Meg Molloy, founder of the Working Arts Club, discusses the systemic barriers facing working-class professionals in the art world. Launched last year, the independent network provides social and professional support for arts workers from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, a demographic often excluded by the industry's reliance on unpaid internships, low entry-level salaries, and expensive urban hubs like London.
Artist Nick Cave and his partner Bob Faust have transformed an abandoned Chicago textile factory into a vast live-work-gallery complex called Facility. The space houses their apartment, studios for themselves and ten assistants, and a street-facing gallery for emerging artists. Cave is preparing for a major exhibition, "Mammoth," at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, while also working on large-scale public commissions, including a sculpture for Princeton University Art Museum and a collaborative installation for the Obama Presidential Center.
Alissa Friedman has returned to Salon 94, the New York gallery where she spent 15 years shaping its identity, after a stint at Stephen Friedman Gallery's US outpost, which is closing. In an interview with ARTnews, she discusses the gallery's early days in the mid-2000s, its unconventional program that embraced Indigenous artists, ceramics, and design before such categories were widely accepted, and how the art world has since aligned with that vision. She also explains her departure in 2021 when founder Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn joined LGDR, as Friedman preferred working directly with living artists.
Multidisciplinary artist Trevor Paglen has been awarded the 2026 LG Guggenheim Award. The honor, established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and LG, includes an unrestricted $100,000 grant and recognizes artists working at the intersection of art and technology.
An unauthorized documentary about mega-gallerist Larry Gagosian is in the works, directed by Barry Avrich, who previously helmed the Netflix hit "Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art." Titled "Shadow Man: Inside The Secret World of Larry Gagosian," the film promises to feature former employees and artists sharing insider stories about Gagosian's empire. Avrich has a track record of documentaries on high-profile figures, including Lew Wasserman and Harvey Weinstein.
Artist Tom Burckhardt discusses his creative process and upbringing in a studio interview, highlighting his upcoming work and the influence of his New York School lineage. The son of artists Yvonne Jacquette and Rudy Burckhardt, he explores the concept of "mouthfeel" in painting—a textural quality that parallels culinary experiences—while utilizing humor and skepticism to challenge artistic pretension.
Cristopher Canizares, a longtime partner at mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth, is departing after 16 years to launch his own venture, the Artist Legacy Bureau. This new agency will function as an artist management firm, with Canizares working directly for and being paid by a select group of five or six artists to advise on long-term career strategy across their gallery, institutional, and collector relationships.
Cultured magazine has published its first Young Dealers List, highlighting 23 galleries under five years old that are revitalizing the art world. The list was compiled from over 100 recommendations gathered from more than 40 collectors, advisors, and curators. The article profiles one of the selected gallerists, Adora Mba, founder of ADA Contemporary Art Gallery in Accra, Ghana, who opened her space in 2020 after working as a cultural news producer. Mba emphasizes supporting emerging African artists and has dedicated her 2025 program to women artists and curators.
Karen Archey, the head of curatorial at Düsseldorf's K20 and K21 museums, shares personal insights in an interview format. She reveals her obsession with painter Alice Neel, discusses a formative 2007 summer touring major European art events, and lists the poetry and audio currently occupying her attention.
carmen reviriego art patronage spain callia foundation
Carmen Reviriego, founder and president of the Callia Foundation, recently hosted the 11th edition of the International Patronage Awards at Madrid’s Royal Collections Gallery. The event honored significant figures in the art world, including ARTnews Top 200 collector Batia Ofer, while highlighting the foundation's broader mission of funding restorations and fostering collaboration between private donors and Spain’s public institutions. Reviriego, who transitioned from a career in finance to art philanthropy, utilizes a business-minded approach to advocate for a more balanced model of cultural funding in Spain.
eugenio viola museo de arte moderno de bogota
The Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO) terminated the contract of its artistic director, Eugenio Viola, earlier this month. Viola claims his dismissal came after he raised concerns with the board in September 2025 about deteriorating working conditions at the museum, concerns he says were shared by other staff. The museum stated the decision resulted from a comprehensive review and that it has begun searching for a new artistic director.
The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, has appointed Allison Blais as its new president and CEO, effective January 2026. Blais, currently executive vice president and chief strategy and operations officer at New York’s 9/11 Memorial & Museum, will succeed Jeffrey N. Brown, who held the role for five years. The announcement was made by board chair Duffield Ashmead IV MD, who praised Blais's experience with large-scale capital projects and stakeholder engagement. Blais, a Connecticut native, expressed her long familiarity with the Wadsworth and her enthusiasm for working with museum director Matthew Hargraves.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced its 2025 class of 22 MacArthur Fellows, each receiving an $800,000 no-strings-attached grant. Among the winners are several visual artists: Garrett Bradley, known for her Oscar-nominated documentary *Time* (2020) and works centering Black resistance; Gala Porras-Kim, whose practice questions how art institutions convey or conceal information about objects; Tuan Andrew Nguyen, whose films and installations explore trauma and colonization; and Jeremy Frey, a seventh-generation Passamaquoddy basket maker whose midcareer survey is on view at the Bruce Museum. Photographers Matt Black and Tonika Lewis Johnson also received fellowships, along with archaeologist Kristina Douglass and non-artists such as novelist Tommy Orange and astrophysicist Kareem El-Badry.
Lisa Phillips, director of New York's New Museum, will retire after more than 25 years in the role, as reported by the New York Times. The museum is currently in the midst of a 62,000-square-foot expansion expected to open this fall, though no date has been set. Phillips, 71, oversaw the museum's relocation to the Bowery in 2007, launched the influential New Museum Triennial in 2010, and added initiatives like New Inc and Rhizome. Her tenure also included controversies, such as criticism over a 2010 show of works owned by a trustee, staff complaints about her $900,000 salary, and tensions around the museum's unionization in 2019.
Chiwoniso Kaitano, executive director of MacDowell since 2023, discusses the oldest continuously operating artist residency in the United States in an ARTnews interview. She highlights MacDowell's 118-year history, its seven artistic disciplines, and its mission to provide a sanctuary for artists. Kaitano, who previously led arts education nonprofits Girl Be Heard and Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy, is working to raise MacDowell's profile and bring artist residencies back to the center of art world discourse.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced its 101st class of fellows for 2026, awarding 223 individuals across 55 disciplines. This year’s cohort includes a significant number of visual artists and art professionals, such as American Artist, John Ahearn, Sonya Clark, and Fia Backström, alongside scientists, writers, and scholars. The fellowships provide varying monetary awards, typically ranging from $30,000 to $45,000, to support the recipients' ongoing creative and intellectual projects.
Danielle Mckinney, a rising painter known for intimate depictions of Black women in moments of repose, shares insights into her creative process in a studio visit interview. She has two concurrent exhibitions: one at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach (through Oct. 4) and one at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York (through June 13), where she debuts a series of watercolors and continues dissolving boundaries between figures and their domestic surroundings.
Art dealer Gordon VeneKlasen, former longtime partner of Michael Werner, launched his own gallery at the start of 2025. The new VeneKlasen Gallery made its art fair debut at the inaugural Art Basel Qatar in Doha and will open twin shows of the late German artist Sigmar Polke at its New York and London spaces on March 3 and 12, respectively. In an interview, VeneKlasen discusses his career trajectory, from studying art history and working at the Ashmolean Museum to a stint with the U.S. Census Bureau, before joining Michael Werner and eventually striking out on his own. Several artists, including Florian Krewer, Issy Wood, and Sanya Kantarovsky, are following him to his new venture.
Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade discusses his collaborative, research-driven practice in a studio visit feature for CULTURED magazine. He describes working with actors, cart drivers, carrier pigeon racers, and zoo employees to create installations, photographs, and films that examine the architecture, labor, and history of northeast Brazil. This month, a Vatican-commissioned video installation about Brazilian activist nuns opens at MACRO in Rome, while a series of flags developed with canoeists on the São Francisco River is on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. De Andrade shares his daily rituals, inspirations, and the expansive definition of his studio—a sanctuary in Recife filled with collected magazines, images, and objects.
Cultured magazine publishes an interview with French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, conducted by a journalist who navigates Calle's characteristic conditions for the conversation. The article recounts the process of securing the interview—including a preliminary phone call from Calle to set rules—and describes Calle's home in the South of France, her tan arms, black sleeveless top, and signature glasses. The journalist references Calle's early photobooks published by Siglio, her "Unfinished" series displayed at the Musée Picasso in Paris (2023–24), and her project "The Address Book," which involved interviewing acquaintances of a stranger whose address book she found on the streets of Paris. The interview also touches on a companion catalog of moldy works after a flood in Calle's storage space, and a large photograph of dried flowers from architect Frank Gehry.
Kurimanzutto has appointed Corinna Durland as the new senior director of its New York gallery. Durland, who brings over two decades of experience from roles at Schwartzman&, Art Agency, Partners, and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, will lead the Chelsea-based space in collaboration with the gallery’s founders. Her mandate focuses on strengthening the gallery's U.S. program and deepening its international reach through artist management, institutional engagement, and strategic acquisitions.
Danish painter Eva Helene Pade, born in 1997, has been working in a borrowed London studio while her Paris home undergoes renovations. Three of her new monumental paintings—Jagt (Hunt), Nærmere (Closer), and Opstand (Surge)—will debut with Thaddaeus Ropac at TEFAF New York this week. Known for tempestuous, large-scale nocturnal scenes filled with writhing naked female bodies, Pade draws on influences from Edvard Munch, James Ensor, and Gustav Klimt, though she now works more intuitively. She signed with Thaddaeus Ropac in 2024 as the gallery's youngest represented artist and was featured in Artnet's Intelligence Report 'Zero to Hero' list for a major spike in search interest.
Brooklin A. Soumahoro, a self-taught painter based in Los Angeles, is featured in ARTnews' 2025 "New Talent" issue. Born in Paris and working in a Glassell Park studio, he creates oil paintings that blend methodical color theory with intuitive emotion, drawing inspiration from West African textile designs, synesthesia, and the Fauvist palette of Henri Matisse. His recent solo exhibition "The Open Window" at François Ghebaly gallery in Los Angeles presented works inspired by the south of France, directly engaging with Matisse's iconic paintings.
Cliff Lauson, a curator, participates in 'A brush with...' and shares his personal connection to art, citing Rodney Graham's self-portrait 'My Late Early Styles (Part I, The Middle Period)' as the single work he would live with. He reflects on formative cultural experiences, including working with Northwest Coast First Nations communities at the UBC Museum of Anthropology and seeing the ballet 'Tree of Codes' by Wayne McGregor with Olafur Eliasson and Jamie xx, which inspired his later collaboration on the exhibition 'Infinite Bodies'. Lauson also discusses his recurring engagement with Brian O'Doherty's book 'Inside the White Cube' and his unusual background as a curator who worked on a Star Wars film during his Clore Fellowship at Industrial Light and Magic.
CULTURED magazine has launched its inaugural Young Dealers List, highlighting 23 galleries under five years old that are reshaping the art world. Selected from over 100 recommendations gathered from more than 40 collectors, advisors, and curators, the list features ambitious new spaces in cities from Accra to Berlin. One featured gallerist, Adora Mba of ADA \ Contemporary Art Gallery in Accra, comes from a family of collectors and opened her gallery after working as a cultural news producer; she has dedicated her 2025 program to women artists and curators.
Danielle Falls, a 32-year-old lawyer and fine art insurance broker, is profiled as a young collector building a contemporary art collection from a non-traditional background. She serves on the Bronx Museum of the Arts board of trustees, chairs its acquisitions committee, and is a patron of Project for Empty Space. Falls discusses her early collecting mistakes, her frustration with exclusivity in the art world, and her commitment to supporting underrepresented artists, particularly women sculptors and those working with unconventional materials and family archives. She has founded the Falls Foundation, a nonprofit private lending collection focused on emerging voices across the Americas.
This article features an in-depth interview with artist Olafur Eliasson, who discusses his career-long focus on human perception, environmental concerns, and the concept of "we-ness" in his work. Eliasson reflects on key installations such as *Beauty* (1993) and *Your lost lighthouse* (2020), his influences from thinkers like Donna Haraway and Alva Noë, and his fascination with James Turrell and early Renaissance art. He also shares insights into his Berlin studio and answers the question "what is art for?" The piece is accompanied by details of his current exhibitions in Brisbane, Jakarta, and Singapore, as well as a new permanent public work in Oxford, UK.
Rhona Hoffman, the 90-year-old Chicago gallerist, is closing her eponymous gallery at the end of May 2025 after nearly five decades in operation. The final group show, “Not Just A Pretty Picture,” ends April 26. Hoffman, who opened her gallery in 1976, gave early platforms to artists like Sol LeWitt, Mickalene Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems, and is especially known for championing women artists such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer. She was also made an honorary member of the Guerrilla Girls after documenting her exhibition history of women artists. Hoffman plans to remain in Chicago, curating shows and working with artists, but will not use the term "pop-up" for her future activities.
Philanthropists Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder, who have been part of Long Island's East End cultural scene since 1969, are being honored at the Parrish Art Museum's annual midsummer gala in July 2025. The couple commissioned an oceanfront home from architect Norman Jaffe in Sagaponack and have filled it with a collection featuring works by Jack Pierson, Almond Zigmund, Constantino Nivola, Roni Horn, Jenny Holzer, Mel Kendrick, Lynn Chadwick, Claude Lawrence, and others. Sandy serves as vice president of the museum's board of trustees, and the couple previously supported a Jaffe retrospective at the Parrish in 2005.
Elyse Gonzales, director of San Antonio's Ruby City art centre, is featured in The Art Newspaper's 'A brush with...' interview series. She discusses her formative experience working at Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery in Houston as a high school senior, which led to an internship at the Menil Collection and a master's degree at Williams College. Gonzales also shares her curatorial interests, including a forthcoming show of Tracey Rose's drawing and video works, and reveals that Ruby City was born from founder Linda Pace's dream of the building, which she sketched and commissioned David Adjaye to realize in 2007.