The Whitney Biennial has announced the 56 artists selected for its 82nd edition, opening March 8, 2026. Curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, the exhibition explores themes of relationality, kinship, infrastructure, and the US role in global affairs. The curators visited over 300 studios worldwide, and the list includes many emerging and lesser-known artists, with most participants under 45 and a significant number identifying as queer.
Eduardo F. Costantini, founder of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba), announced the acquisition of the Daros Latinamerica Collection in Zurich, adding 1,233 works by 117 artists to the museum's holdings. This roughly doubles Malba's collection to 3,000 works, with a major expansion project planned to accommodate the new pieces, set to begin next fall to mark the museum's 25th anniversary. Highlights include works by Doris Salcedo, Ana Mendieta, Julio Le Parc, Alfredo Jaar, Lygia Clark, and Jesús Rafael Soto, with 75 artists new to Malba.
Maria Balshaw, the director of Tate, will step down in the new year after nine years at the helm, the museum announced Friday. Appointed in 2017, Balshaw was the first woman to lead the institutional network, which includes Tate Modern and Tate Britain. Her tenure was marked by a substantial diversification of Tate’s collection and programming to spotlight new art forms, indigenous artists, and artists from the Global South. She also oversaw the launch of a landmark £150 million endowment fund for Tate Modern to address financial woes. Memorable exhibitions included surveys of pre-internet digital artists, modern art in Nigeria, and retrospectives for Leigh Bowery, Isaac Julien, Yoko Ono, and Emily Kam Kngwarray.
The state of New Mexico has announced a major conservation effort to preserve 6,000 acres of desert landscape that inspired artist Georgia O’Keeffe. The New Mexico Land Conservancy is partnering with the National Ghost Ranch Foundation to implement the Ghost Ranch Conservation Plan, which will protect land, water, and wildlife habitat around Ghost Ranch—where O’Keeffe lived and worked from 1940 until her death. The plan involves conservation easements held in trust for the public benefit, ensuring the area remains undeveloped while allowing continued visitor access to hiking trails, museums, and the retreat center.
Sotheby's sold a Tiffany Studios Magnolia floor lamp for $4.4 million at its Dreaming in Glass auction in New York, making it the most expensive leaded lamp by the decorative arts studio ever sold at auction. The lamp, manufactured around 1910, features a patinated bronze stand and a 28-inch colored glass dome depicting magnolias, and was crafted by Agnes Northrop, Tiffany's star designer, rather than Clara Driscoll. The bidding battle lasted 10 minutes, surpassing the $3 million high estimate.
A 1976 Hippopotamus Bar by François-Xavier Lalanne sold for $31.4 million at Sotheby's after a 26-minute bidding war, setting a new auction record for the French artist. The hand-wrought copper, steel, and wood piece, commissioned by art patron Anne Schlumberger, is the only copper prototype from the series and features concealed compartments for bottle storage, ice bucket, and glassware. The sale was part of the Schlumberger collection, which also included a gold-patinated bronze armchair by Claude Lalanne that fetched $1 million and a pair of bronze gates that sold for $787,400.
A pair of rare bronze buttons designed by Alberto Giacometti in 1938 for fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli will be auctioned at Bonhams on December 16, each estimated at £5,000–£8,000. Titled "Femme aux Bras Levés," the buttons were used on garments including a coat worn by Marlene Dietrich, now in the German Cinema Museum in Berlin. Only two other examples exist, held by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and Le Comité Giacometti. The sale also features a rare Émile Gallé vase, works by Lucie Rie, and a Tiffany Studios chandelier.
The Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands in Amsterdam, has announced a partnership with the municipality of Eindhoven to build a satellite branch in the city. The 35,000-square-foot building will be located in a park near Eindhoven Central Station and is expected to open in six to eight years, presenting exhibitions drawn from the Rijksmuseum’s collection of over one million objects, including masterpieces by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Van Gogh. Major sponsorship comes from Dutch semiconductor company ASML.
Barbara Dauphin Duthuit, the wife of Henri Matisse's grandson, has donated 61 works by Matisse to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. The gift includes seven paintings, numerous drawings, etchings, lithographs, and illustrated books, most of which feature portraits of the artist's eldest daughter, Marguerite (1894–1982). Many of these works were on view in France for the first time during the museum's recent exhibition “Matisse and Marguerite: Through Her Father’s Eyes.” The donation spans from Marguerite's childhood to 1945, including pieces that reference her convalescence from diphtheria and her survival of Gestapo torture during World War II.
French painter Claire Tabouret's full-scale maquettes for six new stained-glass windows at Notre-Dame Cathedral go on public display at Paris's Grand Palais museum through March 15. The designs, chosen from 110 submissions in an international competition, depict the Pentecost and will be fabricated by the historic atelier Simon-Marq. The new windows replace 19th-century lights by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus, which survived the 2019 fire but are being replaced at the direction of French President Emmanuel Macron and Archbishop Laurent Ulrich.
Helen Frankenthaler, the pioneering Color Field painter known for her luminous, stain-soaked canvases, is the subject of a renewed wave of exhibitions. The Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao recently hosted a major survey of her work, while the Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently presenting "Helen Frankenthaler: A Grand Sweep" in its atrium. Next year, the Kunstmuseum Basel will open the largest exhibition of her art in Europe to date, marking her first solo museum show in Switzerland. The article also recounts her biography—her privileged upbringing on the Upper East Side, her studies at the Dalton School and Bennington College, her relationships with Clement Greenberg and Robert Motherwell, and her invention of the soak-stain technique in 1952, which helped birth Color Field painting.
A water pipe burst at the Musée du Louvre in Paris on November 26, damaging 300 to 400 archival documents related to Egyptian history in the Mollien Pavilion. The leak, which also posed a fire risk due to a nearby electrical cabinet, was followed by a smaller leak days later. Employees, represented by a coalition of unions including CGT, CFDT, and Sud, have voted unanimously to begin a rolling strike next Monday, demanding urgent renovations and the hiring of 200 new staff to restore the workforce to 2014 levels. The Louvre's director Laurence des Cars had previously warned that the museum's buildings were in "poor condition" and "no longer water tight," and a major renovation was announced, but pipe repairs were not scheduled until September 2026.
The Studio Museum in Harlem reopened its newly rebuilt, seven-story space on 125th Street after nearly eight years without a permanent home. A press preview on November 6, 2025, showcased the $300 million, 82,000-square-foot building designed by Adjaye Associates with Cooper Robertson, which more than doubles the museum's exhibition space. The public reopening is set for November 15 with a free community celebration. Inaugural exhibitions include "From Now: A Collection in Context," works by over 100 alumni of the artist-in-residence program, and a solo show of Tom Lloyd, whose work was featured in the museum's first exhibition in 1968. The building features a grand staircase, a cantilevered auditorium called the "Stoop," a roof terrace, and prominent works by David Hammons and Glenn Ligon.
A week after wildfires erupted across Los Angeles, the city remains under critical threat as the Pacific Palisades, Eaton, Hollywood Hills, and San Fernando Valley fires have forced the evacuation of roughly 200,000 residents, destroyed about 12,000 buildings, and claimed at least 24 lives. Among the losses are culturally and architecturally significant structures, including the Bunny Museum in Altadena, the historic Will Rogers ranch, the Altadena Community Church (designed by Harry L. Pierce), the Andrew McNally House (a Queen Anne-style mansion by Frederick Roehrig), Richard Neutra's Benedict and Nancy Freedman House, and Gregory Ain's Park Planned Homes in Altadena. Adrian Scott Fine of the Los Angeles Conservancy described the destruction as "a mass erasure of heritage."
Ralph Lemon has been awarded the 2025 ARTnews Lifetime Achievement Award for his multidisciplinary practice spanning dance, drawing, painting, installation, sculpture, and writing. The article highlights his career trajectory from founding the Ralph Lemon Dance Company to disbanding it in 1995 to focus on broader artistic collaborations. Central to his work is the Geography Trilogy (1996–2004) and his long-term collaboration with Walter Carter, a former Mississippi sharecropper, whose life and family became a recurring subject. Lemon's recent exhibition "Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon" at MoMA PS1 (November 14, 2024–March 24, 2025), curated by Connie Butler and Thomas Lax, featured videos, found African sculptures, drawings, and a four-channel performance piece, Rant (redux), with Kevin Beasley and Okwui Okpokwasili.
Wafaa Bilal has been named the recipient of the 2025 ARTnews Award for Established Artist, recognizing his survey exhibition “Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (February 1–October 19, 2025). The show is the first major retrospective for the Iraqi American artist, featuring works that put his body at risk, including the iconic performance *Domestic Tension* (2007), in which remote participants fired a paintball gun at him over the internet, and *Virtual Jihadi* (2008), a modified video game that blurs the lines between aggressor and victim. Curated by Bana Kattan, the exhibition restages elements of Bilal’s original performance and presents his ongoing critique of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, particularly the Iraq War and the use of drone warfare.
The article reviews "Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City," an exhibition at 80WSE in New York, curated by Howie Chen, Jayne Cole Southard, and christina ong, running from September 11 to December 20, 2024. Billed as the first institutional survey of Asian American artists in New York City, the show features 90 artists and spans the period from 1969 to 2001, centering on three key organizations: Godzilla: Asian American Art Network, the Basement Workshop, and the Asian American Arts Centre. The exhibition highlights how many of these artists did not solely make work about their race, complicating the link between identity and art, and includes lesser-known pieces such as David Diao's 1974 painting "Odd Man Out" and a provocative 1985 photograph by Hanh Thi Pham.
Pilar Tompkins Rivas, chief curator and deputy director of curatorial and collections at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, has left the museum less than a year before its scheduled September 2026 opening. The museum stated it has no immediate plans to replace her, with George Lucas continuing to oversee curatorial direction. This departure follows a series of staffing issues, including the exit of director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont in March 2025, layoffs of 22 staff members in May, and the earlier losses of curator Amanda Hunt and curator-at-large Dan Nadel. The $1-billion museum, first announced in 2017, has faced repeated delays due to the pandemic and supply-chain shortages.
Artnet News offers a lighthearted holiday guide with seven art-historical conversation starters designed to deflect awkward family small talk. The article reveals quirky facts such as a secret apartment atop the Eiffel Tower, the Surrealists' party game 'Exquisite Corpse,' Leonardo da Vinci's role as a wedding planner for Milan's nobility, Marcel Duchamp paying his dentist with a fake check, and Frank Lloyd Wright inspiring Lincoln Logs.
The article recounts the author's personal rediscovery of Art Nouveau, sparked by encountering an iron doorknob shaped like a Belgian endive at the Bröhan Museum in Berlin. It explores the movement's history, its German variant Jugendstil, and the philosophical debate between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno over its merits—Benjamin criticizing it as a superficial escape from industrial reality, Adorno defending its utopian desire to reconcile art, nature, and technology. The piece also notes a contemporary resurgence of interest in the style.
Qatar has unveiled a new museum dedicated entirely to the late Indian Modernist artist M.F. Husain, titled Lawh Wa Qalam: M.F. Husain Museum. Located in Doha's Education City, the museum houses over 150 artworks spanning from the 1950s to his death in 2011, including paintings, poetry, photography, tapestries, sculptures, and installations. The museum, opened on November 28 by the Qatar Foundation chaired by Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, fulfills a long-held dream of the artist, who was granted Qatari citizenship in 2010 after self-imposed exile from India. The building was designed by architect Martand Khosla based on a sketch Husain himself created for his envisioned museum.
Elizabeth Browning Jackson, a pioneering artist in the art-furniture movement, was rediscovered in 2021 after a phone call from Stephen Markos, founder of Superhouse Gallery, who had long admired her 1982 sculptural couch "Gloria." Markos urged Jackson to open a barn on her Rhode Island property, where she found her early works—hand-tufted rugs, cut-aluminum furniture, drawings, and prototypes—sealed away for 35 years. This rediscovery culminates at Design Miami 2025, where Superhouse presents Jackson as a foundational voice in the art-furniture movement, alongside contemporaries like Dan Friedman and Wendy Maruyama. Jackson's new exhibition "Re/construct" is also on view at Superhouse's Tribeca space through December 20, featuring reconstructed rugs based on her original 1980s designs.
In September 1945, exiled Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington completed her masterpiece *Les Distractions de Dagobert* (also known as *The Pleasures of Dagobert*), a densely layered canvas teeming with mythical figures, ritual fires, and medieval references. The painting, loosely inspired by the 7th-century Merovingian king Dagobert, depicts the monarch in a red robe on a cow-headed cart surrounded by enigmatic scenes. After a fierce 10-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s New York in May 2024, the work sold for $28.5 million to Argentine collector Eduardo F. Costantini, shattering Carrington’s previous auction record of $3.3 million. The painting is now on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of the exhibition “Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100,” the show’s only North American stop.
The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. has deaccessioned eight major works by artists including Georges Seurat, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Anish Kapoor at Sotheby's fall sales. O'Keeffe's "Large Dark Red Leaves on White" (1927) sold for $7.9 million, a Seurat drawing fetched $4.9 million, while a painting by Arthur Dove fell short of expectations and a Kapoor sculpture failed to sell. The plan, devised by director Jonathan Binstock, aims to fund future contemporary art commissions and collection care, but has sparked an 18-month dispute between museum leadership and the Phillips family descendants over the interpretation of founder Duncan Phillips's legacy.
This article explores the rediscovery of Roman sculpture during the Renaissance and its profound influence on artists like Raphael, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. It details how Roman sculptors, inspired by Greek methods after the conquest of Greece in 146 B.C.E., created highly realistic works that served both artistic and political purposes, glorifying emperors and reinforcing imperial power. The piece highlights six iconic Roman sculptures—including the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, the Colossus of Constantine, Trajan's Column, and the Augustus of Prima Porta—describing their historical context, artistic features, and enduring legacy.
A 1906 self-portrait by German modernist Paula Modersohn-Becker, titled *Selbstbildnis nach halblinks (Self-Portrait Looking Slightly Left)*, sold for €1.3 million ($1.5 million) at Berlin's Grisebach auction house on Thursday—more than quintupling its low estimate and more than doubling the artist's previous auction record. The work was acquired by an unnamed European private collector. The painting had previously been seized by the Nazis as "degenerate" art from the St. Annen Museum in Lübeck and was later acquired by the collector Bauer, who aimed to rehabilitate persecuted artists.
Komal Shah, a prominent art collector, announced the renaming of her Shah Garg Foundation to the Making Their Mark Foundation, coinciding with a three-day forum in Washington, D.C., scheduled for March 2025. The foundation takes its name from the traveling exhibition "Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection," curated by Cecilia Alemani, which highlights women artists from Shah and her husband Gaurav Garg's collection. The forum, held at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, will feature panels, keynotes, and performances organized around themes like Visionary Voices and Changemakers, with Alemani as curatorial director and Loring Randolph as director.
A wave of exhibitions and projects is celebrating the 90th anniversary of the births of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the late husband-and-wife duo known for monumental environmental installations. Their nephew Vladimir Yavachev, who directs their foundation, is overseeing the realization of their final permanent work, *The Mastaba* in Abu Dhabi, while temporary works like *The Gates* in Central Park are being revived through augmented reality. The anniversary also marks 30 years since *Wrapped Reichstag* and 20 years since *The Gates*.
The Institute of Contemporary Art Miami is opening "Richard Hunt: Pressure," the first institutional survey of the late sculptor since his death in 2023 at age 88. The exhibition, running through March during Miami Art Week, features 28 sculptures from 1955 to 2010, drawn from Hunt's seven-decade career in which he completed over 160 public commissions and 170 solo exhibitions. The show highlights Hunt's innovative use of industrial materials and abstract forms, while also exploring the dual meaning of "pressure"—both the physical force used in his metalworking and the societal pressures he faced as a Black artist during the Civil Rights era.
The winter collaborations issue of Art in America explores the often unglamorous, slow-paced nature of creative work, challenging the social-media-driven perception of art-making as fast and dramatic. The issue features pieces on Ira Sachs's film *Peter Hujar's Day*, which depicts the artist's mundane daily routine, and an interview with Chicago-based artists Nick Cave and Bob Faust, who discuss their collaborative practice and the perceived lack of drama in their process. Other highlights include features on Talia Chetrit's fashion-art boundary work, Mernet Larsen's multi-perspective paintings, and the role of licensing agreements with artists' estates.