The article reviews the exhibition "MONUMENTS" held at both MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) and The Brick, as covered by Contemporary Art Review LA. The review, written by Qingyuan Deng, appears in Issue 43 (February 2026) of the publication, which also features other reviews, interviews, and essays on topics ranging from olfactory art to tarot and video art.
Château Shatto gallery in Los Angeles is presenting a group exhibition featuring works by Minnie Pwerle, Emily Pwerle, Molly Pwerle, and Galya Pwerle, four Indigenous Australian artists from the Anmatyerre community. The show highlights their distinctive painting styles, which often draw on ancestral stories and bold abstract patterns, continuing the legacy of Aboriginal art in a contemporary gallery context.
The article reports on five distinct art fairs—Frieze, NADA, Independent, 1-54, and Esther III—visited during New York Art Fair Week. It highlights key artists and works, including Kelly Tapia-Chuning's deconstructed serapes at NADA, Esaí Alfredo's queer nighttime paintings, Alex Burke's textile dolls at 1-54, and Laetitia KY's photographic self-sculpture. The fairs collectively emphasized themes of environmentalism, globalism, decolonization, and a growing textiles sector, with curation varying widely from commercial to conceptually driven.
Artist Dayanita Singh mounted a major exhibition titled "ARCHIVIO" at the State Archives of Venice, which opened to the public as an exhibition venue for the first time in its history. Without institutional funding or a public relations budget, Singh relied on a "friendship economy" to install her signature "photo-pillars"—images of Indian archival documents bound in red cloth. The show attracted visitors despite the lack of traditional promotion, as documented in an interview with Hyperallergic Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian.
Market Art Fair in Stockholm celebrated its 20th edition, the largest to date with 150 exhibitors, after moving from Liljevalch’s to Magasin 9, a former warehouse at the city’s port. The fair, founded in 2006 as a joint Nordic initiative, expanded its scope in 2025 to include international presentations. During the preview day, Malin Ebbing captured exhibiting artists, gallerists, and notables with her Polaroid, asking about their work and favorite booths. Artists such as Arvida Byström, Hans Berg, Sigrid Soomus, and Gabriel Karlsson discussed their artistic expressions and discoveries at the fair, with many gallerists reporting significant sales.
Ten art collectors from Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota have loaned 85 works from their private collections to the Sarasota Art Museum for the exhibition 'Something Borrowed, Something New.' The show features pieces by renowned artists including Kara Walker, Ai Weiwei, Alex Katz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Chuck Close, Hank Willis Thomas, and Yoko Ono, with many prints coming from Graphicstudio at the University of South Florida. The exhibition was conceived by executive director Virginia Shearer after visiting collectors' homes and was inspired by a trip to the Renwick Museum at the Smithsonian.
Texas Vignette has announced an open call for Texas women artists to participate in the eighth annual Vignette Art Fair, scheduled for September 30 to October 3, 2026, at On The Levee in the Dallas Design District. Alison de Lima Greene, the Isabel Brown Wilson Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will curate the juried exhibition. Submissions open May 26 through June 26, with a $36 fee, and selected artists will be notified by August 17. The fair is free to the public on October 2-3, with ticketed preview events including a Patron Welcome Dinner and a Preview Benefit.
Frieze New York 2026 opened at the Shed in Hudson Yards, drawing a record crowd of collectors, artists, and celebrities on preview day. The fair featured over 65 international galleries, with a strong presence of Latin American artists and a notable shift toward textile-based works, sculpture, and paper pieces. Highlights included the Ruinart Art Lounge with preparatory studies by Tadashi Kawamata, and the Focus section spotlighting emerging galleries. Notable attendees included Leonardo DiCaprio, gallerist Almine Rech, and Sotheby's senior vice president Ralph DeLuca.
The article is a diary entry from the 2026 Venice Biennale, focusing on the exhibition "In Minor Keys" curated by the late Koyo Kouoh. The author describes an emotional experience, beginning with a poem by Refaat Alareer on the Arsenale wall, and highlights works by Guadalupe Maravilla, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, and others that address themes of perseverance, healing, and survival. Maravilla's sculptures reference a child kidnapped by ICE, while Hatanaka's linocuts explore bipolar disorder as an adaptive trait. The show also features artist-led collectives like Denniston Hill and fierce pussy, emphasizing institution-building and world-making.
A coalition of seven Zurich-based artist-run collectives, led by Peter Baracchi and his nomadic platform 6½, has taken over the former Museum Haus Konstruktiv building in Zurich's Selnau district. The project, titled "Oceans Flow Upwards," occupies 1,200 square meters across five floors and expands into over 2,000 square meters by activating the cellar, offices, storage, shop, café, and rooftop. Participating collectives include Hotel Tiger, Die Diele, Papillarya, MATERIAL, volumes, and zwischentext. Baracchi, who previously worked at Haus Konstruktiv as a technician and photographer, initiated the takeover after the museum relocated to Areal Löwenbräukunst, securing temporary cultural use from the City of Zurich in March. Rather than dividing the space into separate zones, the exhibition presents a single, integrated show where artists were invited by the collectives, not selected by open call.
Mexican artist Paulina Carretero's exhibition "Reminiscence and Furor" is moving from the Laredo Center for the Arts to La Posada Hotel starting May 8. The show, which opened in March for International Women's Month, features paintings that pay tribute to seven historical women artists: Artemisia Gentileschi, Berthe Morisot, Georgia O'Keeffe, Tamara de Lempicka, María Izquierdo, Remedios Varo, and Yayoi Kusama. Carretero created two works for each artist—one capturing their spirit and another reflecting her personal vision. The exhibition also includes a large-format painting titled "El Juego de la Consciencia (The Game of Consciousness)" that incorporates magical realism. Carretero will mark the closing at the Laredo Center for the Arts on May 1.
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) is hosting "Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation," an exhibition running through June 21. It features over 60 works by Marie Watt, an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation's Turtle Clan, including prints, monumental blanket stacks, hanging textiles, and small-scale sculptures. The show is drawn from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer, a top 200 collector recognized by ARTNews, whose foundation has supported more than 180 exhibitions and loaned works to over 130 museums at no cost.
Maya Gallery in New York is hosting a benefit sale that features works by over 50 Israeli contemporary artists, including prominent names like Michal Rovner and Sigalit Landau. The sale aims to raise funds for the gallery's programming and to support Israeli artists amid ongoing geopolitical tensions.
The 61st Biennale di Arte Venezia opens under the posthumous curatorial vision of Koyo Kouoh (1967–2025), the late Cameroonian-born curator who reshaped contemporary African and diasporic art discourse. The central exhibition, spanning the Giardini and Arsenale, features 111 participants including artists, collectives, and artist-led organizations from across the Global South, with works in textiles, film, sculpture, and performance that interrogate colonialism, migration, and ecological repair. The Biennale is also marked by a pronounced presence of African and diasporic narratives across national pavilions, including several first-time pavilions from the African continent.
The Hong Kong Jockey Club launched the Harmonious Horse International Exhibition Tour in Tsim Sha Tsui on Friday, featuring large-scale horse sculptures by artist Simon Ma. The opening ceremony at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Piazza was attended by Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun Yuk-han and Jockey Club CEO Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges. The exhibition runs until May 21 at Tsim Sha Tsui before moving to Tamar Park in Admiralty, then traveling to Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. A nighttime light show accompanies the display, and winners of a youth art competition inspired by Xu Beihong's equine paintings were announced.
Serpentine has launched "I DIDNT REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT," a new online game and critical thinking tool by artist and game designer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. Available from May 21, 2026, on web and mobile platforms, the project extends the world of Brathwaite-Shirley's acclaimed "THE DELUSION" and explores polarization, identity, and social connection beyond the gallery. Developed with nonprofit Beyond Code Collective and supported by Glass Castle Foundation, the game places players in a post-apocalyptic universe where they encounter fictional characters and make decisions that shape narratives and determine multiple endings, drawing on real-world materials from news cycles, social media, and community testimonies.
The Edo-Tokyo Museum in Tokyo's Ryōgoku district has reopened on March 31, 2026, after four years of renovation. Its first exhibition, "In Praise of Great Edo" (April 25–May 24), showcases 160 items from the museum's collection of 350,000, including swords, armor, kimonos, ukiyo-e masterpieces by Sharaku, Utamaro, and Hokusai, and artifacts from Edo-period culture such as kabuki, sumō, and firefighting uniforms. The renovated museum features new animation, projection mapping, full-scale reconstructions like Ginza's Hattori watch store, and a multilingual smartphone guide system.