lough kinale book shrine medieval manuscripts national museum ireland 2659182

In 1986, divers recovered ancient fragments from a lake in Longford County, Ireland, which were later identified as the Lough Kinale Book Shrine, the largest and oldest book shrine in Ireland. After a 39-year conservation process at the National Museum of Ireland (NMI), the 9th-century oak and bronze container is now on public display. The shrine, featuring intricate metalwork, snake-head hinges, and a permanently sealed interior, was reconstructed using photogrammetry and 3D modeling. It is part of the NMI exhibition "Words on the Wave," which showcases over 100 early medieval artifacts, including manuscripts on loan from the Abbey Library of St. Gall in Switzerland.

parker gallery artnews awards 2025 best gallery group show 1234763048

Parker Gallery in Los Angeles mounted its final exhibition, “Bowls, Boxes, Plates & Vessels,” at its longtime home in the Los Feliz neighborhood from February 1 to October 19, 2025. The show featured an intergenerational group of artists—including Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Nancy Shaver, Ruby Neri, Shio Kusaka, Zachary Leener, and Daisy Sheff—who had previously exhibited at the gallery, invited back to explore the theme of the container as form. Works in ceramic ranged from small hand-held bowls to large-scale sculptures, displayed within the domestic space of founder Sam Parker’s home, adding intimacy and resonance.

This Month the Museum Will Open "Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory)"

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) will open "Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory)" on May 22, 2025, featuring Ann Craven's moon paintings created between 2020 and 2024. The exhibition highlights Craven's direct observation of the moon, with each work documenting the date, time, and place of creation. The show includes a "laboratory" of lunar studies stored in labeled cardboard containers, offering insight into her process. It will be presented in three rotations curated by Anne Collins Goodyear, Jay Sanders, and Adam Weinberg, with about 20 paintings per rotation selected from over 150 compositions. The exhibition runs until August 17, 2025, and is accompanied by a digital catalogue. It coincides with two concurrent solo shows of Craven's work in Maine: at the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Portland Museum of Art.

Arielle and the Politics of Beautiful Things

Arielle und die Politik der schönen Dinge

Josefine Reisch presents new works at Noah Klink gallery during Berlin Gallery Weekend. Her paintings combine mermaids, shipping containers, and Euroboxes to explore themes of standardization, global capitalism, and the politics of beauty. The exhibition, titled "Poxy Proxy," is a duo show with Miriam Umiń. Reisch's studio visit reveals her interest in how objects like Eurokisten (standardized plastic crates) and shipping containers symbolize economic progress and power structures, while mermaid imagery from Disney's "Arielle" questions the equation of beautiful things with moral goodness.

lotus l kang on channeling poetry memory and spirits into her new work 2646703

Lotus L. Kang's latest exhibition, "Already," is on view at 52 Walker in New York through June 7, 2025. The Brooklyn-based Canadian artist transforms the gallery into a diasporic memoryscape using steel greenhouses, mixed-media paintings, sculpture, and found objects like oversized kelp knots and soju bottles. The show takes its title from a poem in Kim Hyesoon's "Autobiography of Death" (2016), and Kang's installation explores themes of presence and absence, memory, and the transmutative qualities of photography and film. In an interview, Kang discusses how Korean poetry helps her understand her own origins as a Korean-Canadian gyopo, and how translation—both linguistic and material—shapes her work.

'I'm a container for my own spirit': Nickola Pottinger on her show of sculptures at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Nickola Pottinger presents her first solo museum exhibition, "fos born," at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, curated by chief curator Amy Smith-Stewart. The show features Pottinger's emotive, organic sculptures called "duppies," inspired by Jamaican folklore and her West Indian upbringing in Brooklyn. Constructed from recycled materials like furniture, bones, bird cages, and pigmented paper pulp made from family documents and rubble, the works explore themes of cultural identity, motherhood, and the duality of post-colonial existence. The exhibition centers on the recent birth of Pottinger's daughter, Zora, with pieces like "Give tanks and praises" (2025) incorporating a cast of the artist's pregnant torso.

In China, the Margiela Show is Staged Inside a Series of Containers

In Cina la sfilata di Margiela è allestita dentro una serie di container

Maison Margiela has launched a major traveling exhibition in China titled "Artisanal: Our Creative Laboratory," debuting in Shanghai before moving to Chengdu. Designed by OMA/AMO, the open-air showcase features over forty couture creations from the Artisanal line dating back to 1989, uniquely displayed within weathered shipping containers. The project aims to demystify the fashion house's secretive creative process, highlighting the techniques of deconstruction and manipulation that define the brand's aesthetic.

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California

The exhibition 'Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California' will run from September 18, 2026, to January 17, 2027, at BAMPFA. It traces the flow and flourishing of quilts during the Second Great Migration (1940–1970), when approximately five million African Americans moved from the rural South to the North and West, with hundreds of thousands arriving in California carrying quilts as containers of ancestral memory and cultural survival. The show features more than 80 artworks organized across several themes, highlighting repurposed work clothes, improvisational piecing, and pattern-based quilting by migrants from Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas. Works by contemporary artists show how these traditions remain alive today.

shipping containers frame maison margiela's shanghai exhibition by OMA / AMO in china

OMA and its research arm AMO have unveiled a new exhibition design for Maison Margiela in Shanghai, utilizing industrial shipping containers as the primary architectural framework. The installation creates a modular, raw environment that reflects the fashion house’s deconstructivist aesthetic while navigating the expansive industrial space of the Chinese venue. By repurposing these steel structures, the design team has constructed a series of interconnected rooms that guide visitors through the brand's latest collections and archival pieces.