democratising photography’ on a global level – and now Shutter Hub is making its most democratic move yet. As of this month, the organisation will pass into the control of the community it was built for, in what founder Karen Harvey MBE describes as ‘a logical next step: to make things more equitable we need multiple perspectives.’ The announcement follows Karen’s decision to remove paid memberships last year, making Shutter Hub ‘fully open-access and available at no cost to all’. It’s a typically altruistic move from the social entrepreneur: also the founder of Toiletries Amnesty, the award-winning NGO. She was made an MBE in 2024 for services to people living in hygiene...

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

The City Series by Shutter Hub is an ongoing publishing project exploring the people, places, cultures, and contradictions that shape cities around the world. Rather than documenting a location as a fixed subject, the series invites photographers to respond to a city as an idea: something experienced, observed, imagined, and interpreted through the photographic eye.
For its second edition, we turn our attention to London in partnership with Battersea Power Supplies, a new museum and gift shop celebrating Battersea Power Station. We invite photographers from across the globe to contribute to a major publication celebrating one of the world’s most photographed, complex, and ever-changing cities. We want to see...

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...

By Tabea Martin ‘Me Myself’ brings together four artists — Anna‑Lena Ruff, Debora Schultheiss, Tabea Martin, and Eva Schick — whose works move across differing styles and energies yet find in this art space an unforced coherence. I sense a shared thread of observation and inner dialogue, and a contemplation of natural female presence. The exhibition is currently showing at the Anja Edith Brinckmann Galerie, Basel. From here, the individual narratives invite a closer reading. By Anna-Lena...

 
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...

In the forest nothing stands still. Time layered through thoughts and feelings, leaves kicked and crunched as we walk. The trees talk to each other, sending mycelium messages, carbon gifts, and warnings of drought or illness. From ancient wisdom to popular culture, it’s all here.
If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, did it make a sound? Of course it did. And if Jo Stapleton was there to capture the moment, there would be a visual symphony of light, shape and form to follow.
Published by Shutter Hub Editions, this beautiful collection of 100 images by Jo Stapleton is an expressionist photographic account of her interactions with trees, forest and woodland, later remembered and...

Limited Edition print by Gerhard Wichler It’s been a distinctly textured start to the year at THE GAZE, where invigorating artistic narratives emerge across forms and disciplines, threading their way through an unsettled climate. I’m delighted to share the completion and publication of a candid, close‑range interview with abstract artist Gerhard Wichler—an exchange that brought a refreshing clarity amid the mayhem of today’s world. You can read our fascinating interview here. We also mark an...