Artnet News journalist Annie Armstrong recounts her emotional experience at Art Basel Miami Beach, where she desperately sought to see Julie Curtiss's painting "Mary With the Medela" (2024), a portrait of a woman using a breast pump. As a new mother balancing work and pumping, Armstrong felt a deep personal connection to the work but arrived at the White Cube booth moments after it had been sold and removed from view, leaving her in tears.
Artnet News profiles eight Gulf artists who are shaping the region's cultural renaissance, including Mohammad Alfaraj and Dana Awartani. The article highlights their growing international recognition, with Alfaraj winning Art Basel Emerging Artist and Gold Awards in 2025 and Awartani exhibiting at the 2024 Venice Biennale. It notes the expansion of major art fairs like Art Basel and Frieze into the Gulf, alongside new homegrown initiatives such as the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale and Rubaiya Qatar.
The article, written by Chenoa Baker, critiques the art world's labeling system that categorizes artists as emerging, mid-career, or established. It argues that these labels are particularly harmful to Black artists, who are often kept in the "emerging" category for years despite significant achievements, collections, and decades of practice. The piece highlights the cases of Cheryl Miller, a self-taught analog photographer whose work is held by major institutions yet who had to "re-emerge" after relocating, and Ifé Franklin, a queer Black artist whose career was sidelined by systemic erasure and who is now being honored as an "elder" artist. The article connects these labels to ageism, lack of access to elite schools and galleries, and the undervaluing of self-taught artists and those working outside traditional art centers.
The article examines the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto and the company's 137-year history, tracing its evolution from hanafuda playing cards to global video game dominance. It highlights how the museum curates nostalgia through interactive exhibits and preserved artifacts, framing Nintendo's journey as a sequence of applying technology for fun and profit.
A journalist from Colossal spent a week on an uninhabited island in the Balearic Islands with nearly 80 artists for a residency program called Quarantine, conceived by artist Carles Gomila. Participants follow a rigorous, opaque schedule of talks, workshops, and mentorship sessions, with phones and internet banned, and must stay on the island from early morning until late evening. The April 2026 edition, themed "Tears in Rain" after a Blade Runner monologue, began with a theatrical tour by an actor playing Captain Horacio Hollynwood, who introduced the historic Lazaretto of Mahón, an 18th-century fortress and infirmary.
Art conservator Julian Baumgartner, who runs Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration in Chicago, received an anonymous portrait that arrived severely damaged—folded inside a mangled parcel with substantial creases, tears, and worn-away paint. Using reversible, archival materials and meticulous attention to detail, Baumgartner painstakingly restored the neglected painting, giving it a second chance at life.