A major exhibition dedicated to the pioneering fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli has opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. The show explores Schiaparelli's innovative designs, her collaborations with surrealist artists like Salvador Dalí, and her lasting influence on fashion and visual culture.
The Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, has announced its summer 2026 public tour program, beginning May 24 with weekly Tang Guide Tours led by trained student ambassadors. The museum will also host three curator-led tours: Rachel Seligman will lead tours of 'All These Growing Things' (June 11) and 'Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest' (August 27), while Dayton Director Ian Berry will guide a tour of 'Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes' (July 16). Additional summer programming includes the Upbeat on the Roof concert series, Frances Day community open house, and Family Saturday art-making events.
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) announced a major gift of 1,986 photographs from Joy of Giving Something, Inc. (JGS), a nonprofit founded by financier Howard Stein. The donation includes works by over 450 artists, spanning the 19th century to the present, with highlights such as rare daguerreotypes by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, prints by Gustave Le Gray and Eugène Atget, and significant holdings in American documentary photography from figures like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. The gift follows an earlier 2023 donation of portfolios and series, and positions VMFA to open five new photography galleries in 2027 as part of its expansion.
BmoreArt's Picks for May 12-18 highlights a range of visual art events in Baltimore, including an exhibition of video works by Martha Rosler and Pipilotti Rist at the Elizabeth Myers Mitchell Museum, the Sondheim Art Prize 2026 Semifinalist Exhibition at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, a conversation with artist Louis Fratino at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Scout Art Fair. Other events include a monologue workshop inspired by the 'Shoes at the Door' exhibit at SNF Parkway Theatre, a talk with artists Christine Stiver and Dominic Terlizzi at SBM Gallery, and the CPM 5th anniversary show. The article also notes open submissions for BAD's Creative Placemaking RFQ and other opportunities.
Eldred’s auction house held its Modern Art + Design sale on May 7, featuring 245 lots of art, furniture, decorative arts, rugs and collectibles. The sale achieved a total of $221,740 with an 81% sell-through rate, driven by active phone, online, and absentee bidding. Top lots included a Tiffany Studios Nautilus table lamp that sold for $23,040 (more than three times its estimate), a Handel reverse-painted glass table lamp that reached $10,880 against a $800–$1,200 estimate, and Frank Stella’s “Aiolio” from his “Imaginary Places III” series, which fetched $17,920. An abstract oil on canvas by Manabu Mabe also performed strongly, selling for $14,080.
Christie’s New York kicked off its 20th and 21st Century Art sales week on 18 May 2026 with a record-shattering evening, generating over $1.12 billion across two sales: Masterpieces: The Private Collection of S.I. Newhouse and the 20th Century Evening Sale. The top lot was Jackson Pollock’s *Number 7A, 1948*, which sold for $181.2 million, setting a new auction record for the artist. Other artist records were set for Constantin Brancusi, Joan Miró, Alice Neel, and Mark Rothko. The S.I. Newhouse collection alone achieved $631 million, selling 100% of lots, and its cumulative total across four Christie’s sales reached $1.05 billion, making it the second-highest collection ever sold at auction after Paul Allen’s.
Boston Art Review (BAR) has published an article titled “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone” that reconstructs the life of the 19th-century sculptor Edmonia Lewis across fragmented historical records. The piece examines Lewis’s career, her neoclassical marble works, and the challenges of piecing together her biography due to limited archival materials.
The University of Stirling's Art Collection has been designated a Collection of National Significance by Museums Galleries Scotland, joining four other collections receiving the honor on International Museums Day. The collection comprises over 800 prints, paintings, and sculptures, many displayed across the campus, particularly in the A-listed Pathfoot Building. Founded on a policy set by Principal Dr Tom Cottrell in 1967 to allocate 1% of building costs for art, the collection has grown through purchases and donations, including 14 works by Scottish Colourist J.D. Fergusson gifted by Margaret Morris. The collection team runs exhibitions, workshops, and an Artist in Residence programme to integrate art into university life.
Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), in collaboration with the Institute for Cultural Exchange in Tübingen, Germany, has launched its major spring exhibition "Surrealism: The World in Dialogue." Featuring over 120 works by nearly 60 international artists, the exhibition marks a century since André Breton's 1924 "Surrealist Manifesto." It juxtaposes historical avant-garde works with contemporary practices, organized into sections such as "Collective Dreams," "Body of Desire," and "Absurd Play." Highlights include Yves Tanguy's dreamscapes, Lauren Moffatt's augmented reality installation, Max Ernst's scraping-method works, Patricia Piccinini's hybrid sculptures, and works by Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim, Sarah Lucas, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dalí.
Hong Kong Secretary for Culture, Sports and Tourism Rosanna Law Shuk-pui visited Venice to support the Hong Kong Collateral Event at the 61st Venice Biennale, themed “Fermata: Hong Kong in Venice.” The exhibition features artists Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui, with five installations exploring poetic rhythms in everyday life, curated by the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA). Law also viewed American artist Nick Cave’s sculpture *Amalga (Plot)* and announced the Venice Biennale Internship Programme 2026, which will send six arts-background interns to Venice for a six-week residency.
COVER Corporation has announced a collaboration between hololive DEV_IS ReGLOSS VTuber Juufuutei Raden and The National Gallery, London, launching May 20, 2026. Titled “When Raden Meets Art – A Shared Art Journey”, the project features three masterpieces selected by Raden—J.M.W. Turner’s “Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway”, Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, and Claude Monet’s “The Water-Lily Pond”—reimagined into exclusive merchandise including fragrance mists, scarves, and cup sets. Raden, a certified curator in Japan, also recorded an audio guide highlighting 20 works from the Gallery, and the entire ReGLOSS team visited the museum for a behind-the-scenes experience.
Kunstmuseum Basel has opened a major exhibition of Helen Frankenthaler's work, running from April 18 to August 23, 2026, featuring over 50 large-format pieces spanning six decades. The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation loaned 37 works for the show. The article also notes recent auction results, including Christie's offering of 'The Last Minute in April' (1974) for an estimated $2–3 million, and Sotheby's sales of 'St. John' (1971) for $2.1085 million and 'Perseus' (1983) for $2.804 million. Previous European exhibitions of Frankenthaler's work are listed, including shows at Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Museum Folkwang, Palazzo Strozzi, and Museum Reinhard Ernst.
The Parrish Art Museum and The FLAG Art Foundation are hosting a talk on May 23, 2026, featuring artist Tschabalala Self and writer Camille Okhio to celebrate the exhibition "FRESH PAINT: Tschabalala Self." The event includes a conversation about Self’s painting "Adam and Eve" (2025), which is being shown for the first time in the U.S. as part of the FRESH PAINT series, a rotating single-artwork exhibition program that highlights new or rarely seen works.
India has returned to the Venice Art Biennale with a national pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition, after a seven-year hiatus. The pavilion, titled "Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home," is presented by India's Ministry of Culture in partnership with the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre and Serendipity Arts Foundation, curated by Amin Jaffer. It features five artists—Alwar Balasubramaniam, Sumakshi Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Skarma Sonam Tashi, and Asim Waqif—whose works explore themes of home, loss, displacement, and cultural memory through materials like soil, thread, bamboo, and clay.
The Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah, has opened a new exhibition titled (Re)sounding, running from May 15 to September 13. The show features 15 artists—including Jon Bernson, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Maria Chávez, Spencer Finch, Jónsi, Christine Sun Kim, Jacob Kirkegaard, Tuomas A. Laitinen, Christian Marclay, Milad Mozari, Andy Rappaport, Yuri Suzuki, and Mary Toscano & Andrew Rease Shaw—who create immersive audio-visual and interactive works that encourage visitors to think more intentionally about sound. Highlights include Bernson's installations addressing climate change through wetlands and glacial melt, and Cardiff & Miller's major installation from the acclaimed duo known for their immersive audio-visual pieces.
Wallace Chan, a Chinese sculptor and gem master, has opened a new exhibition titled “Vessels of Other Worlds” at the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà in Venice during the 61st Venice Biennale. The show features large-scale titanium sculptures that explore themes of life cycles, mortality, and introspection, with the artist drawing inspiration from the sounds of the city, including Vivaldi’s music from a neighboring church. Chan, who has presented works at two previous biennials in Venice, also marks his 70th birthday this year with a concurrent show at Shanghai’s Long Museum in July.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) is hosting the U.S. debut of a major collection of masterworks by Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse, assembled by the Berggruen family. The exhibition brings together iconic paintings, drawings, and sculptures from one of the most renowned private collections of modern art, offering American audiences a first look at works that have rarely been seen outside Europe.
The Jacquemart-André Museum in Paris is hosting a major retrospective dedicated to the Venetian painter Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto, running from September 11, 2026 to January 24, 2027. The exhibition features around forty paintings and graphic works, organized thematically to cover the artist's entire career, including religious scenes, portraits, and mythological depictions, highlighting his bold compositions, vivid colors, and dramatic lighting.
The article reviews the first-ever British exhibition dedicated to Spanish Baroque painter Francisco de Zurbarán, held at the National Gallery in London. The show brings together 40 works from collections spanning Seville to San Diego, featuring his hyper-real religious paintings and radiant still lifes, described as a 'magnificently choreographed' trawl through his oeuvre. Critics praise the exhibition for its dramatic lighting and revelatory presentation, though some note uneven quality in his later works.
Raffaella Cortese opened a small 12-square-meter space in Albisola Superiore, Italy, in June 2022, described as "more a think tank than an exhibition space." The venue, located near the Ligurian sea, honors the town's legacy as a center for contemporary ceramics from the 1950s to the 1970s, hosting artists like Lucio Fontana and Asger Jorn. The space alternates works from Cortese's Milan gallery with collaborations from emerging galleries, such as Fanta-MLN of Milan (presenting Noah Barker's installation "lux principum" in 2023) and Gian Marco Casini Gallery of Livorno (featuring Clarissa Baldassarri's "Exposure value" in 2024). A future collaboration with Triangolo gallery of Cremona is scheduled for May–September 2026, showcasing Nicole Colombo's sculpture "Rosario (to the moon and back)."
Meow Wolf's upcoming Los Angeles location, set to open later this year in a former Cinemark movie theater in West L.A., will feature a 20-foot-tall, 1,000-pound amoeba-like creature named WoWoW, created by the L.A.-based multimedia collective Everything Is Terrible. WoWoW serves as the centerpiece of "the N.E.S.T.," an EIT-designed section of the 26,000-square-foot immersive exhibition space that tells the story of the Noothies, a fictional community of former film workers who discover a god and a hidden truth about reality. The installation pays tribute to maximalist roadside attractions like Wisconsin's House on the Rock and New Mexico's Tinkertown Museum, and is one of 45 installations by local collaborating artists including Gabriela Ruiz and David Altmejd.
Tate Britain presents a major exhibition of James McNeill Whistler's work, showcasing his immersive depictions of early industrial life alongside masterpieces of Victorian portraiture. The show brings together a wide range of Whistler's paintings, prints, and works on paper, highlighting his innovative approach to capturing the energy and atmosphere of the modern world in the late 19th century.
Ndayé Kouagou, an artist from Montreuil (1992) based in Paris, presents his first solo exhibition in Italy, "Heaven's truth," at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, running until July 26, 2026. The show features his video installation "A coin is a coin" (2022) and is part of the 21st edition of Fotografia Europea 2026, themed "Fantasmi del quotidiano." During the opening, Kouagou performed with poet and actress Salber Lee Williams, composing and deconstructing phrases into the expression "Please Be Yourself." The exhibition will travel to Heidelberger Kunstverein from September 3, and new works co-produced with the institution will appear at the 18th Lyon Biennale (September 19 – December 13, 2026). In an interview, Kouagou discusses his background as a self-taught visual artist and performer, having worked as a motion designer in advertising and as a DJ, and emphasizes writing as his central expressive medium, comparing himself more to a writer than a visual artist.
Mimmo Jodice, the renowned Italian photographer who died in October 2025 at age 91, is being honored with a new exhibition at the Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro in Naples. The show, curated by former Capodimonte director Sylvain Bellenger, presents Jodice's rare color photographs from the 1980s—his only color project—which focus on 17th-century Neapolitan Baroque paintings by artists such as Caravaggio, Jusepe de Ribera, and Artemisia Gentileschi. The exhibition runs until January 10, 2027, and also marks the inauguration of newly renovated welcome spaces at the museum, designed by Vanni del Gaudio.
Giuli compra tutto! Il Ministero della Cultura vuole prendersi anche Il Teatro delle Vittorie di Roma e Palazzo Labia a Venezia?
Italian Minister of Culture Alessandro Giuli is pursuing an aggressive acquisition campaign for cultural properties. After high-profile purchases including Antonello da Messina's *Ecce Homo* and Caravaggio's *Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini* (€30 million), the Ministry has now expressed interest in acquiring Rome's Teatro delle Vittorie and Venice's Palazzo Labia—both part of a real estate portfolio being sold by state broadcaster Rai. The Ministry also recently bought Verona's historic Cinema Astra (with a €7.5 million restoration plan) and Naples' Teatro Sannazzaro after a fire.
Over 100 employees at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) have announced their intention to unionize, forming Seattle Art Museum Workers United (SAMWU) and affiliating with the Washington Federation of State Employees/AFSCME Council 28. In a letter to Director and CEO Scott Stulen and the museum board, staff across departments including visitor experience, collections care, curatorial, and education cited unsustainable wages, subpar health benefits, and top-down decision-making as key grievances. They are urging voluntary recognition by May 27 to bypass a formal election, and also call for just-cause job protections. The effort follows a successful 2024 strike by SAM's unionized security guards.
Future Fair, held at Chelsea Industrial in New York from May 13–16, 2026, brought together 69 exhibitors from nine countries. Unlike traditional art fairs with segmented booths, the fair emphasized interconnectedness and interpersonal connection, featuring artist-run booths and family-led presentations. Notable participants included Nanor Hakimian showing her brother Garo's paintings, Olivia Janna Genereaux exhibiting with her son Hans Silas Jovine, and artists Cloe Galasso, John Vitale, and Miles Ingrassia. The fair also highlighted its profit-sharing model, dedicating 15% of proceeds plus exhibitor donations to subsidize emerging galleries.
The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, now open at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Manhattan, presents a smaller edition than previous years but continues to offer unexpected, tactile works. Highlights include Rommulo Vieira Conceição's Pop-art-inspired wall installation at Aura gallery, Kendra Frorup's mixed-media piece at the Current: Baha Mar Gallery, and Eymric Moderne's gold-leaf and glass bird painting at TM Arthouse. The fair also features posthumous works by Marcel Gotène at Loeve and Co and Sophia Bounou's enigmatic paintings at Blond Contemporary.
Gallery Weekend Beijing (GWBJ) will celebrate its 10th anniversary with the 2026 edition running from May 22 to May 31, opening with three VIP days before going public on May 26. Founded in 2017, the event features curated exhibitions from 30 galleries and 10 non-profit institutions across Beijing, anchored in the 798 Art District and extending to Caochangdi and the CBD Art District. A new Academic Committee—comprising Guo Xi, Leng Lin, Tian Yuan, Xi Tao, and Yang Beichen—selected the participating galleries, with 25 returning from previous editions and five newly nominated. Highlights include institutional presentations at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Red Brick Art Museum, and SONG Art Museum, as well as a special exhibition titled "Nirvana" by Ouyang Chun.
Lifestyle Asia has published a curated list of art exhibitions and events to see in May, offering recommendations for art enthusiasts looking to explore new shows and installations during the month. The article serves as a guide to notable cultural happenings, likely highlighting both emerging and established artists across various venues.