Tracey Emin's major retrospective, 'Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul,' has opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The exhibition pairs Emin's deeply personal works, including her iconic 'My Bed,' with paintings by Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch, exploring shared themes of love, loss, and existential anguish.
Artist Dayanita Singh mounted a major exhibition titled "ARCHIVIO" at the State Archives of Venice, which opened to the public as an exhibition venue for the first time in its history. Without institutional funding or a public relations budget, Singh relied on a "friendship economy" to install her signature "photo-pillars"—images of Indian archival documents bound in red cloth. The show attracted visitors despite the lack of traditional promotion, as documented in an interview with Hyperallergic Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian.
Printed Matter's Los Angeles Art Book Fair returned to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena for its 13th edition, featuring over 250 exhibitors—slightly fewer than last year—with about a fifth participating for the first time. A common thread across the fair was the archive: publications that excavate, remix, and repurpose historical media, from a book chronicling a 1960s hoax about animal nudity to a compendium of vintage photographs that subvert male subjectivity, and a collection of found photos from abandoned houses in rural Maine. The fair also highlighted diasporic and personal archives, including a Palestinian-American artist's cassette mixtape tracing music from the Middle East and an artist-run press focusing on translation as cultural resistance.
À Giverny, Monet ne profite pas à tout le monde
The article examines the economic paradox of Giverny, the French village where Claude Monet lived and painted. While Monet's gardens attract nearly one million visitors annually—with ticket sales estimated at €9-10 million—the village itself, with a population of just 430 and an annual budget of €600,000, sees almost none of that revenue. Visitors flood in for half-day trips, queue for hours to see the gardens, and leave by evening, spending little in local shops. The gardens, run by the Académie des beaux-arts, are tax-exempt and operate as a closed economic loop, with their boutique and restaurant generating income that stays within the institution.
Les plus belles terrasses de musées parisiens pour profiter des beaux jours
Beaux Arts Magazine has published a guide to the best museum terraces in Paris for enjoying the sunny days of spring and summer. The article highlights five standout spots: Rose Bakery at the Musée de la Vie romantique, Joli at the Musée Carnavalet, the Grand Café at the Grand Palais, Corail at the Musée d'Art moderne, and Sama at the Institut du monde arabe. Each terrace is described for its unique atmosphere, from the bucolic garden of the Musée de la Vie romantique to the spectacular colonnade of the Grand Palais, with details on chefs, menus, and seasonal highlights.
Artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn, known for his distinctive collage-like composite portraits, is opening his first solo exhibition in his hometown of Chicago at the National Public Housing Museum. Titled "A Love Letter to My Mother," the show honors his late mother and includes a replica of his family's living room in the Robert Taylor Homes public housing project. Quinn, who is represented by Gagosian, has seen his work acquired by major institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. His art will also appear on the cover of the Rolling Stones' forthcoming album "Foreign Tongues."
Domenick Ammirati returns to New York after a year-long writing residency in Siena and Provincetown to cover the spring art fairs, including Frieze New York 2026. He observes a notably calm art week, attributing the subdued atmosphere to the fair's proximity to the Venice Biennale, which left key players exhausted. Highlights include a Rei Kawakubo installation at Independent, Gucci's Cruise show in Times Square, and MoMA PS1's 50th anniversary gala, where he mingles with curator Jody Graf and spots Klaus Biesenbach.
Multidisciplinary artists Bobbi Salvör Menuez and quori theodor, a couple living in New York City, have built an extensive collection of everyday objects including T-shirts, cassette tapes, spoons, pacifiers, and playing cards sourced from sidewalks, thrift stores, and shoot sets. Their collecting practice is intuitive and deeply personal, driven by nostalgia, childhood memories, and their bond with each other, treating each object as a talisman or treasure rather than a financial investment.
Artist Iréne Norén, who began painting just three years ago after a personal crisis, is now mounting her first solo gallery show in New York. Titled "Reliquary of the Body: Returning to Eden," the exhibition opens at Harper’s Chelsea and explores themes of shame, self-acceptance, and the female body, drawing on Catholic art historical imagery and Renaissance altarpiece structures. Norén started painting after an abortion while living in New York without a work visa, using art as a tool for emotional expression and confidence.
Dale Chihuly returns to Venice with "Chihuly: Venice 2026," a public exhibition marking the 30th anniversary of his landmark 1996 project "Chihuly Over Venice." The new show features three large-scale glass sculptures installed along the Grand Canal, viewable from the Accademia Bridge, at Palazzo Franchetti, Palazzo Querini alla Carità, and Palazzo Balbi-Valier Sammartini. The article also recounts Chihuly's 1968 Fulbright-funded study at Venini, where he learned Murano glassblowing and embraced glass as his primary medium, and reveals that his son Jackson Chihuly was conceived in Venice after a party hosted by the late Paul Allen.
Danielle Mckinney, a rising painter known for intimate depictions of Black women in moments of repose, shares insights into her creative process in a studio visit interview. She has two concurrent exhibitions: one at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach (through Oct. 4) and one at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York (through June 13), where she debuts a series of watercolors and continues dissolving boundaries between figures and their domestic surroundings.
Agosto Machado, a legendary downtown New York artist, archivist, and activist, died on March 21, 2026, at an estimated age in his 80s. The article recounts his life through a personal tribute, describing a drag performance in Chicago honoring him, and details his decades-long career as a street queen, Warhol-era fixture, and participant in the Stonewall uprising and first Gay Liberation March. Machado performed in Off-Off-Broadway plays, created solo shows, and amassed an extensive archive of ephemera, art, and photographs of his friends and community.
Miami-based collectors Javier Martin and Austria Ulloa discuss their 404 Art Collection, which spans works from mid-20th century Ivorian artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré to contemporary pieces by Ryan Schneider, Augusta Lecaros, and others. The couple, who met through their respective art-world careers, acquire works through studio visits, gallery discoveries, and friend recommendations, and they are donating a Bouabré drawing to the Boca Raton Museum of Art for an upcoming exhibition. Their collection also includes pieces by Sadaharu Horio, Ami Yoshida, Lucas Pereira Elias, Katarina Weslien, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Elsa Mora, and Waichi Tsutaka.
Andrea Fraser and her 92-year-old mother, Carmen de Monteflores, are showing work side by side in the 2024 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. This is Fraser's third time in the biennial, but de Monteflores's first museum exhibition after abandoning her art career in 1970 due to repeated rejections. Fraser presents five wax sculptures of toddlers, while de Monteflores shows exuberant, monumental shaped canvases of heads and bodies from the 1960s. The mother-daughter duo's participation came about after Fraser sent images of her mother's stored paintings to biennial co-curator Marcela Guerrero, leading to a joint invitation.
Cynthia Hawkins, a 76-year-old Black abstract painter, discusses her latest work and career in an interview with Cultured. She describes her ongoing "Maps Necessary for a Walk in 4D" series, which began in 1979, and her current exploration of a new iteration called "Fielding Space" or "Maps Fielding Space." Hawkins will be featured in the upcoming "Hard Art" exhibition at MoMA PS1 opening November 5, which places her work alongside over 40 other Black abstract artists including Sam Gilliam and Carolyn Lazard. She reflects on her early art experiences, from learning to draw Mickey Mouse with her father to rejecting paint-by-numbers, and her enduring fascination with color, particularly orange and yellow.
Art dealer Gordon VeneKlasen, former longtime partner of Michael Werner, launched his own gallery at the start of 2025. The new VeneKlasen Gallery made its art fair debut at the inaugural Art Basel Qatar in Doha and will open twin shows of the late German artist Sigmar Polke at its New York and London spaces on March 3 and 12, respectively. In an interview, VeneKlasen discusses his career trajectory, from studying art history and working at the Ashmolean Museum to a stint with the U.S. Census Bureau, before joining Michael Werner and eventually striking out on his own. Several artists, including Florian Krewer, Issy Wood, and Sanya Kantarovsky, are following him to his new venture.
The Getty Center presents "Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985," a traveling exhibition from the National Gallery of Art featuring 150 images by Black midcentury photographers. The show, on view from February 24 through June 14, includes works by Gordon Parks, Ming Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, Adger Cowans, Doris A. Derby, Harry Adams, Leonard Freed, John Simmons, and others, capturing moments of protest, daily life, and community resistance.
The ICA Miami has organized a major posthumous survey of the late painter Joyce Pensato, opening December 2 and running through March 15. The exhibition brings together over 65 works spanning five decades, from early Batman sketches to her signature enamel paintings that transform cartoon icons like Mickey Mouse, The Simpsons, and South Park characters into grotesque, emotionally charged images. The show is curated by artistic director Alex Gartenfeld, curator Stephanie Seidel, and ICA Art + Research Center Director Gean Moreno, and is the most comprehensive presentation of Pensato's work to date.
Tishan Hsu, a 74-year-old artist based in Brooklyn, is the subject of a feature article discussing his 40-year career exploring the boundary between the virtual and the physical. His current exhibition, "Emergence," at Lisson Gallery in New York (through Jan. 24), presents new biomorphic UV prints with silicone appendages that evoke fingers penetrating a computer screen. Hsu's interest in this territory began in the mid-1980s while working as a word processor on Wall Street, and his practice has consistently sought to give form to the paradox between bodily presence and virtual distance.
Eamon Ore-Giron has taken over James Cohan's two downtown Manhattan galleries with "Conversations with Snakes, Birds, and Stars," an exhibition of new paintings and mosaics running through Dec. 20. The works draw on ancient Mesoamerican and Andean symbology, continuing his long-running "Talking Shit" series, which has previously been shown at the Contemporary Austin, Whitney Museum, and LACMA. In an interview with CULTURED, Ore-Giron discusses how he uses color, mythology, and ritual to create a universe where serpents, birds, and stars engage in dialogue with viewers and across time.
Art collector Joel Lubin travels to Margate, England, to commission a portrait from Brogan Bertie, winner of the Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year prize. During his visit, Lubin tours the Carl Freedman Gallery, meets artists in Tracey Emin's TEAR residency program, visits the Turner Contemporary, and has dinner at Emin's home, where he also encounters works by emerging artists.
Brian Droitcour curates a guide to navigating the current media landscape through the work of tech-savvy artists and writers, focusing on exhibitions in Brooklyn and Queens. The guide highlights Porpentine's show "Xrafstar World" at Haul Gallery in Gowanus, which features poster-prints of drawings depicting characters from their stories and games, made with different digital brushes. Droitcour contrasts this DIY, performance-driven work with major institutions' engagement with AI, such as Sasha Stiles' "A Living Poem" at MoMA, which he criticizes for echoing technology's promises of polish rather than probing its complications.
A major survey of the work of Vaginal Davis, spanning five decades of her contributions to drag, queercore, experimental film, and fine art, is opening at MoMA PS1 in New York on October 9. Titled "Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product," the exhibition debuted at Moderna Museet before traveling to New York. In an interview, Davis discusses her lifelong performance practice, the blurring of her public persona and private self, and the unlikely survival of her archive, much of which was preserved by a high school student in the 1980s.
Cultured magazine publishes an interview with French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, conducted by a journalist who navigates Calle's characteristic conditions for the conversation. The article recounts the process of securing the interview—including a preliminary phone call from Calle to set rules—and describes Calle's home in the South of France, her tan arms, black sleeveless top, and signature glasses. The journalist references Calle's early photobooks published by Siglio, her "Unfinished" series displayed at the Musée Picasso in Paris (2023–24), and her project "The Address Book," which involved interviewing acquaintances of a stranger whose address book she found on the streets of Paris. The interview also touches on a companion catalog of moldy works after a flood in Calle's storage space, and a large photograph of dried flowers from architect Frank Gehry.
Alex Katz presents a new body of work titled "White Lotus" at Gray Chicago, on view through September 20. The exhibition features large-scale portraits and cool, cinematic scenes inspired by a beach in Maine and Antonioni's *L'Avventura*, with only a superficial connection to the TV series *The White Lotus*. Katz, now in his late 90s, continues his seven-decade practice of prioritizing style over narrative, focusing on surfaces, garments, and glances. Concurrently, his work is also on view at SCAI Piramide in Tokyo, San Diego's Museum of Contemporary Art, and Gladstone Gallery will host a fall exhibition of his orange abstractions. The article includes an interview where Katz discusses his studio habits, influences (Fra Angelico, Veronese, Goya), and his resilience in the face of early career criticism.
The article compiles personal anecdotes from several art collectors—Laurent Asscher, Suzanne Syz, Rob and Eric Thomas-Suwall, Toby Milstein Schulman, and Danielle Falls—who share mistakes they made while building their collections. Asscher recounts buying a lesser Basquiat at Christie's before quickly reselling it to acquire a superior work at Phillips; Syz regrets buying a piece because others wanted it; the Thomas-Suwalls missed out on a Dominique Fung diptych; Schulman accidentally bought a work attributed 'after Keith Haring' at a charity auction; and Falls reflects on her early eagerness as a young trustee of the Bronx Museum.
Jon Neidich, a 43-year-old New York nightlife entrepreneur and collector who chairs the board of Creative Time, discusses his art collection in an interview. He shares that his first purchases were works from Robert Longo's "Men in the Cities" series and a Tracey Emin neon titled "Trust Yourself," which offered a wholesome counterpoint to his nightlife-focused world. Neidich credits his mother, Brooke Garber Neidich, a voracious collector of mid-century and contemporary artists, for teaching him to navigate the art world. He also recounts a hard-won acquisition of Victor Moscoso and Lee Conklin rock posters from Matthew Marks gallery, and highlights John Baldessari's "Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line" as a piece he often stares at.
Jackie Amézquita, a Los Angeles-based artist originally from Guatemala, has developed a unique brick-making process using soil and masa de maíz (corn dough) mixed with organic materials like blue pea flower, cocoa, cochineal, and charcoal to create vibrant, colorful bricks. Her work, including the 2023 installation *El suelo que nos alimenta* commissioned by the Hammer Museum for the Made in L.A. biennial, uses soil from each of LA's neighborhoods to explore themes of migration, memory, and colonial legacies. Amézquita's practice is deeply personal, drawing on her family's migration history—her mother moved from Guatemala in 1987, and her grandmother fled Mexico during the Cristero War—and her own eight-day walk from Tijuana to LA, during which she collected soil samples as an archive of memory.
Disparition de l’artiste Fabien Verschaere
The French contemporary art world is mourning the sudden death of artist Fabien Verschaere at the age of 50. Represented by Galerie Brugier-Rigail since 2012, Verschaere was known for a prolific and singular body of work that blended childhood imagery, fairy tales, and pop culture icons like Mickey Mouse and Batman into a complex personal mythology. His career was marked by significant exhibitions at major institutions including the Palais de Tokyo, the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, and the Grand Palais.
Daniel Sikkema, the estranged husband of murdered New York art dealer Brent Sikkema, was found guilty in Manhattan federal court on charges related to a murder-for-hire plot. Prosecutors proved that Daniel orchestrated the killing of Brent Sikkema, founder of the Chelsea gallery Sikkema Jenkins & Co., at his vacation home in Rio de Janeiro in January 2024, amid a bitter divorce and custody dispute. Daniel was convicted on three counts for conspiring to hire Alejandro Triana Prevez, a Cuban former security officer, who stabbed the dealer 18 times. Daniel faces a mandatory life sentence.