Colossal's monthly list for April 2026 details numerous open calls, grants, and residencies for artists worldwide. Key opportunities include the Earth 2026 Art Awards, the Hopper Prize grants totaling $13,000, and the Fleurieu Biennale Art Prize in Australia, alongside calls for fiber art, gallery exhibitions, and magazine publications.
Kyiv-based illustrator Masha Foya has released a new series of dreamlike works that blend human emotion with the natural world. Her illustrations often feature surreal architectural and organic elements, such as foliage tunnels forming into hands or planes flying through bird-shaped apertures, to represent the boundlessness of the human imagination. The collection includes a mix of personal explorations and high-profile commissions for international publications.
Colossal has reached a significant milestone by funding 100 K-12 classroom projects across the United States through its partnership with the nonprofit DonorsChoose. Supported by a portion of Colossal Membership fees, the initiative has contributed over $13,000 to provide essential art supplies, sketchbooks, and equipment to students. The program places a special emphasis on supporting schools in Chicago, ensuring that young learners have the tools necessary for creative expression and artistic education.
Archaeologists have discovered that Native Americans were engaging in games of chance using handmade dice as far back as 12,000 years ago, during the Late Pleistocene. A new study by researcher Robert Madden reveals that these artifacts, found in sites across Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, predate the previously oldest known dice from Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley by over 6,000 years. These early dice, often made of bone and decorated with pigments, were used by the hunter-gatherer Folsom culture.
Miyagi-based artist Misato Sano creates distinctive wooden dog sculptures that serve as a form of self-portraiture. Her work, carved from camphor wood and finished with oil paint, uses exaggerated features and textured surfaces to express a range of emotions and personalities, from shy to silly, as a means of exploring and deepening self-love.
Fine wallpaper manufacturer Astek has launched a new collection of floral mural wallpapers called 'Eterna Nouveau.' The designs are a contemporary reinterpretation of the Art Nouveau movement, featuring arching stems, nature-inspired motifs like lilies and Venus fly traps, and are available in various colorways with metallic outlines.
Fiber designer Jake Henzler, known as Boy Knits World, is releasing a new book titled 'Knit the City' through David & Charles Publishing. The book provides modular knitting patterns inspired by the architecture of global cities like Copenhagen and Paris, allowing crafters to create customizable blankets, pillow covers, and other textile projects that stitch together building-block facades.
British photographer Barry Webb creates large-format macro photographs of slime molds, revealing their intricate, sculptural forms and vibrant colors. His work transforms organisms typically only a few centimeters tall into atmospheric, large-scale images that showcase a hidden world.
The La Napoule Art Foundation has launched Threshold Art Retreats, a new program offering five-day immersive creative experiences at the Château de La Napoule on the French Riviera. The retreats combine hands-on artistic instruction with wellness activities like yoga and paddleboarding, led by mentors who are often former artists-in-residence at the château.
Artist David Morrison has released a new series of hyperrealistic botanical drawings, created with colored pencil. The works, including pieces titled "Botanical Series No.4 Drawing" and "Iceland Poppy," focus on flowers, seeds, and plants, capturing intricate textures and organic forms with delicate lines and smooth gradients that create a soft, luminous effect.
Ceramic artist Soojin Choi creates intricate sculptures of entangled pairs, using stoneware slabs and nylon strands to achieve a precarious balance that minimizes contact with the ground. Her painterly background is evident in the gestural marks, visible brushstrokes, and drips on the white-slipped surfaces, with the artist describing her process as a "constant negotiation with gravity."
Photographer Frank Relle continues his long-term artistic exploration of Louisiana's swamps, capturing the ethereal transition between day and night in his series 'Until the Water'. Based in New Orleans, Relle uses submerged lights to illuminate cypress trees and Spanish moss, creating serene, otherworldly images that convey a sense of timelessness and connection to a primordial landscape.
Artist Charles Young is expanding his intricate city of miniature paper buildings, with 258 structures already completed from a series inspired by Sanzo Wada's color theory book. He is currently working on the final 90 models from the first volume, which explores two-color combinations, and has also created works featuring multiple colors.
Photographer Camille Lemoine presents a series titled 'Down Tower Road,' capturing the intimate landscapes and rhythms of rural life in Baldernock, Scotland. The work focuses on the atmospheric moorland, rolling fields, and the relationship between the female body and the natural environment, aiming to evoke a sense of deep connection and aliveness.
Artist Hu Yuehua presented a large-scale textile installation titled "Weaving Nature" at the 13th edition of Design Shanghai. The work is a dense, wall-like garden composed of stitched and dyed cotton and linen elements in indigo and ochre, forming leaves, blooms, and growths that highlight the artist's hand through loose threads, raw edges, and pleats.
Artist Henry Wood has created a series of wooden figures depicting doomed explorers on Mars, titled 'We went to Mars and it was a disaster.' Each lanky, meticulously carved figure represents a colonist with a specific tragic history, such as being stranded or buried, imagining a future archaeological dig on the terraformed planet. The work reflects on humanity's ambitious but potentially flawed drive to colonize other worlds, using the medium of wood and ancient relic aesthetics to critique grand narratives of exploration and progress. Wood's process, influenced by travel and traditional techniques, transforms speculative science fiction into tangible artifacts that question the costs of expansion and the stories we tell about our future.
Photographer Austin Bell documented all 2,549 outdoor basketball courts in Hong Kong, creating the series SHOOTING HOOPS. Using a drone and Google Maps, he captured the courts' vivid colors and geometric designs from an aerial perspective over 140 days of shooting, sometimes photographing hundreds in a single day.
Artist Stephen Morrison is presenting a solo exhibition titled 'Dog Show #5: Field Recordings' at SLAG&RX gallery in New York. The show features his vibrant, trompe-l'œil paintings that embed canine features into compositions of everyday objects and textiles, referencing his personal connections to Paris, New York City, and Maine.
German photographer and visual artist Jan Erik Waider has released a new series of aerial drone videos capturing a rare natural phenomenon in the Baltic Sea. The footage shows a thin, fresh layer of ice forming intricate, polygon-like shapes on the rolling sea surface, creating a hypnotic, undulating pattern that moves rhythmically without breaking.
Artist Goran Konjevod creates elegant, functional vases using precise origami techniques, transforming thin paper into forms that mimic the visual weight and presence of porcelain. His works, such as "Grey Curves Vase" and "Artist's Palette Vase," explore the relationship between material, form, and function through organic shapes and nuanced color gradients.
New York-based photographer Ben Zank's work, characterized by faceless subjects in ordinary settings evoking uncanny emotions, was featured in an outdoor installation at the Festival Cargo Les Photographiques in Saint-Nazaire, France. His large-scale reproductions were affixed to wooden pallets and brick walls, blending minimalist, earth-toned portraits with the festival's sparse grounds.
Photographer Thomas Jackson creates striking images featuring multi-colored fabric installations billowing in natural landscapes. His work, which appears digitally manipulated but is captured in-camera with minimal post-production, explores the tension between nature and artificiality.
Marc Fornes / THEVERYMANY has installed a new sculptural pavilion titled "L'Ile Folie" in Cary Park, North Carolina. The structure, made from thousands of digitally fabricated, ultra-thin aluminum panels, reinterprets the historical architectural folly—a decorative, non-functional landscape feature—as a contemporary, skin-is-structure canopy perched over a pond.
Japanese artist Shinsuke Inoue creates small, emotionally resonant wood sculptures of human figures. His practice began about ten years ago when he carved a likeness of his child, sparking a dedicated focus on figurative woodcarving that captures universal human essence rather than specific portraits.
Expo Chicago, the city's major international art fair, has opened its 2024 edition at Navy Pier with a redesigned floor plan intended to improve visitor flow and gallery visibility. The fair features over 170 galleries from 29 countries, with a notable contingent of Chicago-based exhibitors and a special section dedicated to art from the African diaspora.