Several major art exhibitions are concluding their runs this spring, offering a final chance for public viewing. Highlights include a rare Caravaggio painting on display, immersive installations featuring streetscapes covered in orchids, and a showcase of colorful figurative works by German Expressionist Gabriele Münter.
Artist Ida Ekblad has converted a 1960s Brutalist villa in Oslo into a dynamic, non-commercial studio and project space named 'Villa Ekblad.' The space serves as her primary studio but is also designed to host spontaneous collaborations, workshops, and experimental projects with other artists, functioning as a creative laboratory removed from market pressures.
Charlotte Perriand, the pioneering French designer and architect, has died at age 96. Her career spanned most of the 20th century, during which she collaborated with giants like Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, creating iconic modernist furniture and championing a vision of functional, democratic design.
Christie’s generated $1.1 billion in back-to-back evening sales on May 18, driven by record-breaking prices for major artworks. The top lot was Jackson Pollock’s 1948 drip painting *Number 7A*, which sold for $181.2 million with fees, tripling the artist’s previous auction record. Other highlights included Constantin Brancusi’s *Danaïde* (ca. 1913) at $107.6 million, Mark Rothko’s *No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe)* (1964) at $98.4 million, and Alice Neel’s *Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia)* (1967) at $5.7 million. The sales featured works from the collections of S. I. Newhouse and Agnes Gund.
Thousands of protesters marched through Venice to demonstrate against Israel's presence at the Venice Biennale, leading many national pavilions to close in solidarity. Pavilions from Austria, Belgium, Egypt, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, and over a dozen other countries shut fully or partially, with some displaying signs reading "We Stand with Palestine." The Israeli pavilion remained closed for its exhibition opening, and armed police clashed with protesters. The main exhibition, curated by Koyo Kouoh, stayed open initially but the Arsenale closed by late afternoon with riot police outside. The 24-hour strike, organized by Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) and Italian activist groups, was described as the largest protest in Biennale history.
The Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) has announced a 24-hour strike for Friday, May 8, coinciding with previews of the 2026 Venice Biennale, alongside a protest rally organized by local group Biennalocene and Italian trade unions. Earlier this week, sixty artists staged a sonic protest at the Giardini entrance to draw attention to the plight of those affected by genocide and war in Palestine and elsewhere. The Latvian pavilion has also encouraged attendees to wear a design by artist Krišs Salmanis reading “Death in Venice – Russia go home!” Meanwhile, dissident artists Pussy Riot stormed the Russian pavilion waving Ukrainian flags, and the entire 2026 Biennale jury resigned after the decision to exclude countries whose leaders are charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court from competing for top prizes.
Sung Tieu's installations, characterized by austere, bureaucratic surfaces, explore the hidden architectures of power embedded in everyday systems. The article examines her series of works that deconstruct administrative forms used in asylum procedures, reducing them to blank spaces and quantified grids to expose how institutional power operates through seemingly neutral documents. Her exhibition "In Cold Print" at Nottingham Contemporary physically manifests these themes by using steel fences to control viewer movement, drawing direct parallels between minimalist sculpture and the dehumanizing design of border controls.
The exhibition "Instructions for Unrest: Art Against Complacency" has opened at Art Produce Gallery in San Diego, featuring a group of artists who utilize their work as a tool for political and social disruption. Curated by Alessandra Moctezuma in collaboration with the nonprofit Space 4 Art, the show presents a diverse range of media aimed at addressing issues such as immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ protections, and environmental policy.
A guide to nine must-see art exhibitions in Miami highlights current and upcoming shows across the city. Featured exhibits include Random International's interactive light installation "Alone Together" at Superblue Miami, the Freedom Tower's centennial exhibitions "Libertad" and "We Carry Our Homes With Us" at the Museum of Art and Design, the first solo show of twin photographers Elliot & Erick Jiménez at Pérez Art Museum Miami, and Weerdo's graffiti exhibit "Signs of the Times" at the Museum of Graffiti. Also listed are the Smithsonian's "EYEJAMMIE" photo collection at The Art of Hip Hop and a Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at Frost Science.
The article previews the 61st Venice Biennale, opening May 9 and running through November 22, highlighting early controversies. The five-person Golden Lion jury, led by Brazilian curator Solange Farkas, resigned after declaring they would not consider pavilions from countries under International Criminal Court investigation, targeting the Israel pavilion and its artist Belu-Simion Fainaru. Separately, the US pavilion has drawn scrutiny from the New York Times over its selection process, with commissioner Jenni Parido (a former pet food store owner) tapping curator Jeffrey Uslip and sculptor Alma Allen, bypassing traditional funders like the Ford and Mellon foundations.
Jean-Michel Basquiat's 1981 painting *Crowns (Peso Neto)* will headline Sotheby's Contemporary Evening Sale this November, carrying an estimate of $35–45 million—the highest ever for a Basquiat work from that year. The painting, never before offered at auction, debuted at Annina Nosei Gallery in 1982 and was later shown at documenta 7. It will be publicly exhibited in London, Paris, and New York before the sale, which coincides with the opening of Sotheby's new global headquarters in the former Whitney Museum's Breuer Building.
Italy has announced a reduction in its VAT on art sales from 22 percent to 5 percent, the lowest rate in the European Union. The move, approved in a cabinet meeting and set to take effect within days, follows sustained pressure from Italian galleries, artists, auction houses, and art market players. The new rate must be approved by parliament within 60 days to become permanent. The change aligns with an EU directive allowing member states to lower taxes on art sales to at least 5 percent, and comes after the government initially resisted calls for reform.
Carla Hemlock, a Kanien’keha:ka artist, has seen a surge in interest from curators and institutions, allowing her to work at her own pace. Her collaborative installation with her son, filmmaker Raohserahawi Hemlock, titled *In the Arms of the Natural World*, has been donated to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) and is now on view in the exhibition *Rising Suns: Art from the Confederacies of the Great Lakes and Rivers*. The piece, featuring three quilts and two films, explores the legacy of residential schools with what the artists describe as absolute delicacy and care.
The article reports that U.S. artists like Lucia Hierro are increasingly forced to pay for their own museum exhibitions and public commissions as institutional budgets shrink. Hierro’s ambitious installation centered on a 7.5-foot monobloc chair required $35,000–$40,000 for fabrication alone, far exceeding what the commissioning institution could provide. The project moved forward only after support from her gallerist and a new fund from Miami-based nonprofit Fountainhead Arts, which received 96 applications requesting $1.8 million—14 times its available $125,000 in grants. The article highlights that even artists selected for the Venice Biennale face such funding gaps.
Llyn Foulkes, the iconoclastic Los Angeles artist known for his defiantly independent and multidisciplinary practice, died on 20 November at age 91. A painter, jazz musician, and provocateur, Foulkes resisted commercial commodification throughout his career, creating work that ranged from Pop Art-inflected paintings to political assemblages incorporating Mickey Mouse imagery. His death was announced by Kent Fine Art, a New York gallery that had published several books on his work.
Borough of Manhattan Community College's Shirley Fiterman Art Center will present two concurrent exhibitions from September 10 to December 20, 2025: Courtney McClellan: Simulations and Victoria Dugger: Late Bloomer. McClellan's installation features photographs of mock courtrooms at law schools across the American South, exploring performance and the law through what she calls 'applied fiction.' Dugger's mixed-media works, including painting and sculpture, use playful yet grotesque imagery to interrogate growth, identity, and embodiment as a Black, disabled woman. Both artists, who live and work in Georgia, will participate in an opening discussion and reception on September 10.
The Los Angeles Times article highlights a curated list of free wellness events in Los Angeles for May, with a focus on the first annual Sacred Music and Healing Festival at the World Stage Performance Gallery in Leimert Park on May 23. Executive Director Dwight Trible explains that the festival blends jazz, Indigenous traditions, and healing arts to offer a wellness experience rooted in culture and community, featuring music, yoga, tai chi, and presentations on herbs and meditation.
The Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, has announced its summer 2026 public tour program, beginning May 24 with weekly Tang Guide Tours led by trained student ambassadors. The museum will also host three curator-led tours: Rachel Seligman will lead tours of 'All These Growing Things' (June 11) and 'Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest' (August 27), while Dayton Director Ian Berry will guide a tour of 'Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes' (July 16). Additional summer programming includes the Upbeat on the Roof concert series, Frances Day community open house, and Family Saturday art-making events.
Boston Art Review (BAR) has published an article titled “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone” that reconstructs the life of the 19th-century sculptor Edmonia Lewis across fragmented historical records. The piece examines Lewis’s career, her neoclassical marble works, and the challenges of piecing together her biography due to limited archival materials.
Hong Kong Secretary for Culture, Sports and Tourism Rosanna Law Shuk-pui visited Venice to support the Hong Kong Collateral Event at the 61st Venice Biennale, themed “Fermata: Hong Kong in Venice.” The exhibition features artists Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui, with five installations exploring poetic rhythms in everyday life, curated by the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA). Law also viewed American artist Nick Cave’s sculpture *Amalga (Plot)* and announced the Venice Biennale Internship Programme 2026, which will send six arts-background interns to Venice for a six-week residency.
The article reviews the first-ever British exhibition dedicated to Spanish Baroque painter Francisco de Zurbarán, held at the National Gallery in London. The show brings together 40 works from collections spanning Seville to San Diego, featuring his hyper-real religious paintings and radiant still lifes, described as a 'magnificently choreographed' trawl through his oeuvre. Critics praise the exhibition for its dramatic lighting and revelatory presentation, though some note uneven quality in his later works.
The Art Institute of Chicago is currently hosting "Matisse's Jazz: Rhythms in Color," an exhibition centered on Henri Matisse's 1947 artist's book "Jazz." The show, on view until June 1, features the iconic cut-paper works Matisse created after a 1941 surgery left him unable to paint. Visitors enter directly into the "Jazz" gallery before backtracking through earlier works, offering a chronological journey that culminates in the cut-paper technique. Wait times can exceed 90 minutes, but the museum recommends joining a virtual queue and exploring other galleries in the meantime.
In an interview marking the sixth anniversary of his gallery, Max Goelitz reflects on the founding and evolution of his two-location operation in Munich and Berlin. He discusses how his decade at Häusler Contemporary, where he served as director, prepared him for the unpredictable nature of running his own gallery. The COVID-19 pandemic forced a strategic pivot from international ambitions to a focus on the local German market, which proved unexpectedly sustainable. Goelitz also addresses the current challenges facing galleries, including generational shifts and a more difficult art market, while advocating for an "old-school" reconsideration of what defines a gallery in times of transition.
The Branch Museum of Design in Richmond, Virginia, has opened a new exhibition titled “Imagining Best Products,” which revisits the radical architectural and graphic designs of the defunct catalog showroom retailer Best Products. Founded in 1957 by Frances and Sydney Lewis, the company commissioned experimental storefronts from architect James Wines and the firm SITE, creating iconic “anti-buildings” that challenged commercial architecture. The show features architectural drawings, models, photographs, sketches, and printed materials, and runs through June 21, 2026.
The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami will present two complementary exhibitions on Afro-Cuban art from May 1 to Sept. 12, 2025, both guest-curated by Alejandro de la Fuente, director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University. "El Pasado Mío/My Own Past" features 43 Afro-Cuban artists from the 1820s to the present in an amplified version with 83 works, while "Afrocubanismo: Highlights from the Ramón and Nercys Cernuda Collection" focuses on early 20th-century Afrocubanista works, including pieces by Wifredo Lam.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art has opened a new exhibition titled "Costume Art" ahead of the 2026 Met Gala, featuring mannequins with diverse body types—including larger, pregnant, trans, and disabled bodies—created through 3D printing and based on real-life models. The show pairs roughly 400 artworks with garments, aiming to shift the traditional perspective by viewing art through the lens of fashion rather than the reverse.
The Musée d’Orsay in Paris has opened a new gallery dedicated exclusively to artworks suspected of being looted or forcibly sold during the Nazi occupation of France. Among the 13 works on display is Edgar Degas's *Dinner at the Ball* (1919), originally owned by Jewish collector Fernand Ochsé, who was deported to Auschwitz with his wife in 1941. The painting passed through multiple hands before being identified as one of over 100,000 artworks plundered by the Nazis. The museum has assembled a team of six provenance researchers to spend three years tracing the original owners of these works, which are part of the "MNR" (Musées nationaux récupération) collection—some 2,200 pieces deemed too important to sell but whose owners remain unknown.
The Met Gala 2026 will take place on the first Monday in May, with the theme "Costume Art" and a dress code of "Fashion is Art." The accompanying exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art explores depictions of the dressed body throughout time, pairing garments with artworks from the museum's collection. Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour are named co-hosts, while Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos serve as honorary chairs. The event will debut the newly named Condé M. Nast Galleries, a permanent 12,000-square-foot space in the museum's Great Hall, allowing the exhibition to run for nine months from May 10, 2026 to January 10, 2027.
San Francisco museums are navigating a mix of upcoming exhibitions and financial challenges in May 2026. SFMOMA is closing "KAWS: Family" on May 3 and opening "Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal" from May 16 to September 13. The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts has suspended operations due to funding issues, and SOMArts is also facing a budget gap. Meanwhile, the Museum of Craft and Design presents "Video Craft" through August 16, and the Letterform Archive hosts "Black Memory Scholar: The Language of Storytellers" and "Piet Zwart: Brand Architect." SFMOMA has announced three SECA award winners—CrossLypka, Em Kettner, and Chanell Stone—who will exhibit from December 2026 to May 2027, and the museum continues to showcase "Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10" and new installations by Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg + Coosje van Bruggen, and Rose B Simpson.