An Abandoned Shipyard in Venice Is Getting a New Life Thanks to This Congolese Choreographer

Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula is staging "The Galeazze Project," a performance in a 16th-century shipyard complex in Venice that has been inaccessible since World War II and never open to the public. Commissioned by the nonprofit Scuola Piccola Zattere, the work will bring up to 500 people into the 32,291-square-foot open-air ruin for two nights during the 2026 Venice Biennale preview week. The rental fee from the performance will help stabilize and restore the floors of the historic Galeazze site.

Le CMN perd le Mont-Saint-Michel

The article reports on several developments in the art world: the Centre des Monuments Nationaux (CMN) loses management of Mont-Saint-Michel; the Venice Biennale opens amid controversy; a law on the restitution of cultural property looted during colonization is definitively adopted; the V&A East museum targets younger audiences; in Giverny, the Monet legacy does not benefit everyone; and the market for the Nabis artists is becoming more structured.

LACMA inaugurates its new building

Le Lacma inaugure son nouveau bâtiment

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has inaugurated its new David Geffen Galleries building, a massive horizontal structure spanning Wilshire Boulevard. Designed by architect Peter Zumthor, the $720 million project features 32,000 square meters of exhibition space across 90 non-hierarchical galleries, a free public park level, and a radical departure from traditional museum departmental organization.

Who Owns the Megayachts Docked Outside the Venice Biennale?

The article examines the megayachts docked outside the Venice Biennale, focusing on the 170-foot vessel 'Private GG' owned by Giancarlo Giammetti, cofounder of the Valentino fashion house. Giammetti, a serious art collector, was in Venice for the Biennale opening, posting photos of artworks and a dinner with actress Salma Hayek and her husband François-Henri Pinault, a major art collector. The yacht, built in 2022 by CRN, features luxury amenities including a jacuzzi, cinema saloon, and beach club.

‘It’s a world heritage site, but it’s my home’: the last resident of Casa Milà on life in Gaudí’s masterwork

Ana Viladomiu, a 70-year-old writer, is the last remaining tenant of Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Milà (La Pedrera) in Barcelona, a UNESCO World Heritage site that receives about a million visitors annually. She has lived in the luminous apartment since 1988, originally moving in with her then-husband Fernando Amat, owner of the iconic design store Vinçon. Viladomiu holds a rare renta antigua (fixed-rent contract) that allows her to stay until she or Amat dies, after which the not-for-profit foundation managing the building will take ownership. The rest of the building now houses offices and cultural event spaces.

LACMA's David Geffen Galleries invites visitors to get lost and move through art without a set path.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has opened its new David Geffen Galleries building to the public. Designed by architect Peter Zumthor, the 900-foot-long structure features a non-linear, single-level layout with abundant natural light, intentionally encouraging visitors to wander without a set path. The inaugural exhibition, organized by 45 curators, abandons traditional art historical categories in favor of a thematic presentation centered on major bodies of water and global trade routes.

Yves Saint Laurent–Owned Mirrors Shatter Record, Selling for $33.5 Million

A unique set of fifteen mirrors custom-made for fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé sold at Sotheby’s for $33.5 million, setting a new auction record for the artist Claude Lalanne. The gilt bronze, copper, and mirrored glass mirrors, created between 1974 and 1985, were originally displayed in the couple’s Paris apartment and were purchased from the collection of Jean and Terry de Gunzburg.

WATCH | Steelman to host studio tour with Arts and the Park Saturday and Sunday

Bethannie Newsom Steelman will host a studio tour at 415 Park Ave. in Hot Springs on Saturday and Sunday, starting at 11 a.m., as part of Arts and the Park. The event features live painting by Steelman, musical performances by Ricko Donovan, DJ Schaeffer, Gino Del Ray, and the band Inoculated Log, as well as New Orleans-style snowballs from Spa City Snowballs. Steelman, who creates murals for businesses, began renting her studio in April and is excited to share her creative process with the public.

Metropolitan Museum receives $23m to endow internship programme

On 30 April, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced a $23m pledge from the Rubio Butterfield Foundation, led by newly elected trustee Jennifer Rubio and her husband Stewart Butterfield, to permanently endow the museum's internship program. The internships, offered for nearly 30 years with 100 participants annually, have only been paid since 2021. The article also explores broader trends in museum philanthropy, featuring insights from former directors Gary Vikan, Gary Tinterow, and Maxwell Anderson on how donors are often guided to fund endowments for curatorial positions, operations, or awards rather than art acquisitions.

Linda McCartney Retrospective Opens May 23 at Fenimore Art Museum

The Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown will open "The Linda McCartney Retrospective: From the Light" on May 23, running through September 7. The exhibition showcases the life and work of Linda McCartney (1941–1998), a celebrated photographer known for her portraits of musicians like The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, and The Beatles. It highlights her career from early editorial work at "Town & Country" to becoming the first female photographer to have a cover photo on "Rolling Stone" magazine, as well as her personal photographs of husband Paul McCartney and their family.

Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection | Broad Strokes Blog

The article features an interview between NMWA Assistant Curator Hannah Shambroom and collector Komal Shah about the exhibition 'Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection.' The show, drawn from Shah and her husband Gaurav Garg's collection, presents approximately 80 works by women artists exploring abstraction, including pieces by Howardena Pindell, Sarah Sze, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Jacqueline Humphries. Shah discusses her transition from a technology career to art collecting, her focus on women working in abstraction, and how the exhibition emerged after publishing a book on the collection in 2023, with curation by Cecilia Alemani.

Helen Frankenthaler at Kunstmuseum Basel

Kunstmuseum Basel has opened a major exhibition of Helen Frankenthaler's work, running from April 18 to August 23, 2026, featuring over 50 large-format pieces spanning six decades. The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation loaned 37 works for the show. The article also notes recent auction results, including Christie's offering of 'The Last Minute in April' (1974) for an estimated $2–3 million, and Sotheby's sales of 'St. John' (1971) for $2.1085 million and 'Perseus' (1983) for $2.804 million. Previous European exhibitions of Frankenthaler's work are listed, including shows at Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Museum Folkwang, Palazzo Strozzi, and Museum Reinhard Ernst.

Raymond Pettibon, the Artist Behind Some of the Most Iconic Album Covers

A new exhibition titled "Nervous Breakdown" at the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen, Germany, presents the most comprehensive collection of Raymond Pettibon's album cover art to date. The show draws from over 200 works in the collection of Stefan Thull, spanning Pettibon's record, CD, and cassette covers from 1979 to the present, including iconic designs for Sonic Youth's "Goo" and Black Flag's logo. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by the museum and David Zwirner Books.

The Artists Who Put Their Bodies Into the Work

This article from Google News, dated May 3, 2026, profiles a selection of artists who have used their own bodies as central elements in their work. It draws a connection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's spring Costume Institute exhibition, "Costume Art," which places fashion in dialogue with other artworks. The roundup includes Marina Abramović, known for her 2010 MoMA performance "The Artist Is Present"; Chris Burden, who staged dangerous works like "Shoot" (1971); David Hammons, creator of the "Body Prints" series; Frida Kahlo, whose painting "The Broken Column" (1944) depicts her own physical pain; Ana Mendieta, whose "Silueta" series used her figure in the landscape; and Yoko Ono, a conceptual artist with a significant body-based practice.

Lee Miller: Fearless

The Art Institute of Chicago announces 'Lee Miller: Fearless,' the first comprehensive survey of photographer Lee Miller's work in over 25 years, running from August 29 to December 7, 2026. The exhibition spans Miller's multifaceted career as a fashion model, Surrealist innovator, portraitist, and World War II battlefield correspondent for Vogue, featuring iconic images such as 'Self-Portrait with Headband' (about 1932) and 'Dressed for War' (1942). It is organized in collaboration with Tate Britain and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, curated by Matthew S. Witkovsky, Hilary Floe, Saskia Flower, and Michal Goldschmidt.

New Perspectives: "Roy Lichtenstein in the Studio"

The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) and the Nasher Sculpture Center have jointly opened "Roy Lichtenstein in the Studio," a landmark two-venue exhibition celebrating the pop artist's centennial. Organized by curators Dr. Catherine Craft, Ade Omotosho, and Dr. Emily Friedman, the show features over 50 works gifted by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, which is closing its operations. The exhibition marks the first collaboration between the neighboring institutions since "Matisse as Sculptor" nearly 20 years ago, and includes prints, drawings, maquettes, and sculptures that establish Dallas as a study center for Lichtenstein's work.

Scene Calendar: Harn exhibit on Florida, 'Million Dollar Quarter' at Hipp

The article is a scene calendar listing upcoming events in the Gainesville, Florida area, including art exhibitions and a theatrical production. Key visual art events include the Santa Fe College Student Juried Art Exhibition, the Santa Fe Springs Plein Air Paintout, the Gainesville Fine Arts Association's 'NEXT: High School and College Juried Exhibition', and the Harn Museum of Art's exhibition 'Florida in the Frame: A Century of Artists’ Reflections on the Sunshine State', which features works by Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and Florida Highwaymen painters. The calendar also lists non-visual-art events such as the Levitt AMP Alachua Music Series and the Hippodrome Theatre's production of 'Million Dollar Quartet'.

Review: Getting lost in the art is the best part of LACMA’s new revisionist fever dream of a museum

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has opened its new David Geffen Galleries, a radical reinvention of the museum experience. The installation, conceived by director Michael Govan and architect Peter Zumthor, abandons traditional chronological and departmental silos, instead creating a continuous, curving flow of art from across time, place, and medium. Visitors are encouraged to wander and get lost, forging their own connections between works.

Gulag Museum rebrand marks latest phase in Kremlin’s assault on free speech

The Kremlin is systematically erasing the memory of Soviet repression under Joseph Stalin from Russian museums. The Gulag Museum in Moscow, which documented Stalin-era crimes, has been rebranded as a "Museum of Memory" focused on Nazi war crimes, with its entire website replaced and exhibitions packed up. Simultaneously, Russia's supreme court banned Memorial, a human rights organization founded to document Stalin-era atrocities, labeling it an "anti-Russian" extremist group. The Yeltsin Presidential Center in Yekaterinburg has also removed references to Memorial from its walls, and the Sakharov Center in Moscow was disbanded and evicted from its facilities.

Fight Club Denounces the System From Within the System

Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou's first major institutional exhibition in Brazil, "Knockout!," has opened at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo's Pina Luz building. The show spans over 25 years of Tayou's career, featuring installations, sculptures, and paintings across seven rooms. Each room is themed around a historical international conference—including the Berlin Conference of 1884, Yalta, San Francisco, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, Bandung, and a fictional Avignon conference—using these as political and historical axes to critique colonial power structures and global inequality.

Artists Pay Tribute to Koyo Kouoh in Poetry Caravan at Venice Biennale

At the Venice Biennale on May 7, 2026, Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons led a poetry caravan across seven locations in the Giardini to honor Koyo Kouoh, the late curator of the Biennale's main exhibition "In Minor Keys," who died of cancer at age 57 in 2025. The procession, inspired by a 1999 voyage Kouoh took with nine African poets from Dakar to Timbuktu, featured performances by poets Natalie Diaz, Robin Coste Lewis, Batool Abu Akleen, and Anne Waldman, kora player Saliou Cissokho, and Kouoh's husband, Swiss saxophonist Philippe Mall, who played a composition dedicated to her. The event was organized by a team of Kouoh's assistants and advisers, including Marie Hélène Pereira, who served as stand-in lead of the 2026 Biennale.

Kim Gordon Was Never Just the “Girl in the Band”

Kim Gordon, best known as co-founder of the influential indie rock band Sonic Youth, is the subject of a new exhibition titled "Count Your Chickens" at Amant in New York. Curated by Patricia Margarita Hernández, the show surveys Gordon’s visual art from 2007 to the present, including paintings, drawings, ceramics, and video works such as "Jeanetta and Alex" (2026). The exhibition explores themes of celebrity, gender, electricity, and the tension between public image and private reality, featuring pieces like "Paris, Paris" (2025) and the "Airbnb Series" (2019).

How Art Libraries Make Art Accessible

Wie Artotheken Kunst zugänglich machen

Artotheken, or art libraries, are public institutions that lend artworks to anyone with a library card, making art accessible beyond the traditional museum or gallery system. In Germany, over 100 such artotheken exist, often housed in public libraries, art associations, or museums. The Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek in Berlin, for example, has a collection of 2,000 works, with around 300 currently on loan to homes, doctors' offices, and law firms. The lending process is informal: borrowers can eat, drink, and even touch the works, and transport by bus or bike is encouraged. A jury selects up to 15 new works annually, and the collection includes major names like Roy Lichtenstein and Niki de Saint Phalle, though most users choose pieces based on personal connection rather than prestige.

The Frigos in Danger

Les frigos en danger

The article reports on the deteriorating condition of Les Frigos, a historic artist studio complex in Paris that has been left neglected and abandoned. Once a vibrant hub for contemporary artists, the site now faces an uncertain future due to lack of maintenance and institutional support.

art olivia walton crystal bridges

Olivia Walton, former TV journalist and current board chair of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, discusses her leadership and vision in an interview for Cultured's 2026 CULT100 honorees. She took over from founder Alice Walton, her husband's aunt, in 2021 and has championed free admission and expanded access. The museum is set to open a major expansion in May, doubling its public space and celebrating its 15th anniversary alongside America's 250th birthday.

Wiggy stardust! The mind-blowing hair artist who astonished Rihanna and Cate Blanchett

Taiba Akhuetie, a London-based artist who uses human and synthetic hair as her primary medium, is preparing for her first solo exhibition at the Sarabande Foundation. Her unsettling, taxidermy-like sculptures transform everyday objects—handbags, mirrors, rocking chairs, and umbrellas—into eerie, hair-covered artworks. Akhuetie began her career as a braider, founding the salon Keash Braids in Peckham, and pivoted to sculptural work during the pandemic. Her creations have attracted high-profile clients including Rihanna, Cate Blanchett, and Nigerian singer Tems, and have been featured by Vogue.

‘I’m not trying to make him handsome’: Polly Samson on photographing husband David Gilmour – in pictures

Polly Samson, acclaimed author and wife of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, presents her first solo photography exhibition at Leica Gallery London, featuring intimate images taken over two decades of Gilmour on tour and in the studio. The show, titled 'Polly Samson – Between This Breath and Then,' runs until 7 May 2026 and coincides with the release of her book 'David Gilmour: Luck and Strange – Studio/Live,' published by Thames & Hudson. Samson's photographs capture candid moments of Gilmour, their family, and the creative process behind albums including 'Luck and Strange.'

For the People: Lubbock’s First Friday Art Trail Engages Thousands of Art-Goers Each Month

Lubbock’s First Friday Art Trail (FFAT), now in its 22nd year, has grown from a small gathering of a few dozen attendees to regularly drawing thousands to the downtown arts district each month. In October 2025, the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (LHUCA) distributed 6,000 wristbands before running out. The event features exhibitions, open studios, craft vendors, music, hands-on activities, drinks, and food trucks, with streets closed to traffic and visitors moving on foot or by trolley. The trail began organically in August 2004, spearheaded by artist Steve Teeters of St. Eligius Studio, and was inspired by a First Friday event in Corpus Christi.

Stephanie Chernikowski, 84, Dies; Photographed the ‘Rough Magic’ of Punk

Stephanie Chernikowski, a photographer who documented the raw energy of New York City's punk scene in the 1970s, has died at age 84. She captured iconic images of bands like the Ramones, Blondie, and the Patti Smith Group performing at legendary clubs such as CBGB, preserving the "rough magic" of that era.

Bugarin + Castle on Representing Scotland at the 61st Venice Biennale

ArtReview published a questionnaire response from Bugarin + Castle, the artist duo representing Scotland at the 61st Venice Biennale (2026). Their exhibition, titled "Shame Parade" and curated by Mount Stuart Trust, explores charivari—medieval public shaming rituals involving sound, costume, and cross-dressing. The work draws on the artists' research into how noise and music have been used as tools of control, with particular attention to the Filipino legal definition of charivari as a punishable public disturbance. The exhibition includes sculpture, print, moving image, and a musical score created with Manila-based band Kalye Teresa, and is housed at the Olivolo, Castello pavilion.