A Persian Garden Blooms on Governors Island

Artist Bahar Behbahani organized a four-hour event called "Damask Rose: A Gathering" on Governors Island, transforming three shallow fountains with handwoven carpets and crocheted canopies. The gathering featured West African musical improvisation, Kurdish poetry, a cyanotype workshop, and communal activities like hair braiding and tea ceremonies, involving over two dozen community groups including the Asia Contemporary Art Forum and Eat Offbeat. The event was part of Governors Island Arts's annual Interventions series, curated with associate curator Juan Pablo Siles.

Art bartering: artists start viral social media trend to fight cost of living crisis

Artists worldwide are using social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok to barter their artwork for goods and services instead of money, in a viral trend responding to the cost of living crisis. Participants trade paintings for items such as handmade clothes, jewelry, tattoos, accommodation, meals, and professional services like video editing or framing, with some simply inviting offers. Artists like Lin Snow, Oli Fowler, and Andrea Mongenie cite economic pressures and anti-capitalist motivations, viewing bartering as a way to build community and bypass financial systems that leave creatives struggling.

19th-century European weapons found in cenote in Mexico

Archaeologists from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) have discovered 153 Spanish and British muskets and rifles, along with an iron cannon, in the Síis Já cenote beneath the 16th-century former convent San Bernardino de Siena in Valladolid, Mexico. The weapons were likely discarded by the Yucatecan government during the early years of the Caste War of Yucatán (1847-1901) to prevent them from falling into Maya rebels' hands. The site also yielded Maya ceramic pieces and 18th-century Chinese porcelain, and INAH reported debris and pollution affecting the cenote.

1,000-year-old archaeological site bulldozed during construction of Mexico-US border wall

On 24 April, a Department of Homeland Security contractor bulldozed a 1,000-year-old intaglio—a 280ft by 50ft etching in the desert sand—during construction of the US-Mexico border wall in Arizona's Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The site, sacred to local Indigenous communities including the Hia-Ced O’odham, was part of a UNESCO biosphere and contained over 3,000 petroglyphs. Despite warnings from tribal members and refuge staff, the contractor destroyed a 70ft stretch of the fish-shaped intaglio, which elders and archaeologists describe as an irreplaceable cultural and archaeological treasure.

Preemptive Listening review – artist’s film about sirens is buzzing with sonic ideas

The Guardian reviews Aura Satz's art film "Preemptive Listening," which explores the cultural and political meanings of sirens as warning devices. The film features a drone shot of a siren in a residential area, a soundtrack by composer Laurie Spiegel, and commentary from British-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla on sirens during the 2011 Arab Spring protests. It also covers sirens on Nakba day in Palestine, a US activist linking emergency vehicle lights to danger for Black women, clocks frozen at the time of the Fukushima disaster, and a Maori activist discussing environmental catastrophe. The reviewer finds the film's ideas interesting but notes it lacks coherence as a feature-length experience, suggesting it would be better suited to a gallery setting.

A Theatre Group of Exiled Belarusian Artists Arrive in Venice, With an Exhibition That Shows What Repression Feels Like

The Belarus Free Theatre, an exiled underground theater group, will stage its first official collateral exhibition at the 61st Venice Biennale, titled “Official. Unofficial. Belarus.” The show, held in the historic La Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia, features site-specific paintings, a sound installation, and large-scale sculptures that aim to immerse visitors in the experience of repression under authoritarian rule. This marks only the fifth time Belarus has been present at the Biennale, and the first time it appears not as a state but as a self-governing cultural body, challenging the official narratives of nations like Russia.

Co-Working Meets Art at Brooklyn’s Newest Experimental Space

Brooklyn’s newest experimental art space, The Gallery (stylized as “The Gallry”), has opened on the fourth floor of a former automobile service station in Prospect Heights, now converted into creative offices. Curated by artist Florian Meisenberg, the exhibition features site-specific works by over 40 artists installed throughout a former guitar-string manufacturer’s office, including cubicle walls, utility closets, and HVAC systems. The space also functions as a co-working hub, with free daily spots for subscribers. The show runs through May 24 and includes events like screenings, poetry readings, and satirical corporate-themed programming.

Shelley’s hair to Schindler’s list: the most fascinating objects in the State Library of NSW – in pictures

The State Library of NSW is celebrating its 200th anniversary with a new exhibition featuring 200 objects from its collection of 6 million items. Lead curator Elise Edmonds and her team selected highlights including a lock of Mary Shelley's hair, the smallest book in the library's collection (measuring 6mm by 6mm), bread wrappers from the 1960s, a colonial sketchbook from 1817, a Dharawal Indigenous language wordlist, Australia's oldest surviving political cartoon from 1808, and a contemporary artwork by Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens. The objects span literature, colonial history, Indigenous culture, sport, and everyday life.

The LA Art World’s New Obsession Is a Theater Where Artists Run the Show

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, former artistic directors of Berlin's Grüner Salon, launched New Theater Hollywood in 2024 as a nonprofit venue on Santa Monica Boulevard. The 49-seat theater specializes in genre-defying, multidisciplinary collaborations, staging works like Sophie Becker's ventriloquist act *Ronnie's Big Idea* and Diamond Stingily's *The Driver*. Every performance sells out, attracting a cult following of literary, art world, and pop culture figures who often linger to discuss shows.

fashion bottega veneta peter fraser venice

Photographer Peter Fraser has collaborated with Bottega Veneta on a new series of 27 photographs exploring Venice, capturing both its iconic landmarks—canals, marble floors, Byzantine façades—and its overlooked details like construction cranes, discarded plaster casts, and beached boats. The images are juxtaposed with Bottega Veneta's intrecciato bags from Louise Trotter's first collection, nodding to the fashion house's long history in the Veneto region. In an interview, Fraser discusses his approach to photographing a city burdened by its own legacy, emphasizing the need to distance himself from preconceptions and to shoot based on feeling rather than appearance.

WAYAMOU: LENGUAS DE LO COMÚN. LAURA ANDERSON BARBATA Y SHEROANAWE HAKIHIIWE

The exhibition "Wayamou: Lenguas de lo común" at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City presents the collaborative work of artists Laura Anderson Barbata and Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, whose artistic and political relationship spans over three decades. The show traces their shared history, beginning in the early 1990s when Barbata traveled to the Venezuelan Amazon and taught handmade papermaking using local plant fibers, introducing Hakihiiwe to a sustained visual exploration of Yanomami cosmology, oral tradition, and legacy. In 1992, they co-founded Yanomami Owë Mamotima ("Yanomami art of papermaking"), a project enabling the community to tell its own stories through its own visual and linguistic codes, exemplified by the handmade book "Shapono (Casa)" (1996).

FROM SÃO PAULO TO NEW YORK: THE MUSEUM OF ERRANCY OF ÉDOUARD GLISSANT

DE SÃO PAULO A NUEVA YORK: EL MUSEO DE LA ERRANCIA DE ÉDOUARD GLISSANT

The exhibition "La tierra, el fuego, el agua y los vientos: Por un Museo de la Errancia con Édouard Glissant" has traveled from the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo to the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) in New York, marking its first U.S. presentation. Curated by Manuela Moscoso with Marian Chudnovsky, and building on prior work by Ana Roman and Paulo Miyada, the show engages with the philosophy of Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, particularly his concepts of errantry, Relation, opacity, and the Tout-Monde. It centers on Glissant's unrealized idea of a museum as a fluid, porous space that resists colonial frameworks and fixed origins, featuring works by artists such as Melvin Edwards, Gerardo Chávez, and Eduardo Zamora.

Dolce Vita is Over

Dolce Vita war gestern

Andrea Modica's new photobook "Italian Story" collects four decades of photographs taken in Italy, beginning with her first trip there in the late 1980s. Born in 1960 to a family with roots in Sicily and Naples, Modica received a Fulbright scholarship to travel to Sicily and photograph the origins of the Catholic imagery, gender roles, and family structures she experienced growing up in New York. The book, however, is not a documentary of her heritage; instead, it presents dreamlike, surreal images—motionless bodies in water, dead fish, figures behind mosquito nets, Madonna statues—that resist clear narrative or identity politics. Modica works with an 8x10 large-format analog camera and prints using the historic platinum-palladium process, giving the images a timeless, collaborative quality.

The Many Sheddings of Valie Export

Die vielen Häutungen der Valie Export

Valie Export, the Austrian media and performance artist known for using her body as a site of social critique, has died at age 85 in Vienna. Her final works include a black-and-white photo series of her forearm resting on a stone snake sculpture at the University of Vienna, exploring themes of skin, transformation, and mimesis. From the 1970s onward, she created iconic "Body Configurations" in which she placed her body on streets and against buildings along Vienna's Ringstrasse, tracing architectural forms to expose institutional power and patriarchal authority.

And who are you?

Und wer seid ihr?

The article is a brief interview conducted at the Venice Biennale, where a visitor named Franzi explains her presence at the event and discusses her favorite pavilion. She cites the Austrian Pavilion by Florentina Holzinger as her absolute favorite after five days of art, and clarifies that her bare chest is not a political protest against Putin but a homage to Holzinger's work. She also mentions missing the Vatican Pavilion due to long queues.

Monuments in Motion

Denkmäler in Bewegung

Berlin-based artist Sarah Ama Duah, who transitioned from fashion to sculpture, creates works that explore Afro-German memory culture. Her practice includes beeswax portraits, found objects like Delft porcelain and baroque vases, and performances at venues such as the Humboldt Forum. In 2025, she received the Wolfram Beck Prize for Sculpture. Duah's early fashion work, including silicone garments shown at the Fashionclash Festival in Maastricht, evolved into sculptural investigations of clothing, body, and space, leading her to study performance and sculpture at the Berlin University of the Arts under Jimmy Robert.

Shit has the power to destabilize systems of order

"Scheiße hat die Kraft, Ordnungssysteme zu destabilisieren"

Aline Bouvy, the artist representing Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale, has created a film essay titled "La Merde" that centers on excrement as its main character. Originally conceived as a performance, the work explores themes of bodily circulation, transformation, and the grotesque, using feces to challenge societal taboos and systems of order. Bouvy discusses the film's development with curator Stilbé Schroeder, noting that the Biennale provided the resources and time to realize the project, which will later travel to the Kunstverein in Salzburg.

The Art of the Chosen Family

Die Kunst der Wahlfamilie

Mike D, co-founder of the Beastie Boys, has co-curated an exhibition titled "Mishpocha. The Art of Collaboration" at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt. The show explores the concept of family beyond biological ties, featuring works such as Ira Eduardovna's video installation "The Library Room," which depicts a family packing for emigration, and immersive audiovisual spaces evoking techno, hip-hop, punk, and Riot Grrrl subcultures. The exhibition includes contributions from artist Jan Ove Hennig, photographer Jan Zappner, design studio Atelier Markgraph, and hospitality group Ima Clique, with Mike D serving as artistic director and ambassador.

A Photographer of Newark’s People Gets a Show Among the People

Manuel Acevedo, a photographer known for documenting the people of Newark, New Jersey, is having his works displayed across the city in highly visible outdoor locations. The exhibition places his portraits directly in the neighborhoods and public spaces where his subjects live and work, making the art accessible to the very community that inspired it.

Theme and title announced for Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu’s 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale

Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu have announced the theme and title for the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale: "Do Architecture – For the Possibility of Coexistence Facing a Real Reality." The curators posed a series of questions addressing global climate change, the coexistence of land and architecture, natural materials versus modern construction, and urban-rural development conflicts. They emphasized that architecture is not just theoretical but must be practiced firsthand, confronting real reality through real construction. The duo, founders of Amateur Architecture Studio, have a long history with the Biennale, having participated in 2006 and 2010, where they received a Special Mention for their project 'Decay of a Dome.' The twentieth edition of the Architecture Biennale opens in May 2027.

Endre Koronczi on Representing Hungary at the 61st Venice Biennale

Endre Koronczi, the artist representing Hungary at the 61st Venice Biennale (2026), discusses his upcoming exhibition in the Giardini pavilion. His project, titled "Pneuma Cosmic," explores the movement of air as both a physical and metaphysical phenomenon, drawing on decades of research into invisible forces like wind and breath. The exhibition also references his long-term experimental zone, Ploubuter Park, inspired by drifting plastic bags. Koronczi notes a strong resonance with the Biennale's curatorial theme, "In Minor Keys" by Koyo Kouoh, describing it as a "cosmic zeitgeist."

À la Biennale de Venise, le pavillon de l’Ouzbékistan fait revivre la mer d’Aral

The Uzbekistan Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, curated around the figure of author Allayar Darmenov, brings together artists including Vyacheslav Akhunov, Zi Kakhramonova, A. A. Murakami, Zulfiya Spowart, and Nguyen Phuong Linh to explore the ecological disaster of the Aral Sea. Once the world's fourth-largest lake, it was drained by Soviet irrigation projects for cotton farming; the pavilion's installations—such as Kakhramonova's participatory salt-fish molding piece and Spowart's cradle-like sculpture—imaginatively revive the vanished sea and its endemic species.

From simple blue to haute couture suit: workwear studied at the Musée Postal

Du simple bleu au tailleur haute couture, le vêtement de travail étudié au musée Postal

The Musée Postal in Paris has reopened with a new name and identity, launching its first exhibition titled "Sous toutes les coutures" ("Under All Seams"). Curated by Elodie Goëssant and Didier Filoche, the show brings together 420 pieces, artworks, and archival objects to explore the history of workwear in France, from uniforms and protective clothing to high-fashion collaborations. It traces the evolution of work attire from the 18th century to the present, highlighting how women lacked dedicated work clothing until the 1970s and how airlines like Air France pioneered partnerships with luxury houses such as Christian Dior to dress flight attendants as national ambassadors.

Brittany Invites Itself to the Venice Biennale: An Unusual Pavilion Dedicated to Breton Creation Moors in the Lagoon

La Bretagne s’invite à la Biennale de Venise : un insolite pavillon dédié à la création bretonne s’est amarré dans la lagune

For the 61st Venice Biennale, a group of artists and art figures from Brittany have created an unofficial "Breton pavilion" in the form of a spectacular sailboat moored on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. The boat, designed by artist Joachim Monvoisin, features contributions from Morgane Tschiember (who sewed a sail with a black cross, the 11th-century Breton flag) and master glassmaker Andrew Erdos (who made the navigation lights). Performances during the opening week included readings by Breton authors and traditional music concerts with binious and bombardes on the Via Garibaldi.

La Rocabella : une résidence d’artistes paradisiaque qui croise les disciplines près de Toulon

La Rocabella, a Belle Époque villa near Toulon, France, has been transformed into an interdisciplinary artist residency by Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, co-founder of Criteo. Built in 1898 by architect Hans-Georg Tersling, the estate now hosts ceramic sculptors, comic artists, documentary filmmakers, and musicians in two-month sessions, with themes like 'Les Gardiennes de la mer' linking their work. The residency, funded entirely by Rudelle, aims to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration in a serene Mediterranean setting.

Sarah Rowe Will Light Up Native Neon Residency in Kingston, NY

A new residency program for Indigenous artists working with neon for the first time has been launched through a collaboration between the Walker Youngbird Foundation and Lite Brite Neon Studio in Kingston, New York. Sarah Rowe, a painter and installation artist from Omaha, Nebraska, was selected as the first recipient from over one hundred applicants. She plans to create a work inspired by the heyoka, a trickster figure from Lakota tradition, and will receive a $10,000 stipend plus fully funded fabrication, materials, studio time, and technical instruction valued at around $50,000. The resulting artwork will be publicly presented, and Rowe will retain full intellectual property rights and ownership.

Gary Baseman fills iconic L.A. coffee shop with charming drawings on real restaurant menus

Artist Gary Baseman has opened his first hometown solo show in over a decade, titled “Off the Menu,” inside the long-shuttered Johnie’s Coffee Shop on Wilshire and Fairfax in Los Angeles. The exhibition features about 40 colored pencil drawings, mostly executed on real menus from iconic L.A. restaurants such as Musso & Frank, Canter’s Deli, and Genghis Cohen, as well as newer spots like Jon & Vinny’s. The whimsical show, which launched in conjunction with the opening of the Wilshire and Fairfax subway station, runs through June 14 and celebrates the dining culture and community of the Fairfax neighborhood.

Around North America, Community Members Are Stitching Nearly 11,000 Birds

Artist and educator Holly Greenberg launched the multi-year project "Bird Collisions in the Anthropocene" in 2024 after learning about a mass bird collision at Chicago's McCormick Place Lakeside Center in October 2023, where nearly 1,000 birds died in a single night. Using data from the Chicago Field Museum and ornithologist Dave Willard, Greenberg focuses on the 10,863 birds found dead after hitting Chicago buildings in 2023 alone. The project involves community members stitching nearly 11,000 fabric birds to raise awareness and educate the public about preventing window collisions, which kill an estimated one billion birds annually across North America.

Faig Ahmed Weaves Mysticism, Science, Technology, and Craft into ‘The Attention’

Faig Ahmed, the Baku-based artist known for transforming traditional Azerbaijani carpets into melting, glitching textile sculptures, has opened a solo presentation at the 61st Venice Biennale, where he represents Azerbaijan. Titled 'The Attention,' the sprawling, maze-like installation curated by Gwendolyn Collaço explores science, alchemy, spirituality, and self-perception, weaving together digital processes with handcrafted techniques. Works include monumental machine-woven carpets like 'I Can Contain Both Worlds But I Do Not Fit Into This One,' a handwoven piece called 'Ancestors' that glows under black light, and 'Entropy Altar,' which uses a quantum random number generator to respond to visitors. The exhibition bridges 15th-century Hurufi mysticism with modern information theory, reflecting Ahmed's interest in consciousness, quantum physics, and the dialectic between measurable science and subjective experience.

Creative Thought Is Essential: A Letter from Our Editor

Jackie Andres, online editor of Colossal, writes an open letter to readers reflecting on Virginia Woolf's assertion that "thinking is my fighting." Andres connects this to contemporary concerns about declining literacy rates, the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, doomscrolling, and "brain rot" that undermine critical thinking. She positions Colossal as a free, accessible resource for art education, noting that the publication has remained entirely free for 15 years, and highlights how educators and students use the site for lesson plans and learning.