The Barbican Art Gallery in London is presenting a major retrospective of Colombian artist Beatriz González, marking her first solo show in the UK and her largest-ever exhibition in Europe. The exhibition spans six decades of her work, from the 1960s to the present, showcasing her roles as an artist, curator, art historian, and educator.
Koo Jeong A presents "KANGSE X" at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich, an exhibition that extends from her previous show "ODORAMA CITIES" at the Korean Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale. The title derives from the Korean term "KANGSE," meaning spatial strength, and the show encompasses her multifaceted practice across drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, film, and animation, including her earlier work "MYSTERIOUSSS" (2017).
A major retrospective exhibition dedicated to John Giorno, titled "The Performative Word," has opened at MAMbo, the Museum of Modern Art of Bologna. The show, curated by Andrea Bellini and Vincente Todolí, explores Giorno's multidisciplinary practice as a poet, artist, and activist, highlighting his collaborations and his innovative approach to making poetry a performative and visual experience.
Curator and writer Reuben Keehan has been appointed artistic director of the forthcoming Kontempo – Center for Contemporary Art in Manila, a new institution developed by the Ayala Foundation. Keehan will relocate from Australia, ending his 15-year tenure as curator of contemporary art at Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. In other career moves, Manuel Rabaté has become CEO and director of New Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, bringing over 25 years of museum leadership including his previous role as inaugural director of Louvre Abu Dhabi. Additionally, the Kochi Biennale Foundation has named board member and Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat as president of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, succeeding Bose Krishnamachari who resigned in January.
Fondation Opale in Lens, Switzerland, has unveiled "ROOTS," a major exhibition that bridges Australian Aboriginal art with Western contemporary masterpieces. Curated by Samuel Gross, the show juxtaposes works by Aboriginal artists like Keith Stevens and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri with global icons including Olafur Eliasson, Sheila Hicks, and Niki de Saint-Phalle. The exhibition utilizes the unique alpine setting to explore themes of materiality, ancestral territory, and the universal human creative impulse across different geographies and epochs.
Philanthropists Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder, who have been part of Long Island's East End cultural scene since 1969, are being honored at the Parrish Art Museum's annual midsummer gala in July 2025. The couple commissioned an oceanfront home from architect Norman Jaffe in Sagaponack and have filled it with a collection featuring works by Jack Pierson, Almond Zigmund, Constantino Nivola, Roni Horn, Jenny Holzer, Mel Kendrick, Lynn Chadwick, Claude Lawrence, and others. Sandy serves as vice president of the museum's board of trustees, and the couple previously supported a Jaffe retrospective at the Parrish in 2005.
Muriel Hasbun, a multidisciplinary artist known for exploring themes of memory, migration, and the Salvadoran diaspora through photography, video, and installation, died on May 13 from ovarian cancer in Silver Springs, Maryland, at age 64. Born in El Salvador in 1961, she left during the country's civil war in 1979 and settled in Washington, D.C. Her work, including series like "Santos y sombras / Saints and Shadows" (1990–97) and the 2023 survey "Tracing Terruño" at the International Center of Photography, poignantly combined archival family photos with new imagery to examine loss, exile, and the complexities of identity.
The UK government is exploring a proposal to charge admission fees for foreign tourists at national museums in England, sparking widespread opposition from cultural institutions. The idea was raised in a review of Arts Council England by Labour peer Margaret Hodge, who suggested digital ID checks could enable such a system, though she noted it would bring in less than £10 million and may not be worth the hassle. Museums like the Royal Armouries have condemned the plan as undermining universal access and projecting a lack of generosity, while the Cultural Policy Unit warns it would be logistically complex and ideologically problematic given the colonial origins of many collections.
Art historian James Hamilton has published a paper in the JMW Turner Society’s magazine arguing that a famous portrait long believed to be a self-portrait by JMW Turner was actually painted by John Opie, a British portrait artist 14 years Turner’s senior. Hamilton notes that the work is an anomaly in Turner’s oeuvre, which is dominated by landscapes and seascapes, and that its dramatic lighting closely resembles Opie’s style. He suggests Opie may have given the painting to Turner, and that its authorship became misattributed after Turner’s death when his vast bequest of artworks was transferred to the nation and eventually housed at the Tate.
The Museum of Image and Sound (MIS-RJ) on Rio de Janeiro's waterfront opens to the public on May 8 after 16 years of development. The 10,000-sq.-m building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, features eight floors with panoramic views of Copacabana Beach and a façade honoring Roberto Burle Marx. The project faced multiple delays, funding suspensions, and controversy over urban redevelopment, including backlash when a nightclub on the site was demolished in 2010. Work resumed in 2021, and the $62.5 million museum was completed with public and private funds from donors like Itaú, Vale, and Rede Globo.
Poland's entry for the 2024 Venice Biennale, titled *Liquid Tongues*, is an audio-video installation by artists Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski. The work centers on a performance by the Chór w Ruchu (Choir in Motion), which includes both hearing and deaf performers, with much of the content filmed underwater in a Warsaw swimming pool. Presented across two screens in the Polish pavilion, the installation draws inspiration from whale song to explore alternative modes of communication, using spoken English and International Sign. The project builds on a previous performance at Warsaw's Zachęta National Gallery of Art and was developed in close collaboration with curators Ewa Chomicka and Jolanta Woszczenko.
Trinket exchange boxes, where people swap small items like pins, stickers, and ceramic animals, are rapidly spreading across the UK and US. The phenomenon, which began in Philadelphia in autumn 2024, has grown from 800 to nearly 1,500 installations in two months, according to Portland-based artist Rachael Harms Mahlandt, who tracks them on a world map. In Edinburgh, pet-sitter Sam Stevens runs a popular pink box outside Argonaut Books, inspired by a San Francisco exchange, and has seen her follower count jump overnight as locals trade trinkets for fun.
Artist Dries Verhoeven has transformed the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennale into a bunker-like space by covering its iconic glass-and-steel structure with metal shutters. Inside, visitors experience a gradually darkening environment and a raw vocal performance by 13 rotating performers, intended to evoke desperation and confusion about contemporary global crises. The work critiques the modernist ideals of openness and optimism embodied by the pavilion, designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1953.
Researchers Karen L. Davies and Hassan Ugail used artificial intelligence facial recognition to analyze two Hans Holbein drawings from the Royal Collection Trust. Their study, published in npj Heritage Science, suggests that a portrait previously labeled as Anne Boleyn actually depicts her mother, Elizabeth Howard, while a drawing cataloged as an unidentified woman is the true likeness of Anne Boleyn. The findings challenge long-held identifications based on 18th-century inscriptions and align more closely with contemporary descriptions of Boleyn as slender with dark hair.
Fiona Pardington has created a new series of human-scale photographic portraits of native New Zealand birds, many of which are extinct or endangered, using taxidermy specimens from regional museums. The series, titled "Taharaki Skyside," will be exhibited at the Aotearoa New Zealand pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Pardington, who has Māori and Scottish ancestry, incorporates the birds' eyes with superimposed historical landscapes to evoke their lost habitats and spiritual significance as intermediaries between human and divine worlds in Māori culture.
Barbados's Heritage District at the Newton Enslaved Burial Ground, a major project including a memorial, national museum, archives, and cultural complex, is facing significant construction delays more than four years after its 2021 announcement. The site, one of the largest known burial grounds of enslaved Africans in the Western Hemisphere, is being developed under the Road (Reclaiming Our Atlantic Destiny) Programme led by Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley. While a temporary pavilion for the National Performing Arts Centre opened in August 2025, the overall completion—initially slated for 2024—has been pushed back due to expanded archival digitization, supply-chain disruptions, and a fire at the Barbados Archives Department in June 2024. The memorial, designed by Adjaye Associates, is conceived as a landscape intervention using teak sourced from Ghana.
Art Basel has announced a new initiative called "Basel Exclusive" for its upcoming Swiss fair, running June 18–21 with VIP previews June 16–17. Under the program, participating galleries will withhold at least one artwork—or even their entire booth—from the PDF previews sent to clients ahead of the fair, encouraging collectors to visit in person. So far, 170 of 232 exhibitors (nearly 75%) have signed on, including major galleries like Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace Gallery, David Zwirner, Gladstone, Lehmann Maupin, Lisson, Matthew Marks, Paula Cooper, Thaddaeus Ropac, and White Cube, as well as secondary-market dealers such as Galerie 1900-2000, Helly Nahmad, Landau, Mayoral, Pace Di Donna Schrader, and Van de Weghe. Art Basel’s chief artistic officer Vincenzo de Bellis described it as a "gallery-led process" developed from conversations with exhibitors, formalized during Art Basel Hong Kong.
A late 19th-century stained-glass window by Tiffany Studios, known as the Boyd Family Memorial Window (The Falls), is set to be auctioned at Christie's New York in June with an estimate of up to $2 million. The window, commissioned in 1898 and installed in 1899 at the Second Congregational Church in Winsted, Connecticut, depicts a waterfall landscape and has been in the church for about 125 years.
The V&A East Museum is set to open in Stratford, London, marking a significant milestone for the East Bank cultural quarter. This £135m project joins the V&A East Storehouse and other major institutions in a transformed area of East London, aiming to attract younger and more diverse audiences through accessible art and design collections.
The Peabody Essex Museum is hosting "Said in Stone," the first-ever comprehensive retrospective dedicated to Edmonia Lewis, a pioneering 19th-century sculptor of Black and Ojibwe heritage. The exhibition assembles a significant body of her marble works, including the landmark sculpture "Forever Free" (1867), which is recognized as the first formal visual representation of emancipation by a Black American artist. The show traces her journey from her upbringing with her Ojibwe family and her traumatic years at Oberlin College to her eventual success as an expatriate artist in Rome.
Labour peer Margaret Hodge has detailed her proposal to introduce admission fees for overseas tourists at England’s national museums, stipulating that such a move must be preceded by a universal digital ID system. Speaking to a parliamentary committee, Hodge argued that without digital verification, museum staff might resort to profiling visitors based on appearance, which would undermine community cohesion.
The National Gallery in Athens is hosting a major exhibition celebrating the legacy of George Costakis, the visionary collector who rescued thousands of Russian and Soviet avant-garde works from state-sponsored oblivion. Born in Moscow to Greek parents, Costakis spent decades acquiring pieces by artists like Kazimir Malevich and Liubov Popova at a time when such art was vilified by the Soviet regime. The new exhibition reinterprets these works through the lens of humanity's relationship with the environment, marking 30 years since the collection was first shown in Greece.
The Hole, a prominent New York-based contemporary art gallery, is facing multiple lawsuits and allegations of financial instability. Legal filings from landlords at both its Bowery and Tribeca locations indicate significant rent arrears totaling over $180,000, alongside unpaid real estate taxes. Founder Kathy Grayson confirmed the closure of the gallery’s Los Angeles outpost, attributing the crisis to a sharp decline in sales starting in late 2023 and a destabilizing period of rapid expansion.
Canadian tourism to the United States has plummeted by more than 30% following a period of heightened political tension, including threats of annexation and the imposition of trade tariffs by the Trump administration. This decline is being felt acutely across the northern border states and major cultural hubs, with cities like Seattle, Detroit, and Portland reporting significant drops in Canadian visitors.
Artist Gisela Colón is the subject of two concurrent solo exhibitions: "Radiant Earth" at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut and "The Mountain, The Monolith" at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico. This dual presentation marks a significant career milestone and a homecoming for the Puerto Rican-born artist, who has built an international profile over the past decade with installations from Desert X AlUla to sites near the Pyramids of Giza.
The British Museum has opened a major exhibition titled 'Samurai,' which challenges the widespread, simplified portrayal of samurai as solely honor-bound, hyper-violent warriors. The show, curated by Rosina Buckland, presents them as a complex social class who were also bureaucrats, administrators, and cultural figures, emphasizing their roles during periods of peace and governance.
Artist François-Xavier Gbré's photographic series "Radio Ballast" made its US debut in a duo exhibition at the International Center of Photography in late January. The work documents the century-old railroad system in Côte d'Ivoire, built by French colonizers, exploring the country's colonial history, independence, and modernization through landscapes, train stations, and the communities shaped by the railway.
Patricia Marroquin Norby, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first-ever curator of Native American art, has stepped down from her role after a five-year tenure. While both Norby and the museum cited health reasons for her December 2025 departure, the exit follows intense public scrutiny regarding her claims of Indigenous heritage. A 2024 report by the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds (TAAF) alleged that Norby has no American Indian ancestry, leading to a public debate over her qualifications and identity.
A significant 8.5-foot segment of the Eiffel Tower's original 19th-century spiral staircase will be auctioned by Artcurial on May 21. This piece, removed during a 1983 renovation and one of only 24 sections created, has remained in private French hands since its initial sale that same year and is expected to fetch between €40,000 and €50,000.
The Katy Trail, a prominent 3.5-mile urban greenway in Dallas, has announced the launch of the KTX Biennial, a new public art initiative set to debut in Spring 2027. Curated by Jovanna Venegas, currently of New York’s SculptureCenter, the inaugural edition will feature site-specific commissions and sculptures installed along the trail for up to 18 months. The project is an evolution of a pilot public art program started in 2021 by the Friends of the Katy Trail, intended to integrate contemporary art into the daily experience of the park's two million annual visitors.