The 79th Juried Members’ Exhibition has opened at the Museum of Art, showcasing works selected from member artists through a competitive jury process. The exhibition highlights a diverse range of media and styles, reflecting the creative output of the museum's artist community.
Four screenprints by Banksy from the 2000s are featured in Artnet Auctions’s Contemporary Editions sale, running through August 28, 2025. The lots include 'Bomb Love (Bomb Hugger)' (est. $25,000–$35,000), 'Welcome to Hell (Pink)' (est. $30,000–$50,000), and 'Morons (Sepia)' (est. $25,000–$35,000), tracing the artist’s rise from Bristol street graffiti to international fame. The article highlights key milestones: his 2002 Los Angeles show 'Existencilism,' his counterfeit £10 notes featuring Princess Diana, and the Oscar-nominated documentary 'Exit Through the Gift Shop.'
The Sarasota Art Museum will open an exhibition titled "Art Deco: The Golden Age of Illustration" on August 31, featuring 100 rare fine art advertisement posters from the 1920s and '30s. The posters, created by early master graphic designers such as A. M. Cassandre and Leonetto Cappiello, are drawn from the Crouse Collection, considered the most significant private collection of its kind. The exhibition also includes sculptural works, cocktail shakers, and Art Deco furniture on loan from the Wolfsonian Museum at Florida International University.
The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA) is presenting five exhibitions, including an outdoor public art installation, with the highlight being "Something from Everything" (on view through Jan. 3, 2026). This exhibition features works from 19 artists that use mundane, discarded, and overlooked materials, exploring the evolving medium of sculpture. Key pieces include Lee Bontecou's 1959 "Untitled" relief (on loan from the Art Bridges Foundation) and Charlotte Posenenske's modular "Vierkantrohre (Square Tubes)" from 1967, alongside contemporary works by Nolan Flynn, Patrick Durka, Ricardo Rendón, and Leonardo Drew.
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has opened "Jessi Reaves: process invented the mirror," the New York-based artist's first major solo museum exhibition. Curated by Walker director Mary Ceruti, the show features a single body of new work that blends readymade furniture, found objects, and recycled materials, exploring the tension between functionality and absurdity. Ceruti, who previously worked with Reaves at the SculptureCenter in 2016, describes the work as playful yet rigorous, pushing viewers to reconsider how objects function in daily life.
Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London will open a newly transformed sculpture garden to the public on 6-7 September, as the centerpiece of its £5m Open Art project. The redevelopment reclaims previously underused green space for a rotating programme of contemporary art on two-year loans, alongside permanent works including a land art piece by Kim Wilkie, an ArtPlay Pavilion designed by HoLD Collective and Carmody Groarke, and a new entrance restoring elements of John Soane's 1811 plans. The project is funded by principal donor The Lovington Foundation, The Julia Rausing Trust, the Manton Foundation, and a public campaign, as the gallery receives no regular government funding.
LACMA announces a week of programming from August 18–24, headlined by the opening of *Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer*, an exhibition featuring the artist’s 2015 video starring Tahar Rahim and Salma Hayek, alongside related photographs and Egyptian movie posters. Member previews run August 21–23 before the public opening on August 24. Other highlights include a mindful evening with Buddhist art tied to the ongoing exhibition *Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia*, plus concerts, workshops, and family programs.
The Alexandria Biennale, the third-oldest biennial in the world after Venice and São Paulo, is relaunching in September 2026 after a 12-year hiatus. Curated by Egyptian artist Moataz Nasr under the title "This Too Shall Pass," the event will feature artists mainly from the Mediterranean basin, along with performances, music, and lectures. In a shift from its previous state-funded model, the biennial now operates as a private-public partnership, with seed money from the Egyptian and Alexandria governments and pledges from local businesses. The exhibition will take place at historic venues across Alexandria, including the Roman amphitheatre, the Alexandria Library, and the Qaitbay Citadel.
The Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas has opened "Soundings: Making Culture at Sea," an exhibition exploring connections to the ocean from the landlocked state of Kansas. Curated by Emily Casey and Celka Straughn, the show runs through December 14 and features works from the museum's collection, including a Winslow Homer watercolor, a carved wooden mermaid, and photographs of Greenland glaciers, alongside a video by Isaac Julien. The exhibition is organized into four sections covering maps, ocean crossings, ecological threats, and maritime trade.
Two works by Iranian artists were sold at Bonhams London's online auction of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art on August 14, 2025. The auction featured 45 pieces from Middle Eastern artists, including 10 by Iranian artists such as Sirak Melkonian, Ebrahim Olfat, Babak Kazemi, Marcos Grigorian, and YZ Kami. Only two works found buyers: an untitled 2020 oil on canvas by the late Sirak Melkonian (1930-2024) sold for $13,888, and Ebrahim Olfat's calligraphy painting "Eshgh (Hafez Poem)" (2012) sold for $5,207. The article provides extensive background on Melkonian, an Iranian-Armenian modernist pioneer and co-founder of the Azad Art Group, and on Olfat, a calligraphy specialist with a medical degree.
The Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art will present "Korean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared" from November 8, 2025 to February 1, 2026, marking the first U.S. exhibition of masterpieces from the Lee Kun-Hee Collection. Featuring over 200 works including a dozen Korean National Treasures, the exhibition spans 1,500 years of Korean art—from ancient Buddhist sculptures and ceramics to Joseon dynasty furnishings and 20th-century modern paintings. The collection, donated to the Republic of Korea in 2021 by the family of the late Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-Hee, comprises more than 23,000 works accumulated over 70 years. The exhibition is co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum of Korea, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, with additional loans from the Leeum Museum of Art shown exclusively in Washington, D.C.
Jane and Louise Wilson, identical twin artists born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1967, are featured in a podcast interview where they discuss their collaborative practice since the late 1980s. Working primarily in video installation, photography, and sound, they explore duality and selfhood through loaded sites like abandoned military bases and borderlands. The podcast covers their early inspirations, including John Martin and Cindy Sherman, and the influence of filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean Cocteau, and Stanley Kubrick. Their current exhibitions include 'Performance of Entrapment' at London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE (until 10 January 2026) and 'Dendrophiles' at Leadenhall Building as part of Sculpture in the City, London (until spring 2026).
The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) team faced an extraordinary challenge installing the retrospective “Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei,” which required handling eight tractor-trailers of artwork—far more than the usual two—within just three weeks. The exhibition features 130 complex works, including a giant tree sculpture, a life-size jail cell replica, and a Lego rendition of the Mueller report, many arriving without instruction manuals and requiring creative assembly by a 12-person crew led by lead preparator Joshua Gosovich.
Wayne McGregor, artistic director of the Biennale Danza in Venice, has created a new immersive dance installation titled 'On the Other Earth' in collaboration with artist Jeffrey Shaw and digital museologist Sarah Kenderdine. The work features a 360-degree 'nVis' environment with a massive 12K LED screen, allowing dancers from McGregor's company and the Hong Kong Ballet to perform in extreme close-up. The installation will travel to the Venice Film Festival, Stone's Nest in London as part of McGregor's exhibition 'Infinite Bodies' at Somerset House, and later to the Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts in Hong Kong.
The Frist Art Museum in Nashville will host 'Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm,' an exhibition featuring nearly 300 recently discovered photographs taken by Paul McCartney during the height of Beatlemania. Organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, the show runs from November 7, 2025, to January 26, 2026, and includes personal images of The Beatles—John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr—captured between December 1963 and February 1964, along with ephemera and an audio tour narrated by McCartney.
Adam Zhu, an artist, skateboarder, and photographer, has transformed a 9-by-15-foot former storage shed on his Chinatown rooftop into Market Gallery, a tiny exhibition space. The opening of Tucker van der Wyden's "Savage Love" drew about 200 visitors who walked through Zhu's one-bedroom apartment to reach the show. Zhu, who moved into the apartment in 2015, renovated the shed with contractor Andrew Kass, adding concrete walls and folding glass doors. The gallery has hosted seven shows, featuring emerging and established artists, and has become a platform for art in an unconventional setting.
The Tate Modern in London is hosting a landmark retrospective of Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye (c. 1914–1996), running from July 10 to January 11, 2026. The exhibition features 70 works spanning her career, from early batik designs to her final acrylic paintings, and is organized in collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia, the Utopia Art Centre, and Kngwarreye's descendants. It is the first major solo exhibition of her work in Europe, highlighting her deep connection to her ancestral country and culture.
Clearing, the influential New York and Los Angeles gallery that launched the careers of many prominent artists, will close both locations. Founder Oliver Babin announced the closure on August 7, citing crushing overhead costs—rent, shipping, and art fair expenses—that outpaced declining revenue. The gallery opened in 2011 in Bushwick, later moved to the Bowery in Manhattan in 2023, and expanded to Brussels and Los Angeles. Babin described the decision as inevitable, noting that the gallery had been kept alive by hope but now faces no viable path forward. The closure follows a wave of US gallery shutdowns this summer, including Kasmin, Venus Over Manhattan, and Tim Blum’s spaces.
Preston Park Museum is opening a new multi-million pound exhibition space in 2025 with a series of railway-themed exhibitions called 'Tracks of Change', part of the S&DR200 festival celebrating the bicentenary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Highlights include 'Corridors', a suspended floral installation by internationally acclaimed artist Rebecca Louise Law; 'All Aboard', an interactive playscape for children; 'Gateway to the World', a collection of nationally significant paintings; and 'Perfume', a light-and-sound installation by visual artist Yann Nguema. All exhibitions will be free with museum admission.
Thom Yorke, frontman of Radiohead, is presenting his first-ever museum exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, UK. Titled 'This is What You Get', the show runs until January 2026 and features the complete catalog of album covers, unseen sketchbook pages, and recent paintings created in collaboration with artist Stanley Donwood. Yorke, who trained as a visual artist before turning to music, describes returning to physical painting as 'absolutely terrifying' and sees the exhibition as a reclamation of his original artistic identity.
A first-century CE marble bust, known as the "Head of Alexander," was returned to the Italian government on August 5, ending a seven-year legal battle. The bust, believed stolen from an Italian museum decades ago, was seized in 2018 by the Manhattan District Attorney's Antiquities Trafficking Unit from Safani Gallery in New York. The gallery filed multiple lawsuits against Italy and the Italian Ministry of Culture, claiming unlawful taking and seeking compensation, but all claims were dismissed. The bust, excavated in the early 1900s along Rome's Via Sacra, had passed through multiple cities and auctions, including sales at Sotheby Park Bernet and later for $150,000 by Safani Gallery in 2017.
Lorna Simpson's custom-designed Brooklyn studio, created by architect David Adjaye in 2006, has been listed for sale at $6.5 million. The 3,300-square-foot, four-story property at 208 Vanderbilt Avenue in Fort Greene features a double-height great room, three bedrooms, a rear garden, and was originally built as a live/work space for the artist and her then-husband James Casebere. The listing is handled by Leslie Marshall and Nick Hovsepian of the Corcoran Group. Simpson, whose survey exhibition "Lorna Simpson: Source Notes" is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has moved her primary practice to a larger nearby space, using the Vanderbilt Avenue property for archives and events.
Thom Yorke, the Radiohead frontman, reflects on his journey back to visual art in an exclusive interview with The Art Newspaper. Having left art school in the late 1980s, Yorke felt resistant to calling himself a visual artist, a discomfort compounded by his music career. He and his bandmate Stanley Donwood, whom he met at Exeter University, are now opening their first institutional exhibition, "This is What You Get," at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The show spans 30 years of record covers, sketchbooks, and recent paintings, marking a significant return to Yorke's artistic roots.
A new book titled "William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love" by biographer and critic Philip Hoare explores the life and work of William Blake, focusing on the three years the artist spent in Felpham, a coastal village in England, starting in 1800. Hoare argues that the ocean profoundly influenced Blake's art and poetry, using the sea as a metaphor to examine Blake's visionary prints, poems like "Milton," and his androgynous, fluid figures. The book also weaves in a cast of other historical figures—including Herman Melville, Paul Nash, and Nancy Cunard—whom Hoare dubs "sea monsters" for their rebellious, queer, and amphibious spirits.
Eike Schmidt, the German-born museum director who led Florence's Uffizi Galleries from 2015, has taken on a series of high-profile and controversial roles. After restructuring the Uffizi and nearly leaving for Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum in 2019, he stayed on, then moved to Naples' Museo di Capodimonte in 2024. Months later, he ran for mayor of Florence as a centre-right independent backed by far-right parties, losing in a run-off. Now settled at Capodimonte, he reflects on his unpredictable career with no regrets.
The Portland Art Museum is hosting a series of informal, interactive conversations with curators and a conservator about the exhibition "Monet’s Floating Worlds at Giverny." Participants include Jeannie Kenmotsu, The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Asian Art, and Hugo Torii, Garden Curator at Portland Japanese Garden. The free events explore connections between Monet’s waterlilies, Japanese printmaking, and conservation, encouraging open discussion and audience engagement.
Robert Wilson, the visionary experimental playwright, director, and visual artist known for his highly stylized theatrical productions, has died at age 83. He passed away at his home in Water Mill, New York, on July 31 following a brief acute illness, according to a statement from the Watermill Center, the arts organization he founded. Wilson's most famous works include the silent opera *Deafman Glance* (1970) and the epic collaboration with composer Philip Glass, *Einstein on the Beach* (1976). He was also a prolific visual artist, creating drawings, sculptures, and video portraits, including a series featuring Lady Gaga, Pope.L, and Isabella Rossellini, and his work was exhibited at institutions such as SFMoMA, the Centre Pompidou, and the Louvre.
Los Angeles artist John Knuth uses flies as collaborators to create paintings, with over one million insects contributing to his current exhibition 'The Hot Garden' at Hollis Taggart Downtown in New York. Inspired by flyspecks he noticed on a windowsill in 2005, Knuth orders fly larvae by the thousands, letting them hatch on canvases where their regurgitation deposits pigment. The show features works priced between $700 and $20,000, and a custom enclosure at the gallery allowed visitors to see the flies working live during the opening. Knuth's fly paintings gained viral attention in 2013 after a video by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art received over 100,000 views, helping launch his career.
The Yale University Art Gallery has withdrawn two federal grant applications submitted to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for an upcoming exhibition on African art exploring the migration of Nguni peoples, scheduled for 2026. The gallery objected to new anti-DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) restrictions imposed by the Trump administration, which require that funded projects do not promote certain ideologies based on race or gender. The gallery will instead use Yale University's $46 billion endowment to cover the $200,000 exhibition costs. This follows a previous instance where the gallery opted out of NEA funding, and a separate $30,000 NEA grant for the exhibition "Nusantara: Six Centuries of Indonesian Textile" was rescinded, though that show will proceed with support from the Robert Lehman Endowment Fund.
The Denver Art Museum is hosting 'Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors,' a major exhibition of the Cree artist's provocative, large-scale paintings that challenge Western art history through an Indigenous lens. The show, co-organized with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, runs until August 17 before traveling to Montreal in September. It has drawn widespread critical acclaim and emotional visitor responses, with reviewers praising its blend of humor, beauty, and political urgency.