The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute has opened a new exhibition titled "Costume Art," featuring a design by Robert Wun displayed in the "Vital Body" section. The show opened on Saturday, May 2, 2026, in New York, as captured in a photograph by Charles Sykes for Invision.
CULTURED and Aritzia co-hosted a dinner party at the former Fred Segal store on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles during Frieze Week. The event celebrated Aritzia's Artistic License series, featuring photographer Gregory Crewdson, whose work appears on shopping bags and in stores. Guests included Aritzia CEO Jennifer Wong, CULTURED Editor-in-Chief Sarah Harrelson, artists Chloe Wise and Maya Man, curator Essence Harden, and others from the art and fashion worlds. The evening featured a multi-course meal, Krug champagne, and copies of CULTURED's Entertainers Issue.
La mostra dell’artista Marinella Senatore a Milano è una festa di nome e di fatto
Marinella Senatore's solo exhibition "FESTA!" opens at Mazzoleni's Milan space, marking both the artist's first show at the gallery and the gallery's 40th anniversary. The exhibition presents new works including sketches, drawings, and embroidered tapestries that reinterpret Baroque public celebrations as participatory, community-driven art. The tapestries, produced in collaboration with the Chanakya school in Mumbai, feature motifs from 17th- and 18th-century festivities—ephemeral architecture, light displays, and fireworks—transformed into contemporary banners that activate the gallery space.
Ecuador has selected artist Oscar Santillán to represent the nation at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026. Curated by Manuela Moscoso and organized by the Museum of Anthropological and Contemporary Art (MAAC), the pavilion will feature a collaboration between Santillán and the collective Tawna. The exhibition, titled after the collective, will explore Andean-Amazonian contexts through a dialogue on territory, indigenous knowledge systems, and coexistence.
Lebanese artist and Bard College professor Tania El Khoury discusses her multidisciplinary practice and her recent experience living through the escalation of conflict in Beirut. The interview highlights her interactive performance piece, "The Search for Power," which uses her own 2018 wedding blackout as a jumping-off point to investigate the colonial roots of Lebanon's systemic infrastructure failures. Originally set for a Beirut run in March, the production was postponed due to the outbreak of war.
Com’è la mostra internazionale della Biennale di Venezia? Recensione di “In minor keys” di Koyo Kouoh
The 2026 Venice Biennale, titled "In minor keys" and curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, opens to the public on May 9 amid controversies including the absence of the president's name in the colophon at the Arsenale entrance. The exhibition, organized by Kouoh's team (Rory Tsapayi, Siddharta Mitter, Marie Helene Pereira, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, and Rasha Salty), unfolds across the Giardini and the Arsenale's Corderie, featuring works that balance strength and beauty with a harmonious mix of voices and themes. The Giardini section is particularly compelling, with a non-linear, polycentric layout that feels like a living organism, while the Arsenale offers further depth.
Cosa c’è dietro alla scelta di un vestito? Lo abbiamo chiesto a uno degli stylist più famosi del mondo
Tom Eerebout, a renowned stylist and fashion consultant known for his work with Lady Gaga, Kylie Minogue, and Austin Butler, has curated an exhibition titled "Exposure – Il potere di essere visti" at ITS Arcademy in Trieste. The show, which runs alongside the ITS Contest where Eerebout serves as a judge for the third consecutive year, explores styling as a tool for constructing identity and shaping contemporary visual culture. In an interview, Eerebout discusses his creative process, his early childhood experiments with costumes, and his belief that styling is not about appearance but about how we exist.
Il mitico film “Novecento” di Bertolucci nella sua Parma diventa una grande mostra
A major exhibition titled "Bernardo Bertolucci. Il Novecento" has opened at the Palazzo del Governatore in Parma, Italy, marking the 50th anniversary of Bertolucci's epic film "Novecento" (1976). The show is structured as a visual experience across 25 rooms and four sections, exploring the film's dialectic between collective history and intimate gaze. It features video, drawings, photographs, production materials, and artworks by artists such as Franco Angeli, Renato Guttuso, Taner Ceylan, and Mario Schifano, all drawn from private collections. The exhibition's first room sets the tone with a video juxtaposing the film's opening credits over Pellizza da Volpedo's painting "Il Quarto Stato" and a close-up of the young Olmo holding a frog, encapsulating the tension between political epic and sensory detail.
Produrre cinema dentro e con i videogiochi. A Milano ci fanno un festival (da 30 anni)
The Milan Machinima Festival recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of machinima, the practice of creating audiovisual works and films within video game environments. The event, curated by scholar Matteo Bittanti at IULM University, explored the medium's dual origins in 1996: the community-driven "vernacular" style seen in the Quake-based 'Diary of a Camper' and the artistic approach pioneered by Miltos Manetas in his work 'Miracle'.
A Roma c’è un festival dedicato al cinema contemporaneo e alle sperimentazioni audiovisive. L’intervista
The Ru-mòre Cinema and Audiovisual Experimentation Festival is launching in Rome’s San Lorenzo district from April 14 to 18. Evolving from the former Barkov Film Festival, the event features a diverse program of short films, screenwriting competitions, and a dedicated section for virtual reality. The festival utilizes multiple local venues, including Cinema Tibur and the Mercato di San Lorenzo, to host international works and industry panels.
“Lo stato del mondo? Un atto di follia”. Intervista con Ai Weiwei che arriva a Milano con un’installazione a sorpresa
Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has unveiled a surprise site-specific installation in Milan, created in collaboration with the historic Venetian textile house Rubelli. Located in the Rubelli showroom for Fuorisalone 2026, the immersive work features a large-scale lampas fabric woven with silk and gold threads, depicting symbols of surveillance, censorship, and political struggle such as handcuffs, the Twitter bird, and alpacas.
Fragilità e resistenza di un’artista dell’Iran in mostra a Roma
The Galleria Anna Marra in Rome is hosting "Assemblages," the first Italian solo exhibition of Iranian artist Sepideh Salehi. The show features works that blend collage, Japanese paper, photography, and drawing to depict Iranian women living in the United States who have shared experiences of displacement and political upheaval. Salehi’s figures often avert their gaze or conceal their faces, symbolizing a "calligraphy of refusal" and a quiet resistance against the historical traumas of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war.
Space One Eleven Art Center in Birmingham is launching two concurrent solo exhibitions: "Navegando la Masculinidad de la Frontera / Navigating the Border’s Masculinity" by El Paso-based artist José Villalobos and "see saw sawn" by local sculptor Jason Tanner Young. Villalobos’s work utilizes sculpture and performance to deconstruct machismo and queer identity within Norteño culture, while Young, an Associate Professor at the University of Montevallo, presents a body of work rooted in his extensive background in wood and expanded sculpture practices.
Andrea Romano presents a new body of work at Federica Schiavo Gallery in Rome, titled “All The Synecdoches And Metonymies In The World Make Up One Great Metaphor.” The exhibition explores the intersection of the artist’s private life and professional practice through a series of fragmented forms, residues, and reflections. By utilizing linguistic concepts as a framework, Romano investigates how individual parts of an experience attempt to coalesce into a unified whole, even when that totality remains elusive.
嶋田美子：滅私｜愛護 @ オオタファインアーツ
Ota Fine Arts in Tokyo is hosting a solo exhibition by Yoshiko Shimada titled "Selfless Devotion / Loving Care," running from March 14 to May 16, 2026. The exhibition features a significant selection of Shimada’s seminal works from the early 1990s, including "A Woman Shooting II," "A House of Comfort," and "Tied to Apron Strings." These pieces utilize photography, installation, and found objects to confront difficult historical narratives.
Architects Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of the firm MOS discuss the concept of "polycrisis"—the intersection of economic, political, and ecological failures—and its impact on architectural form. The conversation highlights a growing void between the formal aesthetic project of architecture and the urgent political realities of the modern world. Sample specifically addresses how the dominance of political and regulatory restrictions in collective housing has stifled formal innovation, often reducing architecture to a mere byproduct of governance rather than a tool for social or cultural expression.
Guillermo del Toro received a rare painting of Frankenstein's Monster by the late British artist Josh Kirby as a gift from collaborators during Oscars festivities, despite his film not winning Best Picture. The painting, which depicts Boris Karloff's iconic portrayal, was previously owned by famed horror collector Forrest J. Ackerman and was sourced through a gallery specializing in pop culture art.
Whitestone Gallery Hong Kong presents 'Intersection', a duo exhibition featuring Japanese artists Kisho Kakutani (b.1993) and Kosuke Harasawa (b.1997), running from 16 May to 4 July 2026. Kakutani's works capture bright, humid mornings with frosted, detailed depictions of beaches and cityscapes, while Harasawa focuses on rain-soaked Hong Kong night scenes populated by ghostly figures with transparent umbrellas, blending nostalgia with urban transformation.
Esther Schipper Berlin presents 'Hyperarousal', Celeste Rapone's first exhibition with the gallery, featuring three new paintings that explore the intersection of sensuous stimulation and nervous tension. The works depict female protagonists in narratively dense, ambiguous scenes that allegorize millennial angst, using techniques like alla prima painting and color-based formal constraints. Key pieces include 'While Waiting' (2025), showing a figure with pepper spray and a digital camera, and 'Den' (2026), where intertwined figures follow a self-defense tutorial on an iPad.
Qualia Contemporary Art in Palo Alto is currently hosting two concurrent exhibitions, "Emergence" and "Tidal Traces," featuring the work of Yulia Pinkusevich, Cathy Lu, and Stella Zhang. The shows explore the four classical elements—fire, earth, air, and water—through a diverse range of media including large-scale ceramic incense sculptures, paintings incorporating charcoal and ash, and mixed-media works inspired by oceanic tides.
Seattle-based artist Lauren Boilini has reached a significant career milestone with the simultaneous opening of her first museum exhibition at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art and her first solo gallery show, "The Good Death," at J. Rinehart Gallery. Boilini’s practice is rooted in deep scientific research, including residencies at biological stations and insectariums, which she translates into large-scale, frenetic paintings of animals and ecosystems. Her current work explores the intersection of animal behavior and the human condition through dense, layered compositions that blur the lines between struggle and pattern.
South African artist Lulama Wolf presents 'The Architecture of Memory,' an online-only exhibition hosted by THK Gallery. Wolf utilizes a distinct material language of pigmented sand and acrylic to create tactile surfaces that reference the weathered walls of domestic and sacred spaces. Her work moves beyond simple representation, using geometric abstraction and earth-based materials to explore the intersection of personal history and collective generational memory.
Gallery Chang is hosting a solo exhibition titled "A Bold Attention" by South Korean artist Suh Yongsun at its New York location from April 9 to May 2, 2026. The exhibition features fifteen works, including self-portraits, historical scenes such as those involving King Danjong, and contemporary urban observations of New York locations like Rockefeller Center and Brooklyn.
The HUB-Robeson Galleries at Penn State University will host a solo exhibition by Jamaican-born interdisciplinary artist Krystle Lemonias titled "Puss an dawg nuh ave di same luck." Running from March 5 through July 19 in Art Alley, the showcase features textile-based installations and mixed-media works that utilize repurposed materials, such as baby clothes, to explore the intersections of labor, identity, and the Black diaspora.
Billionaire collector Ken Griffin has quietly acquired a second rare first printing of the US Constitution, known as the Van Sinderen copy, through a private deal after it was pulled from a planned Sotheby’s auction in 2022. Griffin, who previously paid $43.2 million at Sotheby’s in 2021 for another copy, now holds the only two copies of the 1787 document still in private hands. The newly acquired document will go on public display starting May 27 at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York, headlining an exhibition titled “The Promise of Liberty” that includes other foundational texts.
The European Commission has issued a 30-day ultimatum to the Venice Biennale, threatening to withdraw a €2 million ($2.3 million) grant for the 2028 edition unless the organization addresses concerns regarding the Russian Pavilion's inclusion in 2026. The Commission alleges that hosting a government-funded delegation violates EU sanctions and provides a cultural platform for Russian state interests amidst the ongoing war in Ukraine. The Biennale's president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, must respond by May 11, just two days after the exhibition's public opening.
Artist Eimear Walshe, who represented Ireland at the 2024 Venice Biennale, will stand trial alongside activists Áine Treanor and Aindriú de Buitléir, collectively known as the Shannon Three. They are charged with trespassing and illegally accessing a runway at Shannon Airport in County Clare during a 2024 protest where they raised a Palestinian flag and held a sign reading "US military out of Ireland." The protest, which shut down the airport for over half an hour, was staged on Land Day to draw attention to the conflict in Gaza and the use of the airport by US military and civilian aircraft allegedly transporting munitions to Israel.
A portrait of Anne Boleyn at Hever Castle in England has been revealed through infrared reflectography to have been altered to show her hands, countering rumors that she was a witch with six fingers. Tree-ring analysis dates the painting to around 1583, during the reign of her daughter Elizabeth I, making it the earliest known likeness of Boleyn. The underdrawing lacked hands, suggesting the unknown artist deliberately added them to rebut claims by Catholic activist Nicholas Sanders that Boleyn had six fingers.
The U.S. State Department's annual report on gifts to senior officials revealed that former President Joe Biden received a painting valued at $19,000 from Angolan President João Lourenço in 2024. The artwork, titled *Marimba*, was created by self-taught Angolan painter Augusto Guizef Guilherme. Other officials, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, also received various artworks from foreign leaders, all of which were subsequently transferred to the National Archives.
Shanti Escalante-De Mattei's column 'Link Rot' examines the debate over generative AI in creative fields, focusing on the argument that AI is just another tool like a paintbrush. The article critiques this view by highlighting how AI is being used by clients and studios to pressure animators, cut pay, and impose unrealistic deadlines, while the technology was built on ethically questionable datasets scraped from public websites without permission.