Geometric pattern explosion as abstract artist’s Diné rugs and blankets get first public showing, in New York City

Artist Elisabeth Smolarz is well known in Ridgewood for running a popular seasonal ice cream window, but her photography ironically engages with the unsettling effects of isolation.Her photo collage and video installation, "Soft Confinement," one of several works at Supermoon Art Space’s exhibition for Ridgewood Open Studios, features a lone male figure walking through a hi-tech dystopic landscape while AI-generated images on screens include affirmations and lullabies.“We’re in a moment right now where a lot of people experience loneliness,” Smolarz told Hyperallergic. “I realized from my students at Pratt how lonely they are and that led me to do work with AI.” Fortunately, life in the...

More than 150 guns and an iron cannon were recently discovered at the Síis Já cenote in Yucatán

An ancient Roman residential and agricultural complex has been unearthed across from a shopping mall near Split, Coatia, according to Croatia Week. The news was first reported by Slobodna Dalmacija. Led by archaeologist Eduard Visković, a team from the consulting company Kantharos discovered the complex during excavations at the Mostine archeological site near Split. The team had been checking for ruins around the Bauhaus retail center before further commercial development proceeded in the area, continuing work started in 2011 with the discovery of an early Christian church there. Covering approximately 6,500 square feet, the complex appears to have been a country estate that processed olives for oil. The...

As Somalia’s first-ever national pavilion debuts at the 61st Venice Biennale, a coalition of local cultural organizations says that artists based in the country “were not meaningfully consulted, included, or recognised in a process that should have belonged to the nation more broadly.”Last month, the Somalia Arts Foundation (SAF), the country’s self-coined first contemporary art institution, issued a statement denouncing the absence of Somalia-based artists from the pavilion’s artist lineup, which included only artists living in diaspora. In a separate missive, the Somali queer collective Warbixinta Cidda decried the appointment of Italian graphic designer Fabio Scrivanti as the pavilion’s...

WASHINGTON, DC — Three fully functional arcade cabinets appeared at the DC War Memorial this morning in the latest installment of anti-Trump protest art in the nation’s capital. Visitors are invited to play “Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell,” also accessible online, which lambasts President Trump's erratic and flippant public messaging as the United States and Israel’s prolonged war on Iran continues with no end in sight.   The anonymous artist collective Secret Handshake, which was behind other protest works near the National Mall, including a golden toilet lambasting Trump’s gaudy White House renovations and a 10-foot-tall birthday card for Jeffrey Epstein, has claimed...

Iris Van Herpen Brings Living Systems Into Couture
 
Iris Van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses brings the Dutch designer’s couture, materials research, and collaborations with science into the Brooklyn Museum as the exhibition will be on view from May 16th — December 6th, 2026.
 
designboom attended a preview of the show, where Iris Van Herpen led a walkthrough of the galleries, speaking about her inspirations from the micro and macro worlds, along with her process of turning material experiments into complex, wearable sculptures.
 
Seen through the lens of Radical Softness, the exhibition lands with force through its attention to touch and interdependence. Its strength comes from the patient labor behind...

Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who fostered the famous collaboration between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, died on May 9. He was eighty-six. His death was announced on May 9 by his namesake gallery, which he had operated since 1963. Bischofberger played a crucial role in introducing US Pop artists to Europe and forged close, […]

An excavation in Moharam Bek, a neighborhood in central Alexandria, has uncovered a trove of archaeological findings dating from the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine periods. The news was announced by Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities earlier this month and reported by Greek City Times. The items range from Greek and Roman statues to smaller objects like coins, lamps, and ceramic vessels. Also uncovered were architectural structures like a public bathhouse, decorative mosaics from a Roman villa, and high-tech water systems. Mohamed Abdel Badi, of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), said in a statement that the site provides “a comprehensive model of the development of residential and service...

Sophie Rivera, "Untitled" (c. mid-1980s), color photograph (photo courtesy El Museo del Barrio)In the final room of the exhibition Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures at El Museo del Barrio, the first survey of the late Nuyorican photographer, who passed away in 2021, I found myself inexplicably drawn to a grid of abstract photographs by the gallery’s restroom. They belonged to two different series, one printed in a rust-colored red, the other in a deep, purple-hued black and white; something about the rounded, overlapping forms they depicted felt immediately familiar. These must be pinhole photographs, I thought to myself, nodding like a dutiful photo historian: Just look at the vignetting and that classic...

After eighteen years in the position, the director of DC’s National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) Susan Fisher Sterling has announced she’s retiring, per a press release. Sterling has spent close to four decades at the institution overall, having joined in 1988 as an associate curator just one year after the museum’s founding. […]

I keep reading about this A-Corp thing in Colorado, but I still don’t know what it is, let alone if I need it. Can you help? —Confused in Colorado I sure can. An Artist Corporation or A-Corp is a new type of business structure for artists in a bill introduced in the Colorado state legislature, first proposed by entrepreneur Yancey Strickler. To understand why it’s relevant to you, we need to back up a little. As an artist, you are a small business owner. You choose what type of business you’ll operate when you start making money. For most visual artists, this means filing taxes as a sole proprietor, which means all you need is your Social Security number. Filing as any other type of business requires...

An exhibition of Swiss German artist Paul Klee, at New York’s Jewish Museum, is now complete, thanks to the arrival of a long-delayed loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Angelus Novus (1920) has now taken its place in “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds,” which opened March 20 and focuses on work from the last decade of the artist’s life. The piece, measuring just 12 inches high, was previously stuck in Israel as a result of the war that country and the US are waging in Iran, which began with major joint bombardments on February 28.  Up until Monday, it was represented by an authorized facsimile and a note in accompanying wall text reading, “Due to current conditions affecting international...

Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Cupid complaining to Venus (1526–27) once hung in the Munich apartment of Adolf Hitler, the Art Newspaper reports. Now owned by the National Gallery in London, the painting, showing Roman god Cupid complaining to his mother Venus about being stung by bees, can be seen in the center of a blurry, black-and-white photograph dating to the 1940s that was published in a 1978 furniture catalog. That image was most recently republished in 2023 in the journal Kunstchronik in an article by art historian Birgit Schwarz, who is writing a book on Hitler’s personal art collection. Schwarz had previously confirmed Hitler’s ownership of the painting when she discovered, in 2006, an album at...

Midtown Jerusalem reconfigures the entrance to the city
 
DLF Architecture presents Midtown Jerusalem, a mixed-use master plan positioned along Jaffa Road at the former site of the historic Shaare Zedek Hospital. The project reconfigures the entrance to Jerusalem through a layered urban composition that combines residential towers, civic programs, commercial spaces, hotels, and public circulation networks within a single architectural framework. Located near the Chords Bridge, the development occupies a strategic position between the downtown district, Mahane Yehuda Market, and the low-rise residential fabric of Nahlaot. The site sits along the historic corridor connecting Jerusalem to Jaffa, where the...

A painting stolen by the Nazis from the Goudstikker collection has surfaced in the home of descendants of a Dutch SS collaborator, according to an art detective. Portrait of a Young Girl, by Dutch artist Toon Kelder, was allegedly displayed for decades by the family of Hendrik Seyffardt, a general who aided the Nazis during their occupation of the Netherlands before being killed by the Dutch resistance. As previously reported, a man claiming to be a descendant of Seyffardt contacted the detective Arthur Brand after discovering the painting in his family’s possession. The source, who requested anonymity, told Brand he’d only recently learned of his familial relation to Seyffardt, and later saw the work...

For a little more than two decades, Bavarian photographer Markus Brunetti has scoured Europe for its most impressive basilicas, monasteries, duomi, and other striking ecclesiastical landmarks. Working closely with collaborator Betty Schöner, with whom he travels around the continent in a firetruck that has been converted to a photo lab, the pair snap thousands of images of each structure in meter-by-meter detail, often over the course of several years. Through a meticulous editing process that includes layering and arranging each shot into composite images, Brunetti creates precise, high-resolution views of the facades that we never experience in real life. Perspective is skewed so that the ornate temples and...

a new generation of orthopedic casts
 
Castomize is developing a new generation of orthopedic casts in Singapore, using ‘4D-printing‘ to make limb immobilization lighter, cleaner, and easier to adjust. The company’s cast system moves away from the dense, wrapped structure of fiberglass, and toward a pre-made mesh shell that softens with heat, molds directly to the patient’s limb, and hardens again as it cools.
 
Recently displayed as part of part of PROTOTYPE ISLAND during Milan Design Week 2026, product began as a research project at the Singapore University of Technology and Design before spinning out as a medical technology company in 2022. Its premise is direct, stating that a cast should hold...

ARNHEM LAND, AUSTRALIA—According to a Phys.org report, Patrick Schmidt of the University of Tübingen and Peter Hiscock of the University of Queensland reanalyzed stone tools from two archaeological sites in Australia’s Northern Territory. It had been previously thought that heating rocks as part of the knapping process began in Australia about 40,000 years ago. Heat-treating the minerals helps the process along, Schmidt said, by forming new atomic bonds in the rocks. “This leads to the loss of pore space, allowing better force transmission when a fracture runs through the material. In terms of stone knapping, this means that less force is needed to make flakes and blades,” he explained. In general,...

San Giacomo launched with two temporary exhibitions and a series of site-specific works, including a leaning church

In solidarity with the resignation of the entire 2026 Venice Biennale voting jury, fifty-four individual artists and twenty-two teams affiliated with national pavilions have now withdrawn from consideration for the Visitors’ Lion awards. The Visitors’ Lions were hastily established by the Biennale after the resignation of the jury, who were, of course, responsible for the assignment of the Golden […]

As it prepares for its third edition, the St Louis-based triennial will present a performance by the Oglála Lakȟóta artist Kite at The Shed in partnership with Frieze

TOKAT, TURKEY—Hürriyet Daily News reports that mosaics dated to the second century A.D. have been uncovered in north-central Turkey. The images feature a female figure and Greek inscriptions meaning “luxury” and “abundance.” First uncovered in 2025 through an illegal excavation in Zile, the mosaics were subsequently brought to light during rescue excavations conducted by experts from the Tokat Archaeology Museum, said Alper Yılmaz of Ondokuz Mayıs University. “When we evaluate them within their architectural context, it is clear that they were part of an important structure in Roman social life,” he added. The mosaics will be preserved in place when the excavation is completed. For more on...

ONTARIO, CANADA—The remains of another four sailors from the Franklin Expedition have been identified through DNA matches with living descendants, according to a Live Science report. Led by Sir John Franklin, the expedition left England in 1845 on two ships to travel the Canadian Arctic and look for a route to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. All 129 men were lost by 1848. William Oren, a seaman; David Young, a boy first class; and John Bridgens, a subordinate officer’s steward, all sailed on HMS Erebus and died at Erebus Bay. The fourth man, Harry Peglar, was Captain of the Foretop on HMS Terror. His body was found about 125 miles from where the icebound ships had been abandoned, indicating that...

By Melanie Chapman Let the Art (and the Artist) Speak for Itself Outside of the art world, painter Celeste Dupuy-Spencer may not yet be as familiar a name as Jean-Michel Basquiat or Vincent Van Gogh, but to those who followed her artistic growth over the past ten years, she was on her way. Perhaps therein lay the problem. For those who knew Celeste personally and/or had the opportunity to work with her professionally, there is still a profound sense of loss permeating most conversations...

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A collateral exhibition displays lacquer paintings by Su Xiaobai in a 15th century palazzo

robotically printed ceramic shingles form a cladding system
 
Studio WE presents CeraShingle, a modular ceramic facade system developed through robotic 3D printing and computational design. Led by designer Yutao Chen, the project investigates how additive manufacturing can expand the architectural and material possibilities of ceramic cladding systems.
 
The project reconsiders ceramics as an active building envelope rather than a flat or repetitive surface treatment. Each shingle is robotically printed in clay and designed as part of a larger modular system. Measuring approximately 400 by 130 millimeters and weighing just over one kilogram, the units are developed for durability, handling efficiency, and...

In ballpoint pen on found fragments of philosophical and historical texts, Habib Hajallie delves into the emotional realm of memory, connection, and loss. The Kent-based artist often celebrates Black cultural figures and beloved family members, along with examining his own personal experiences as a British man of Sierra Leonean and Lebanese heritage. In his current solo exhibition, Black & Blue at Larkin Durey, Hajallie grapples with the devastating stillbirth of his daughter and the “indescribable emotions that sit beneath language,” says the gallery. For this show, the artist deliberately switched from using black ballpoint ink to blue. As he made these works, Hajallie also reflected on the loss of his...

The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh (1967-2025), is now open. It will run until 22 November at the Giardini, the Arsenale and in various locations around the city. Here is Aesthetica‘s run-down of 10 standout national pavilions to discover this year – paying attention to timely themes such as communication, connection, ecology, identity and legacy. Swiss Pavilion | The Unfinished Business of Living Together In April 1978, an episode of the Swiss public programme Telearena aired. The live broadcast debated the “problem of homosexuality”, and, whilst controversial, marked one of the first occasions when individuals from the LGBTQ+ community gained a...

To celebrate the 100th anniversary performances of Turandot at the Met starting next week, Patrick Dillon gives a listen to seven versions of "Signore, ascolta!" for Perspectives on an Aria.

Vivacious performances outweigh a host of odd directorial choices in the Washington National Opera's West Side Story

koyo kouoh foundation continues the late curator’s vision
 
A new foundation established in memory of late curator and cultural thinker Koyo Kouoh seeks to preserve and expand the intellectual, curatorial, and institutional legacy she built across Africa and beyond. Based in Basel, Switzerland, the Koyo Kouoh Foundation positions itself as a platform for future generations of artists, curators, and cultural practitioners, continuing the late curator’s commitment to critical thought, artistic discourse, and long-term cultural infrastructure. The announcement arrives as the art world continues to reflect on Kouoh’s enduring influence following her appointment as curator of the 61st International Art...

In 2010, the world was recovering from a seismic financial crash. The Great Recession was the worst economic downturns since the Great Depression (1929 – 1939), and in the USA, households lost an average of 26% of their net worth. The effects rippled across the world, and in the UK, unemployment reached its highest rate in a decade, whilst earnings failed to keep up with prices. It was in this climate of uncertainty, desperation and hardship that photographer and writer Johny Pitts embarked on a five-month journey across Europe, armed with several notebooks and a camera. The project grew from a necessity both intimate and political: to understand what it means to be Black in Europe, beyond cliches, identity...

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Dear readers, In a collection of her published diary entries, Virgina Woolf wrote, “Thinking is my fighting.” This sentiment was a prominent theme in her 1940 essay, Thoughts on Peace In an Air Raid, in which the British writer framed the importance of individual thought as a crucial antidote to war and the rise of fascism. I’ve been thinking a lot about Woolf’s quote and its relevance today, largely connected to discourse on education. While literacy rates in the U.S. continue to plummet, a soaring number of individuals are adopting habits antithetical to thinking—offloading even the smallest of cognitive tasks onto Chat GPT, doomscrolling for hours on social media, and numbing the mind with...

Victoria de los Ángeles has always been my Violetta of choice, a portrayal that never ceases to move me.

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How can ideas transform into a visual experience? How can engineering and technology intersect with art? What does it mean to embody perception? These are the questions at the heart of Manlin Zhang’s practice. The research-led visual artist is uniquely placed to navigate these intersections, having previously trained at the College of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering She develops a structured, process-driven approach to image-making, treating painting as embodied research rather than illustration. Her work features layered surfaces and visual structures that sit between the organic and constructed.  Zhang effortlessly traverses science and art, and nowhere is this better demonstrated than...

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Liberation, modernism and the politics of self-determination form the conceptual spine of Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa, an exhibition opening this July at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It examines how architecture became a critical medium through which newly independent West African nations articulated sovereignty, identity, and futurity in the decades following colonial rule. Rather than treating modernism as a neutral or imported style, the exhibition frames it as a charged and adaptive language, refracted through the urgencies of nation-building and rapid urban transformation. Across Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo, architectural...

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I feel that the best years of Maria Callas’s vocalità, when we hear such a unique freedom and generosity in her singing, were captured in her early recordings.

Fotografiska has become one of the most visible forces reshaping how photography is exhibited and experienced in the contemporary museum landscape. Founded in Stockholm, 15 years ago, now it has expanded internationally to cities including Berlin, New York and Tallinn, it operates less as a conventional institution and more as a fluid cultural platform. Its programming model is built around scale and accessibility – presenting major photographic names alongside emerging practitioners in ways that collapse hierarchy while retaining curatorial clarity. Recent years have seen a steady sharpening of its global identity, with exhibitions that move between documentary urgency, staged spectacle and conceptual...

Before the screams of horror begin, it says 'favorite', not best.

In Love Letters, Hilary Pecis captures the mundane moments and under-appreciated views of daily life. The Los Angeles-based artist presents a suite of new acrylic paintings in her signature saturated style, focusing on snippets of a backyard pool, the corner of a studio worktop, and a friendly picnic complete with a radiant strawberry cake. Pecis prefers to work from photos and translates singular moments onto linen. Utilizing a uniform opacity in her paints, she incorporates both comparable and exaggerated colors and affords particular attention to texture and pattern. Frilly fronds on a plant, light radiating off the water’s surface, and the rough texture of a woven tablecloth each evidence the artist’s...

Thousands of marchers flooded the thoroughfares of Venice to protest the presence of Israel at the Venice Biennale, with many national pavilions shuttering in solidarity. The New York Times reported that the pavilions belonging to Austria, Belgium, Egypt, Japan, the Netherlands, and South Korea closed. Austria’s pavilion bore a sign noting that some of its […]

The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) on May 8 named Richard Lewer the winner of the 2026 Archibald Prize. The award, considered Australia’s top portrait honor, is presented annually in recognition of the best portrait of an individual “distinguished in art, letters, science or politics” painted by an Australian resident. The New Zealand–born Lewer, […]

Despite its name, the Canadian Tuxedo is a distinctly American look. The denim-on-denim getup dates back to the 1950s, when Bing Crosby sported a full Levi’s ensemble while in Vancouver, setting a sartorial trend that continues today. The national mythology woven into this utilitarian material is also the focus of Brooklyn-based Nick Doyle, who layers denim atop denim into large wall sculptures. From a pair of aviators reflecting puffy clouds to a vast Rocky Mountain landscape framed by brick, the works evoke a sort of nostalgic road trip west, as if chasing a big break, and ultimately, realizing the American dream. “First Come the Dreamers” (2026), bleached and collaged denim on panel, 25 x 72 inches...

SOUTH GYEONGSANG, SOUTH KOREA—A genetic study of the remains of four 2,000-year-old dogs recovered from two archaeological sites on the Korean Peninsula suggests that the canines belonged to a lineage separate from other dog populations in East Asia, according to the Korea JoongAng Daily. It had been previously thought that dog populations in East Asian shared a single lineage. Hyeongcheol Kim of the Gaya National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, Suyeon Kim and A-reum Yu of the National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, and their colleagues determined that ancient Korean dogs resembled the Australian dingo and the New Guinea singing dog. Korean dogs were also found to carry DNA from European...

AUSTRÅTT, NORWAY—According to a Science Norway report, a hiker discovered a rare gold fitting for a scabbard near the southwestern tip of Norway. The ornament, which dates to the first half of the sixth century A.D., was topped with thin gold threads twisted into patterns for a shimmering effect. “This places the object among the finest works from the period, created by highly skilled goldsmiths,” said Siv Kristoffersen, who retired from the University of Stavanger Museum of Archaeology. Such patterns, she added, were used to depict animals. In this case, the two animal heads face each other in profile. One animal was placed on the upper edge, while the other was inverted and placed on the lower edge of...

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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...

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.

Orpheus Acosta  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Orpheus Acosta’s Website
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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...

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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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