Belu-Simion Fainaru, the artist representing Israel at this year’s Venice Biennale, is said to have pressured Biennale officials ahead of the mass resignation of the event’s prize jury. According to reports first published last week by Italian news agency Adkronos, Fainaru accused the Biennale of “racial discrimination” and “antisemitism” and threatened to file suit in […]

Strangers are constantly photographing my ass. Not on purpose, though — I’m sure they would much rather my backside not be in the frame as I stand contemplating some artwork in front of which they’re trying to pose. They fix their gaze on the camera, ignoring both me and the art itself. I’ve spent much of my life as a marathon looker. A morning in front of Théodore Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” (1818–19), an ecstatic afternoon in the frescoed garden room from the Villa of Livia. Marcel Duchamp’s 1918 piece titled “To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour”? I’ve done just that. I used to feel a sense of sneaking guilt after one...

The Aspen Art Fair will return to the Hotel Jerome from July 29 through August 1 with more than 35 exhibitors for its third edition, as the boutique fair continues to carve out a distinct presence during Aspen Art Week.  The 2026 edition will be the first under director Kelly Cornell, who joined earlier this year while continuing to lead the Dallas Art Fair. Her appointment signaled a broader effort to connect collector communities across the two fairs while maintaining Aspen’s smaller scale and more intimate format.  That scale, according to cofounder Bob Chase, remains central to the fair’s identity. Spread throughout the Jerome’s guest rooms and public spaces, the fair favors close viewing and...

SPIN Reimagines the Bicycle Helmet Through Foldable Design
 
SPIN is a foldable bicycle helmet designed to address the practical limitations associated with conventional helmet use in urban environments. Developed by designer Krittika Bhekasut, the project combines a compact folding mechanism with visual references drawn from vintage cycling equipment, positioning the helmet between protective gear and personal accessory.
 
The design responds to the difficulty of carrying and storing rigid helmets during everyday commuting. SPIN introduces a segmented shell structure that allows the helmet to collapse into a reduced-volume form, making it easier to transport in bags, under seats, or within compact storage...

Located just off of Copacabana Beach, the new museum celebrates the artists and musicians that helped make the city a global cultural destination

According to multiple media reports, artist Belu-Simion Fainaru, Israel’s representative at the recently opened Venice Biennale, put pressure on the exhibition’s organizers before the show’s jury abruptly resigned last week. When that five-person jury quit, it did not state its reason for doing so. But prior to departing the Biennale, the jury, which been charged with selecting the winners of the Biennale’s Golden Lions, said that it would not consider nations who were charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. That would have applied to Israel and Russia, both of which are showing at the Biennale. Last week, the Italian news agency Adnkronos ran two reports about what it...

The Vatican meanwhile recently opened a contemporary art space, which next year will feature work by artists including Yan Pei-Ming

“The world hums with beauty and danger, harmony and discord,” says Jake Messing. “We walk through these shifting currents every day. For as long as I can remember, I have turned toward the natural world—studying its patterns, its relationships, its quiet lessons.” In highly detailed, hyperrealistic paintings, the Northern California-based artist explores nature as a reflection of our inner lives. Abundance and beauty are sometimes confronted with tension and discomfort, and through nature, “I question the fears and unspoken rules that shape us,” Messing says. “Coccinellidaes Hideaway 2” Working in acrylic on canvas, the artist composes otherworldly vignettes of flora and fauna, often uniting...

At the Saudi Pavilion, curated by Antonia Carver, Dana Awartani has constructed a room-filling installation that marries craft tradition with conceptual force. In the Arsenale, she is showing a horizontal array of thousands of clay bricks placed in decorative motifs drawn from the artist’s long-term study of damaged or destroyed ancient heritage sites and monuments […]

VENICE — Alma Allen’s United States pavilion at the Venice Biennale says nothing, does nothing, means nothing, and goes nowhere.Curated by Jeffrey Uslip, who resigned from a job in 2016 after accusations of “racial insensitivity,” the show is titled Call Me the Breeze. That's also the title of a 1974 Lynyrd Skynyrd song. A breeze is something refreshing, nourishing, mood-altering. However, I left Allen’s pavilion feeling the same as I did before. Nothing. The pavilion features a series of amorphous, nature-inspired sculptures — all untitled — made of bronze, wood, and stone. Installation view of Alma Allen, Call Me the BreezeIf there’s any essence to the show, it’s in the choice of...

Kengo Kuma to build its first US museum
 
Kengo Kuma & Associates unveils the design for its first museum building in the United States as part of a major expansion for the Brandywine Conservancy & Museum of Art in Pennsylvania. Conceived as a series of wood-clad pavilions embedded within the landscape, the new 3,716 square meter structure anchors the transformation of the institution from a 6-hectare campus into a 131.52-hectare public preserve and garden designed in collaboration with Field Operations. The expanded site is expected to connect the new museum building with Brandywine’s historic mill structure, surrounding wetlands, and the former studios of artists N.C. and Andrew Wyeth through ten miles of...

When the Venice Biennale first announced the artist list for Koyo Kouoh’s main exhibition in February, the show included 111 participants. But when you visit the Biennale’s website now, you’ll find that Kouoh’s exhibition, titled “In Minor Keys,” now features 110 artists. ARTnews can reveal that the artist who was struck from the list was Bodys Isek Kingelez, a Congolese artist known for his vast, colorful cardboard sculptures of opulent cities. Kingelez, who termed these works “extreme maquettes,” died in 2015, by which point he had already appeared in Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta XI in 2002 and was celebrated widely. Despite Kingelez appearing on that initial artist list, a Biennale...

Most American museums have a problem that visitors rarely see until it’s too late: their buildings are falling apart. A new report from the Government Accountability Office analyzed by The Art Newspaper finds that roughly 85 percent of museums across the country are dealing with deferred maintenance or major repair needs. Even more concerning, about 77 percent say they have at least one structural issue that could put their collections at risk.  The scope of the problem cuts against the usual image of the museum as a well-funded institution in a grand building. In reality, most of the country’s roughly 16,700 museums are small, under-resourced operations, often housed in aging or historic structures...

By Coral Pereda Serras Among established and other art spaces in Melrose Hill, sits 1028 N. Western Ave., home to Western Avenue Collective artists studios. This 1922 building hosts 22 artist spaces among which is El Nido, an artist-run curatorial and research space by VC Projects. El Nido, borrowing from its Spanish name, is nested in this distinctly LA courtyard and through "Photography Into Sculpture: An Homage and An Update," emerges as a portal into the imagined memories of a Victorian...

The international art world visiting Venice for the preview week of the Biennale woke up Thursday with great relief to a sunny forecast after two days of rain. For some, the day got even better with a visit to the island of San Giacomo, in the Northern Lagoon, where ARTnews Top 200 collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo today inaugurated a new art site that will serve as a home for exhibitions, performances, and residencies.  San Giacomo is the newest exhibition venue for the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, created in 1995 by Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; the foundation opened its headquarters in Turin, Italy, in 2002, and opened the Palazzo Re Rebaudengo and its Art Park among the hills of the Langhe and...

Pristina-based artist Brilant Milazimi’s paintings depict wide-eyed figures baring their teeth in exaggerated, grotesque smiles—creaturely expressions that betray their tormented psychological states. Milazimi’s exhibition for the 2026 Kosovo pavilion, curated by José Esparza Chong Cuy, centers around a massive, eight-panel painting that foregrounds groups of such figures in various states of suspension and anticipation. Intended […]

Mikoü Architecture Reworks Historical Atelier in Montparnasse
 
Located within an Art Nouveau stone building in the Montparnasse district of Paris, Mikoü Architecture’s renovation of the former workshop of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé engages with the architectural and cultural context of interwar Paris. Situated near Rue Campagne Première and the Vavin crossroads, the atelier is connected to a broader artistic history associated with figures including Guillaume Apollinaire, Amedeo Modigliani, Man Ray, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, and Yves Klein.
 
The project focuses on revealing and extending the atelier’s Art Deco characteristics while preserving existing architectural elements. Floral...

For the better part of two decades, Irina Werning has traveled throughout Latin America searching for a specific trait: incredibly long hair. In her photography series Las Pelilargas—meaning “the long-haired ones” in Spanish—she chronicles a time-honored Indigenous tradition through a visual celebration of patience, joy, and cultural pride. In a statement, Werning shares that when she asks young women in the many small towns she’s visited why they have long hair, they respond with simple reasons akin to, “Because I like it.” But, Werning adds, “The true reason is invisible and passes from generation to generation. It’s the culture of Latin America, where our ancestors believed that cutting...

Boston Lyric Opera’s Revolutionary War-set Daughter of the Regiment prioritizes accessibility without losing its charm.

Deaf and hearing performers worked on the project, filmed in a Warsaw swimming pool

At a conference on 6 May, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco said that calls to ban countries from the Biennale would go against its mission to be ‘the place where the world comes together’

The non-profit London space, which closed in 2020, enters a new era at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition of 11 female artists

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andreas angelidakis traps history inside plato’s cave
 
The Greek Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale 2026 turns inward this year, transforming the architecture of national representation into a psychological and political stage through Escape Room by Andreas Angelidakis, curated by George Bekirakis. The Athens-based artist reimagines the pavilion as a contemporary Platonic Cave, where truth fractures into replicas, projections, staged realities, and algorithmic illusions. The installation positions the Greek Pavilion itself as a historical body haunted by nationalism, propaganda, and the unresolved tensions embedded within the Giardini. Angelidakis describes the project as ‘a pavilion split in half,’...

jr and fondazione bonotto unveil monumental tapestry of care
 
For the 61st Venice Biennale, artist JR has unveiled ‘Il Gesto,’ a multidisciplinary project that activates both the exterior and interior of Palazzo Ca’ da Mosto (The Venice Venice Hotel). The intervention begins on the building’s facade, where a large-scale temporary installation of ultra-lightweight panels transforms the Veneto-Byzantine architecture into a public stage visible from the Grand Canal. While these external figures appear to lean out from the windows to engage with the city, the project finds its permanent and definitive form inside the palace: a monumental tapestry created in collaboration with master weaver Giovanni...

The dictionary definition of Kuntenserven.

Journalist Omar El Akkad’s viral aphorism, “one day, everyone will have always been against this,” hangs solemnly over the art-world Olympics. At this week’s Venice Biennale previews, so far, the protests are louder than the art — as is the silence of those who choose not to speak up.Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hakim Bishara reports from a roaring rally outside the Israeli pavilion, where South African artist Nolan Oswald Dennis tells him that protesting is "an artist's duty." Avedis Hadjian covers a pink smoke-filled Pussy Riot and FEMEN action against Russia’s participation, and Staff Reporter Rhea Nayyar has the latest on the Biennale jury’s sudden decision to resign.Stay on top of...

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Artist, writer, editor, and cultural organizer Steven Durland died on March 11 at the age of 75 after a brief illness. His longtime collaborator and life partner, Linda Frye Burnham, confirmed his death in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, his home base of three decades. Durland was born in 1951 in Long Beach, California, and raised in South Dakota. Over the course of his early life, he lived in Massachusetts and New York before returning to the West Coast in the early 1980s. In 1993, together with Burnham, he relocated to Frog Pond Farm in Saxapahaw, where they lived alongside dogs, cats, chickens, and geese.Durland is best known for his work as editor of High Performance magazine, founded by Burnham in 1978, from...

New revelations that Israeli pavilion artist Belu-Simion Fainaru issued legal threats against the Venice Biennale may shed light on the awards jury’s sudden decision to step down from this year’s event. According to the Italian news agency Adnkronos and as independently confirmed by Hyperallergic, Fainaru filed legal warnings outlining allegations of antisemitism and nationality-based discrimination shortly after the jury initially stated that it would not consider countries accused of human rights crimes, disqualifying Israel and Russia. The women-led jury, which included Elvira Dyangani Ose, Zoe Butt, Marta Kuzma, Giovanna Zapperi, and Solange Farkas (who served as the chair), stated its intent to omit...

Construction workers racing to build the Trump administration’s border wall between the US and Mexico accidentally damaged a two-hundred-foot-long work of Indigenous Land art thought to be over a thousand years old, according to the Washington Post. Satellite imagery near Ajo, Arizona, showed what appeared to be bulldozer tracks cutting a path approximately sixty to […]

The Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), an international group of culture workers that was formed in order to call for the exclusion of Israel from the Venice Biennale, announced via press release this week that they are planning a 24-hour strike for Friday, May 8 in tandem with the previews for this year’s international exhibition.  […]

ABOVE: Installation view, Jeffrey Gibson, boshullichi / inlvchi – we will continue to change, Kunsthaus Zürich, 2025, photo by Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich Jeffrey Gibson was far more open about the act of dreaming and the beliefs that make-up spirituality than I expected. I started our conversation saying that I like to keep things loose, […]
The post Jeffrey Gibson: More Colors than The Eye Can See first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

A visit to Lincoln Park or the Garfield Park Conservatory is one of the outings Chicagoans rarely pass up, particularly when we need some reprieve from all the concrete and steel. Two beloved green spaces in the city, these spots boast oases blanketed in verdant foliage even in the depths of winter and house an array of specimens not native to the Midwest. For artists Merryn Omotayo Alaka and Sam Frésquez, the immersive nature of a conservancy, with plants above and below and all around, became a central point for a collaborative project. Your Birth is My Birth presents the duo’s synthetic hair sculptures, which suspend from the ceiling of Jane Lombard Gallery and splay across the wooden floor like organic...

“To me, being a visual activist means I only illustrate stories that resonate with me deeply, by giving voice to minorities or social situations that need to be addressed,” says Fatinha Ramos. “It is the only way I can truly connect with others.” Based in Antwerp, the Portuguese artist and illustrator is well-known for blending analog and digital techniques to create rich, emotive compositions. Collaborating with clients like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Tate, and Scientific American, among many others, Ramos has cultivated a keen eye for storytelling through her distinctive visual language. Recent partnerships include the Anne Frank Museum and MoMA, the latter of which commissioned the...

When it comes to photo dumps, NASA has upped the ante. The organization has added thousands of snapshots from the Artemis II mission to the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth archive. The album now holds 12,217 images by cosmic travelers Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen during their more than 250,000-mile, 10-day flyby mission around the moon. According to PetaPixel, a couple of Nikons and an iPhone 17 were the cameras of choice for the journey. And even though many of the thousands of recently uploaded images are very similar—some are even quite blurry—scrolling through them gives the impression of being seated right next to the “Moonfarers” as they marvel at Earth...

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Orpheus Acosta’s Website
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A joint Beethoven-Adams program conducted by Dima Slobodeniouk suggests a way forward for the embattled Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Parterre Box features the Met's current Eugene Onegin, Iurii Samoilov, in a performance of Rossini ahead of a return to Pesaro this summer.

In 1945, WWII was in its waning months. Allied forces entered Nazi occupied territories, liberating concentration camps and revealing the true extent of the horrors of the war for the first time. Adolf Hitler committed suicide on 30 April, and Victory in Europe Day was officially celebrated on 8 May. At the same time, John Baer was serving with the 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion, a unit of the US military. Here, he got a Leica camera from a captured German soldier. His earliest photographs were taken of his fellow soldiers in France and Germany, weary from war. Baer’s collection is a moving portrait of Europe and New York City in the decade after WWII. Now, almost a century on, a debut book demonstrates his...

When I was a fledgling opera enthusiast, professors at a small-town Wisconsin college routinely travelled to Chicago for Lyric Opera performances.

Portrait(s), the annual photography festival in Vichy, returns as a curatorial proposition that treats portraiture less as a genre than as a system for understanding how images construct identity, power and attention. The programme brings together David LaChapelle, Paul Graham, Yohanne Lamoulère, Julia Gat and Patrick Tournebœuf, each working through different models of portraiture: staged spectacle, documentary observation, social space and architectural trace. It positions photography as a field where historical memory, institutional frameworks and contemporary image saturation intersect. At its centre, LaChapelle anchors a major solo exhibition that sits alongside documentary, archival and pedagogical...

At some point, I realized I didn’t want to choose between the past and the present. I was interested in allowing them to coexist,” says baroque-style painter Nieves González, who distorts trappings of traditional portraiture to exalt modern day women. Her recent portrait of British pop star Lily Allen, for example, places contemporary attitude—and fashion—within […]
The post Baroque-style Painter Nieves González distorts trappings of traditional portraiture to exalt modern-day women first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Lorraine Heitzman Erik Otsea's show, Clever Animals & Static at Alto Beta is a menagerie of a different sort. His tabletop ceramic sculptures are quirky but solemn hand-built industrial shapes that suggest machine parts found in abandoned factories or as models for obscure patent applications. They conjure Soviet-style brutalist architecture and futuristic inventions, all simple geometric forms that hint at a bygone time when we believed that life could be improved through industry. So...

“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...

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...

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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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...

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Blake Masi’s Website
Blake Masi on Instagram

 
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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By Nancy Spiller Alec Egan's painting "Dawn House," in his show "Groundskeeper" at Vielmetter Los Angeles, is tender, serene, and calm — a lavender and peach sky sheltering the triangular top of a house flanked by two palm trees and the tip of a cypress. In its companion painting, "Night House," the sky takes a sinister turn with layers of dark blue, sunset orange, and a roiling strip indicative of flames mixed with what might be smoke. It hints at something of what Egan, his wife, and two...

Matthew Walton is an emerging artist based in Toronto. He holds a B.A.A. (Hons.) in Animation from Sheridan College. His mixed-media practice combines drawing and painting, often merging the human form with a distinct graphic sensibility. The result is figurative compositions that strike a distinct textural contrast between softness and hardness. Embracing gestures and mannerisms once repressed, his work is also a celebration of authentic self-expression.
Froot Loops features Matthew’s mixed-media-work-on-paper series highlighting the quiet charm of everyday queerness. Each piece reimagines a separate mundane moment, transformed by Matthew’s bold, graphic approach to figuration and his vibrant technicolor...

“What I am advocating for is a type of grace,” says Matthew Hansel. “Both in the way we see ourselves and in the way we see others. I am celebrating the impossible mix of contradictory things that make us human, including the parts of ourselves we hide from the world.” Hansel’s tour of our hidden […]
The post Matthew Hansel’s Hidden Demons first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Jorge Rodriguez-Jimenez Gustavo Rimada is showing his third solo show and largest to date at Thinkspace Projects. The show, titled “Rhythmic Sequence,” brings together his masterfully vivid acrylic paintings and his newly found love for ceramics. Offering mugs with faces that both haunt and delight, Rimada, who was born in Mexico and raised in California, is blending his Mexican heritage and his California lifestyle to create bold and culturally stunning works of art. Rimada’s ceramic work...

To celebrate the cult movie director’s 80th birthday, we bring you our interview with John Waters from Hi-Fructose Isssue 69. You can still get a copy in print of this issue here. Happy Birthday to The King of Puke! ABOVE: Portrait of John Waters, photo by Greg Gorman, © Academy Museum Foundation Early on in the […]
The post Happy 80th Birthday to The Pope of Trash: An Interview With John Waters first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.