School of Visual Arts Faculty Are Officially Unionized
Over 1,000 faculty members at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in Manhattan are officially unionized as of Thursday, May 22, after a two-thirds majority vote in favor. Organizing under United Auto Workers (UAW), the SVA faculty union is prioritizing scheduled pay increases in accordance with inflation, compensation for out-of-classroom labor, and protecting and expanding […]
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LA’s $1B Lucas Museum Lays Off 22 Employees
LOS ANGELES — The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, co-founded by Star Wars filmmaker George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, has laid off 14% of its full-time staff — 15 employees — as well as seven part-time employees. Most of the cuts were in the Learning and Engagement and Museum Services teams, the organization […]
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Columbia Students Honor Mahmoud Khalil in Unofficial Commencement
This morning, May 21, a chorus of boos directed at Columbia University’s Acting President Claire Shipman resonated through the crowd of thousands at the school’s official commencement. It was a marked contrast from the scene at St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist Church in Manhattan three days ago on Sunday evening, where a rendition […]
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Transforming Sites of Violence, One Stitch at a Time
In Jāḷī—Meshes of Resistance, nine embroidered textiles bear photographs of women who gaze out at the viewer and one another. Details sing and delight: folded hands resting on a patchwork of flowers, a dupatta threaded with cyan and gold, droplet-sized mirrors reflecting light. It’s through these lovingly sewn stitches that an unassuming white-walled room at […]
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Five New York City Shows to See Right Now
The artists we’re highlighting this week have diverse practices, ranging from the earthy, unglazed ceramics of Stanley Rosen to the complex, multicolored tapestries of Kenny Nguyen to the embroidered textile-photographs of Spandita Malik, but all share a desire to express personal preoccupations, personalities, and concerns through their art. Along with these impressive solo shows, a […]
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Archaeologists Discover New Style of Ancient Aboriginal Rock Art
Archaeologists in Australia have identified a new Aboriginal rock art style in the country’s western territory that dates back to the mid-to-late Holocene age, around 7,000 to 5,000 years ago. In a study published by the journal Australian Archaeology in February, researchers proposed that zoomorphic rock paintings found in the Kimberley region should be classified […]
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Whitney Museum Cancels Performance About Palestinian Mourning
“No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance,” a piece by artists Noel Maghathe, Fadl Fakhouri, and Fargo Tbakhi about Palestinian mourning, was scheduled to take place Wednesday evening, May 14, as part of programming for the Independent Study Program’s (ISP) curatorial exhibition a grammar of attention. The work, which typically runs for an […]
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Two Artists Capture Australia’s Ecology in a Bird
Michelle Cawthorn, a work from the Anni’s Birds series (2025) (all images courtesy the artists) BETHANY, Connecticut — Shortly after I met Peter Sharp and Michelle Cawthorn, Australian artists who had been awarded a two-month residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, they invited me to visit, saying they would make sure I could […]
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A Kashmiri Border Museum Unlocks Memories Interrupted by War
HUNDERMAN, India — When I first arrived in Hunderman, a village near Kargil in India-controlled Kashmir, in March, I was struck by its stillness. The 500-year-old settlement’s residents believe it predates the Mughal and British empires. Once a prominent stop on the historic Silk Road trade route, this village has witnessed centuries of history, serving […]
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Painter Amy Werntz Wins the 2025 Bennett Prize
Amy Werntz, “Carlyla” (2024), oil on panel (all images courtesy The Bennett Prize unless otherwise noted) Painter Amy Werntz of Dallas, Texas, has been named winner of the 2025 Bennett Prize. In her work, she strives to “give importance to ordinary moments in everyday life and to show the importance and value of this generation […]
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Looking for Subculture? It’s at LA’s Art Book Fair
LOS ANGELES — Books offer the contradictions of intimacy and communal experience. They represent the specific characteristics of the people and places that created them, but can be easily and affordably shared with a global audience. (It’s no surprise that one of the first things authoritarian regimes do is ban, or burn, books.) The latest […]
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Film Disputes Authorship of Iconic “Napalm Girl” Photo
It is a photograph etched into the visual canon of the first “television war”: a group of children flee a napalm attack near the town of Trảng Bàng, including a naked nine-year-old girl who charges forward, her skin discolored and peeling after being burned by the deadly weapon. The June 1972 photograph, officially titled “Terror […]
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Protesters Rally Outside Israeli Embassy Party at British Museum
A slew of politicians, government officials, and public figures rubbed shoulders at the British Museum in London earlier this week for a private ceremony to commemorate the 77th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel. On Tuesday evening, May 13, the inside walls of the museum’s Great Court were drenched in a cascade […]
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Critic Renounces NYU Degrees After School Punishes Pro-Palestine Student
Art critic Aruna D’Souza renounced her degrees from New York University today, Thursday, May 15, after the institution condemned a graduating student’s pro-Palestine commencement speech and said it would pursue disciplinary action against him. In remarks for NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study ceremony yesterday, a student identified as Logan Rozos characterized Israel’s attacks on […]
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Eric Adams Calls for Artists to Design “Chinatown Welcome Gateway”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s criticized plan to “beautify” parts of Chinatown is moving forward as the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) begins to search for artists for the project. DCLA issued a Request for Expressions of Interest for artists to help create a $2.5 million “Chinatown Welcome Gateway” in the neighborhood’s Kimlau Square […]
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Why Did a Frank Lloyd Wright Lamp Sell for $7.5M?
A Frank Lloyd Wright-designed double-pedestal lamp became the most valuable piece by the famed American architect to sell at auction when it fetched $7.5 million at Sotheby’s modern art evening sale last night, May 13. Following a lively 11-minute bidding battle, the piece both surpassed its high estimate and more than tripled its previous 2002 […]
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What Do Visitors Think of Thomas J. Price’s Times Square Sculpture?
British sculptor Thomas J. Price’s 12-foot-tall bronze statue “Grounded in the Stars” (2023), which monumentalizes a casually dressed Black woman with her hands on her hips, has sparked immense online discussion since it was installed smack-dab in the center of Times Square on April 29. On a rainy Wednesday morning, Hyperallergic set out to hear […]
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New York University MFA Students Rethink the Body
The stress of 2025 is no doubt taking a physical toll — so it’s timely that New York University’s MFA cohort is reckoning with their bodies in the second part of their senior thesis show. This exhibition is not preoccupied with body image, nor restating the obvious about social media-induced dysphoria. It’s more about coming up […]
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Manufacturing “Black Fatigue” in the Art World
Thomas J Price’s “Grounded in the Stars” (2023) in New York City’s Times Square (photo Isabella Segalovich/Hyperallergic) Black portraiture is on a timer. Every few years, institutions rush to fill their collections with Black faces, signaling progress. But the moment the optics shift, that visibility fades like a marketing campaign. This cycle of exposure and […]
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One Man’s Trash Is Another’s Art
In a room thick with memory, there is a thing — that’s the closest word I have for it — irradiated by late afternoon light. Before your eyes, it toggles between meaning and pointlessness, resembling, by turns, a rocking horse-like toy set atop a glimmering metallic ocean of plastic wrappers, like a chariot riding toward salvation, and […]
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New York Area Shows We Love Right Now
This week I’m reminded of the breadth of world cultures and the long shadow of human history, with art exhibitions that span the local and global, past and present. While artists at the Bronx Museum engage with area communities and ecosystems, others at MoMA PS1 examine mass waste and excess, and the Morgan Library & […]
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Who Says You Have to Leave Brooklyn to Go to an Art Fair?
With more than a dozen fairs occurring simultaneously this week and next, New York’s spring art season can be dizzying. But across the Brooklyn Bridge, away from the perhaps buzzier Manhattan shows, a more intimate opportunity to engage with artists awaits. Independent artists run the show at The Other Art Fair held at ZeroSpace in […]
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A Mystical, Obsessive Encounter With the Ginseng Root
Book cover of Ginseng Roots: A Memoir (2025), written and illustrated by Craig Thompson (all images courtesy Pantheon Graphic Library, an imprint of Penguin Random House) Twenty years ago, Craig Thompson captivated readers with Blankets (2003) — a gripping and fluidly drawn romance set amid the Christian fundamentalism, poverty, and abuse of his childhood. Now, […]
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Downtown New York Shines at the Independent Art Fair
My first stop at the Independent Art Fair was the rooftop bar: I wanted to catch my breath, enjoy the view, eavesdrop a little. I was immediately rewarded (though not with a drink — if the public opening is anything like the private preview, the line is simply not worth your time). Two blandly stylish […]
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A Late Feminist Sculptor Who Plumbed the History of Human Migration
Tuning out the din of fad-hunting throughout Frieze Week, a New York exhibition re-awakens a late feminist sculptor’s embodiments of human migration — both primordial and present. Mary Ann Unger, who died in 1998 at age 53 after a battle with breast cancer, left a crucial legacy of biomorphic sculptures and related drawings, as seen in […]
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Conversation Flows at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair
“I was friends with a porn star when I moved back to Los Angeles, and we spent a very depressing Christmas together,” Massoud Hayoun, an investigative reporter turned painter, told me steps from the entrance of The Halo in New York City’s financial district. We’re standing in front of Hayoun’s painting “Christmas Under Capitalism” (2023), […]
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The European Fine Art Fair Is a Cabinet of Curiosities
The European Fine Art Fair’s (TEFAF) reputation for being at the top of the luxury spectrum lent it the air of a frenzied spring shopping spree on Thursday afternoon in New York City. Underneath bobbing strings of purple alliums, VIPs strode through the Park Avenue Armory previewing art, design, jewelry, and antiquities from 91 galleries […]
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Sculptures Steal the Spotlight at NADA New York
I gasped when I saw them: a pair of hermit crabs, poking out of resin-printed sculptures resembling a daisy and a gaping toad. I had been walking around the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair for over an hour after giving up on its no-frills map and resigning myself to plunging into the sea of […]
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Frieze New York Is Back to Its Old Ways
“Oh, I looove her!” I hear a woman in a striped suit gush about Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens, whose large glass piece “Pinky Sunset R” (2021) is currently on view at Esther Schipper gallery’s booth at Frieze New York. “Ugh,” she grunts with elation. “This!” she points back at the piece as she walks […]
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The Next Big Thing Is at Spring Break Art Show
“It all started with my band breaking up,” artist Taraka Larson began. We’re sitting on a marble-patterned bedspread draped over a blow-up mattress placed on faux grass mats at New York’s Spring Break Art Show. A vaguely Rolling Stones-esque tune wafts in the background. “I was in this band with my sister for 10 years, […]
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Papal Conclave Yields a Holy Bounty of Memes
Meanwhile, at the Vatican (via Bluesky, all screenshots Isa Farfan/Hyperallergic) As Hyperallergic’s resident adult Catholic convert, I am obliged to bring you my insight on the papal conclave unfolding before our eyes via screens big and small. That’s right, you read that correctly. I was baptized, received communion, and was confirmed into the Catholic church […]
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How Workers in Ancient Egypt and Rome Organized Strikes
At Hyperallergic, we take pride in covering protesting museum workers who take to the streets. But few realize that these workers are taking part in a practice that’s as old as some of the ancient artifacts in their institutions. In this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, we’re joined by professor, public historian, and Hyperallergic contributor […]
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This Year’s Met Gala Memes Prove We’re All Tired of This Shit
I’ve covered the Met Gala from a meme standpoint in years past, and I intended on doing so this year as well — except … Where are the memes? The morning-after meme frenzy has followed the Met Gala for at least a decade now, with allegations of Jason Derulo falling down the red carpet stairs […]
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The Hyperallergic Art Crossword: May 2025
With the Frick finally back at its original home on Fifth Avenue, test your knowledge of the artists and works in its opulent collection, from the painter behind “The Night Watch” to the pioneering Italian Rococo woman painter, plus Manhattan’s beloved canine museum, painting techniques, “Angelus Novus,” and much more. Natan Last’s essays, poetry, and […]
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New York City Shows to See This Week
There’s so much to stimulate the eye and mind in museums and galleries this week that it’s a joy to behold. I spent way too much time marveling at 1970s notebook sketches by graffiti artists at White Columns, while our writers sought out awe-inspiring artists, past and present, such as Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and Claudia […]
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At Home With the Last Heir of a Pissarro Painting Looted by Nazis
TELLURIDE, Colorado — “I’m the last of the Mohicans,” ruminates David Cassirer from the dining room of his modest frontier-style house in the mountains. David is the last surviving heir of the Nazi-looted Camille Pissarro painting “Rue Saint-Honoré, après midi, effet de Pluie” (1897), the subject of a serpentine legal case that has wound up […]
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New Research Shows Slavery’s Outsized Role in Pompeii’s Economy
Millions of tourists visit the ancient site of Pompeii each year to explore enchanting frescoes, opulent villas, and a seemingly frozen snapshot of a prosperous Roman town. But how did Pompeii come to reach such levels of success and affluence? A new study argues that this was largely due to the labor of enslaved people, […]
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Meet the Next Changemakers in Art & Design at Parsons Festival
Parsons Festival is an annual event series that showcases the creative and intellectual achievements of Parsons School of Design’s graduating students — a diverse and talented group of artists, designers, architects, photographers, filmmakers, technologists, scholars, and strategists — to the campus community and the greater public in New York City. From symposia and exhibitions to […]
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The Best Signs and Art of This Year’s Massive May Day Protests
Mayday! Mayday! From coast to coast, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators flooded streets across the United States to commemorate May Day, also known as International Workers Day, annually observed on the first of the month around the world. This year’s labor rallies, which follow last month’s Hands Off! demonstrations, were heavily focused on immigration, healthcare, […]
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Judge Halts Trump’s Cuts to Museum and Library Funding Agency
As Trump threatens to eliminate government-funded arts and culture agencies in a newly released budget proposal, a federal judge has temporarily halted the administration’s efforts to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) on Thursday, May 1, after a series of cuts to IMLS grants and staff intended to dismantle the agency. The […]
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Dara Birnbaum, Video Art’s “Wonder Woman,” Dies at 78
Dara Birnbaum, a pioneer of the feminist and video art movements who probed, mimicked, and remixed mass media, died today, May 2, at age 78. The news of her death was announced by Marian Goodman Gallery, which has represented the artist since 2001. As a young artist in the 1970s, even as television was being […]
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What to See in Upstate New York This May
We can interpret the phrase “may day” in two ways: First, as the ancient May Day festival in Europe, which marks the approximate halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice; and second, the internationally recognized radio word to signal distress. While the urge to call a roaring Mayday alarm for our nation […]
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10 Shows to See in Los Angeles This May
This month’s picks are about art’s ability to tell stories, and how those stories can reveal larger collective narratives. At Nazarian / Curcio, Widline Cadet reflects on her family’s immigration from Haiti through photo-based works. Akinsanya Kambon’s ceramic vessels draw on the vast Black diaspora, informed by his own life experience as a Black Panther […]
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100 Days of MAGA Broligarchy
The Siren is back! We have dedicated issue #2 to a satirical reflection on the first 100 days of MAGA: malicious mass firings, big-headed Broligarchs, despicable deportations, dodgy DOGE, and the whacked-out attacks at so-called wokeness. Have a good laugh with us, but please don’t laugh this all off. What’s happening is worse than horrible. […]
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10 Art Books to Bring to the Beach This Summer
Even the figures in Katsukawa Shunchō’s 1789 woodblock print only buy from independent bookstores! (image public domain via the Metropolitan Museum of Art, edit Shari Flores/Hyperallergic) Flipping through a volume with a bit of sand in its spine, basking in sun, and in no rush — this is how we were meant to read art […]
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A Looted Greco-Roman Statue Goes on Display Before Its Return
A 1,800-year-old, life-sized Greco-Roman statue looted nearly six decades ago from present-day Turkey has gone on its final display at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). Following more than a year of legal battles, the headless bronze sculpture went on view earlier this month in the museum’s rotunda, where it will remain through July 8 […]
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Pompeii Aerial Tour Helicopters Seized in Safety Investigation
Italian police have seized eight helicopters and are investigating four pilots associated with a company offering aerial tours of Pompeii’s archaeological ruins last week, alleging a laundry list of safety and operations violations. Citing concerns “considered extremely dangerous to public and private safety,” Public Prosecutor Nunzio Fragliasso of the Torre Annunziata municipality said in an […]
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Five New York City Shows to See Right Now
From jobs to clothing to colors, and more, there’s a lot of variety in our list this week. While our critics are enjoying historical shows focused on labor in the United States and women’s workaday clothes, an exhibition that proposes different ways of looking at color is well worth a visit, as is one that […]
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The Darkness of Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light
The paintings of Thomas Kinkade — all those anodyne, nostalgic magic-hour landscapes and cute cottages — felt inescapable in the 1990s and 2000s. He built a public company around his brand, becoming the first artist with their own stock ticker. Despite his name being nearly synonymous with wholesomeness, Kinkade privately struggled with alcoholism and ultimately […]
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The Experimental Composers Who Inspired a Generation of Artists
LOS ANGELES — “Speak boldly!” says musician and composer Julius Eastman in the 1981 prelude to his musical composition, “The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc.” In REDCAT’s newest exhibition, World of Echo: Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell, Eastman’s bold speech is often heard only in echoes: between the present and the past, the dead and the […]
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Exhibition at Children’s Museum Decolonizes Color
What is color? The answer to that question is often that it’s subjective. But such vagueness can somehow still leave intact pale, male, and stale color theories of the past as the default. A gem of a group show, All That Remains at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, spotlights artists who […]
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Indigenous Humor and Resistance Shines at The Photography Show
What struck me first about this year’s Photography Show, running through April 27 at the Park Avenue Armory, was the near-total absence of traditional photojournalism. Without the deluge of protest imagery or the urgency of crisis photography I’ve grown accustomed to while doom-scrolling social media, I worried the fair might be edgeless; rehashing the archive […]
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Puerto Rican Painter and NYC Arts Advocate Tony Bechara Dies at 83
Painter and printmaker Tony Bechara, whose passionate support for artists helped mold New York City’s cultural landscape, died at his home on Wednesday, April 23, on his 83rd birthday. The news of his death was announced by Lisson Gallery, which presented a solo exhibition of his work last January. A pioneering visual artist whose 50-year […]
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Amid Market Uncertainty, Expo Chicago Brings a Spirit of Hope
CHICAGO — Walking through an art fair can feel like swimming in the middle of Lake Michigan — there’s a fine line between floating through art and drowning in it. After all, these shows aren’t always made for the people trying to swim; they’re for the ones riding the yachts. But at Expo Chicago, running […]
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How a Tiny Crab Museum in the UK Stood Up For Trans Rights
I only just learned about this, but International Crab Day is tomorrow, April 26, so there’s no better time to put some respect on the Crab Museum in Margate for its unwavering public support for transgender rights after the United Kingdom Supreme Court ruled that a woman is defined by “biological sex” rather than her […]
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NEH Calls for Proposals for Trump’s Bizarre Sculpture Garden
After slashing critical grant programs for cultural institutions and placing the majority of its staff on leave, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is now seeking artist submissions for statues to include in President Trump’s “National Garden of American Heroes.” An application page on the NEH’s website says the agency is looking to commission […]
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Required Reading
‣ One museum in New Mexico is grappling with historical photos of the Navajo Nation, reframing them in the context of colonial photography and bringing in the voices of Diné people. Jordan Eddy writes about the museum’s new show for Southwest Contemporary: Milton Snow was a non-Native photographer hired by the federal Navajo Service in […]
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NYC Subway Mural Evokes Hilma af Klint’s Mysticism
Celestial motifs and cosmological geometries strewn across a prismatic landscape comprise “Abstract Futures” (2025), the newest public artwork to grace the walls of the New York City subway system. Designed by the feminist art collective Hilma’s Ghost, the 600-square-foot glass mosaic mural now greets transit riders between the turnstiles and escalators at the 42nd Street […]
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The Danish Women Who Made Modernism Radical
Bertha Wegmann, “Portrait of the Swedish Painter Jeanna Buck” (1887), oil on panel (image public domain in the United States via Wikimedia Commons) In late 2017, I visited a traveling exhibition at the Denver Art Museum called Her Paris: Women Artists in the Age of Impressionism, featuring work by 37 artists from various countries who […]
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Lady Pink, the Queen of New York City Graffiti
In 1971, a seven-year-old Sandra Fabara moved with her family from a city nestled in an Ecuadorian rainforest to the dense brick landscape of Brooklyn. By the time she was a teenager, she had gone from climbing trees to hopping the fences of the MTA train yards. Soon, she was known as the queen of […]
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Woman Accuses Kehinde Wiley of Sexual Assault in New Lawsuit
Editor’s Note: The following story contains mentions of sexual assault and harassment. To reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline, call 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit online.rainn.org. Kehinde Wiley, the widely known artist who painted Barack Obama’s official portrait held at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, has been formally accused of sexual assault in a complaint filed […]
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The Neoliberal Roots of Trump’s Anti-DEI Crusade
On February 26, the Washington Post reported that the Organization of American States (OAS) had canceled two major exhibitions at the Art Museum of the Americas, which is funded by the OAS. Founded in 1948, the OAS consists of 30 member countries across the Western Hemisphere, with its unofficial headquarters in Washington, DC. The canceled […]
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Patty Chang Looks Into the Abyss
We watch as a woman slices open a glossy black baby porpoise on a Microsoft Teams screen recording. Artist Patty Chang explains what we’re witnessing in a voiceover: Aleksija Neimanis, a scientist, is conducting necropsies on these animals to determine causes of death and help prevent further species loss. Chang and writer Astrida Neimanis are […]
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A Vision of Design That Transcends Empire’s Grid
Western design has long obeyed the dicta of fin de siècle and early 20th-century Berlin and Paris — that ornament is crime, that form follows function, that clarity trumps complexity. Non-European traditions, however, weren’t peripheral influences to design, but rather systems with their own complex codes. Slipping past the now-famous glass-enclosed forest at the Ford […]
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Isaac Julien Returns to the Cutting Room Floor of History
SAN FRANCISCO — Time folds unto itself and reflects historical and contemporary moments that have shaped society in Isaac Julien’s I Dream a World, the British artist’s first comprehensive museum survey, and his first retrospective in the United States, at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. Light bends around corners and cascades over mirrored walls as […]
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Pratt Manhattan Gallery Exhibits Photography by Dona Ann McAdams and Abby Robinson
On Friday, April 18, Pratt Manhattan Gallery will open two new photography exhibitions: Black | Box by Dona Ann McAdams, which combines black and white photography with text to encapsulate late 20th century American life, and AutoWorks & WaterWorks by Abby Robinson, which captures the body performing games of chance with the camera, moving through […]
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Your Low-Stress Guide to Spring Art Fairs and Events in NYC
The early-blooming daffodils may bow their trumpets in defeat amid the frosty trickery following Fool’s Spring, but no amount of rain and dreary weather can thwart the annual blossoming of New York City’s spring art fair season. Over the next few weeks, over a dozen art fairs will simultaneously sprout across NYC, each consisting of […]
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Required Reading
‣ For Studio International, writer and curator Yasmeen Siddiqui excavates the layered political dimensions of the work of artist Lee Bul, whose headless sculptures are currently standing sentinel outside The Met: In the 1990s, Lee began a body of work, a counterpoint to the soft, fabric sculptures that speak of internal bodiliness. Her Cyborg and […]
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For the Wing Luke Museum, Storytelling Is a Path to Healing
America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States. We tell their stories, because if we don’t, no one else will — at least within the museum field. […]
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Devastating Photo of Gaza Child Amputee Wins Top Global Award
A portrait of Mahmoud Ajjour, who lost both of his arms in an Israeli attack in Gaza, won the World Press Photo of the Year award. (© Samar Abu Elouf for the New York Times, all images courtesy World Press Photo) Before his tenth birthday, Mahmoud Ajjour lost both of his arms after an Israeli […]
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The Banality of the American Dream
Suellen Rocca was one of the original six artists who comprised the Hairy Who. The Chicago artist group exhibited three times in the city between 1966 and ’68, then, in 1969, Walter Hopps curated the final Hairy Who show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. Nearly six decades later, what continues to impress me […]
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Workers Protest Abrupt Layoffs at Guggenheim Museum
Chants of “Guggenheim’s cheap!” “New York is a union town!” and “Up with the union, down with the layoffs!” reverberated down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan’s Upper East Side this evening, April 16, as more than 50 cultural workers rallied outside the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to protest the abrupt termination of 20 staffers. The museum […]
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In Puerto Rico, a Museum Builds Community Outside Its Walls
America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States. “Puerto Rico’s lack of definition has created doubts about who we are, how valuable we are, and it was […]
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Fresh Sets Examines the Fine Art of Nail Art
As a small-scale painter, I’ve been interested in meticulous manicures since 2005, when my mom presented me with the holy text — Klutz’s Nail Art tutorial book with six peel-off nail polishes. Twenty years later, I’m pivoting into DIY gel nails and poring over beauty and culture writer Tembe Denton-Hurst’s Fresh Sets: Contemporary Nail Art […]
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Jennie C. Jones Transforms The Met Into an Instrument
The language of sound structures our understanding of the world: A “composition” is both a piece of music and the makeup of a whole; one’s unique contribution to a text or artwork is their “voice.” For decades now, Ohio-born, New York-based artist Jennie C. Jones has been translating between music and the physical world in […]
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Five New York City Art Shows to See Right Now
If art both reflects and critique the world around us, there’s more than enough to say at the moment — and plenty of art that can provide some insight. While artists like Aaron Gilbert and Weegee take on capitalism and celebrity culture decades apart, two shows featuring women artists are reminders that women are still […]
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The Giant Women Who Stomped on Art World Invisibility
A compact exhibition with a massive presence, Giant Women on New York at James Fuentes Gallery takes its name from a series of drawings and collages by Anita Steckel. In Steckel’s works, dating from 1969 to ’74, women the size of skyscrapers overtake New York City, their voluptuous curves challenging the authority of the phallic […]
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Reading Georgia O’Keeffe Along Lines of Class and Race
Forget, if you can, what you think you know about Georgia O’Keeffe. Remember that American art in the 1950s was more than just Abstract Expressionism. And consider that Abiquiú, New Mexico, has identities and histories of its own. With his book Georgia O’Keeffe: The Late Work, Randall C. Griffin contributes to the more than 150 […]
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Still Life Painting That Is Anything But Still
The title of Judith Linhares’s current exhibition at PPOW Gallery, The river is moving, The blackbird must be flying, consists of the 12th stanza of Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (1917). Together, the two short sentences imply, on the one hand, what we observe and, on the other, what we […]
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Independent Publishing, Cultural Production, and Design
On April 26 and 27, the Other Islands Book Fair returns to Pratt’s Brooklyn campus, bringing together over 40 independent publishers in a two-day event to engage in dialogue centered on making, cultural production, and graphic design. The fair features a wide range of vendors, from Ugly Duckling Presse, known for experimental poetry and critical […]
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Toledo Art Museum Workers Move to Unionize
Staff members at the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) in Ohio are unionizing after 86% of workers voted in favor on Wednesday, April 9. The effort comes amid the museum’s ongoing, multi-year collection reinstallation effort and in light of the challenging political climate and its consequences for the arts and culture sector. Organizing under the […]
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White House Replaces Obama Portrait With Trump Raised-Fist Painting
A video posted by the White House on April 11, 2025 appears to show a painting of Trump hanging in place of Obama’s portrait. (screenshot Hyperallergic via X) A new painting of Donald Trump depicting the moments after his attempted assassination last July appears to have replaced a portrait of former President Barack Obama in […]
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Aline Manoukian and the Specter of War Photography
In 1988, photojournalist and photo editor Aline Manoukian captured an image of a Palestinian militiaman holding a white kitten in Lebanon’s Burj Al Barajneh refugee camp. That photo would go on to circulate for decades, recently appearing across social media platforms in doctored forms, including as a colorized poster. When I went on a research […]
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Required Reading
‣ Identifying the color of your aura is trending, thanks to an ill-conceived TikTok filter. But for Believer, photographer Adalena Kavanagh visits a shop in Manhattan’s Chinatown for insights into aura readings and what they can offer those of us looking for answers: The technology of aura photography has its roots in a technique developed […]
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The Violent and Sensual Bodies of Galli
LONDON — “The body as a battleground — that applies to everyone,” writes Galli. This statement, quoted in the exhibition text for the solo exhibition So, So, So at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, is indicative of the artist’s approach to painting — and to life. Most of the paintings in the exhibition date from the […]
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Max Kozloff, Intrepid Art Critic and Photographer, Dies at 91
Art critic, educator, and photographer Max Kozloff died at the age of 91 on Sunday, April 6. He passed away at his home in New York City after living with Parkinson’s disease for over a decade, according to an Instagram post by his spouse, the artist Joyce Kozloff. A leading voice in 20th-century art criticism, […]
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At Project Row Houses, Art and Basic Needs Go Hand in Hand
America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States. “As the architects and interpreters of our community, the artists cultivated an environment for us where social realities were […]
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RISD Student’s Visa Revoked Amid Trump Crackdown
An international student enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence has had their visa terminated, as confirmed in a public letter to the campus community from RISD President Crystal Williams on Monday, April 7. The student remains unnamed for their privacy and the school declined to comment further, referring Hyperallergic to […]
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An Exhibition Makes Absence Present
LOS ANGELES — It was 65 degrees and sunny the day I visited Earthshaker, an exhibition of work by Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman, and P. Staff staged across two rooms at Del Vaz Projects. Between the entrance and the gallery door is a courtyard with a terracotta fountain, a mass of night-blooming jasmine, and a bowed […]
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The No-BS Protest Art of the Anti-Trump Marches
Is it hot in here, or is it just these protest signs? From New York City to Washington, DC, from Los Angeles to Boston, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets this Saturday, April 5, in a massive show of anti-Trump, anti-Musk, anti-fascist mobilization filled with art and signage that was critical, cheeky, […]
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Adventures in the Louvre Is the Guidebook Nobody Asked For
It is not until the acknowledgments at the back of Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum, with sections titled “The Allure,” “Romance,” and “Be Mine,” that author Elaine Sciolino states she has written it not as an art expert, but as a journalist, for tourists who see visiting […]
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Six Art Books to Read April 2025
Mary Cassatt, “Family Group Reading” (1898) at the Legion of Honor’s Mary Cassatt at Work, January 2025 (photo Lakshmi Rivera Amin/Hyperallergic) It feels both eerie and stabilizing to read Octavia E. Butler’s books in the year 2025, when the realities she prophesized have come true. But the exhibition catalog American Artist: Shaper of God grants […]
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Meet Bai Jo the Fish, Scholar-in-Residence at a Maryland Museum
We’re all partial to a cool rock. I’ve certainly amassed a collection of some neat stones from driveways and beaches in my 27 years. But are they art? If so … Is nature the artist? At the Elizabeth Myers Mitchell Art Museum (stylized “/m” for short) at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, an exhibition […]
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Republican-Led Bill Would Penalize Texas Museums for “Obscene” Art
Following the seizure of Sally Mann’s photographs from an art exhibition in Texas in January, the state’s museums could face new penalties if the attorney general finds them to contain “certain obscene or harmful material” under a new Republican-led bill. The proposed civil penalty comes months since Fort Worth Police confiscated photographs by Mann that […]
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Art Scholars Pledge to Boycott Columbia University
More than 1,800 academics, including art historians and art professors, have committed to boycotting Columbia University in a March 26 open letter denouncing the school’s agreement to comply with Trump administration crackdowns on pro-Palestinian dissent. By caving to Trump’s demands and failing to protect international students, the letter says, Columbia has participated in an “authoritarian […]
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Judge Denies Motion to Block Trump’s Anti-Trans Arts Funding Bar
Ahead of next week’s grant application deadline for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), organizations are in limbo following a new court ruling that does not prevent the federal agency from incorporating Trump’s anti-trans directives into its grant-making activities. Yesterday, April 3, Rhode Island’s federal district court denied a motion to stop the NEA […]
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Vilcek Foundation to Award $50,000 Prizes to Immigrants in Fashion Fields
Applications for the 2026 Vilcek Foundation Prizes for Creative Promise in Fashion & Culture and Fashion & Design are now open to immigrants under the age of 38. The Vilcek Foundation will award six $50,000 prizes to young immigrants who have demonstrated exceptional early career achievements in the fields of Fashion & Design and Fashion […]
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Organizations Lose Pivotal Grants as DOGE Takes Axe to Humanities Agency
A paid undergraduate internship to train the next generation of museum professionals. A program to educate collections care professionals on climate resilience. Archaeological research at two former Native American boarding school sites. These are just some of the projects that received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in January, before the Trump […]
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NOMA Highlights Contemporary West African Masquerade Artists
This week, the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) opens New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations, a major exhibition presenting the work of four artists working in cities across West Africa: Chief Ekpenyong Bassey Nsa, Sheku “Goldenfinger” Fofanah, David Sanou, and Hervé Youmbi. The first presentation of its kind, New African Masquerades offers a […]
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An Artist’s Thirty-Year Affair With Copper
Karachi-based artist Amin Gulgee’s three-decade-long oeuvre spans metal sculptures, bold performance art, and collaborative curation. A well-structured new volume on his work, titled Amin Gulgee: No Man’s Land and edited by John McCarry, is neither fully academic nor a catalogue raisonné; it balances the two approaches with plenty of images, candid writings penned by Gulgee’s […]
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Enjoy Summer Marathons in Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture at New York Studio School
“You should do it,” said a friend, and on that speculative basis I showed up on West 8th Street, sculpting apron in hand, butterflies in stomach. I’d made a small sitting man before, but this was my first try at a life-size figure. […]By lunch break, sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park among […]
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New York City Shows We Love Right Now
The exhibitions below ask viewers to engage their senses and spend time with art that’s slower to reveal itself. That may means noticing details you’d otherwise miss, in the work of Madalena Santos Reinbolt and Deborah-Joyce Holman. It could also mean reimagining something familiar, like a rose at the FLAG Foundation, or “exposure” in the […]
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“Fasc-isms” Announced as This Year’s Met Gala Theme
In an interview on the Joe Rogan podcast, Met Gala co-chair Anna Wintour announced “Fasc-isms” as the theme for this year’s highly anticipated event. “The popular 20th-century movement has been reduced to stereotypes and this is the time to revisit innovations of the misunderstood period of art,” Wintour said on the popular podcast that helped […]
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Deborah-Joyce Holman’s Quietly Radical Black Femininity
Deborah-Joyce Holman’s “Close-Up” (2024), currently on view at the Swiss Institute, aestheticizes a Black woman’s mundane domestic activities in a moving image work that taps into the power of the quotidian. Aside from the wall-sized projection of the film and the seating, the lower-level gallery is empty, creating a contemplative space (which is collectively titled […]
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10 Shows to See in Los Angeles, April 2025
This month, we recommend shows by several artists who provide singular, visionary, and radical ways of viewing the world — and imagining new ones. Madam X’s enigmatic diagrams on view at the Philosophical Research Society draw on myriad spiritual traditions to wrestle with the weight of existence, while Ramekon O’Arwisters’s tangled and knotted constructions reflect […]
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The World’s Biggest Print Fair Returns With Surprises
Deborah R. Grayson never expected to find her way back to printmaking. “I was actually a painter until the pandemic. Then I couldn’t get into my studio. All I had were tools and wood at my house,” she explained. “I haven’t picked up a paintbrush since.” Grayson is one of six artists showing work with […]
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Trump Whitewashes History in New Smithsonian Executive Order
President Donald Trump issued an executive order yesterday, March 27, targeting so-called “race-centered ideology” in the Smithsonian Institution, conflating critical examinations of the nation’s oppression of women, people of color, and other groups with “anti-American” sentiment and effectively whitewashing United States history. In addition to influencing programming at the Smithsonian, which oversees 21 museums, 14 […]
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Celia Paul Paints Her Place in the World
Celia Paul is “a person in love with the romance of that which can never be,” or so says critic Hilton Als in a new monograph of her work. That sense of nostalgia permeates the British painter’s oeuvre, collected for the first time in Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025, which includes five essays, including one by […]
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Colorado Legislature Bows to Trump’s Demands to Remove “Distorted” Portrait
A portrait of Donald Trump that has hung in the Colorado Capitol Rotunda since 2019 was removed by state legislators after the president lambasted the work on Sunday, March 23. The president wrote on his social media platform Truth Social that the painting was “purposefully distorted” and “truly the worst,” and called upon the state’s […]
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Australian University Scraps Show Featuring Work of Lebanese-Born Artist
Monash University in Melbourne has “indefinitely postponed” an upcoming exhibition featuring the work of Lebanese-born artist Khaled Sabsabi one month after Australia rescinded his 2026 Venice Biennale appointment. Sabsabi made headlines in early February when the federal arts body Creative Australia chose him and curator Michael Dagostino to represent the Australian pavilion at the 61st […]
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The “Signalgate” Memes Have Entered the Chat
Minutes before the United States launched a deadly missile campaign in Yemen that reportedly killed 53 people and wounded 89, including multiple children, on March 15, the Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was sitting in his car in a grocery store parking lot waiting for the attack. The story is now well-known and well-memed: Days before […]
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What The Frick Changed?
In 2021, when the Frick Collection temporarily took over the Brutalist Breuer building that was once home to the Whitney Museum of American Art and a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was a peculiar fit. The museum’s delightful stable of European icons were shuffled into boxy, modernist gallery spaces that lacked the […]
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Venezuelan Migrants Allegedly Labeled as Gang Members Based on Tattoos
Lawyers representing Venezuelan migrants who are being held in immigration custody, or who have already been deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador for alleged gang affiliation, say their clients may have been targeted for innocuous tattoos depicting roses, crowns, and other symbols. Last weekend, on March 15, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies […]
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15 NYC Print Shops for Your Most Press-ing Art Needs
As March comes to a close, New York City ushers in Print Week with the 34th edition of the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) Fair at the Park Avenue Armory and the Brooklyn Fine Art Print Fair at Powerhouse Arts in Gowanus. To celebrate the power of the press, Hyperallergic has put together the following guide of city-based […]
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Catherine Murphy Makes the Ordinary Inexplicable
Catherine Murphy is one of a handful of artists who changed observational painting between the 1960s and ’80s, when painting’s dominance was being contested. Murphy, along with Lois Dodd, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and others, learned from abstraction and found a way to expand the parameters of observational painting, overturn assumptions regarding the relationship of two- […]
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Nona Faustine, Whose Defiant Self-Portraits Confronted Centuries of Violence, Dies at 48
Artist Nona Faustine, whose self-portraits memorialized under-recognized narratives and fearlessly confronted violent histories, died on Thursday morning, March 20, at the age of 48 in New York City. The news of her passing was confirmed by the New York gallery Higher Pictures. The cause of her death has not been made public. Grounded in extensive […]
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The Call to Return the Statue of Liberty to France, Explained
A call that could easily have gone unnoticed for the Statue of Liberty to be repatriated to France has generated a media swarm over the sculpture and sparked a war of words between a European Parliament member and the White House press secretary. Raphaël Glucksmann, one of France’s 79 members of the European Parliament, called […]
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How I’d Spend My Gen-Z Savings at New York’s Affordable Art Fair
As of today, my Roth Contributory IRA balance stands at $3,372.30. Being that I’m 23, that number is not an astonishingly low figure, but it isn’t particularly impressive either, and no, I do not have any sort of trust fund. However, if I emptied all that money — and for the purpose of this article there […]
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The Cinematic Dreaming of Ryuichi Sakamoto
TOKYO — At the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, a standing-room-only crowd watches the unfolding of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani’s “TIME TIME” (2024). The shadow of a woman playing a shō, a classical Japanese reed instrument, slowly creeps across the three screens on the wall, her image reflected in a glassy pool of water on […]
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Trump-Appointed Museum Agency Leader Vows to “Restore Focus on Patriotism”
After ordering the effective dismantlement of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) last week, President Donald Trump has sworn in a new director for the agency who has pledged to “restore focus on patriotism,” alarming advocacy groups who fear a reduction of critical cultural services and restrictions on free expression. Keith E. Sonderling, […]
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Champagne, Caviar, and Provenance Gaps at TEFAF Maastricht
MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands — Luxury, legacy, and a touch of subversion — the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) returned to the MECC convention center in the Netherlands this week with an extraordinary selection of museum-quality artworks. Despite its somewhat remote location, the fair has maintained its reputation as one of the world’s premier art events […]
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A Foolproof Guide to New York City Print Week
Gert and Uwe Tobia, “Untitled” (2012-13), lithograph with hand-coloring (© 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, courtesy The New York Public Library) From Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt to Kiki Smith and Amy Sherald, artists spanning nearly six centuries of printmaking will converge next week in Manhattan and Brooklyn for Print […]
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The Secret Life of LA’s Small Museums
Los Angeles has cemented its status as a global art capital over the past two decades, with the arrival of several new museums, not to mention the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s long-awaited expansion. In Also on View: Unique and Unexpected Museums of Greater Los Angeles (2024), Todd Lerew argues that the region’s cultural […]
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Fred Eversley, Sculptor Who Fused Art and Science, Dies at 83
Fred Eversley, who fused art and science to create captivating parabolic sculptures, died on March 14 at the age of 83. A spokesperson for David Kordansky Gallery, which has represented the artist since 2018, told Hyperallergic that he died unexpectedly following a brief illness. Eversley emerged on the Southern California art scene in the late […]
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Can Porn Be Art? Erika Lust Thinks So
BARCELONA — Erika Lust has built a career at the intersection of art and erotica — so it’s no surprise that after establishing herself as a trailblazer in feminist pornography, she would continue pushing the boundaries of the medium. Her latest venture, House of Erika Lust (2024), is a sprawling immersive art installation that blends Virtual […]
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Could Hilma af Klint’s Works Be Removed From Public View?
In a new interview with Hyperallergic, Erik af Klint, board chair of the Hilma af Klint Foundation and the artist’s great-grandnephew, doubled down on his stance that the late Swedish artist’s body of work should be removed from institutional and commercial curation entirely. Citing a clause in one of the foundation’s statutes, Erik initially told […]
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Ericka Beckman’s Surreal Visions of Late Capitalism
The expansive front gallery of the Drawing Center may get the most attention, but the smaller back space and the lower-level one have hosted many quietly intriguing exhibitions. Ericka Beckman: Power of the Spin is such a show. Though Beckman, best known as a filmmaker, is often associated with the Pictures Generation, she came of […]
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Five Shows to See in New York City Right Now
This is a week of big statements by artists and expanded possibilities by curators and gallerists, past and present. If you haven’t already made the trip to Pioneer Works in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood to see American Artist’s exploration of author Octavia E. Butler, we highly recommend it. Multimedia artist Nick Cave’s new work makes […]
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Unlearning the Myths of Asian Art History
I have never taken an art history course, unless you count two COVID-impacted Zoom classes. Particularly given the weight of everything I don’t know, engaging with ancient art can be a fraught task. It’s rife with traps and tricks of the eye, and the gaps left in its wake are ripe for misinterpretation and, perhaps […]
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Nick Cave’s Eternal Garden
Nick Cave has long been a flag-bearer of maximalism even as the art world tended toward minimalism. His Soundsuit sculptures, for which he’s best known, were born out of the 1990s, when issues of identity entered the media spotlight after a series of tumultuous events, including the Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, […]
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From the Fire’s Remains, Kelly Akashi Sculpts Possibility
LOS ANGELES — “Witness” is a bronze cast of the bottom half of Kelly Akashi’s face. The surface of the sculpture (from 2024–25) has an irregular patina that is unexpectedly beautiful. It was one of several elements in the artist’s current exhibition at Lisson Gallery that was recovered from the remains of her Altadena home […]
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SFMOMA Gets $1.5M From Google for Ruth Asawa Exhibition
This month, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) received the largest corporate donation it’s ever gotten for a single exhibition. SFMOMA announced on March 5 that it would host the first major posthumous retrospective of works by artist, activist, and educator Ruth Asawa, who died in 2013, backed by $1.5 million in funding from […]
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Tate Museums Cut Staff by 7%, Citing Post-Pandemic Deficit
The trail of staff cuts trickling throughout cultural institutions in the United States appears to continue across the pond, as the Tate museums in the United Kingdom are trimming 7% of its workforce to address a post-pandemic deficit. Approximately 40 roles have been impacted by the cutbacks, made through voluntary exits and hiring freezes, the […]
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“We Don’t Want To Leave”
MIAMI — A small arthouse cinema on Miami Beach faces the possible cancellation of its lease and the loss of $80,000 in grant money promised by the city after refusing to cancel screenings of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land (2024) following repeated intimidation attempts by the mayor. The 90-minute film, co-directed by Palestinian journalist […]
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Getty Acquires Raymond Pettibon Archive
Raymond Pettibon with David Larsen, “Untitled (Joan had been…)” (mid-1990s), linocut (all images courtesy Getty Research Institute) LOS ANGELES — The Getty announced this week that it has acquired the archive of Raymond Pettibon, whose career spans flyers and album art of the early Southern California punk scene, videos, artist books, and drawings and paintings […]
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Trump Pushes Out First Native Chair of National Endowment for the Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Chair Shelly C. Lowe, the first Native American and second woman to hold the agency’s highest-ranking post, has stepped down from the role “at the direction of President Trump,” an NEH spokesperson told Hyperallergic. Lowe, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, was nominated to head the agency — which […]
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SF Museum Workers Push Back Against Proposals to Slash Staff
San Francisco art museums may lay off staff and reduce operating hours to meet the city’s budget reduction proposal as workers elsewhere fear a wave of cost-cutting measures impacting cultural institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum and the Guggenheim in New York. The Asian Art Museum (AAM) and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), which […]
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New Penn Station Proposal Channels Trump’s Classical Architecture Order
The Grand Penn Community Alliance (GPCA) presented its proposal for renovating Penn Station at the New York Historical on Tuesday, March 11, outlining a return to the original transit hub’s pre-demolition Beaux Arts glory and a total relocation of Madison Square Garden (MSG), among other features. Led by former New York City Chief of Urban […]
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Artists and Cultural Workers Protest Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil
Artists, cultural workers, and historians are mobilizing in protest of the targeted arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian refugee raised in Syria who served as a negotiator between Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) and the institution’s administration. Approximately 3,000 demonstrators marched from Manhattan’s federal courthouse to Union Square calling for the release of Khalil on […]
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Trump Federal Job Cuts May Threaten Thousands of Artworks
Widespread cuts to the federal workforce under President Trump may leave the General Services Administration’s (GSA) massive collection of public artwork in a state of purgatory. As reported by the Washington Post, expected cuts to the agency have reportedly impacted the GSA’s fine arts and preservation units, which are primarily responsible for commissioning and maintaining […]
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Brooklyn Museum Workers May Avert Layoffs, Union Says
After weeks of rallies against expected layoffs at the Brooklyn Museum and even a special oversight hearing at City Hall, District Council 37, one of the unions representing employees, said in a statement that leadership will offer some buyouts to impacted workers. In an email press release today, March 10, a week before the staff […]
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Rarely Seen Sketches by Michelangelo Debut in the US
An ongoing exhibition at the College of William and Mary’s Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Virginia, brings seven of Michelangelo’s few surviving sketches to light in the United States for the first time. Through May 28, Michelangelo: The Genesis of the Sistine, organized by Special Exhibition Curator Adriano Marinazzo, incorporates 38 objects in total, […]
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Daisy Patton Paints Wedding Photos Back to Life
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. — At the center of Daisy Patton’s Before These Witnesses hangs a double swing festooned with fabric flowers. Fashioned from a decrepit sofa the artist found on Craigslist, it frames vintage wedding photos of an anonymous Venezuelan couple that the artist has enlarged, printed on canvas, and embellished with bold acrylic […]
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Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gift to New York
I have this vague, flickering memory of neon orange billowing impossibly through threadbare trees like the penumbric trails of large, unseasonal fireflies. I would’ve been seven years old when the late Christo and Jeanne-Claude installed “The Gates” — 7,503 16-foot gates adorned with fabric flowing along 23 miles of walkways — for 16 days in Central Park […]
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Cum Shots Across Art History
Deborah Kass, left to right, “Making Men 4” (1992) and “Puff Piece” (1992) Deborah Kass created the Art History Paintings out of frustration at not seeing herself in the halls of museums even as she fell in love with the work of the artists themselves. That contradictory dynamic of attraction and repulsion is what gives […]
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As DEI Slowly Dies, What Comes Next?
We’re hosting a virtual town hall meeting for Hyperallergic Members on March 19 at 6pm (EDT). We loved connecting with so many of you at our last town hall in November and are looking forward to meeting again. On March 19, members will learn about the latest happenings at Hyperallergic and get a behind-the-scenes look […]
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Chinoiserie Through a Feminist Lens
Largely derided as the pinnacle of feminine vanity and frivolity, the imported porcelain fever of early 18th-century Europe laid the framework for Chinoiserie, a Western imitation and interpretation of Chinese culture and aesthetics in manufactured wares. An upcoming exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art examines the obsessively collectible status symbol of upper-echelon homes, identifying […]
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Buffalo AKG Art Museum Workers Decry Layoffs of 13 Union Members
The Buffalo AKG Art Museum, formerly the Albright–Knox Art Gallery, has come under scrutiny after the institution laid off 13 employees and reorganized staff to effectively remove union positions. Buffalo AKG Workers United, the union representing employees in the visitor experience (VEX), facilities management, and food services departments, claims that the western New York art […]
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Required Reading
‣ Handwriting is one of those topics that will never cease to fascinate me, and poet Anne Carson’s new essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books casts it in a new light. On writing with Parkinson’s, Cy Twombly, and more, she writes: Like certain other artists of the modern era Twombly seems to have been […]
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JD Vance Memes Bloat the Internet but Miss the Point
Absurd edits of Vice President JD Vance have ballooned across social media in the week following the disastrous televised meeting between him, President Trump, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Oval Office last Friday, February 28. Latching onto Vance’s petulant and interruptive demands that Zelensky thank the United States for its aid throughout the […]
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Small Arts Nonprofits Face Uncertainty as NEA Cuts “Challenge America” Grant
For Backstreet Community Arts, a nonprofit in Newnan, Georgia, that provides free art workshops and studio access for individuals grappling with trauma, grief, and other mental health struggles, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) helps to fill a gap in community care. “For many in our community, having no-cost access to creative resources is […]
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Virginia Museum Receives “Transformative” Gift of Haitian Art
For over three decades, textile artist Myrlande Constant has depicted scenes from Haitian history, religion, and daily life through the large-scale, labor-intensive beaded embroidery of traditional Vodou flags. Now, her work will join the permanent collection of the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, as part of a landmark gift of approximately […]
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Anne Imhof’s Armory Performance Is a Bad Balenciaga Ad
Anne Imhof’s three-hour performance at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan is overwhelmingly infantile, comically apolitical, excessively pessimistic about the future, and tragically hollow beneath all the hype. Doom: House of Hope, curated by Klaus Biesenbach, is a Gen-Z adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set on a high school prom night and performed […]
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10 Shows to See in Los Angeles March 2025
After the recent frenzy of Art Week here in Los Angeles, this month’s selections focus on community and collaboration, tracing historical and personal networks of connection. Wael Shawky’s film Drama 1882 is a stylized opera based on an anti-colonial uprising in Egypt, a fanciful mix of fact and fiction. Kour Pour’s first LA show in […]
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No Other Land Creators Issue Urgent Call to Action in Oscars Speech
In an over two-minute speech on the stage of Los Angeles’s Dolby Theater on Sunday night, March 2, Palestinian journalist, lawyer, and activist Basel Adra and Israeli investigative journalist Yuval Abraham called for the world to take “serious actions to stop injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.” The co-directors’ documentary film […]
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Five NYC Art Shows to See This Week
A gilded brass reliquary bust of a martyred female saint (Southern Germany or Switzerland, c. 1500), brass with gilding and polychrome, at Luhring Augustine gallery in Manhattan (photo Natalie Haddad/Hyperallergic) A good two-person show can bring out the best of both artists. Trenton Doyle Hancock and Philip Guston at the Jewish Museum may be the […]
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Alex Strada Says “No” to NIMBYs
As I made my way up the winding path to DeKalb Gallery, a squat aquarium of a building on the Pratt Institute quad in Brooklyn, I could tell that Collective Mobilities would be an unusual show. A sign much like one you’d find on a corner deli proclaimed, “We’re Open.” On a mild February afternoon, […]
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What to See in Upstate New York March 2025
Kathryn Freeman, “Living with Goats” (2023), oil on linen (courtesy Carrie Haddad Gallery) Although we celebrate his birthday in April, March always reminds me of Shakespeare — something about the melodramatic in-betweenness of this time of year. And thinking of Shakespeare brings me into his theatrical mindset, where notions of madness and absurdity are measures of human […]
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Trump’s Funding Freeze Leaves Ukrainian Cultural Heritage in Limbo
In the three years since Russia invaded Ukraine, near-daily heavy drone strikes and missile bombardments have killed thousands of civilians and displaced many more. In addition to the loss of life and large-scale damage to civilian infrastructure, Russia has targeted many valuable Ukrainian cultural and natural heritage sites. Now, Donald Trump’s presidency poses new challenges […]
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A Mixed Bag at the Outsider Art Fair
During my first visit to the Outsider Art Fair in Manhattan yesterday, February 27, the overall experience was exactly what I’d expected: a few stand-out booths amid a sea of puzzling ones. I often find the first floor of the Metropolitan Pavilion venue, a popular spot for New York art fairs, impossible to navigate, but […]
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Guggenheim Museum Lays Off 20 Workers
The Guggenheim Museum in New York will lay off 20 employees, around 7% of its staff, the institution announced today, February 28, citing post-pandemic financial constraints. The staff cuts are set to go into effect immediately and will impact all departments except for senior leadership and curators, the New York Times reported. It’s the third […]
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City Council Holds Hearing on Brooklyn Museum Layoffs
In a special oversight hearing at New York City Hall this morning, February 28, Brooklyn Museum workers, union representatives, and City Council members called on the institution to “exhaust all options” before implementing its recently announced mass layoffs affecting 47 full- and part-time employees. Earlier this week, District Council 37 Local 1502 and UAW Local […]
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Art Museum of the Americas Cancels Second Show Amid Trump’s DEI Crackdown
Artist Andil Gosine would be setting up his exhibition Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine in Washington, DC this week if the Art Museum of the Americas, an arm of the Organization of American States (OAS), hadn’t canceled it earlier this month. “For three years, I have imagined every centimeter of the three galleries for this […]
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Manhattan’s New Museum to Reopen With 150-Artist Exhibition
After being closed to the public for about a year, Manhattan’s New Museum will reopen this fall with more than double the gallery space and a sweeping exhibition featuring the work of more than 150 artists. The long-awaited reopening follows the New Museum’s temporary closure to the public last March for the $82 million construction of […]
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Two Painters’ Not-Quite-Abstract Art
The pairing of paintings by Amanda Church and Jenny Hankwitz in Intersection at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects was a stroke of genius. Opening a week after A Planar Garden, curated by Stephen Westfall, closed at Alexandre Gallery, Intersection is another reminder that planar abstraction is thriving, even if the art world seldom focuses on […]
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Former Ringling Trustees Decry “Catastrophic” Proposal to Transfer Museum
Former museum trustees and donors of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art are decrying a proposal that would transfer control of the institution and its over 10,000-item collection to the New College of Florida (NCF), which has gained national attention over the last few years for undergoing a right-wing transformation. Based in Sarasota, […]
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Brooklyn Museum Workers Rally Against Layoffs Outside Benefit Dinner
Over 200 people, including current and former Brooklyn Museum workers and supporters, rallied outside the institution during a fundraising event tonight, February 25, to protest the recent sweeping layoffs impacting nearly 50 full- and part-time staff members. Starting at 6pm, concurrently with the invitation-only Chairman’s Dinner, demonstrators held signs that read “Art Workers Won’t Kiss […]
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Gertrude Abercrombie’s American Surrealism
PITTSBURGH — In 1935, a 26-year-old largely self-taught painter named Gertrude Abercrombie accompanied her friend, the writer Thorton Wilder, to a lecture at the University of Chicago in her native Hyde Park. There, she would meet the lecturer who would become a lifelong influence and mentor of sorts: Gertrude Stein. An irascible American modernist who not only […]
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Show on Artists of African Descent Loses Funding Amid Trump DEI Crackdown
The Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC, has terminated an exhibition of works by Afro-Latino, Caribbean, and African American artists after the Trump administration allegedly withdrew the show’s funding amid crackdowns on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. Before The Americas, curated by Cheryl D. Edwards and four years in the making, was slated […]
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An Artist’s Dispatches From Luigi Mangione’s Hearing
It’s 31 degrees outside, but the wind makes it feel like 19. When I arrived at the New York Supreme Court Criminal Term at 100 Centre Street around 10am last Friday, watercolor pencils and sketch paper in hand, there weren’t many people there except for a handful of journalists wielding cameras. I found this relatively […]
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Christine Sun Kim’s Multidimensional Music
The fan kicked on with a loud drone. A giant red hand flopped forebodingly over the tape meant to protect artworks from viewers, before lunging at me with an accusatory finger. As it filled with air — and while I caught my breath — the hand drifted calmly to a cream-colored rock, tapping it lightly, […]
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Kenneth Tam’s Requiem for the Shattered American Dream
Strewn about a dark room are objects that recall the wreckage of a plane. As I investigated the scene of the catastrophe, I saw cloth bags holding battered metal beams and headlights or, even more ominously, nothing at all, their mouths frozen open like gaping voids. Glowing forms resembling melted milk cartons provide the only light […]
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Art About Resilience and Resistance Dazzles at Frieze LA
LOS ANGELES — As crowds descended on the Santa Monica Airport yesterday, February 20, for the opening of Frieze Los Angeles, casual bystanders might forget that just a month ago it wasn’t certain whether the international art fair would even be returning to LA this month. Wildfires had just swept through the Pacific Palisades and […]
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Luigi Mangione Cleans Up Nicely in New Courtroom Sketches
Accused UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson shooter Luigi Mangione appeared for a brief hearing at a Manhattan court today, February 21, for the first time since his December arraignment. The Ivy League graduate’s mug, embraced by many as a symbol of resistance against all that is wrong with America’s healthcare system, was high-profile courtroom sketch artist […]
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LA Artists Reclaim the Spotlight at Two Alternative Fairs
Harry Gould Harvey IV, “Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear To Tread” (2025) at Post-Fair (all photos Sigourney Schultz/Hyperallergic) LOS ANGELES — Yesterday, I bypassed Frieze’s VIP opening and headed to two of the city’s alternative art fairs instead: the Post-Fair and the Other Art Fair. As the former’s name suggests, the new kid on […]
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Massive “Free Luigi” Image Projected on Manhattan Building
The projection of Luigi Mangione portrayed as a saint on a building at the intersection of Canal and Lafayette Streets in Lower Manhattan on Thursday evening, February 20. (image used with permission) Amid biting winds and blustering streaks of snow, a group of autonomous activists projected a large and saintly illustration of accused UnitedHealthcare CEO […]
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Suggestive Portraits of Queer Priests and Nuns Spark Fury in Mexico
A Mexico City exhibition of paintings portraying sexualized and queer Christian priests and nuns has elicited fervent complaints from religious groups and right-wing figures who have held protests at the museum for over a week. Artist Fabián Cháirez’s exhibition La venida del Señor (The coming of the Lord) opened on February 5 at the Academia de […]
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Street Stories – Graffiti and the Legacy of Martin Wong
Street Stories – Graffiti and the Legacy of Martin WongLee Quiñones, Wendy Olsoff, Sean Corcoran, & Hrag Vartanian (moderator) Monday, March 10, 7pmExplore the exhibition starting at 6pmThe Museum of the City of New York1220 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY$25 | $10 for Hyperallergic Members Be part of an engaging panel discussion that delves into […]
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Fairs and Events Not to Miss During LA Art Week
When wildfires swept through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena last month, the fate of the fairs participating in LA’s February Art Week was an open question. Many in the art world wonder whether it was too soon after a major tragedy to move forward with such a grand event, especially one so commercially driven. But […]
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Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Labyrinths of Desire
Photography, in one conception, is the art of constructing fictions. Working with, alongside, and against conventions of portraiture photography, Paul Mpagi Sepuya manipulates the gaps between image and object. He creates, negotiates, and frustrates desire and intimacy — viewers glimpse fantasy, but never quite reach a state of full enjoyment of it. In TRANCE, his […]
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Hundreds of Artists Ask NEA to Stop Enforcing Trump’s Anti-DEI Mandates
Hundreds of artists rebuked the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in an open letter this week after the agency imposed new requirements for grant applicants not to operate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs or use federal funds to “promote gender ideology.” The updated compliance standards for applicants come after the NEA canceled its […]
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Dawoud Bey Asks, Can Landscapes Hold Traumas?
Stony the Road, photographer Dawoud Bey’s current exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery, led me to some against-the-grain thinking that provoked a few vexing conclusions. It might do the same for you. If you were to peer at the reclusively lit gelatin silver photographs mounted on Dibond, as I did, you would encounter forest scenes in […]
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Five NYC Art Shows to See This Week
Sometimes we need to see the big picture to find meaning; other times it’s in the little things. And still other times, we can’t find it at all. Each of these perspectives is represented in the shows below, by artists including Alexis Rockman, Stephanie H. Shih, and Raoul De Keyser. What all the shows share […]
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Hyperallergic Mini Art Crossword: February 2025
Valentine’s Day may be over, but love in art endures — including an iconic Klimt embrace. Solve this and other clues in the mini puzzle for the month of love, including a Michelangelo biopic, Broad City‘s co-lead, and more. Natan Last’s essays, poetry, and crossword puzzles appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Narrative, Los […]
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The Artist Bending Modernism Toward Mysticism
LEIPZIG, Germany — My first impression of Marina Perez Simão’s recent oil paintings — 17 of which are shown at G2 in Leipzig, in the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany — was how remarkably grounded they felt. For all their evident moltenness, with their billowy shapes suggesting undulating landscapes, these compositions also conveyed a […]
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Raoul De Keyser’s Dramas of Looking
A drama lives within each painting by Raoul De Keyser. Even the sparsest works are entire galaxies buzzing with activity. Yet, as curator Helen Molesworth writes of Touch Game, the late artist’s current show at David Zwirner Gallery, De Keyser “deliciously halts the human impulse to make meaning.” He may not always halt the impulse, […]
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Australia’s Decision to Drop Its Venice Biennale Artist Ignites Uproar
Australia’s decision to drop Lebanese-born artist Khaled Sabsabi as its representative for the 2026 Venice Biennale has triggered an uproar culminating in a string of resignations and petitions signed by hundreds. Creative Australia, the country’s governing arts body, announced yesterday, February 13, that it had rescinded last week’s appointment of Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino as […]
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8 Art Books on Love to Read This Valentine’s Day
The spirit of Valentine’s Day, like February itself, is best kept short and sweet. On the occasion of a notoriously commercial day that can provoke resentment, elation, or both at the same time, we’ve gathered art books about letters and love in all its forms — platonic, romantic, familial, artistic, political. Read on for a […]
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Required Reading
‣ Calling all haters! This critical, refreshing review of a dance piece in London by Louise Levene in the Financial Times may renew your faith in performance criticism: The weakest of the four finalists was Larsen C, by Athens-based Christos Papadopoulos, which consisted of six black-clad dancers on a black stage lit with obvious reluctance by what […]
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Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory
Apply today for September 2025 admission. The IDSVA PhD in Visual Arts: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory is a research-based, low-residency PhD for creative thinkers. As a true nomadic institution, IDSVA is a school without walls — a community that exists everywhere our students and faculty are and gathers in person in various parts of […]
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Jeffrey Gibson’s Venice Biennale Show Is Heading to LA
About a year after becoming the first Native artist to ever singularly represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, Jeffrey Gibson will make his solo museum debut in Southern California this spring at the Broad Museum in Downtown Los Angeles through an adaptation of his pavilion presentation. Opening on May 10 and running through […]
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The Opulent Beadwork of Black Masker Demond Melancon
Louisiana-based artist Demond Melancon, known for his meticulously hand-beaded Mardi Gras Indian suits, was selected among three finalists for the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art through the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina. In addition to a year-long display of his beadwork at the museum beginning February 7, Melancon was awarded a […]
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Brent Sikkema’s Husband Charged With Hiring His Killer
Federal investigators have filed charges against the husband of New York gallerist Brent Sikkema for allegedly hiring his killer, the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan announced today, February 11. The news comes just over a year after the prominent art dealer was found stabbed to death in his Rio de Janeiro residence, triggering an […]
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Chinese Dissident Artist Ai Weiwei Denied Entry to Switzerland
Chinese dissident artist and activist Ai Weiwei was denied entry into Switzerland after landing at Zurich Airport on Monday, February 10, reportedly because of his expired Schengen visa issued by Portugal. Swiss border patrol held Ai in the airport overnight until he was made to travel back on a flight to the United Kingdom on […]
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How Craft Helps Chamorros Reconnect to the Ocean
This article is part of a series focusing on underrepresented craft histories, researched and written by the 2024 Craft Archive Fellows, and organized in collaboration with the Center for Craft. From seashell and tortoiseshell body adornments to carving, seafaring, and tool-making, the unique beauty and history of Chamorro craft are rooted in concepts of reciprocity and deep respect for […]
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Hidden Woman Portrait Found Beneath Picasso Masterpiece
An iconic portrait from Pablo Picasso’s blue period gained a new layer of complexity after the Courtauld Institute of Art in London discovered an earlier image of a woman beneath it that went undetected for over a century. The hidden depiction of the mystery woman was revealed in the upper right corner of Picasso’s “Portrait […]
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Before Black, There Was Blue
Human beings have a tendency toward collection. I have a theory that this desire to hang onto things is more true in times of crisis, but lately, I’ve begun to believe that we also have a tendency toward crisis itself. This makes untying the impulse to collect and the challenges of the times a fairly […]
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KAPOW Presents Naoto Nakagawa
In vibrant color, Naoto Nakagawa blends the real and the fantastical, inspired by the Surrealist movement and elements of Pop Art. Recent works epitomize his engagement with what he has coined the “conceptual real:” representational compositions rooted in metaphor that reference contemporary events, literature, and art history. Several of these paintings and drawings are on view at […]
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The Wobbly Humanity of Cy Twombly
Upon encountering Cy Twombly’s monumental nine-part polyptych “Untitled” (1971), I thought about the dark, domineering monolith that appears early on in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The object is of such unprecedented sublimity that it jump-starts the human species. Many in Twombly’s cohort of canonical American artists might have welcomed the comparison: […]
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Prettiness Is Political for Marie Laurencin
“Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? … Girls are so much prettier,” Marie Laurencin once told a Time magazine reporter. This often-repeated quote suggests that the late artist made pretty pictures — and the pastel-hued images in the exhibition Marie Laurencin: Works from 1905 to 1952 at Almine Rech Gallery are […]
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