Agata Kurzela Studio Crafts Spatial Cycles of Emirati Memory
 
Agata Kurzela Studio leads the creative direction, curatorship, and interior design of public, VIP, hospitality, and research spaces within Abu Dhabi’s Zayed National Museum. The studio’s work extends across spatial planning, FF&E, material development, and collaborations with regional designers and artisans, translating Emirati cultural references into contemporary interiors through craft, material, and spatial sequences.
 
Located in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Cultural District, the Zayed National Museum is one of the United Arab Emirates’ major cultural institutions. Agata Kurzela Studio was commissioned to develop the interior language...

Next great listen unlocked: Senior Editor Valentina Di Liscia was recently a guest on the Atlas Obscura podcast to discuss the controversy around the destruction of the kaleidoscopic "Casa Cueva," one of the last works by architect Juan O'Gorman (who also designed the studios of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera), by fellow Mexican artist Helen Escobedo. Tune in to her brilliant narration of this contentious chapter in art history wherever you get your podcasts.Just off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Carroll Gardens is a small but mighty museum dedicated entirely to a single painting. Sculptor Elliott Arkin established the Salvator Mundi Museum of Art right in the lobby of his building, staging exhibitions...

ISLAA's 2026–27 Fellows (photos courtesy ISLAA)Art Movements, published every Thursday afternoon, is a roundup of must-know news, appointments, awards, and other art-world happenings. Today, we report on a new cohort of fellows at ISLAA, the bittersweet closure of a West Coast arts magazine, Mamdani's plans for Elizabeth Street Garden, and new leaders at SFMOMA, the Portland Art Museum, and more. Institute for Studies on Latin American Art Announces 2026 Fellows The curatorial practices of the Bienal de La Habana, neográfica in Mexico, women printmakers in Buenos Aires, and a Chilean artist’s experiments with early artificial intelligence: These are just some of the areas and topics that 24...

An Egyptian archaeological mission has discovered three tombs from different historical periods at the Sheikh Sobi archaeological site in the Bahariya Oasis. The news was reported by several outlets, including Arab News, following an announcement by Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The site, which lies about 225 miles southwest of Giza, contains a necropolis used to bury governors and priests of the oasis during Egypt’s Late Period (664–332 BCE), as well as the Bawiti Temple, built during the 26th dynasty (664–525 BCE) in honor of the pharaoh Ahmose II, the last great native pharaoh before the Persian conquest of Egypt. The newly discovered burial structures consist of a rock-cut family...

Tulsa, Oklahoma-based digital artist Lily Belmira has made a new, free video game allowing anyone to virtually visit Michael Heizer’s mysterious and radically difficult-to-enter land artwork in the Nevada desert, titled City. Only six people a day who are willing to pay the regular admission fee of $150 are permitted to explore City, one of the world’s largest artworks, in person. Spanning over a mile and a half, its precise location has been kept secret to some degree since its opening in 2022. But Belmira hopes to offer a virtual way around all that, while deliberately challenging the notion of restricted access to art, in favor of a more democratic and broad-reaching approach. She told ARTnews via email...

Living on Philadelphia's Avenue of the Arts will become a reality for dozens of artists as early as next year. The Village of Industry & Art (VIA) announced on August 12 that it will transform a former University of the Arts (UArts) dormitory into 45 affordable apartments. The news comes after the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awarded the VIA a $2.5 million grant for the building project and the establishment of on-site arts programming.

lincoln gives 2027 nautilus an interior that reveals itself slowly
 
With Monterey Car Week 2026 underway and designboom arriving on the peninsula, Lincoln has introduced the 2027 Nautilus with a redesigned exterior and two new Black Label interiors. There is a wider grille and a newly shaped hood, though the more interesting changes happen once you look inside. Lincoln has worked subtle patterning into the vehicle‘s cabin that become more apparent as the lighting comes on, pairing them with new woods and color combinations that give the interior another layer to discover.
 
The two new Black Label themes take landscape as their starting point. Eminent Hour draws from a desert sunset, surrounding Tranquil...

“A litham-wearing orchestra begins to play with tenderness”

The public statement of support follows the international museum body’s recent update of its code of ethics, as well as a similar statement issued by the American Alliance of Museums in July

The Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project (JDCRP), an organization founded in Berlin in 2016, announced today that it has added AI capabilities to its provenance research tool, Legacy Explorer, which launched last year. Legacy Explorer is currently able to search five archives, including the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg archive at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, as well as several others that organize property cards and photographs. A sixth archive will be added later this month, according to a statement from the JDCRP. Prior to this AI sync, users would have to search each archive individually. Now, the AI document-scanning tools, along with partnerships with organizations and archives around the world,...

Both AI-generated art and digital art have had a tough time lately, but the 61st Venice Biennale offers the digitally-minded some work to feel good about

The Bayeux Tapestry is set for its big moment at the British Museum this fall, but the New York Times is dishing on how the loan came to be. In a feature published Tuesday, reporter Alex Marshall reveals the many behind-the-scenes negotiations that brought the famed Romanesque-style textile artwork depicting the 1066 Norman invasion back home to the UK. The most recent loan request was far from the first: the UK had previously asked for the work in 1953, 1966, and 1980. So what changed? As Marshall tells it, Chris Bryant, a senior UK official, went to the Cannes Film Festival last year to meet with Rachida Dati, France’s then–culture minister. (Dati, a controversial figure for her right-wing views,...

PHILADELPHIA — Held from August 6 to 9, the BlackStar Film Festival marked its 15th anniversary this year with 91 films underscoring its ongoing commitment to “a cinema for liberation.” That vision is one of collective endurance, a shared struggle rooted in solidarity and dogged determination. It suffused Haile Gerima’s Black Lions, Roman Wolves, a five-part documentary on Ethiopia’s resistance to the Italian invasion of 1935; artist Suneil Sanzgiri’s “An Impossible Address,” a poetic documentary on the legacy of Indian and African freedom struggles against Portuguese colonialism; and Harlan Banks’s “I Wonder Shall I Fly,” weaving Black diasporic footage with precious 1940s recordings of...

The San Francisco photography collective SF Camerawork announced that it will permanently close on August 16 after fifty-two years. The announcement, posted on the organization’s website and Instagram, cited “rising operating costs, declining public funding, and a changing philanthropic landscape.”  The institution began as Lamkin Camerwork Gallery in 1974, founded by John Lamkin. Three years later, he sold […]

The board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted Thursday to close the center for renovations for a second time, while keeping a smaller, separate theater open. This week’s vote marked a dramatic escalation in the legal battle over the historic center: the Trump-allied board also moved to inscribe the president’s name beneath the signage—a direct rebuke of a May federal court order that had blocked both the closure and a name change. According to the New York Times, the board has approved an inscription beneath the center’s name reading: “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.” The Kennedy Center board voted last December to change the institution’s name to...

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The Lola Mora Cultural Center, named for the pioneering Argentine sculptor, opened in early July in the vicinity of San Salvador de Jujuy in northwestern Argentina. Nestled in the Yungas forest, the museum features wide terraces overlooking the city. The institution’s collection houses six monumental works by Mora (1866–1936), an innovative artist who has grown to […]

Roar Uses Mathematical Fractals for Calming Retail Journey
 
In Mumbai’s historic Lower Parel district, design practice ROAR completes the interior of a new Jaipur Rugs showroom within the Empire Mills compound. Located in a former Victorian-era cotton mill warehouse, the project connects the industrial history of Mumbai’s textile district with India’s continuing tradition of hand weaving. The design introduces a spatial system based on fractal geometry, translating the repetition and rhythm of hand-knotting into a series of stepped architectural volumes that organize the showroom.
 
The site forms part of Girangaon, the historic ‘mill village’ that became a center of Mumbai’s textile industry...

jaguar turns the cabin lengthwise
 
With the exterior of Jaguar Type 01 still hidden under camouflage, the production car’s interior offers the clearest view yet of how far the provocative Type 00 concept will survive the trip from show car to road car. The central idea has made it through intact. A broad spine runs from the dashboard through the rear of the cabin to divide the four-seat layout into individual zones and draw the eye along the length of the GT instead of across it.
 
Jaguar chief interior designer Thomas Holden calls it ‘an architectural statement that creates four individual spaces,‘ and these first images show that it behaves almost like an interior wall, thick enough to shape how...

Preservationists have raised concerns that vibrations from President Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 Grand Prix, to be held August 22–23 in Washington, DC, will cause damage to artworks housed in buildings along the race route, the Washington Post reports. Cars will travel at speeds of up to 185 mph past the National Gallery of Art, the […]

From the collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, which features a wealth of artwork and artifacts related to social justice and community organizing, a new exhibition highlights American democracy and freedom of speech through the lens of art as an agent of change. Turn the volume up! includes works by a diverse group of contemporary artists and photographers, from Spider Martin’s dramatic documentation of Freedom Marches during the Civil Rights Movement to Kara Walker’s multimedia interrogations of U.S. history and racial stereotypes. Visitors will also encounter works by the Guerilla Girls, Carrie Mae Weems, Kiki Smith, Bruce Davidson, and many more. Kara Walker, “Confederate...

The Picasso had disappeared without a trace.On the morning of February 6, 1961, a graduate student and dormitory aide at the University of Pittsburgh reported Picasso's painting "Femme dans un fauteuil" (1918) missing from the Students Union building. The 13.5-by-10.5-inch oil had been on loan from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for an exhibition in the fall semester, and was due to be returned to the museum later that month. The school reported the theft to the Pittsburgh Police Department and the FBI was swiftly brought in to investigate, but despite a slew of news articles, notifications to institutions across North America, and a reward for information, the case went cold.More than six decades...

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The High Renaissance master’s “Madonna of St Sebastian” shows off its colours after nearly four years of treatment

The Ministry of Culture in Ukraine has stated that Russian attacks on the country have damaged or destroyed 2,625 cultural infrastructure facilities and 1,990 cultural heritage sites as of the end of July 2026 “Russia is waging a systematic war against Ukrainian culture in an attempt to erase our identity,” Tetyana Berezhna, Deputy Prime Minister […]

The town of East Hampton claims Matt Johnson’s 60ft-tall sculpture is a structure built without proper safety permitting

4SPACE reinterprets Equestrian Heritage for Falwa restaurant
 
Within the distinguished grounds of Abu Dhabi Royal Equestrian Arts (ADREA), a captivating new architectural narrative takes shape. Designed by Dubai-based studio 4SPACE for Michelin-starred Emirati Chef Faisal Alharmoodi, Falwa restaurant presents a thoughtful study in how regional identity can be translated into built form without falling into the trap of literal illustration or nostalgic decor. Spanning 450 sqm, the project bridges contemporary regional gastronomy with the UAE’s deep-rooted affinity for the Arabian horse, achieving a fluid, modern spatial language that speaks through form, motion, and tactile materiality.
 
The conceptual...

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Our oceans are places of mystery and biological wonders as much as they are essential to communities’ livelihoods. We tap these expansive bodies of water for recreation, food, transportation. From the Atlantic to the Arctic, oceans cover around 70 percent of the earth’s surface, and there is an incredible wealth of life yet to be discovered. As the continuing climate crisis melts ice caps and raises sea levels, and industrial fishing and waste threatens endangered marine animals and habitats, reminders of the oceans’ irreplaceable value and power are ever more critical. That’s where Oceanographic magazine and Blancpain’s annual Ocean Photographer of the Year contest comes in as a catalyst for...

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Each year, Siena commissions an artist to hand paint the silk ‘drappellone’, awarded to the museum associated with the race winner

Speaking of dementia in opera, all I can think of is the extraordinary reimagined production of Béla Bartók’s chamber opera Bluebeard's Castle that I saw at Atlanta Opera in October 2022.

“The wind is my nemesis!” says Jennifer Latour, and rightly so. In her sculptural assemblages, single flowers or small clusters of blooms sprout from tree branches or thick stems, appearing like otherworldly forms standing in the landscape. A soft breeze could topple the Vancouver-based artist’s ephemeral works, scattering their delicate petals and spindly shoots before she has the chance to snap a photo. These fleeting moments are preserved in Latour’s Bound Species series, which she began during lockdown by piecing together objects found around her home into unconventional, ikebana-style compositions. “During this time, I started having a recurring dream of giant flowers growing around me with...

From materials we normally discard like padded packaging or the mesh sleeves that protect fruit from bruising, Suzanne Jongmans summons elegant and dreamlike Renaissance portraits. The artist drapes models in lush velvet fabrics and typically positions them against deep backgrounds in the vein of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” (1489-91) or Antonello da Messina’s “Portrait of a Young Man” (c. 1470). The settings and the addition of fine garments contrast found plastic detritus with hints of refinement and the figures’ dignified postures, mirroring the solemn, pious expressions of individuals in Renaissance portraiture. Recently, she has also incorporated copper coils extracted from the...

Scientists have long studied how magnetic energy powers solar activity. The constant motion of plasma particles and the sun’s rotation are major contributors to its cycles and events, such as flares and coronal mass ejections, which lob huge quantities of plasma and gas into space. Sometimes these explosions reach the earth’s magnetic field and cause geomagnetic storms, which are when we see some of the most brilliant auroras. But they also disrupt or damage our communications systems, power grids, GPS, and satellites, and researchers want to further understand how the sun builds up its magnetic energy so we better know how to guard against its massive fits of activity. They’ve also been trying to figure...

Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen shows that he's at the top of a crowded pack of countertenors in two recent New York performances with Philharmonia Baroque.

Caleb Stein  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Caleb Stein’s Website
Caleb Stein on Instagram

Alexander Köpeczi, currently plying leading roles in two operas in Santa Fe and, rumor has it, the life of one prominent soprano, is the object of this week's Grand Tier Grab Bag.

Le sculture di Anna Maria Maiolino (Scalea, 1942) si accumulano. Si ammucchiano per ripetizione e sono costruite da gesti infiniti e dal tatto. Ma questi piccoli gesti quotidiani non sono solamente pratica artistica: visualizzano come la vulnerabilità e la sensibilità, il tatto e la cura, possono essere un atto di resistenza. La Galleria Ovale del Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) di Lisbona, Portogallo, racchiude queste sculture create con modalità ripetitiva. La mostra si intitola Poetic Earth. Alcune delle opere sono state realizzate decenni fa, altre sono state create in situ, proprio in questo spazio a forma di foglia.
View of the exhibition “Anna Maria Maiolino. Poetic Earth”,...

Ilana Walder-Biesanz reports from The Santa Fe Opera, where Tobias Picker's latest opera falls short, a new Rodelinda scintillates, and sumptuous singing abounds across the entire repertoire.

That this performance of Verdi's Lady Macbeth was recorded and preserved for posterity is beyond the pale.

Ci sono artisti la cui carriera coincide con una lunga ricerca e altri che, raggiunta una determinata soglia, sembrano aver trovato una lingua tanto riconoscibile da poter attraversare qualsiasi soggetto senza modificarne realmente la struttura. È una condizione rara, che appartiene a quei pochi autori il cui immaginario ha ormai assunto la forma di un universo autonomo, capace di assorbire temi, epoche e narrazioni mantenendo pressoché intatta la propria grammatica. Osservando Le Alchimiste, il mastodontico progetto concepito da Anselm Kiefer per la Sala delle Cariatidi di Palazzo Reale, a Milano, a cura di Gabriella Belli, la sensazione è proprio questa: non quella di assistere a una svolta, quanto...

Leonie Bo  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Leonie Bos’s Website
Leonie Bos on Instagram

La pittura contemporanea ha spesso trasformato il ritorno in una narrazione di recupero: un’interruzione superata, una perdita convertita in nuova possibilità. When the Sun Shines Again, la prima grande personale newyorkese di Guimi You presso Lehmann Maupin, usa questa struttura per metterla in crisi. La mostra osserva ciò che accade quando il gesto artistico emerge da periodi di sospensione, quando il fare pittura si intreccia con la cura, l’attesa e forme di vita che tradizionalmente rimangono fuori dalla storia della produzione.
Guimi You, “When the Sun Shines Again”, installation view at Lehmann Maupin New York. Photography by Studio Kukla, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul...

Knokke Art Fair è una delle fiere d’arte più antiche al mondo e la più longeva tradizione internazionale sulla costa belga, un luogo speciale dove l’arte emoziona, giovani e anziani, curiosi ed esperti. Che sia ammirata tra le solenni mura di un luogo deputato o all’aria aperta (con una scultura site-specific), l’arte suscita emozioni, stimola la riflessione e invita al dialogo.
Vista esterna della location di Knokke Art Fair, edizione 2026
Knokke Art Fair è un evento del tutto indipendente, incentrato sulla qualità basata su un’accurata selezione che si svolge prima dell’apertura della fiera, ed è organizzata da Alexander Tuteleers. In questo luogo, il tempo sembra essersi fermato in...

Fino al 30 novembre 2026 il Parco Archeologico di Pompei ospita la mostra Philip Colbert in Pompeii: Pop Mythology. La mostra, curata da Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, espone oltre trenta sculture monumentali dell’artista britannico tra le quali protagonista assoluto è l’astice antropomorfo, alter ego dell’artista e ormai suo marchio riconoscibile.
Philip Colbert, ph. courtesy of the artist studio
Le opere di Colbert sono progettate per risultare subito leggibili e perfettamente compatibili con le aspettative della comunicazione social. Molti lavori si distinguono per l’uso di colori saturi, monumentalità, ironia pop e kitsch con citazioni della classicità ridotte a segni facilmente riconoscibili e nel...

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...

Xiao Hua Yang  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Xiao Hua Yang’s Website
Xiao Hua Yang on Instagram

Alina Bobrova  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Alina Bobrova’s Website
Alina Bobrova on Instagram

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.

A selection of recent work by artist Emma Steinkraus. Based in Lexington, Virginia, Steinkraus  
   
   
   
   
 
Emma Steinkraus’s Website
Emma Steinkraus on Instagram

By Victoria Thomas Photographer and ceramic artist Catherine (Cathy) Opie first shocked and rocked the fine art world with her self-portraits during the late 1990s. Today, her decades of work — often termed confessional — now serve as context for the far more enigmatic Holding Blue installation, on view at Regen Projects through July 3. The Los Angeles-based artist identifies as a leather dyke, lesbian cowboy, an elder, and as "Mama Cathy," with a mustachioed male alter-ego named Bo. Opie is...

“Danger” is a word often associated with the candy-colored work of Los Angeles artist Kristen Liu-Wong. Her feminine tableaus, often rendered in a bright blend of acrylics, paint pen, and marker, have particularly veered into more menacing territory in recent years. “The world is a dangerous place,” Liu-Wong says, in a June interview. “I don’t […]
The post Dont Tempt Me: the Art of Kristen Liu-Wong first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

On paper, Nathan Reidt’s creatures sometimes reveal themselves through a fog of graphite. He may begin with a “vague, circle-y shape” and shade areas. “Then I just stare at it for a long time and wait for something to pop out and refine that a little and stare at it.” The Philadelphia-based artist explains by […]
The post Personal Growth: the Art of Nathan Reidt first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

By Betty Ann Brown "Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation — I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances."—Henri Matisse Jill sykes by Eric Minh Swenson Jill Sykes creates beautiful paintings of botanical phenomena. Like Matisse, she translates three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional images, occupying the territory between abstraction and representation to achieve balance and equilibrium. From a very early age,...

By Victoria Thomas There's something about a hanging. Whether legal or not, the visual experience seems mythic, supernatural, theatrical, and ritualistic, versus the efficiency of a swift kill. If local authorities greenlight the killing, it's called a hanging. If they don't, the hanging is extrajudicial, and it's called a lynching. Anyone with even the scantiest grasp of American history will know that our country has a sordid romance with lynching — a romance which persists. And unless...

By Betty Ann Brown Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, February 22–June 28, 2026 Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.—Dolores Huerta The Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF, originally the Rebel Chicano Art Front) was an art collective founded in Sacramento in the early 1970s. The visual art members, who focused on printmaking and murals, collaborated with writers, musicians, performers, and teachers. Together, they...