In AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted, sending a cloud of ash and hot gas sweeping through the ancient Roman town of Pompei. The writer Pliny the Younger—whose uncle, Pliny the Elder, died in the eruption—watched the catastrophe unfold from a vantage point across the Bay of Naples, later describing how inhabitants had tied pillows over their heads to protect themselves from falling debris and carried torches to find their way through the darkness. In 2024, archeologists discovered the skeletons of two of the volcano’s victims, likely killed as they tried to reach the sea, just outside Pompeii’s southern gates. The first skeleton was of a young man, who is thought to have died in a pyroclastic surge—a rush...

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

Drew Hayden Taylor’s “The Undeniable Accusations of Red Cadmium Light”, which recently debuted in Vancouver, interrogates fraud in several forms

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

inside the new galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of art
 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens Costume Art this May in New York, inaugurating the new Condé M. Nast Galleries with a show that puts fashion in direct dialogue with the museum’s wider collection.
 
designboom attended a preview of the exhibition where architects Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich of Peterson Rich Office gave a tour of their new galleries. Their design frames the show as a continuous spatial sequence. Here, garments and artworks share the same platforms, materials, and sightlines. Rusticated plaster bases extend from the permanent architecture into the display plinths to create a consistent ground plane that links objects...

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

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

With a single day remaining before the 61st Venice Biennale opens for previews this week, the Biennale Foundation announced today that Iran will not be participating in the national pavilion exhibition. The news comes two months after the United States and Israel first launched strikes across Iran, and coincides with resumed attacks along the Strait of Hormuz as tensions throughout the temporary ceasefire bubbled over in the last 24 hours. Little information is available about the pavilion exhibition aside from the fact that Aydin Mehdizadeh Tehrani, the director general of the visual arts office in the Iranian Ministry of Culture, was listed as the commissioner as of March 4. “With regard to the National...

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

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

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

A gold-leafed statue of Donald Trump is now standing at his Trump National Doral golf club in Miami after a drawn-out payment dispute. The 15-foot bronze sculpture, which rises to about 22 feet with its pedestal, was finished with gold leaf after the artist, Ohio-based sculptor Alan Cottrill, proposed the upgrade. “It [was] like pitching ice water to a man dying of thirst,” Cottrill told the Daily Beast.  The addition helped push the cost of the project, commissioned by a group of cryptocurrency investors to promote their $PATRIOT meme coin, from $300,000 to $360,000. Cottrill also demanded compensation for the group’s use of images of the statue to market the token before his payment had been...

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

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

MoMA PS1 in New York City will present the first United States survey of Mexican artist Teresa Margolles this fall. Formally trained as a forensic pathologist, Margolles has spent over 30 years creating sculptures, performances, and installation work with organic and bodily materials sourced from homicide victims, morgues, and crime scenes.The Queens-based institution will bring together select works across the artist's various confrontations of murder and violence along the US-Mexico border, as well as the treatment, disposal, and remembrance of the human body after its life has been taken. In a 2026 evolution of Margolles's ongoing Air (2003–) series, a MoMA PS1 gallery will be humidified with...

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

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

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

ENESS turns social media into a physical AI experience
 
Inside the medieval halls of Kalmar Castle, ENESS presents The Cloud Utopia Machine, a new interactive installation staged as part of the expanded exhibition Modern Guru and the Path to Artificial Happiness, on view until November 1st, 2026. Set within the 800-year-old Swedish fortress, the work invites visitors to hand over their smartphones to a moving conveyor system where the devices travel through a sequence of cloud-shaped chambers filled with miniature speculative worlds. The installation turns the logic of social media into a physical experience, reflecting on artificial intelligence, digital dependency, and the architecture of online...

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

Gagosian gallery in London will present an artwork conceived by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1968 but never realized before the artists’ deaths—Jeanne-Claude in 2009 and Christo in 2020. The exhibition “Christo: Air,” opening May 21 and running through August 21, will feature rare works by Christo as well as Air Package on a Ceiling, a work that Christo and Jeanne-Claude planned for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia but never mounted due to technical limitations. Described in the gallery’s press release for the exhibition as a “vast, internally illuminated and suspended form,” the work will measure around 32 by 52 feet and hangs just over the heads of viewers in the gallery. In a...

Iran has dropped out of the Venice Biennale, the world’s most important recurring art exhibition, as the United States and Israel’s war continues on. “Regarding the National Participations at the 61st International Art Exhibition, In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh (9 May – 22 November 2026), La Biennale has been informed that the Islamic Republic of Iran will not participate,” the Biennale said in a statement, noting that there are now an even 100 countries with pavilions in the show instead of 101. The Biennale did not state why Iran would no longer mount a pavilion. On the exhibition’s website, Iran is the only nation listed without any artist representatives. Aydin Mahdizadeh Tehrani is listed as...

Chanel is teaming up with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation on a new curatorial fellowship that will move between New York and Venice, tying one of the art world’s biggest institutions more closely to one of its busiest international stages—and to a growing network of cultural initiatives backed by the fashion house. The announcement will come at the very start of the Venice Biennale. Beginning in 2027, the Chanel Culture Fund Fellowship will be a one-year program is for MA- and PhD-level scholars focused on collection studies and curatorial research. Each fellow will begin at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York before continuing at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, working...

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

derrick adams arrives in venice
 
A new public work by Derrick Adams has appeared in Venice, floating over the city’s network of canals in the heart of the Biennale. Titled Heavy is the head that wears the crown, the piece takes the form of a large-scale portrait of the late curator Koyo Kouoh, installed as a banner on the facade of the Palazzetto dello sport Giobatta Gianquinto in Castello. Facing the Rio della Tana, the image meets visitors as they move between the Arsenale and the surrounding streets.
 
The project, curated by Francesco Bonami, runs from May 4th through September 24th, 2026. Its placement is significant. The facade reads as a flat plane stretched across a busy edge condition, and Adams...

From a Christie's exhibition to a posthumous display Mel Ramos, this year numerous explicitly commercial shows signal a shift in attitude

Artist Amina Agueznay has created a 300 sq m site-specific installation in the Arsenale

Chromatic Symphony of Landscapes by Moriyuki Ochiai Architects
 
Moriyuki Ochiai Architects collaborates with a paint manufacturer specializing in gradational coating techniques, developing Chromatic Symphony of Landscapes. The project translates the colors and material qualities of the Seto Inland Sea and Sensuijima Island into an interior environment and furniture system. The design draws on the visual characteristics of water, stone, and earth to establish a spatial composition informed by natural processes.
 
Furniture elements are defined by layered color gradients and textured surfaces, referencing coastal rock formations and geological strata. These pieces are distributed throughout the space in...

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

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

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dreams as active design tools
 
Following the speculative systems and future frameworks explored in Utopia Then and Now, designboom turns its attention inward toward the subjective, emotional, and often irrational territory of dreams. The Dreams in Motion chapter asks a simple but radical question: what if dreams are not passive fantasies, but active rehearsals for reality?
 
Unlike utopian thinking, which tends to construct structured visions of better societies, this chapter operates in a looser, more fluid space. Dreams are approached as systems already in motion: forces that shape how we perceive, design, and ultimately build the world around us. The projects, interviews and profiles gathered under this...

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

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

I realize Igor Gorin did not sing much Verdi except for a few Papa Germonts, yet this performance of the famous baritone aria from Attila I claim is well-night perfect singing.

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

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

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

Luminous Lucia Popp’s “Caro Nome” beams with Gilda’s youthful passion, displaying Popp’s signature bright, beautiful timbre and magnificent coloratura.

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

After the ruling, President Donald Trump imposed new rate of up to 15%, although this is also being challenged and is likely to be temporary

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

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

The veteran provocateur talks about his return to the enduring motif of Santa Claus, and his ongoing collaboration with the German actress Lilith Stangenberg, as an exhibition of his taboo-busting work opens in Paris

Blake Masi  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Blake Masi’s Website
Blake Masi on Instagram

Systems of power, cultural identity and “the fragile boundaries between perception and reality” are the ideas that drive Lucia Shuyu Li, a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, performance, painting and sound. They’re also some of the most relevant themes of our times, emerging from a contemporary era defined by misinformation, political polarisation and an endless news cycle. Li draws on her Chinese heritage and time spent in the US to create her works, which express her “experiences as an individual navigating the complexities of contemporary society.” The trio of paintings Judge Me, I Am Dead Therefore I Was Alive and Who Cried Walking Home are perhaps her most personal, and...

In recent years, Julianknxx has developed a practice that sits at a compelling intersection of film, poetry and performance – one that resists easy classification while remaining grounded in lived experience. Born in Sierra Leone and now based in London, his work reflects an engagement with questions of identity, displacement and cultural memory. Rather than treating these themes as fixed subjects, he approaches them as evolving conditions, shaped by movement, language and time; unfolding through a logic of association rather than linear narrative, rhythm, voice and atmosphere. This creates a viewing experience that is as much about listening and sensing as it is about interpretation. In this way, Julianknxx...

Home might be a mutable concept, but some objects retain the aura of belonging and comfort even outside the walls we reside in. For Monica Rohan, those items are patterned fabrics and bentwood dining chairs, which venture outdoors in her vibrant oil paintings. The Brisbane-based artist has long depicted the supple folds and bright motifs of textiles, which tended to swaddle her characters or hide their faces among natural landscapes. Upholstered loungers and carved wood seats have similarly appeared in unusual spots, precariously holding a figure while nested in a slim hedge or slumping down a small hill. “Draped Clover” (2026), oil on board, 70 x 100 centimeters In recent years, though, Rohan’s...

 
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...

Sylvia Trotter Ewens  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
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...

Kelsey Shwetz  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Kelsey Shwetz’s Website
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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...

Dorian Tocker  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Dorian Tocker’s Website
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By Katherine Kesey In the last few years, Los Angeles's Melrose Hill neighborhood has quickly become one of the city's most walkable arts districts. This past Saturday night, there were nearly ten coordinated openings, and I attended almost all of them. Taken individually, the shows were equally captivating. Together, they were a warm and exciting medley of passionate color, lighthearted mystery, and wry humor. Hannah Tishkoff, Beyond Love There is No Belief. 2026. Acrylic, oil, and pennies...