Tony Cokes' solo exhibition "SM BNGR2" at FELIX GAUDLITZ in Vienna centers on club culture as a space for celebrating life through love, desire, queerness, music, art, aesthetics, and moving bodies. The show de-marginalizes club culture by examining its significance for subcultures, activist movements, and political resistance through the lens of writers and academics.
A roundup article highlights current and upcoming art and cultural exhibitions across Central Illinois, featuring venues such as the McLean County Museum of History, Krannert Art Museum, Prairie Aviation Museum, Peoria Riverfront Museum, Eaton Studio Gallery, Illinois Art Station, Illinois State Museum, McLean County Arts Center, Main Gallery 404, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Dickson Mounds Museum, and David Davis Mansion State Historic Site. Specific shows mentioned include "Material Memory" fiber arts show at Brandt Gallery, "Goya's Ghosts" at Armstrong Gallery, "Arts Alive!" auction at Dolan Gallery, "Lincoln: Sight, Sound & Touch" at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, "Ken Kashian Botanical Photography Exhibit" at IAA Credit Union, and "Kelly Pile Pyrography Pop-up Sale" at Main Gallery 404.
Two solo exhibitions by artists Josefina Auslender and Billy Gerard Frank are on view in Woolwich and Portland, Maine, through mid-May. Auslender's "La Chimera de Oro (The Golden Chimera)" at Sarah Bouchard gallery features new ink-on-paper drawings exploring themes of artistic truth and the seductive danger of commercial success, while Frank's show at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design (ICA at MECA&D) addresses the legacy of slavery through multimedia installations.
Yoshiko Shimada, a Japanese feminist and antiwar artist, is featured in a conversation with ArtAsiaPacific ahead of her inclusion in the 2026 Venice Biennale, curated by Koyo Kouoh under the theme "In Minor Keys." The article explores Shimada's decades-long practice of excavating the gendered scars of Japanese imperialism, focusing on her collaborative work with BuBu de la Madeleine, which uses drag and irony to critique imperial frameworks and the erasure of wartime atrocities. It also highlights her revival of the Chū-pi-ren movement, a 1970s feminist group that fought for abortion rights and access to birth control, arguing that their legacy remains urgent in 2026 given Japan's slow progress on women's bodily autonomy.
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 High Museum of Art in Atlanta presents "Isamu Noguchi: 'I am not a designer'," the first design retrospective of the Japanese-American sculptor in 25 years. Co-curated by Monica Obniski and Marin R. Sullivan, the exhibition features nearly 200 objects, including sculptural models, furniture for Herman Miller and Knoll, Akari light fixtures, and large-scale installations like Martha Graham's stage set for "Seraphic Dialogue" (1955). The show challenges Noguchi's own resistance to categorization by framing his multidisciplinary practice—spanning sculpture, design, architecture, and public art—through a design lens.
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.
The 61st Venice Biennale opened with unprecedented political tension, set against the backdrop of the international jury's mass resignation, the death of curator Koyo Kouoh, Russia's closed pavilion, threats from the European Commission to withdraw funding, and Italy's culture minister boycotting the opening. The article highlights ten works and moments where art and power intersected most explicitly, including Alfredo Jaar's 'Red Room' installation in the Chilean pavilion confronting humanitarian crisis, and Ukraine's collateral event 'Still Joy' at Palazzo Contarini Polignac, which frames joy as an act of resistance amid war.
Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo presents 'Minga for the Sea,' a major new commission by Chilean artist, poet, and activist Cecilia Vicuña, running from May 29 to August 9, 2026. This is Vicuña's first major presentation in Scandinavia, featuring two large horizontal quipus made from locally sourced raw wool, one dedicated to the Southern Hemisphere/Chile and the other to the Northern Hemisphere/Sápmi. The quipus incorporate contributions from Indigenous and environmental defenders, including poems, drawings, and videos, forming a polyphonic archive of cultural resistance against destructive resource extraction and pollution of marine environments.
From 26 April 2026 to 10 January 2027, the Vincenzo Vela Museum in Ligornetto, Switzerland, presents "Bertille Bak: Voices from the Earth," the first major solo exhibition in Switzerland of French artist Bertille Bak. The show brings together works from the past fifteen years that combine cinema, visual arts, and field research, focusing on marginalized communities and themes of labor, identity, and resistance. Bak, born in Arras in 1983, creates video installations and narrative devices through long immersions in communities, with her work held in collections such as the Centre Pompidou and the Collection François Pinault.
The CART Department has organized an exhibition titled 'Ai Weiwei LEGO Story' at Free Parking in New York, running from April 24 to May 3, 2026. The show presents a focused selection of the artist's brick-based works, including pieces from his Zodiac and After series and his BMW art car, highlighting accumulation and repetition as core methods.
A roundup of summer art exhibitions across Maine highlights dozens of artists showing at galleries and pop-up spaces from Rockport to Portland. Notable shows include Alexandre Gallery's pop-up featuring charcoal works by the late Cooper Union-trained artist Emily Nelligan, who spent decades depicting Cranberry Island; Karma's annual summer pop-up at artist Ann Craven's deconsecrated church in Thomaston; and solo exhibitions at Caldbeck Gallery, Courthouse Gallery, and Cove Street Arts. Other venues such as Carver Hill Gallery, Corey Daniels Gallery, Dowling Walsh, and Moss Galleries present group and solo shows spanning landscape painting, mythical imagery, and works addressing social resistance.
Inuk artist Laakkuluk Williamson has opened her first solo exhibition, titled *Nuliaminik Neqilik*, at Mimosa House gallery in London. The show draws on a Greenlandic tale of a cannibal and his seventh wife, Masaannaaq, as a metaphor for Inuit resistance against colonial powers. It features beadwork, photography, film, vocal performances, and enlarged replicas of historic Inuit objects from the British Museum. The exhibition opened with an immersive performance at the British Museum and was curated by fellow Inuk artist Taqrilik Partridge. After its London run, the show will travel to the Nuuk Art Museum in Greenland and then to Ottawa.
French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira discusses her Tate Britain Commission, a new work that serves as a love letter to African cinema. The piece explores themes of resistance to nostalgia and learning from the past, drawing on Sedira's personal heritage and cinematic influences.
New York- and Ramallah-based Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme present *Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom* (2025), an hour-long four-channel film installation at The Bell/Brown Arts Institute in Providence. The work layers psychedelic imagery of figures in nature with spoken and written testimonies from Palestinians formerly detained by Israeli authorities, exploring themes of incarceration, surveillance, and resistance through fragmented montage and poetic text. The exhibition also includes drawings by Abou-Rahme’s father and printed screenshots of reflections on the genocide in Gaza.
Uffner & Liu in New York is presenting 'What Remains,' a solo exhibition by Iranian artist Arghavan Khosravi, running through July 2, 2026. The show features multi-paneled sculptural canvases, a freestanding sculpture, and intimate mixed-media works, including the debut of her 'Altar Series,' which reimagines medieval devotional altarpieces through a contemporary political and psychological lens.
This article from a Parisian events guide rounds up ten exhibitions to see over the Whitsun weekend (May 23–25, 2026) in Paris and Île-de-France. Highlights include a show of works by artist-patients at the Art and History Museum of Sainte-Anne Hospital, maritime paintings at the Navy Museum, a Papua New Guinea-themed exhibition at the Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac Museum, an interactive socially engaged show called "Ne Pas Toucher" in the Marais, a Louvre exhibition on water in ancient Mesopotamia, and a major Hilma af Klint retrospective at the Grand Palais in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou.
Naomi Rincón Gallardo presents her first solo exhibition in London, 'Sonnet of Vermin,' at the Hayward Gallery. The show features her 2022 film following a group of animals from Mesoamerican myths—Bat, Snake, Scorpion, and a choir of frogs—as they navigate dystopian landscapes in Oaxaca, communicating via radio signals and calling for solidarity amid social and ecological devastation. Rincón Gallardo works across video, performance, drawing, and sculpture, weaving cuir/queer resistance, pre-colonial folklore, DIY aesthetics, music, and dance into surreal narratives that critique colonialism and exploitation.
The article text is corrupted and unreadable, appearing as garbled binary data. Based on the title "Yinka Ilori: Joy Through Resistance He Who Laughs Last, Laughs Best", it appears to be about British-Nigerian artist and designer Yinka Ilori, likely covering an exhibition or project that explores themes of joy and resistance through his signature colorful, pattern-based work.
Welten bauen
Lina Lapelytė has transformed the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin into a mutable landscape of wooden blocks for her second Chanel Commission. The installation, titled "Welten bauen" (Building Worlds), invites visitors to actively shape the space, incorporating elements of poetry, song, and community. The work draws inspiration from Paul Hindemith's 1930s children's singspiel "Wir bauen eine Stadt," which was banned by the Nazis and led to Hindemith's emigration.
This week's Required Reading roundup from Hyperallergic covers a diverse range of art-world stories. French photographer JR has unveiled "La Caverne du Pont Neuf Paris" (2026), an optical illusion installation that transforms the pathway across the Seine into a black-and-white mountain range cave, paying homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 1985 wrapping of the same bridge. Other highlights include architecture scholar Karrie Jacobs investigating a New York waterfront walking initiative for The Nation, curator Tara Contractor writing in Apollo about James McNeill Whistler's use of metallic pigments influenced by Japanese traditions, and Rob Corsini interviewing Amelia Abraham about their new book celebrating photography of queer nightlife for Dazed.
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.
The Anozero Biennale in Coimbra, Portugal, opens at the former Santa Clara convent, blending religious imagery with anarchist ideas. Artists including Taryn Simon and Nan Goldin present works that explore utopian visions of community and reciprocity within the monastery's walls.
Ist Berlin doch noch nicht over?
Çağla Ilk, who curated the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale two years ago, has presented her plans as the new artistic director of the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. Her program reimagines theater from the perspective of visual art, signaling a major shift in the city's theater landscape. The announcement comes amid broader reforms in Berlin's theater scene, including Matthias Lilienthal's upcoming takeover of the Volksbühne, and was met with both anticipation and anxiety, reminiscent of Chris Dercon's failed tenure at the Volksbühne in 2017.
The Disobedience Archive, a mobile video archive initiated by Marco Scotini in 2005, is presented in dialogue with Raqs Media Collective at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich. The archive contains over one hundred documentary and art films at the intersection of art and activism, documenting forms of resistance, social struggle, and collective self-organization.
A new exhibition at Poster House in New York, titled "Reading Under Fire: Arming Minds & Hearts During Wartime," showcases vintage posters from World War I and World War II that promoted reading and book donations to support troops. The posters, drawn from the collections of the American Library Association, the YMCA, and other organizations, encouraged the public to supply soldiers with reading material as a form of morale-boosting and education. The exhibition runs until 1 November and is curated by Molly Guptill Manning.
New York-based arts nonprofit A Blade of Grass (ABoG) has announced the three members of its 2026 In Fellowship cohort: Emily Johnson / Catalyst, The Projects/Space, and UNDOC+Collective. Each fellow receives $25,000 in support and a $25,000 honorarium for their socially engaged practices. The fellowship, established in 2025, focuses this year on gathering as a form of movement building and resource distribution.
Paul Stopforth's artwork "HERE COMES EVERYBODY 5" (2026) is being offered for sale through The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The piece is a unique gouache on panel measuring 16 × 16 inches, priced at US$900, hand-signed by the artist, and includes a certificate of authenticity. Stopforth, born in 1945 and originally from South Africa, emigrated to the United States 27 years ago and has since lived and worked in Boston, Cambridge, and Provincetown. His career includes teaching at Harvard University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and the Fine Arts Work Center, with his works held in public collections including the Harvard Film Archive, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and the National Gallery in Cape Town.
A wave of independent, artist-run galleries is emerging across North Texas, operating out of unconventional spaces like houses, lofts, and apartments. Notable examples include PRP (Permanent Research Project) in a little white house in Trinity Groves, Nature of Things in a Deep Ellum loft, and 2 BED 1 BATH in an Oak Cliff apartment. These venues often face precarious funding and zoning issues, yet they persist, with some like 500X operating since 1978 and PRP for a decade. Recent exhibitions have addressed themes such as the treatment of bodies in visual culture and political commentary, including a protest show after the University of North Texas shut down an exhibition critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The PinchukArtCentre has opened a new exhibition titled "Still Joy — From Ukraine Into the World" as part of the official parallel program of the 61st Venice Biennale. The show, which opened on May 7 at Palazzo Contarini Polignac and runs through August 1, features works by over 20 international and Ukrainian artists exploring joy as an act of resilience and humanity. Central to the exhibition are testimonies from Hlib Stryzhko, a marine veteran who returned from Russian captivity, which are transformed into sculptural elements. Notable works include a protest performance by Yurii Hruzinov at the Russian pavilion, a video installation of Kyiv rave parties by Malashchuk and Khimei, and installations by Future Generation Art Prize laureates Ashfika Rahman and Zhanna Kadyrova.