A new book titled 'Art Cure' by scientist Daisy Fancourt argues that engaging with the arts has significant, measurable benefits for both mental and physical health. The author, a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology, compiles extensive research to claim arts experiences can prevent suicides, help manage epidemics, increase life expectancy, reduce depression, aid trauma recovery, enhance neuroplasticity, and even encourage healthier eating habits.
The article is a first-person dispatch from Rojava, a Kurdish-majority region in northeastern Syria, where the author meets artists and fighters living and working on the front lines against jihadist groups. It focuses on artist Diyar Hesso, who has exchanged his camera for a rifle, and YPJ fighter Hevi, who articulates the necessity of armed self-defense for women facing a genocidal enemy. Their stories illustrate the impossible choice between artistic creation and survival in a war zone.
ArtReview's feature 'The Museum in Crisis' presents a critical diagnosis of contemporary museums, questioning their foundational authority, purpose, and relevance. The article compiles perspectives from professionals, highlighting challenges like restitution claims, alienated audiences, and the need to dismantle colonial hierarchies embedded in language and display practices. It argues that museums must move beyond being mere preservers to become active producers of public knowledge.
Artist Gisela Colón has opened her first retrospective exhibition, 'La montaña, el monolito (The Mountain, the Monolith),' at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico. The show, curated by Abdiel Segarra Ríos and Alexandra Méndez, features sculptures, paintings, video, and installations spanning over three decades of her career, with a focus on the organic forms of monoliths and mountains.
THE HISTORY OF ART FROM BOGOTA AT MAP
Montenegro Art Projects (MAP) in Bogotá opens a group exhibition titled 'La historia del arte contada desde Bogotá' (The History of Art from Bogotá), featuring 30 artists. The show explores how art history is activated today, treating it not as a closed archive but as a field in constant transformation, with artists reinterpreting and appropriating historical images and gestures through contemporary sensibilities.
Absa Group has announced that Eric Joe Gayi, an Absa L’Atelier 2023 Ambassador, will open his solo exhibition *Breaking the Norm* on November 1, 2025, at The Summit Residences in Naguru, Kampala, in collaboration with Amasaka Gallery. The show features intricate ballpoint pen drawings exploring Afro hair as a symbol of identity, resistance, and cultural pride, using blue figures to represent conformity and black figures with honeycomb textures to symbolize authenticity and resilience against Eurocentric beauty standards.
Continental, the premium tire manufacturer, has commissioned WOA Studio, a creative studio founded by Davide Carioni and Giuliana Pajola, to create an immersive sound installation titled "The Sound of Premium" for the Fuorisalone design festival in Milan. Presented at BASE Milano, the installation transforms urban noise pollution into a three-part sonic journey—chaos, harmony, and quiet—using seventeen audio-luminous elements that abstract the city soundscape. The experience is designed to show how noise can be mitigated rather than eliminated, with sound data derived from real urban recordings, particularly tire rolling noise.
Treviso è una città dipinta. La Fondazione Benetton racconta tutto nelle sue ricerche
The Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche has unveiled the results of its decade-long multidisciplinary project, "Treviso urbs picta," which documents the extensive history of frescoed facades in Treviso, Italy. Spanning the 13th to the 21st centuries, the initiative has produced a comprehensive database of 614 buildings, a scholarly publication, and a topographical map. The project includes a digital archive featuring professional photography and historical mapping to track the evolution and current state of the city's unique painted architecture.
« Restitutions » : le Parlement prêt à tout lâcher
The French Parliament is moving forward with an accelerated legislative process to pass a framework law governing the restitution of cultural property to foreign states. This bill aims to streamline the return of artworks and artifacts deemed to have been illicitly acquired, fulfilling a long-standing promise made by President Emmanuel Macron to address colonial-era acquisitions and other contested heritage.
Franco-Malian artist Ladji Diaby presents 'Who’s gonna save the world?' at Lafayette Anticipations, a solo exhibition featuring sculptural installations crafted from found furniture and discarded objects. By repurposing second-hand furnishings through the lens of his mother’s domestic and spiritual rituals, Diaby transforms marginal items into talismanic vitrines of memory. The works challenge Western hierarchies of cultural value, positioning the act of salvaging as both an aesthetic and political gesture.
The Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul has opened “Queering Indigeneity,” a new exhibition curated by artist Penny Kagigebi and supporting curator Ben Gessner. Featuring works by 16 queer and two-spirit Indigenous artists, the show includes a birch bark basket by Kagigebi that retells an Ojibwe story about two-spirit ancestors, a glass mosaic by Sharon Day, beaded soundwave portraits by Ryan Young, and an abstract quilt by Delia Touché. The exhibition opens Thursday in the Nancy and John Lindahl Gallery.
Brandon Sines, the artist behind FrankApeWorld, opens his first solo exhibition in eight years, titled “Let’s Be Frank,” on May 1 at Cycol Gallery in New York. The show features a cohesive, journey-like curation culminating in a site-specific immersive installation, with every piece minted on Exchange.Art. Cycol Gallery, located at 91 Allen Street, describes itself as Solana’s first brick-and-mortar gallery, built on Solana infrastructure and powered in part by the BONK memecoin, which acquired Exchange.Art in March 2025. Physical display uses Blackdove Art’s digital frames, allowing works to exist as tangible objects and verifiable onchain assets simultaneously.
Graduate students at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, part of George Washington University, have created an interactive exhibition titled “American Made” to commemorate the United States’ 250th anniversary. The exhibit, on view at the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery until May 14, combines 21 traditional artworks from GW’s collection—including photographs, pottery, and textiles—with interactive elements such as a touchscreen map and audio components. The project was developed collaboratively by students in museum studies and interactive design programs, led by professors Laura Schiavo and Sam Shelton, as part of the school’s annual NEXT Festival. Featured works include Patricia Kennedy-Zafred’s contemporary quilt “Tagged,” which addresses the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
The exhibition 'Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California' will run from September 18, 2026, to January 17, 2027, at BAMPFA. It traces the flow and flourishing of quilts during the Second Great Migration (1940–1970), when approximately five million African Americans moved from the rural South to the North and West, with hundreds of thousands arriving in California carrying quilts as containers of ancestral memory and cultural survival. The show features more than 80 artworks organized across several themes, highlighting repurposed work clothes, improvisational piecing, and pattern-based quilting by migrants from Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas. Works by contemporary artists show how these traditions remain alive today.
The British Museum in London is opening a major exhibition titled 'Hawai‘i: a Kingdom Crossing Oceans' (15 January–25 May), accompanied by a catalogue featuring over 150 works from ancient Hawaiian treasures to contemporary pieces. The show explores the historical and cultural ties between Hawaii and the UK, highlighting objects such as an 18th-century feather cloak gifted to a British captain, portraits of King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu from their 1824 London visit, and a crested helmet. The catalogue includes an inventory of the entire Native Hawaiian collection at the British Museum, the largest outside Hawaii.
Fourteen Kurdish artists staged a provocative "Non-Art Exhibition" at Media Gallery in Erbil to commemorate World Art Day. In a radical departure from traditional gallery formats, the participants displayed only the reverse sides of their canvases, completely concealing the painted surfaces from the audience. Organized by artist Ahmed Nabaz, the one-day event kept its conceptual twist a secret from the participating artists until the moment of the opening.
Portland-based artist Ami Maki has unveiled her latest exhibition, "Obese Landscapes," at the Multnomah Arts Center. The showcase features eight large-scale charcoal drawings, some reaching seven feet in height, that draw visual parallels between the human form and natural topographies like rolling hills and rock formations. By utilizing earth tones and monumental scale, Maki seeks to reframe bodies often marginalized by societal beauty standards as majestic, natural environments.
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) Academy has opened its 2026 program at Ocean Space in Venice with the exhibition 'Tide of Returns'. Developed by the Repatriates Collective, the show features artists, filmmakers, and Indigenous communities from across the globe, transforming the former Church of San Lorenzo into an immersive environment. It moves beyond conventional restitution debates by presenting repatriation as a living, tidal process expressed through ritual, memory, and community care, using materials like sand from Anindilyakwa Country and returned shell dolls.
The Bailey Art Gallery in Hobe Sound, Florida, will open a new exhibition on April 24 featuring works by local painter Dan Mackin and photographer M.E. Gruber. Mackin’s highly stylized paintings—created with airbrush and traditional techniques—depict idyllic coastal scenes on canvas, navigation maps, surfboards, and a guitar, and include collaborations with Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys. Gruber’s mid-century Kodachrome transparencies, drawn from an archive of over 5,000 images, document the emerging surf culture of Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast. The exhibition will display 50 full-frame prints from this collection.
A student-led exhibition titled 'Unsung Artists' is being organized in New Paltz, New York, to provide a platform for young and emerging local artists who struggle to find opportunities to showcase their work. The show, a collaboration between SUNY New Paltz student Izzy Kerr and the Unframed Artists Gallery, aims to be inclusive of various artistic mediums and offers a professional, off-campus venue for artists who might not otherwise have a thesis show or gallery access.
The Museum of Contemporary Art has opened a new exhibition titled 'Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón.' The show features works by 42 contemporary artists, including paintings, sound sculptures, and interactive installations like a karaoke machine, examining the social, political, and spiritual histories of these musical genres. It was inspired by the 2019 protests in Puerto Rico, where reggaetón music and dance became a central form of protest and celebration.
Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi has unveiled a new body of work that utilizes the visual language of Old Masters and classical mythology to process the collective trauma of the October 7 attacks. By referencing iconic compositions from art history, Cherkassky-Nnadi creates a bridge between historical depictions of suffering and the immediate, raw experiences of contemporary Israeli life, offering a formal structure to otherwise unspeakable events.
The Daegu Kansong Art Museum has launched a special exhibition titled "Chusa's Painting Lessons" to mark the 240th anniversary of the birth of Kim Jeong-hui, the legendary Joseon Dynasty scholar and artist. While most retrospectives of Kim's work focus on his revolutionary calligraphy and academic scholarship, this showcase specifically highlights his paintings and his pedagogical influence on his students. A centerpiece of the exhibition is the "Yerim Gapeulrok," a document that illustrates the artistic exchanges and critiques shared between the master and his disciples.
Six teenagers currently involved with the Lucas County Juvenile Court system are debuting a new art exhibition at JUST Toledo. The showcase features 25 original works, including photography and custom-built frames, all created and installed by the young artists under the guidance of lead artist Christopher Pickett.
Solana Beach art gallery and custom frame shop Once Upon a Frame is set to host an opening reception for Southern California artist Paul Kauffman on April 18. The exhibition, titled “In The Presence of Color,” will showcase Kauffman’s recent paintings and include a live painting demonstration, music, and refreshments. The show explores the artist's unique background, balancing his experiences in a Catholic seminary with his time working in a family carnival.
Florida State University’s Department of Art is set to debut "A New Paradigm," an exhibition showcasing the thesis projects of eight graduating Bachelor of Fine Arts students. Opening April 17 at the Working Method Contemporary Gallery, the show features a diverse array of media including ceramics, digital fabrication, installation, and printmaking. The works collectively explore shifting societal frameworks and represent the culmination of the students' academic journeys.
Green Bay Austin Straubel International Airport (GRB) has issued a call for artists and collectors for its third annual art exhibition, themed "Patriotic | Historic | Americana." The exhibition is timed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States and will feature framed photography, 3-D objects, ephemera, and traditional artwork. Submissions are open until March 31, 2026, with the final installation scheduled for May 2026 to coincide with the airport’s Honor Flight for Veterans.
Western Exhibitions in Chicago presents “Spaces for People, Systems for Spaces,” a group exhibition featuring fifteen artists who explore the intersection of architecture, urban infrastructure, and the human body. The show includes diverse approaches to mapping and structural representation, ranging from Kim Beck’s hand-woven asphalt photographs and Courttney Cooper’s massive ink-on-receipt Cincinnati maps to Brian Petrone’s basswood and limestone tectonic sculptures.
A new multi-use artist-run gallery called Revolve Gallery has opened in Redfern, Sydney. Founded by Daryl Lo, the space combines a coffee shop, art supply store, workshop, and studio hire with an exhibition area, aiming to provide a dynamic, experimental environment for young and emerging artists to develop and present their work.
The Altos de Chavón Art Gallery in La Romana, Dominican Republic, is presenting 'WONDERLAND,' a new exhibition by artist Stepanova opening on January 9, 2026. The show explores early childhood perception through immersive paintings, and the opening will feature a darkroom installation, live performances, and a curated atmosphere.