Walter Price, a U.S. Navy veteran, has successfully transitioned to a career as a painter in New York, achieving his artistic dream. His journey from military service to the art world highlights a significant personal and creative transformation.
Thomas Gentille, an influential American artist and master jeweler, has died at the age of 89. His work, which he described as "wearable sculpture," blurred the lines between jewelry and contemporary art, favoring abstract, architectural forms in materials like eggshell, wood, and stone over traditional precious gems and metals.
The article profiles the unique aesthetic and historical significance of Kettle's Yard, a house in Cambridge, England, created by Jim Ede. Ede, a former Tate curator, transformed a series of dilapidated cottages into a living work of art and a haven for modern artists in the mid-20th century. He filled the space with a carefully arranged collection of modern art, natural objects, and furniture, embracing the building's worn, imperfect character rather than restoring it to pristine condition.
The 1990 theft of 13 artworks from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum remains unsolved, generating countless theories about the perpetrators. A new book by the former FBI agent who led the investigation for over a decade systematically debunks many prominent public theories, arguing they distract from the actual investigation.
A major exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, "Mark Rothko: The Artist's Museum," presents a significant collection of the artist's monumental works, including the rarely seen Harvard Murals and the Seagram Murals. The show focuses on Rothko's late-career shift towards creating immersive, chapel-like environments intended for deep, meditative viewing.
Donna Distefano, a contemporary jewelry designer, has meticulously recreated 16th-century jewelry pieces for The Frick Collection's exhibition "Gold, Silver, and Rare Stones: Renaissance Jewelry in the Robert Lehman Collection." Her work involved extensive research into historical techniques and materials, resulting in wearable replicas of intricate pendants and brooches originally owned by European nobility.
A Washington Museum Zeros In on the Watergate Scandal
The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., has opened a new exhibition titled "Break the News: Watergate and the American Presidency." The show features over 60 objects, including photographs, political cartoons, and artifacts like the infamous tape recorder used by President Richard Nixon, to explore the scandal's impact on media, politics, and public trust.
The Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) has relocated from its original space on East 26th Street to a new, larger location at 101 Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. The move triples the museum's exhibition space, allowing for the addition of new interactive exhibits, including a major installation called "Prime Number Sunburst," which visualizes the distribution of prime numbers.
Acclaimed actor Meryl Streep has donated a seven-figure sum to the National Women’s History Museum. The funds will support digital storytelling projects and programming, and the museum has created the Meryl Streep Educator Award in her honor, to be presented annually starting this November.
The Affordable Art Fair is returning to Hampstead Heath in London from May 6th to 10th, featuring over 100 galleries and more than 1,000 artworks. A key highlight is the inaugural 'Ceramics Unbound' exhibition, curated by Caroline Jackman, showcasing 27 boundary-pushing ceramic artists, including featured programme artist Sara Dodd. The fair also includes curated displays like 'Heath & Heart' and 'Finds Under £500,' outdoor painting workshops, evening 'Summer Lates' events with music, and family-friendly activities including a children's art competition.
Unionized workers at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, have demanded that the institution remove the name of top funder Les Wexner from its moniker, citing his close ties to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. In a letter to Ohio State University leadership, Wexner Workers United (WWU) argued that Wexner’s name on the building harms the center’s mission and community trust. Wexner, a billionaire retail magnate and art collector, donated $25 million to the center’s construction in the 1980s and has been mentioned over a thousand times in the Epstein Files; Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre named Wexner as among those she was trafficked to, though Wexner denies the allegations.
Billionaire collector and National Gallery of Art trustee Mitchell P. Rales has donated $116 million to the museum. The gift, the largest programming endowment in the institution's history, will fund the 'Across the Nation' initiative, which loans works from the National Gallery's permanent collection to small and midsize museums across the United States for two-year periods at no cost to the borrowing institutions.
Patricia Marroquin Norby, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's inaugural full-time associate curator of Native American art, quietly left her position in December. Her departure followed independent investigations, including a 2024 report from the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, which challenged her claims of Native American ancestry. Both Norby and the museum cited health concerns as the reason for her exit.
London-based artist Zazou Roddam explores the intersection of pop culture nostalgia and historical trauma through the manipulation of found objects and archival media. Her practice, rooted in a long-standing fascination with the 'detritus of history' found in London’s Portobello Road Market, gained significant attention following her debut solo exhibition at Brunette Coleman. Central to her recent work is the video piece 'Pop Inflection (The City)', which meticulously edits footage from 'Sex and the City' to track the architectural and psychological shifts in New York City before and after the 9/11 attacks.
Joy Machine presents 'Feel Free', a group exhibition featuring new works by Rachel Hayden, Paulina Ho, Hanna Lee Joshi, and Jeremy Miranda. The show opens with a reception on May 15, 2026, and runs through June 27, 2026. Each artist explores the tension between chaos and control, using diverse media—from acrylic and gouache to Japanese indigo on thrifted textiles—to capture moments of impermanence and unexpected harmony.
This article explores the enduring fascination that visual artists have with opera, tracing a historical lineage from figures like Oskar Kokoschka and David Hockney to contemporary practitioners such as William Kentridge and Tacita Dean. It examines how opera's fusion of music, drama, and visual spectacle has inspired artists to create set designs, costumes, and even direct productions, often blurring the boundaries between fine art and performance.
The Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens presents "Jeff Koons: Venus Lespugue," an exhibition pairing Jeff Koons' monumental stainless steel sculpture *Balloon Venus Lespugue (Orange)* (2013–2019) with ten certified copies of Paleolithic Venus figurines from major European museums. The Koons work, on public display for the first time, is loaned from the Homem Sonnabend Collection and directly references the 28,000-year-old Venus of Lespugue carved from mammoth tusk ivory.
Russian contemporary artist Pavel Otdelnov has established a home studio in London, where his domestic environment serves as an extension of his artistic practice. Following his relocation in 2022, Otdelnov has integrated Soviet-era motifs—such as wall carpets and television color grids—into his English terraced house to explore themes of memory and the 'uncanny.' His recent works, including 'Unheimlich' and 'No Signal,' utilize these familiar objects to critique how nostalgia can be weaponized and how violence often hides within the mundane.
The Fairfield University Art Museum has launched "For Which It Stands…," a landmark exhibition featuring over 70 artworks that utilize the American flag as a central motif. Curated by Carey Mack Weber, the show spans more than a century of artistic production, from World War I-era paintings by Childe Hassam to contemporary works by artists such as Julie Mehretu and Danielle Scott. The exhibition is a centerpiece of the university's America250 programming, marking the 250th anniversary of the United States.
Tennants Auctioneers in North Yorkshire achieved a total of £215,990 during its Modern and Contemporary Art Sale on February 28. The auction was led by works from LS Lowry, including the signed print 'Going to the Match' which fetched £35,000 and the drawing 'Children in a Crowd' which sold for £25,000. Other significant results included works by Brian ‘Braaq’ Shields, Geoffrey Key, and a David Hockney etching, contributing to a high 96 per cent sell-through rate.
A major exhibition of artist Robert Williams, "Robert Williams: Fearless Depictions," opened at the Long Beach Museum of Art, drawing massive crowds with wait times up to two hours. The show features 57 paintings, 3-D miniatures, and a large fiberglass sculpture, exclusively showcasing work Williams created in the 21st century.
The contemporary art market in 2025 is experiencing a paradox: traditional indicators show cooling, but online sales are booming and attracting new, younger collectors. According to the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2025, online sales now account for 22% of dealer transactions, with 46% of online sales in 2024 going to first-time buyers—up from 35% the previous year. High-net-worth individuals increasingly prefer purchasing through digital channels like dealer websites or Instagram, and established collectors are also buying sight unseen. This shift is driven by greater access to authenticated limited editions and prints by blue-chip artists such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Banksy, David Hockney, and Damien Hirst, offered by galleries like Calder Contemporary in London with transparent pricing and provenance.
The Ohio Art League has opened a new exhibition titled "Uncensored" at RAW Gallery in Downtown Columbus, running from July 13 through September 12, 2025. The show features provocative, unfiltered artworks that address politically charged topics such as gun violence and reproductive rights. Participating artists include Jim Bowling, a professor at Otterbein University, whose sculpture "Second Amendment Rites" critiques gun violence and was previously questioned for being "too political"; Gwen Waight, whose assemblage "Free Abortion" was censored in another show over funding concerns; and Kenia LaMarr, a master's student at Ohio State University, whose painting "Virtuous Intimacy" explores the sexualization of women's bodies. The exhibition is free and open to the public.
Damien Hirst has revealed plans for a series of "posthumous drawings" that would allow new works to be created and sold in his name for up to 200 years after his death. In a recent interview with The Times, Hirst described a system where certificates would grant the right to produce a specific sculpture in a given year after his death, with one work released annually. He cited an unrealized 1991 idea for a pig in formaldehyde as an example of a piece that could be made posthumously and dated to its original conception year. The artist also commented on the current art market, noting a "big turn" due to global uncertainty and emphasizing the need to avoid producing unsold work.
Martha Stewart has curated her first-ever art auction with Joopiter, Pharrell Williams' auction platform, titled "The Contemporary Take." The sale features nearly 50 works by leading contemporary artists including Andy Warhol, Amy Sherald, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Damien Hirst, and Ai Weiwei, running from April 28 through May 6. Highlights include Yiadom-Boakye's "Bark Scraper" (estimated $900,000–$1.2 million), Hirst's pillcase "Up at Dawn" ($500,000–$700,000), and works by George Condo, Esther Mahlangu, and Hank Willis Thomas.
The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair has announced its exhibitor lineup for its New York edition, set for May 13–17 at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea. More than 20 galleries will participate, including a mix of returning and first-time exhibitors from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas, with the fair running concurrently with Frieze New York and NADA New York.
Zane Bennett Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, presents "Lucid Perturbations: The Sewn Drawings and Books of China Marks," the first major solo exhibition dedicated to the artist's sewn works. Featuring over 200 pieces from the last 23 years of Marks's practice, the show runs from May 15 to July 11 and includes pieces like "At the Winter Palace" (2018) and "Above and Below" (2022). Marks, who pivoted from painting to sewing at age 59 in 2000, creates fabric-based narrative tableaux that blend personal and political themes.
Performance artist Maria De Victoria spent Tuesday chanting the last words of Renee Nicole Good—a poet and mother killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis—outside the ICE field office in New York City's Jacob K. Javits Federal Building. Dressed in a coat bearing Good's phrase "I'm not mad at you, dude," De Victoria performed the endurance piece from sunrise to sunset as an act of dissent against federal immigration crackdowns. The work concluded with a silent vigil, and De Victoria, an immigrant from Peru represented by Desnivel Gallery, has a history of politically charged endurance performances.
Peggy Ahwesh's solo exhibition "The Wayfinders," recently on view at New York's Microscope Gallery, marks a new direction for the experimental filmmaker. For the first time, she incorporates footage from an early-2000s flight simulator alongside original video and animation to create a large-scale installation. The work serves as an elegy for the abandoned Qalandia/Atarot airport, situated between Qalandia and Jerusalem, which operated as a civilian airport from 1948 to 1967 before Israel annexed the site. Through poetic voiceover and imagery of travel and navigation, Ahwesh reflects on Palestine's thwarted right to the sky, the history of wayfinding by the stars, and the porous borders of the past contrasted with today's restrictions.
Abbas Akhavan, born in Tehran in 1977, will represent Canada at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026 with an exhibition titled "Entre chien et loup" (Between Dog and Wolf). Commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and curated by Kim Nguyen, the Canada Pavilion is transformed into a monumental Wardian case—a 19th-century plant transport device—serving as a greenhouse for Victoria water lilies. The seeds were germinated at the Orto Botanico di Padova in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the installation will be on view until November 22, 2026.