We are living in a strangely apocalyptic moment where a perverse logic runs the machinery of public life while insisting everything is just fine. Around the world, political systems are tightening control over commerce, education, culture, and communication. Independent critical thinking is increasingly treated as subversive rather than a civic virtue. Public space, once the laboratory for egalitarian expression, is shrinking under surveillance, privatization, and corporate branding.So where does socially engaged art fit into a world progressively hostile to independent thought?There is a peculiar naïve optimism embedded in the history of social practice art. It assumes that art, when placed in the public...

Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, whose renowned installations and large-scale sculptures interrogate his home country’s civil and material society, has threatened to sue his government after members of its police force allegedly assaulted him. According to local news coverage, members of Ghana’s Special Operations Team, also known as the “Black Maria,” allegedly assaulted the well-known artist on March 21, following Eid al-Fitr prayers in Tamale, the northern city where Mahama founded the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art and Red Clay Studio. Officers reportedly began assaulting several motorists, including Mahama, after attempting to clear traffic. Mahama reportedly lost two teeth and was treated...

In Memoriam is published every Wednesday afternoon and honors those we recently lost in the art world.Calvin Tomkins (1925–2026)Celebrated art writer On staff at the New Yorker for more than 60 years, Tomkins penned elegant, refined, and iconic profiles of artists like Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jean Tinguely. His crystalline prose shook off art jargon, cutting cleanly to the core of each subject he took on. “I go around and get a sense of what’s going on and then write about something that interests me,” he once said about what compelled him in his process. He published several books on subjects as wide-ranging as postmodern art, the 1980s art world, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art....

New research has confirmed the site of the giant ancient metropolis, but further archaeological work has been delayed due to issues such as travel restrictions

The interactive map has recorded 69 damaged sites so far, but experts say the verified cases represent only a fraction of the destruction as war continues

Frank O’Hara and MoMA: New York Poet, Global Curator (2025) by Matthew Holman is published by Bloomsbury and available online and through independent booksellers.

The writer and artist discusses her visual work, on view at New York's American Academy of Arts and Letters

Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen captures people in oils with all the precision and clarity of a camera. He then places these incredibly lifelike images in impossible scenes. Uldalen’s models float in blank spaces. They precariously climb staircases that spiral upside down. They fall from buildings that tilt at odd angles. The Oslo-based artist’s work isn’t so […]
The post Weightless: The Paintings of Henrik Uldalen first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

Studio Loan wants to connect LA artists with the space they need — for free By Kristine Schomaker 60% of artists in Los Angeles don't have a studio outside their home. Or one at all. I think about that number a lot. Because space — or the lack of it — shapes everything. What you can make. How you can show it. Whether you can even invite someone in to see the work. Studio visits matter. Not in some abstract networking way, but in the real, tangible way where someone comes to your space, stands...

Monologue Café: A colossal sculpture in the landscape
 
Korean studio SOSOKKI ANAC takes to a forested landscape in Gangwon-do to design this Monologue Café as a series of angular brick volumes. The monolithic structure rises from the ground in sharp, deliberate formations. The building reads as a continuous mass, its surfaces folded and inclined, with each plane catching light differently across the day.
 
Set along a quiet edge of water and low vegetation, the project avoids a single, fixed viewpoint. As visitors move around it, the café shifts in profile, sometimes appearing compact and vertical, elsewhere stretched and low against the terrain. The reddish brick facade gives the structure a consistent...

Baldernock is a small parish located in the hills just north of Scotland’s largest city. It’s only seven miles between the village and Glasgow city center, but its atmospheric moorland and rolling fields, dotted with sheep, feel a world away. For photographer Camille Lemoine, who currently lives in Glasgow and grew up in Bladernock, the familiar rhythms of small town life, agriculture, and the country’s legendarily mercurial weather lend themselves to a series called Down Tower Road. Intimate images capture steel gray clouds, gnarled trees, elegant grasses, and clusters of purple heather. Lemoine also emphasizes the presence of the female body, whether communing with the earth in a narrow track through a...

New york city in handmade, miniature wooden model
 
For 21 years, artist Joe Macken has built a handmade, miniature model of New York City, which has now gone on public view for the first time. On display at the Museum of the City of New York until the summer of 2026, the exhibition and model take over the Dinan Miller Gallery on Fifth Avenue, where the public can study the city ‘from above,’ through their eyes. Titled He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model, the exhibition presents a 50-by-27-foot installation that shows the city, crafted by the artist’s own hands using materials that are readily available.
 
Artist Joe Macken started the work in 2004 using balsa wood, cardboard, and glue, and for...

Visual Arts residencies at Banff Centre offer dedicated time, spacious studios, and thoughtful mentorship for project-based studio practice. Participants are guided by accomplished faculty through research, experimentation, and peer-engaged learning. Visual Arts Thematic – On Other ArchivesApplication Deadline: May 6, 2026Program Dates: November 2–December 4, 2026 Working with institutional, personal, fictional and/or speculative archives, participants are invited to think critically about the archive as a method or “technology” for re-storying social and cultural narratives. Themes may include but are not limited to familial/ancestral lineages and cultural inheritance, oral...

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.The HeadlinesTHE SHOW MUST GO ON. Gabrielle Goliath’s banned performance artwork commemorating Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, initially meant to be shown at South Africa’s Venice Biennale pavilion, will now go on display outside the main exhibition, reports the Guardian. The Chiesa di Sant’Antonin church in Venice’s Castello district will host the artwork, which was nixed over its “highly divisive” content, as a video installation for three months, beginning May 4 and staged in partnership with the London arts center Ibraaz. The South African pavilion, meanwhile, will remain empty, for...

Henry S. McNeil Jr.’s collection, led by a major Judd "stack" sculpture, is expected to exceed $30m at Christie's this spring

South Africa’s contribution to this year’s Venice Biennale will be both absent and impossible to ignore. Months after the government abruptly canceled a planned pavilion by artist Gabrielle Goliath, the work at the center of the dispute is now set to appear in Venice anyway, just not inside the Biennale proper. Instead, according to The Guardian, Goliath’s Elegy will be installed nearby at the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, where it will run for three months beginning in May.  The official South African pavilion, meanwhile, will sit empty. The unusual arrangement caps a controversy that has been simmering since January, when that country’s culture minister Gayton McKenzie pulled the plug on...

For the 13th edition of Design Shanghai, Hu Yuehua presented a bold bouquet intersecting organic forms and human craft traditions. “Weaving Nature” is a large-scale composition of indigo and ochre leaves, blooms, and growths stitched together from dyed cotton and linen. Tightly nested in a wall-like garden, the individual pieces form a dense field of color and texture. Loose threads, raw edges, and tight rows of pleats radiate across the upright piece, merging evidence of the artist’s hand with the natural forms she depicts. Design Shanghai concluded last week, but you can see more of the projects on display at the annual event on its website. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a...

With Gustavo Dudamel in the spotlight at Parterre Box this week, Grand Tier Grab Bag foreshadows one of the New York Philharmonic's upcoming operatic engagements.

El último sueño de Frida y Diego at the Lyric Opera of Chicago is a visual and sonic wonder, but a weak libretto dampens its effect.

Riding a bike. Singing. Going to a football match. These are everyday activities for most people, but not for Iranian women. Instead, they are part of a wealth of experiences that have been restricted for women and girls since the 1979 Revolution. In the decades before the Revolution, the women’s movement in Iran had made important strides. The right to vote and to take their rightful place in various contexts was improved, and more and more doors opened in society. But since, a series of laws once again limited women’s rights in the public arena and laid the foundations for a gender-segregated reality. Creative duo Atoosa Farahmand and Oscar Hagberg depict the lives of women and girls in Iran, marked by...

Kristina Tzekova  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Kristina Tzekova’s Website
Kristina Tzekova on Instagram

Kent Nagano gives a boost to the Opéra national de Paris's revival of Nixon in China.

The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. is starting to show its hand ahead of October’s long-awaited reopening of its rethought and improved sculpture garden. The museum has announced the first round of acquisitions for its overhauled garden, redesigned by Hiroshi Sugimoto, with a lineup that leans heavily on contemporary names now entering the institution’s orbit. The group includes works by Mark Grotjahn, Raven Halfmoon, Lauren Halsey, Izumi Kato, Liz Larner, Woody De Othello, Chatchai Puipia, and Pedro Reyes. Together they sketch out the institution’s pitch: a garden that still nods to its modernist roots while making a more forceful case for the present. A few of the works give a sense of...

The 17th-century Bernardine Monastery was one of several buildings hit in the Ukrainian city’s historic centre, which is a Unesco World Heritage Site

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Freddy Mamani on his fusion of architecture and heritage
 
Bolivian architect Freddy Mamani emerges not simply as a stylistic outlier, but as a practitioner of a living utopia; one grounded in cultural continuity rather than speculative abstraction. Known for his vibrant Neo-Andean architecture, Mamani has reshaped the monochromatic cityscape of El Alto in his native country, transforming its once monochromatic skyline into a bold expression of identity. His work resists the homogenizing tendencies of global modernism, instead proposing an alternative vision of progress rooted in indigenous knowledge and collective memory.
 
Mamani’s architecture operates less as a projection of an ideal future and more as...

A leading figure in Hong Kong’s art world, championing artists, events and venues, Adrian Cheng tells us what is on the agenda during Art Basel

The Met in HD proved to be a major gateway drug for me, showing me my first Don Carlo in 2010.

discarded concrete pipes turn into public pavilion in Busan
 
Concrete Utopia by designer Hyunje Joo reconfigures discarded concrete pipes into an open-ended public pavilion at the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan in South Korea. The project examines the environmental implications of concrete, one of the most widely used and carbon-intensive construction materials, and proposes reuse as a spatial and conceptual strategy.
 
Concrete, second only to water in global consumption, generates significant greenhouse gas emissions during production. In response to the climate crisis and the material dominance of contemporary cities, the project addresses the condition of the ‘concrete city’ through the adaptive...

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MPC sample is a portable retrofuturistic DJ-set device
 
Akai Pro releases MPC Sample, a portable retrofuturistic sampler that plays tracks through the embedded speaker for on-the-go DJ sets. Small enough to fit in a bag, the standalone sampler, sequencer, and effects processor also comes with a built-in microphone for recordings. The design is a descendant of the MPC60, the 1988 machine that set the visual language for the project. The MPC60 had a grid of pads at the center, knobs on the right, and a display above, and in the MPC Sample, it follows that design line. 
 
The 16 pads sit in a four-by-four grid and are backlit in RGB, each one can change the sound depending on how hard and how long the user...

A Milano la quindicesima edizione della fiera italiana dedicata alla fotografia si è presentata come luogo di incontro e influenza delle più interessanti ricerche nell’ambito dell’immagine. Tramite uno sguardo mirato alla rappresentazione della complessità del contemporaneo, la direttrice Francesca Malgara, ha delineato il tema della Metamorfosi come ambito che interpreta al meglio i cambiamenti repentini tipici della realtà del nostro tempo, mettendolo in collegamento con i profondi cambiamenti avvenuti all’interno del linguaggio fotografico e aprendo il dialogo all’universo di riflessioni sulla realtà che questa tematica suscita.
MIA Photo Fair BNP Paribas 2026, ph. Zima Studio, courtesy MIA...

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The Wagner Foundation today announced Tomashi Jackson, Lucy Kim, and Yu-Wen Wu as the winners of its 2026 Wagner Arts Fellowships. Inaugurated last year, the fellowships are awarded annually to mid-career or established artists in the Boston area who are engaged with social change. Each fellowship is accompanied by a $75,000 unrestricted grant. The winning artists are offered professional development opportunities […]

The auction of a newly-discovered Renaissance portrait, attributed to German master Hans Baldung Grien in January, has been paused following the work being declared a French National Treasure. The last-minute intervention by the French culture ministry means that the work, which was expected to be sold by the auction house Beaussant Lefèvre on March 23, will now […]

If you want to see one of Peter Paul Rubens’s beloved paintings in the Marie de’ Medici cycle, head to the Louvre before the fall. After that, these canvases, considered by some to be the high watermark of Rubens’s career, will be off view for four years. The reason they will leave the public eye for so long is a restoration project that was announced by the Louvre on Tuesday. In its release about the project, the Paris museum called the initiative “the most ambitious restoration in the history of the Department of Paintings.” Composed of 24 paintings that all hang together in one dedicated gallery, the paintings were commissioned in 1621 by Marie de’ Medici, the queen to France’s Henry IV and a...

Like a miniature chapel with enough space for one person to stand comfortably, Judith Schaechter’s glowing installation, “Super/Natural,” invites viewers to reflect on nature. An exhibition of the same name just opened at Claire Oliver Gallery and pays homage to biophilia, a theory positing that humans seek connections with nature through an innate attraction. Schaechter celebrates this propensity with a cornucopia of florals, insects, birds, and other imaginative organic forms. “The vernacular of stained glass is one of worship and mythology,” Schaechter says. “Super/Natural turns this a bit on its head, creating a secular sanctuary for contemplating beauty, nature, and our relationship to it.”...

Celebrated contemporary artist Ibrahim Mahama says he is planning to file charges against Ghanaian state police after suffering a violent attack on Saturday. Mahama, who is from Ghana, says that members of a state police unit called the Black Maria accosted him on a bus he was riding after a visit to a mosque in Tamale, Ghana; the artist says severe […]

The Will Welch era of GQ has ended with a bang. On Tuesday, the magazine unveiled the cover for its new special global issue featuring an extensive interview with Jay-Z—who is now styling his name JAŸ-Z in honor of the 30th anniversary of his 1996 debut album Reasonable Doubt. For the cover, GQ tapped contemporary art star Rashid Johnson, who has interrogated the Black male psyche in paintings, installations, and photographs, while also resisting the notion that Blackness is monolithic or easily defined. In that respect, Johnson is an apt match for the rapper and hip-hop mogul, who has spent his career behind the mic, in front of the camera, and in the boardroom challenging facile notions of Blackness and...

CONSIDER EXPOSED-BRICK WALLS, and the thought arises that bricks can be both functional and aesthetic, on display even as they disappear into the work of dividing space. Kamrooz Aram’s suite of five collages Variations on Glazed Bricks, 2021, calls attention to this ambiguous condition of being both structural and decorative—as it applies not just to […]

As speculation about humans colonizing the moon and Mars ramps up, it’s increasingly likely that we’ll see attempts at living in places previously unthinkable. For Henry Wood, the potential for inhabiting Mars, in particular, has inspired a series of wooden figures with quite a turbulent backstory. “The premise of this growing body of work is that in the not-too-distant future, humanity will establish a doomed colony on Mars,” he tells Colossal. Each figure has a specific history, their difficulties and demise carved into wood. The character he refers to as Scott, for example, found himself stranded at the South Pole, while an onslaught of ice from the sea buried Franklin. The title of the series fits...

When Austin Bell first visited Hong Kong in 2017, he was struck by the chromatic vibrancy of its public basketball courts. Coming from the U.S., where these surfaces are often the neutral and uninteresting textures of asphalt and other materials, he was compelled to document the range of vivid color combinations, especially within the context of high-rise neighborhoods and urban infrastructure. Bell set out to capture 2,549 outdoor basketball courts around Hong Kong—every single one there is in the region. The resulting series, SHOOTING HOOPS, not only highlights the physical courts but conveys a unique portrait of the region and the spaces where people can mingle. “To me, basketball courts are one of the...

In its first production since departing the Kennedy Center, the Washington National Opera presents a new adaptation of "King of Ragtime" Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha.

Experimentation, modernism and the shifting boundary between art and commerce define Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond, a compelling new exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Drawing on a transformative gift from the artist’s estate, the presentation reframes fashion photography as a site of radical visual inquiry rather than mere commercial output. Across more than 60 works, the exhibition reveals a practice grounded in process, materiality and reinvention. Here, the magazine page becomes an arena for aesthetic risk, where gesture and atmosphere displace clarity and precision. The show foregrounds the tension between control and spontaneity, tracing how Bassman’s work resists fixity. As Max...

In Tales from Fractured Minds la memoria personale e identitaria di sette giovani artisti viene analizzata e dissezionata. In un tempo in cui il corpo è terreno politico e l’identità appare costantemente ridefinita e distorta dal ‘fuori’ il ricordo assume una propria dignità e autonomia, trasformandosi in un organismo vivo e puro sentimento umano.
AA.VV., “Tales from Fractured Minds”, 2026, installation view, works by Tatjana Danneberg and Hanna Antonsson, courtesy of the artists and The Address, ph. Alberto Favara
Ad accogliere il nostro sguardo all’entrata di The Address c’è Weekends and beginnings dell’austriaca Tatjana Danneberg, che costruisce, attraverso la raccolta di scatti e...

Mary Iverson paints bucolic, sweeping landscapes reminiscent of the late nine-teenth century that look as if were discovered in the dusty corners of an underrated thrift store. At first look, I assume the canvases are found objects, painted over and re-imagined as something quite different than the original painter intended. This is only partially true. […]
The post Worlds Collide: The Art of Mary Iverson first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

Sami Farra is this artist we selected for this year’s Capture Photography Festival! Sami is an architect and photographer based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Combining image and object, his work questions the photographic medium in its representation of reality, offering a unique vision of our shared environment. Sami’s interest in images developed during his architecture studies which led him to explore the links between photography and architecture in greater depth at CEPV (Centre d’enseignement professionnel de Vevey).
As the winner of our open call Sami’s work will be installed at the Olympic Village Canada Line Station in Vancouver. The images on display are part of a project involving accidental...

Movement, memory and the infrastructures that quietly shape daily life underpin Phoebe Boswell’s latest commission for London’s Underground, where escalators become both conduit and canvas. Water threads through the work as a conceptual and historical force, linking subterranean rivers with human passage above them. The project situates transit as a site of reflection, where repetition and routine open onto questions of belonging and visibility. Beneath the surface of the city, layered geographies and suppressed ecologies echo the lived experiences of those who move through its spaces. Boswell’s intervention reframes the Underground as a place where histories converge, diverge and resurface in unexpected...

La premessa da cui muove la pratica dell’artista olandese Anneke Eussen (Kerkrade, 1978, vive a Vaals), di cui è in corso la prima mostra personale in Italia alla Galleria Studio G7 di Bologna, è l’intuizione della consistenza materica del tempo. La prima conseguenza è l’idea che i materiali (quelli da lei più frequentati sono il vetro, il marmo e il metallo) siano depositari di durate, stratificazioni e momenti vissuti che persistono nella materia anche quando la funzione originaria è venuta meno. In base a questi presupposti, ogni successiva scelta tecnica e compositiva si configura come un gesto di ascolto verso ciò il tempo ha depositato sulla superficie dei materiali infiltrandosi in...

Exploration and absence form the twin axes of Sophie Calle’s (b. 1953) compelling body of work. From the delicate interplay of text and image to her investigations into the seen and unseen, her art occupies a space between intimacy and universality, curiosity and revelation. Themes of love, memory, longing, beauty, and mortality pulse throughout her practice, inviting viewers to reconsider the boundaries of perception. In her latest exhibition, Something Missing?, opening 26 March at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Calle presents seven major series alongside additional works spanning nearly four decades. Totalling more than 300 individual pieces of photographs, texts and videos, the exhibition...

Nel contesto del progetto di EDICOLA480, di 480 Site Specific, con la direzione artistica del curatore Massimiliano Bastardo, l’intervento di Jona Fierro – artista napoletano, classe 1997 – si presenta come una soglia percettiva più che come una semplice installazione. Come il fuoco brucia la foresta e come la fiamma incendia i monti – Residuo #01 (2025) non costruisce un racconto lineare, né cerca di restituire un’immagine spettacolare della distruzione. Al contrario, si colloca deliberatamente nel tempo che segue l’evento, in quella dimensione sospesa in cui ciò che resta diventa l’unico elemento attraverso cui interrogare ciò che è accaduto.
Jona Fierro, “Come il fuoco brucia la foresta...

Each year, Foam presents the Talent Award. The prize spotlights extraordinary new image-makers who are shaping the future of photography. This edition was a record-breaking one, with almost 3,000 submissions from 107 countries. Particularly exciting, the 2026 award marked the first time the Foam Talent Call welcomed artists of all ages in the early stages of their career. Those that submitted reflect a remarkably wide range of narratives, perspectives and artistic approaches. Many consider the constant global change and uncertainty of our times, addressing themes such as political oppression, mental health, religion and faith, displacement and the search for cultural identity. Technological developments are...

Nel cuore di Firenze, una stanza vetrata al piano terra dello storico Hotel Torre Guelfa interrompe il ritmo pedissequo delle vetrine commerciali e degli ingressi alberghieri, infiltrandosi silenziosamente nel corpo della città: è lo spazio espositivo indipendente Marameo. Qui nasce Liminale, la mostra di restituzione della residenza d’artista di Luca Granato, curata da Lucrezia Caliani e visitabile fino al 3 maggio 2026. Durante la serata inaugurale si è tenuta anche Cartografia di un corpo, intervento performativo site-specific della danzatrice e performer Irene Lombardi, realizzato insieme al DJ e musicista elettronico Andrea Lenzi. L’incontro tra esposizione e performance – divenuto nel tempo...

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Cezar Berje’s Website
Cezar Berje on Instagram

 
Who doesn’t love a good photo book? To flick through the pages, be enlightened, educated, distracted and absorbed into another world through another’s eyes? Totally fantastic!
We’re here to share our Photobook Favourites – a selection of our favourite photography books recommended by the Shutter Hub community, an archive of titles we’ve enjoyed, and a reference point for you to explore. Las Pelilargas, Irina Werning, GOST
For 18 years photographer Irina Werning travelled across Latin America to seek out those with long hair to uncover and understand its cultural significance. Her book Las Pelilargas (the long-haired ones) brings together this body of work in an exploration and celebration of...

ABOVE: Gaza Cinderella, Northern Gaza Strip, 2012“Although her drawing is filled with soldiers, helicopters, and tanks, “Amara” only spoke about her intense fear of missile strikes. When a building or other structure is targeted in Gaza, it is often hit with a barrage of several missiles to ensure its complete destruction. The sound of successive […]
The post WAR TOYS: Photographer Brian McCarty Travels to War Zones & Refugee Camps To Communicate Children’s Stories When Words Fail first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

Embroidery as an art form is often overlooked as a craft, but that is part of its appeal to Burbank, California-based artist Michelle Kingdom, who uses embroidery to express her innermost thoughts and escape to her imaginary world. Michelle Kingdom’s unexpected approach to embroidery is like a painter’s, and some have dubbed her work as […]
The post The Embodieries of Michelle Kingdom Capture the murky tangle of our interior world first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

Gonzalo Palaveccino  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Gonzalo Palaveccino on Instagram