Curator Conversation: Inside The Stars We Do Not See

The Denver Art Museum is presenting "The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art," an exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with the Denver Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the Peabody Essex Museum. The show features works from the National Gallery of Victoria's collection, including paintings by Indigenous Australian artists such as Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, Thunduyingathi Bijarrb May Moodoonuthi, and others, with Bank of America serving as the North America Tour Sponsor.

Graduate art and design students exhibit their work at Krannert Art Museum

The Krannert Art Museum is currently hosting the annual Master of Fine Arts Exhibition, showcasing the thesis work of eight graduate students from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Art & Design. The exhibition features a diverse range of media, including sculptural 3D collages by Samantha Jones that critique the hypersexualization of Black girlhood, and a mixed-media experimental classroom by Anthony Obayomi that explores social justice and educational metrics. Other works, such as Emily Tomlinson’s text-based drawings, highlight themes of cataloging and observational study.

Worthwhile textiles: artist Faig Ahmed’s Art@Bainbridge exhibit

The Princeton University Art Museum’s Art@Bainbridge space has launched "Faig Ahmed: Textiles of Consciousness," a solo exhibition featuring the innovative woven sculptures of the Azerbaijani artist. The show presents ten textiles across four themed galleries, including works from his "GLITCH" series that utilize digital aesthetics and pixelated distortions to subvert traditional carpet-weaving forms. Notable pieces like "The Knot" and "Kutab" illustrate Ahmed's signature style of blending classical Islamic patterns with surreal, melting, or fragmented geometries.

Wisconsin Artists Biennial exhibition opens at MOWA on Feb. 7

The Wisconsin Artists Biennial exhibition opens at the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) in West Bend from February 7 to April 19, featuring 52 works by 50 Wisconsin artists. Selected from nearly 500 artists who submitted over 1,200 entries, the show was juried by Nicole Jacquard, Taylor Jasper, and Melissa Oresky. The biennial awards $10,000 in cash prizes, including the MOWA Prize of $5,000 and a solo museum exhibition. An opening party on February 7 includes a reception, juror talk, and award presentation.

Illinois art and design faculty explore stories about place in Krannert Art Museum exhibition

Eleven artists from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Art & Design explore the relationship between people and place in a new exhibition at Krannert Art Museum. Titled “Another Place: Storymaking the Entangled Prairie,” the show opens January 29 and runs through July 2, featuring sculpture, installation, photography, printmaking, video, and performance. Curated by art history professor Terri Weissman, the exhibition is tied to the Humanities Research Institute’s 2025-26 theme “Story and Place.” Works include Ryan Griffis’s multimedia project on the Illinois River Valley, Stephen Signa-Avilés’s wearable sculptural assemblage “The Recollector,” and Melissa Pokorny’s prairie-inspired installation.

Ground Control to London: David Bowie’s childhood home to be restored by heritage charity

The Heritage of London Trust has acquired David Bowie's childhood home at 4 Plaistow Grove in Bromley, southeast London, and plans to restore it to its early 1960s appearance. The railway workers' cottage, where Bowie lived from ages 8 to 20 and is believed to have written "Space Oddity," will open to the public in late 2027, offering an immersive experience centered on his bedroom. Geoffrey Marsh, co-curator of the V&A's "David Bowie Is" exhibition, will oversee the restoration, funded by a £500,000 grant from the Jones Day Foundation and a public fundraising campaign.

Francis Kéré's design for Las Vegas Museum of Art revealed

The Las Vegas Museum of Art (LVMA) has revealed renderings for its new 60,000-square-foot building, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Francis Kéré. Set to open in 2029 at Symphony Park in downtown Las Vegas, the four-floor museum features a stone mosaic façade sourced from the Red Rock Mountains, a shaded front porch, a canyon-like grand staircase, and galleries inspired by Modernist architect Paul R. Williams. Baobab trees, symbolizing community, inform the design. The $200 million capital campaign, supported by the late Elaine Wynn and other trustees, has passed the halfway mark. The museum is a partnership with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) and will showcase works from its collection, with Lacma director Michael Govan serving as a founding trustee. A satellite exhibition, Family Album, is currently on view, and a 15,000-square-foot gallery and media lab will open next year.

London's National Gallery announces £750m fundraising drive towards new wing and expanded collection

London's National Gallery has announced a £750m fundraising drive, called Project Domani, to expand its collection into the 20th and 21st centuries and build a new wing on the site of St Vincent House, north of the Sainsbury Wing. Around half the target has already been pledged, including two record £150m donations from the Crankstart foundation and the Julia Rausing Trust. A shortlist of six architectural firms—including Foster + Partners, Kengo Kuma and Associates, and Selldorf Architects—has been released to design the extension, with a final choice expected by April and the wing opening in the early 2030s.

Lacma staff move to unionise as $720m new building nears completion

Staff at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) announced their intent to unionize as part of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The new union, Lacma United, will represent over 300 museum employees across curatorial, visitor services, education, and publications departments. Workers cite fairer compensation, expanded benefits, and increased transparency as key motivations, and have requested voluntary recognition by November 5. The effort joins AFSCME Cultural Workers United District Council 36, which has supported union campaigns at other Los Angeles institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

Citizen Recommends: LOOK HERE, Art for All

Haverford College's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery is hosting 'LOOK HERE,' an exhibition curated by Jennifer Gilbert, Paige Donovan, and Mary Bevlock from the Center for Creative Works (CCW). The show features works by Philadelphia artists with physical, intellectual, and developmental disabilities, and is designed for multi-sensory access—including touch panels, audio descriptions, sniffable panels, and sensory backpacks—so that visitors of all abilities can experience the art. Artists include Kelly Brown, Cindy Gosselin, Clyde Henry, Tim Quinn, Brandon Spicer-Crawley, and Allen Yu.

Chicken buckets, baked beans, liters of coke: the final meals of death row inmates

Artist Julie Green spent 22 years painting the last meals of 1,000 death row inmates on ceramic plates, resulting in the exhibition "The Last Supper" at the Boise Art Museum. The cobalt-blue images on second-hand white plates include specific requests like tacos, doughnuts, fried chicken, and lobster, drawn from newspaper accounts of executions. The exhibition features plates from across the U.S., including two from Idaho, and was inspired by Green's reading of a 1999 newspaper article about a condemned man's final meal.

Tate Modern weekend opening hours to be extended

Tate Modern has announced it will extend its weekend opening hours from 26 September, staying open until 21:00 BST on Fridays and Saturdays. The move follows the success of the Tate Modern Lates evening events, which have attracted over 750,000 visitors since 2016, including a curated event by rapper Little Simz that drew 18,500 attendees. Director Karin Hindsbo stated the extended hours aim to make the gallery more accessible, particularly for young people after work.

LMU Student Art Featured in Design Museum of Chicago Exhibition

Nine studio arts students from Loyola Marymount University (LMU) have their poster designs featured in the Design Museum of Chicago's 2025 "Great Ideas of Humanity" exhibition. The students—Alfonzo Dave, Nicole Dressel, Olivia Giganti, John Leary, Jestene Passolt, Leila Walker, Dezia Washington, Lucien Weber, and Eddie Young—created the works as part of Professor Garland Kirkpatrick's Typography II course. The museum selected all nine student designs for the professional exhibition, where they are displayed alongside their professor's work, rather than in the museum's student showcase.

Tate chair floats selling Turbine Hall naming rights for ‘a minimum of £50m’

Tate chair of trustees Roland Rudd has suggested that naming rights for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern could cost a minimum of £50 million. The proposal, reported by The Telegraph, is tied to the institution's new Tate Future Fund, launched last week with a goal of reaching £150 million by 2030. Rudd stated that endowing curators, directors, or naming the iconic space are all potential options for donors, though a Tate spokesperson emphasized the comments were hypothetical and the fundraising campaign is just beginning.

Toledo Museum of Art exhibition to explore landscape of digital and generative art

The Toledo Museum of Art will open "Infinite Images: The Art of the Algorithm," a special exhibition curated by Julia Kaganskiy that explores digital and generative art from the 1960s to the present. The show features works created using custom software, algorithms, and machine learning models developed by the artists themselves, emphasizing rule-based systems and automation as part of the creative process. Associate Curator Paige Rozanski notes that the exhibition contextualizes generative art within a longer tradition of analog algorithmic processes, distinguishing it from AI-generated images produced by large language models like ChatGPT.

UK city council launches £100,000 appeal to buy rediscovered Turner painting

Bristol City Council has launched a one-week public fundraising campaign to raise £100,000 toward purchasing a newly attributed J.M.W. Turner oil painting, *The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent’s Rock, Bristol*, which is consigned to auction at Sotheby’s London on 2 July with an estimate of up to £300,000. The painting, made in 1792 when Turner was 17, was previously sold at Dreweatts Donnington Priory for £524.80 as a work by a follower of Julius Caesar Ibbetson. If acquired, the work would go on display at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery this summer and will also be included in the upcoming *Turner and Constable* exhibition at Tate Britain.

The Denver Art Museum presents Southwest Impressions: Prints from the Barbara J. Thompson Collection

The Denver Art Museum has announced the upcoming exhibition "Southwest Impressions: Prints from the Barbara J. Thompson Collection," opening June 29, 2025, and running through June 14, 2026. The show features works on paper by artists who lived or traveled in the American Southwest between the late 1800s and mid-1900s, drawn from a collection of over 100 prints gifted to the museum's Petrie Institute of Western American Art in 2024 by Barbara J. Thompson in honor of her grandfather, printmaker C. A. Seward. The exhibition will be presented in two rotations of about fifty prints each, covering intaglio, block printing, lithography, and serigraphy, with interpretive videos and a digital publication.

Finalists for Canada’s top contemporary art prize, the Sobey Art Award, revealed

The Sobey Art Award, Canada's top contemporary art prize, has announced its six finalists for 2025: Tarralik Duffy, Tania Willard, Chukwudubem Ukaigwe, Sandra Brewster, Swapnaa Tamhane, and Hangama Amiri. Each represents a different region of Canada and will receive C$25,000, with the winner taking home C$100,000 on November 8 at the National Gallery of Canada. The finalists were selected by a jury including past winner Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and international juror Carla Acevedo-Yates, among others.

From Africa to the Arctic Circle, this public artwork is stampeding into cities with a cry for climate action

A mobile public artwork called *The Herds* is traveling from the Congo Basin through Africa, Europe, and up to the Arctic Circle, featuring life-sized animal sculptures made from recyclable materials. The project began in April in Kinshasa and will pass through eighteen cities including Lagos, Marrakech, Madrid, London, and Copenhagen, culminating in Trondheim, Norway on July 30. Created by South Africa-based artists and led by artistic director Amir Nizar Zuabi, the herd grows as local species are added in each region, engaging communities through parades, performances, and workshops.

US participation in 2026 Venice Biennale in limbo amid Trump's arts defunding

The United States' participation in the 2026 Venice Biennale is in jeopardy due to the Trump administration's campaign to defund the arts. According to a Vanity Fair report by Nate Freeman, the US government's preparation is behind schedule, with the typical 18-month planning timeline now reduced to just 12 months before the opening. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) faces funding cuts, staff reductions, and a vacant position for coordinating biennale affairs, while the application process has been altered to emphasize "American values" and remove references to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The Big Review | Caravaggio 2025 at Palazzo Barberini, Rome ★★★

The article reviews the "Caravaggio 2025" exhibition at Palazzo Barberini in Rome, which brings together 24 paintings by the Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Curated by Francesca Cappelletti, Maria Cristina Terzaghi, and Thomas Clement Salomon, the show is accompanied by a heavy marketing campaign tied to the Catholic Church's Jubilee year. The review notes that while any gathering of Caravaggio's works guarantees a beautiful experience, the exhibition's title and scope remain unclear, and the curatorial approach—divided into four thematic sections—feels disjointed. Highlights include the reunion of three paintings from Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte's collection and the public display of the recently identified portrait of Maffeo Barberini.

Latter-day Saint artists ‘Lift Up the Hands Which Hang Down’ in new exhibit

The Church History Museum in Salt Lake City has unveiled 150 artworks selected for the 13th International Art Competition of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, themed "Lift Up the Hands Which Hang Down" after Doctrine and Covenants 81:5. The exhibition opened on April 24, 2025, featuring works by 584 artists from 26 countries, including pieces like "Deposition" by Sarah Hawkes and "The Parable of the Gardner: The Garden of the Lord" by Pamela Salinas Bernal. Curator Laura Paulsen Howe and BYU art history professor James Swensen, a juror, highlighted how artists visualized themes of succoring the weak and strengthening others through diverse media and personal testimony.

UK artist resale right at 20: how successful has the pioneering scheme been?

The UK's Artist Resale Right (ARR), a law entitling visual artists to royalties from secondary market sales of their work, marks its 20th anniversary. Initially met with fierce opposition from auction houses and dealers who feared it would drive high-value sales offshore, the scheme is now largely accepted by the UK art trade, though concerns about administrative burdens compared to markets like New York and Hong Kong remain.

The Ohio Art League's Newest Exhibit Features Uncensored, Provocative Art at RAW Gallery

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.

Top auction houses draw Southeast Asia’s elite art buyers

Auction houses Sotheby's, Christie's, and Bonhams are seeing a surge in participation from wealthy Southeast Asian collectors, particularly Millennials and Gen Z. Elaine Holt of Sotheby's Asia reports significant growth in collector activity from the region, with strong bidding at recent Hong Kong sales. Christie's Asia-Pacific president Francis Belin notes Southeast Asia is now the firm's third-largest buying market in Asia-Pacific, led by Singapore and Indonesia, with notable increases from Vietnam. Bonhams' managing director for Asia, Julia Hu, reports a 67% year-on-year rise in Southeast Asian auction spending. Younger buyers are driving demand, with Millennials and Gen Z accounting for 37% of Bonhams' Hong Kong buyers and 40% of Sotheby's Hong Kong marquee sales. A Renoir painting sold for $23.56 million to a collector in their 30s, highlighting youthful buying power.

Kazakhstan's creative industry accelerates. A new foundation supporting the art scene emerges

L’industria creativa del Kazakhstan accelera. Spunta una nuova fondazione che sostiene la scena artistica

A new private foundation called TOVA Foundation, based in Geneva, has been established to promote contemporary art from Central Asia, specifically focusing on Kazakhstan's art scene. The foundation debuted at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition titled "Trading Treasures" featuring Kazakh artists Saule Suleimenova and Sayan Baigaliyev at Casa dei Tre Oci. The initiative is backed by Togzhan Wertheimer, a Kazakh-born entrepreneur and philanthropist connected to the fashion industry through her husband David Wertheimer, and includes a board with figures like Tatiana de Pahlen and art consultant Jean-Olivier Despres. The foundation's curator is Vladislav Sludskiy, who previously worked at Ethan Cohen Gallery and co-founded the ARTBAT FEST and Eurasian Cultural Alliance.

Art Gallery of Burlington to host inaugural exhibition for emerging artists

The Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB) will host the inaugural Henry Goodman Exhibition for Emerging Artists starting May 21, presented by the arts charity FUSION. The traveling show features over 25 emerging artists working in ceramic and glass under the theme 'gathering,' curated by 2025 Sobey Award finalist Chukwudubem Ukaigwe. Artists include Laura Wagner, Thomas Paik, Deborah Hatanaka, and Ryan Nesbitt. The exhibition will later travel to Rails End Gallery in Haliburton and Neilson Park Creative Arts Centre in Mississauga.

The Flaten Art Museum presents Gateway to Himalayan Art, a traveling exhibition from the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art

The Flaten Art Museum at St. Olaf College is presenting "Gateway to Himalayan Art," a traveling exhibition from the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art that introduces the forms, concepts, and traditions of Himalayan art and cultures. The exhibition features objects from the Rubin Museum's collection along with multimedia elements from its educational initiative, Project Himalayan Art, and will be on view from September 12 to December 7, 2025. A companion exhibition, "Tashi Delek, Minnesota! (Auspicious Blessings, Minnesota!)," curated by Thor Anderson and Karil Kucera with the Tibetan American Foundation of Minnesota, will run concurrently, highlighting the public life of Tibetan Minnesotans through photographs and videos.

The artist who blocked an Ice projectile with her drawing board during protests

Artist Isabelle “Izzy” Brourman narrowly escaped serious injury while documenting protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis. While sketching the scene for her project Starring America News, a masked federal agent fired pepper balls at her at point-blank range; Brourman managed to block the projectile with her wooden drawing board, which was left with a jagged hole. The incident, captured on video by her collaborators Peter Hambrecht and Jeannette Berlin, occurred on the same day a nurse was killed by federal agents during the unrest.

Jiaqi Wang gives a new face and a new style to Miss Chiquita for this Milan Art Week 2026

Jiaqi Wang dà un nuovo volto e un nuovo tratto a Miss Chiquita per questa Milano Art Week 2026

Chiquita has selected Chinese-born, New York-based illustrator and animator Jiaqi Wang as the third artist for its 'Pop by Nature' campaign, which connects the brand with contemporary art. Wang has reinterpreted the brand's iconic Miss Chiquita mascot with her signature vibrant colors, clean lines, and scenes of daily life. The campaign includes out-of-home installations, urban interventions like a mural in Milan, limited-edition banana stickers, and culminates with an immersive 'Miss Chiquita House' experience during Milan Art Week 2026.