Sotheby's will auction ten works donated by Royal Academicians during its London spring sales to raise funds for the financially struggling Royal Academy of Arts. The sale, with a cumulative high estimate of £2.6 million, includes major works by El Anatsui, Sean Scully, William Kentridge, Tony Cragg, Georg Baselitz, Anish Kapoor, Mimmo Paladino, and Jeff Koons.
The University of North Texas abruptly cancelled the solo exhibition "Ni de Aqui, Ni de Allá" by artist Victor Quiñonez in its College of Visual Art & Design Gallery just nine days after its opening. The university covered the gallery windows with brown paper, removed all promotional material from its website and social media, and informed the artist via a misspelled email that it had terminated its loan agreement with Boston University Art Galleries, which originated the show. The artist was not notified in advance and learned of the closure from students.
Sotheby's is auctioning ten works of art donated by Royal Academicians and honorary RAs, with an estimated total value of up to £2.6 million, to provide financial support for the Royal Academy in London. The lots, including pieces by El Anatsui and Sean Scully, will be featured in the auction house's flagship March contemporary sales.
An exhibition titled 'America Will Be!' opened at the University of Maryland's David C. Driskell Center, exploring how Black artists have reinterpreted the US flag. However, the show opened without a key work by artist Dread Scott, 'What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag? (1988)', after the loan request was rescinded by the curators citing logistical and safety concerns.
The Brooklyn Fine Art Print Fair (BFAPF) will hold its second edition at the Grand Hall of Powerhouse Arts in Gowanus, Brooklyn, from April 9–12, 2026. The fair expands its scope to include academic printmaking departments from across the United States, self-representing artists, and a subsidized program for emerging artists, alongside established galleries and publishers. New exhibitors include 10 Grand Press and Petzel Gallery, while international participants like D & S Fine Art Editions from France return.
You Yang, the director of X Museum, discusses the recent surge in new art museums, particularly those backed by tech companies in China's Greater Bay Area, including Shenzhen and Hong Kong. He attributes this boom to a strategic shift in Shenzhen's cultural policy, the city's established cultural foundations, and the region's historical role in cross-cultural exchange, which has created a demand for contemporary institutions.
Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei faced a vote by the Royal Academy of Arts in London on whether to revoke his membership as an international Royal Academician. This followed a controversial tweet he posted in late 2023 about the Israel-Hamas conflict, which he later deleted and which led his gallery, Lisson Gallery, to postpone a show of his work. The RA's General Assembly ultimately voted to retain his membership.
A small copper-alloy object, excavated nearly a century ago from a predynastic cemetery at Badari in Upper Egypt, has been re-identified as the world's oldest known Egyptian bow drill. Dating to the late 4th millennium BCE, the tool pushes back the earliest evidence for this technology in Egypt by about 2,000 years, revealing that Egyptian craftspeople mastered efficient rotary drilling much earlier than previously thought.
Judy Baca, a pioneering Los Angeles muralist known for her socially engaged public art, is participating in the Other Art Fair for the first time. She is showcasing a new 10-by-22-foot painting, *The 1968 East L.A. Walkouts*, which is the latest addition to her monumental, decades-long project *The Great Wall of Los Angeles*. The fair has commissioned a printed reproduction of the work for exhibition and will donate it to a community center afterward.
Artist Ai Weiwei has claimed in a new interview that he faced censorship in the West, citing a specific incident with London's Royal Academy. In late 2023, an exhibition of his new works at the Lisson Gallery was canceled after he posted a controversial tweet about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Subsequently, the Royal Academy held a vote on whether to revoke his honorary membership over accusations of antisemitism, which he won. Ai also claims the Academy then declined to publish an article he wrote on free speech for its magazine.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has laid off 33 employees and eliminated 23 vacant positions, a 10% overall staff reduction, to address a projected $13 million budget deficit. The cuts affect a range of roles, including three endowed curatorial positions, and have sparked renewed tensions with the museum's unionized workforce, which is seeking to bargain over the decision.
The Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire has appointed Olivia Colling as executive director and Laura Smith as artistic director, filling the leadership void left by former director Simon Wallis, who departed last summer to lead the Royal Academy of Arts. Colling, who joined the gallery in 2015, previously oversaw commercial income and capital projects, while Smith, who arrived in 2022, has focused on expanding the collection and curated a Helen Chadwick retrospective in 2025; her upcoming exhibition features the late Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee.
Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) announces the reopening of its upper-level galleries (Assyrian, Shaw-Ruddock, Walker, and Markell) on February 3, 2026, following floor refinishing and reinstallation projects, with additional galleries (Bowdoin, Boyd, Rotunda) set to reopen in March. Three new exhibitions are now on view in the lower-level galleries: "Josefina Auslender: Drawing Myself Free," "Hung Liu: Happy and Gay," and "From Guild to Genius: Inventing 'The Artist' in Western Culture." The museum also highlights the acquisition of Anna Boberg's painting "The Blue Roof [Det blå taket]," a loan of an Edmonia Lewis sculpture to the Peabody Essex Museum for the exhibition "Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone" opening February 14, 2026, and an upcoming artist talk with Samira Abbassy.
Artnet News has compiled a list of the spookiest, bloodiest, and most gruesome works in art history to celebrate Halloween. The selection includes Francisco de Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" (ca. 1820–23), Hermann Nitsch's blood-soaked "Schuttbild" (2013), Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's woodblock print of a samurai drinking from a severed head, and Théodore Géricault's macabre still lifes of body parts. Other entries feature Goya's "The Witches' Flight," Katsushika Hokusai's ghost story print "The Lantern Ghost, Oiwa-San," John Henry Fuseli's "The Nightmare," Vincent van Gogh's "Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette," and Utagawa Kuniyoshi's "Takiyasha The Witch and the Skeleton Spectre."
The Asheville Art Museum in North Carolina will present "In a New Light: American Impressionism 1870–1940 | Works from the Bank of America Collection," an exhibition featuring over 120 works that trace the development of American Impressionism and its break with academic tradition. The show runs from February 7 through June 29, 2026, and is made possible through the Bank of America Art in our Communities program, which loans exhibitions at no cost to nonprofit community museums.
Telfair Academy in Savannah has unveiled the Walter and Linda Evans Gallery of African American Art, a permanent gallery dedicated to late 19th and early 20th-century African American artworks. The gallery is named for collectors Walter and Linda Evans, who donated 28 works from their collection in 2023. The space, originally the Dining Room, underwent a full restoration and opens to the public on February 6, 2025, after a sold-out reception. The exhibition highlights the challenges and successes of African American artists and the emergence of cultural centers in the Midwest and Northeast, while also reflecting on Telfair's historical relationships with local African American artists.
Utah State University's Arts Are Core program has opened its seventh annual 'Creativity Unbound' student art exhibition at the Lyndsley Wilkerson Gallery. The show features over 300 artworks from K-8 students across multiple northern Utah school districts and charter schools, highlighting arts-integrated learning and student creativity. The exhibition will remain open to the public until March 20.
A new contemporary art gallery, Casa Batlló Contemporary, has opened on the previously closed second floor of Antoni Gaudí's iconic Casa Batlló building in Barcelona. The inaugural exhibition, "Beyond the Facade," is by the London-based art practice United Visual Artists, founded by Matt Clark, and runs until May 17.
Several major Los Angeles institutions are opening new exhibitions in February. Highlights include the Academy Museum's interactive "Studio Ghibli’s Ponyo" show, the Autry Museum's "Desert Dreams and Coastal Currents" exhibition on Southwestern art, a performance by Wild Up at The Broad, the Getty Center's "Photography and the Black Arts Movement" survey, LACMA's display of modern masterpieces from the Pearlman collection, and the Marciano Art Foundation's Bruce Conner retrospective.
The Goldstein Museum of Design at the University of Minnesota has opened a new exhibition titled 'Resist and Reclaim,' which explores design as a tool of both oppression and liberation. The show focuses on denim as a material linked to labor, exploitation, and resistance, featuring 20 custom denim jackets created by local Black and Indigenous women and femme artists, alongside faculty research on architecture and visual culture.
Trinity College's Widener Gallery is hosting its first fully student-curated exhibition, 'Reshaping Tradition: Contemporary Explorations in East Asian Art.' The show, open through April 2026, was produced by students from the 'Art History 205: East Asian Art, Now to 1850' course, who selected the artists, refined the theme, chose the works, conducted artist interviews, wrote catalogue essays, and designed the exhibition layout, all under the guidance of gallery director Lisa Lynch and professor Michael J. Hatch.
The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles has appointed Michael Wellen as its new chief curator and Regan Pro as chief of learning, engagement, and research. Wellen joins from Tate Modern, while Pro was previously at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. The appointments fill key leadership roles that had been vacant, with the chief curator position open since 2023.
Florida State University's Museum of Fine Arts and College of Fine Arts have unveiled their spring 2026 schedule of exhibitions and public programs. The lineup includes student and faculty exhibitions across multiple campus gallery spaces, a series of public workshops on topics like experimental cartography and basket weaving, and special events like an art crawl and family storytime sessions. Key exhibitions include "A Place Within," "Horizon: Speculative Worlds and Interdisciplinary Research," and the MFA thesis shows.
A major exhibition titled 'El Galeón Acapulco – Manila Somos Pacífico: El Mundo que emergió del Trópico' has opened at the Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City. It features 300 works, including 80 from Singapore's national collections, exploring the centuries-old cultural and economic exchange between Asia and the Americas facilitated by the Manila Galleon trade route. The show was launched to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Mexico-Singapore diplomatic relations and a state visit by Singapore's president.
The Winter Show at New York's Park Avenue Armory features a standout booth by the gallery French and Company, presenting a darkly themed collection. The eclectic offerings include Old Master still lifes by Willem Kalf and Willem Claesz Heda, a Victorian ceramic peacock, a 1979 painting by Susan Rothenberg, and a "horror wall" with works like Pasko Vucetic's *Hatred and Madness* and Wilhelm Trübner's *A Gorgon's Head*, all curated by the gallery's Henry Zimet.
The University of Richmond Museums has launched a new season with three exhibitions at the Harnett Museum of Art. The centerpiece is 'Politics of Place,' a rotating film program curated by professor Jeremy Drummond, featuring works by nine contemporary filmmakers and two collectives exploring identity and power through geography. Other shows include a newly commissioned installation by sculptor Abigail DeVille examining Black mental health care, and 'Black Work: Absence/Absorption,' a group exhibition investigating the material and conceptual nature of the color black.
The Macy Art Gallery at Teachers College, Columbia University, has opened a new exhibition titled 'Studio Works Part 1: Painting, Drawing, Ceramics, and Video Art.' The show features works by students from the college's Art and Art Education program, showcasing their exploration across diverse mediums.
Mexico City is renowned for its immense concentration of museums, with estimates ranging from 150 to 200 institutions. The city's art scene has been further amplified by the rise of Zona Maco, which has established a major international Art Week each February, drawing collectors and galleries. The article highlights five must-see museums, beginning with the Museo Anahuacalli, a unique museum built by Diego Rivera and architect Juan O'Gorman to house Rivera's vast collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts.
Chicago-based artist Jan Tichy has created a new exhibition titled 'Darkness' at Michigan State University's Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. The project is the result of a nearly nine-month collaboration with four MSU labs, most prominently the Department of Entomology, where Tichy worked with researchers and students to incorporate insects and scientific methods like blacklight sampling into the artwork.
Sandra Art4All, an art studio in Acol, Kent, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. The studio provides a supportive platform for deaf, autistic, and neurodivergent artists with learning disabilities to develop personal artwork, promoting expression and creativity. It was founded after the closure of the Royal School for Deaf Children in Margate and has become a cornerstone of the local arts community.