Maya Gallery in New York is hosting a benefit sale that features works by over 50 Israeli contemporary artists, including prominent names like Michal Rovner and Sigalit Landau. The sale aims to raise funds for the gallery's programming and to support Israeli artists amid ongoing geopolitical tensions.
Qatar has made its debut at the Venice Biennale with an official national pavilion, marking a major cultural milestone as the first new national pavilion in the Giardini in 30 years. Led by artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, the project titled "Untitled 2026: A gathering of remarkable people" transforms the space into a living environment featuring live music, film screenings, shared meals, and ongoing performances. The pavilion brings together artists, musicians, and chefs from across the Arab world and its diasporas, emphasizing cultural exchange rather than a single national narrative.
The Cleveland Museum of Art has unveiled "Epic of the Northwest Himalayas: Pahari Paintings from the ‘Shangri’ Ramayana," an exhibition reuniting a widely dispersed 18th-century pictorial series. The show features 40 physical paintings alongside digital animations that reconstruct the original episodic sequences of the Hindu epic. This presentation is part of a larger collaborative initiative involving the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art to study and display works from the Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Ralph Benkaim Collection.
The Cleveland Museum of Art has opened "Epic of the Northwest Himalayas: Pahari Paintings from the ‘Shangri’ Ramayana," an exhibition featuring 40 rare paintings from a 1700s royal commission. These works, which depict the life of the Hindu deity Rama, have been reunited from 12 different lenders after being dispersed globally for centuries. The display is augmented by digital stations that animate over 100 additional paintings to illustrate the narrative's themes of virtue and heroism.
Anti-Zionist Jewish artists in Chicago, led by Gabriel Chalfin-Piney-González, founded the Jewish Museum of Chicago in 2023 as a decentralized cultural center without a permanent physical space. The initiative emerged from frustration with the lack of a Jewish museum in the city and a desire to create a welcoming community for anti-Zionist Jews, especially galvanized by the war in Gaza. The museum has since hosted over a dozen exhibitions and events, including a Liberation Seder and an artists collective, and is planning a brick-and-mortar space.
The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth presents "Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art," co-organized with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, marking the first major Maya exhibition in the U.S. in a decade. Featuring 95 works, the show includes 50 objects never before seen in the U.S. and 17 recent archaeological discoveries, with contributions from 23 lenders including the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología in Guatemala and the INAH – Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. The exhibition is organized thematically around Creations, Day, Night, Rain, Maize, Knowledge, and Patron Gods, and highlights recent scholarship in Maya glyph decipherment, archaeology, and art interpretation.
Elsa James's exhibition "It Should Not Be Forgotten" at Firstsite in Colchester, UK, confronts Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade through immersive installations. The show features a floor covered with larger-than-life photographs of the artist, recalling the diagram of enslaved Africans on the slave ship Brooks, accompanied by a cello soundscape by Kirke Gross. Other works give voice to enslaved women Phibbah and Molia, documented in the journals of their 18th-century owner Thomas Thistlewood, subverting historical narratives. The exhibition builds on James's earlier "Black Girl Essex" residency, which challenged the racist and sexist "Essex Girl" stereotype.
Chuck Connelly's monumental 1994 painting "Coliseum" has been unveiled at One Art Space in Tribeca, New York, after spending 21 years in storage. The 90-by-108-inch oil on canvas, a signature work of the late American artist known for his fiercely expressive style, is now on public view for the first time since 2005. The May 2, 2026 unveiling was attended by family members including Adrienne Connelly, as well as notable figures such as MaryAnn Giella McCulloh, Mei Fung, and others.
The FOMU photography museum in Antwerp has opened a new exhibition titled 'Families', curated by Anne Ruygt. The show explores the evolving concept of family through historical and contemporary photography, featuring works by artists such as Mous Lamrabat, Cecil Beaton, Omar Victor Diop, Mayara Ferrão, Peter Hujar, Carmen Winant, and Seiichi Furuya. It includes diverse perspectives, from 'hidden mother portraits' and post-mortem photography to AI-generated images of queer Black and Indigenous women, questioning traditional notions of kinship and representation.
The statute of limitations has officially expired on the 2006 heist at the Museu da Chácara do Céu in Rio de Janeiro, one of the most significant art thefts in Brazilian history. During the chaos of Carnival, armed thieves overpowered guards and stole masterpieces by Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. Despite the works being valued at over $10 million and listed on international databases like Interpol and the Art Loss Register, the perpetrators were never identified and the art remains missing.
The historic Variety Arts Theater in downtown Los Angeles is reopening after decades for a six-week exhibition titled "What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem." The show, running through March 20, presents a non-linear, late-night experience featuring over 120 years of moving images, from early cinema to contemporary video art, allowing visitors to wander freely from 5 p.m. to midnight.
The 24th edition of Guatemala’s Bienal de Arte Paiz, titled "The World Tree" and curated by Eugenio Viola, runs until 15 February across 11 venues in Antigua and Guatemala City. It features 46 artists from 30 countries, with 31 commissioned works, making it the largest and longest edition in the biennial's history. The organizing non-profit, Fundación Paiz, has also created its first permanent exhibition venue, which soft-launched with a performance by Cuban artist Carlos Martiel.
The Obama Presidential Center has announced a new commission by Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, who will create a large frieze made of photo-printed aluminum using images from the Johnson Publishing Company archives—the publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines—and the work of photographer Howard Simmons. The installation, set to open in 2026, honors the dignity of Black life and the vibrancy of Black culture throughout the 20th century. Gates has been working with 20,000 photographs from the archive since 2016, and the frieze will be visible from Stony Island Avenue, near his own Stony Island Arts Bank. Other high-profile commissions for the center include works by Julie Mehretu, Maya Lin, Lindsay Adams, Nick Cave, Aliza Nisenbaum, Jenny Holzer, and Idris Khan.
The City of West Hollywood has announced the debut of the next exhibitions in its Moving Image Media Art (MIMA) program, featuring artworks by Isabel Beavers, Diana Thater, Maya Kell-Abrams and Adam Agostino, Sara Silkin, Nina McNeely, and Noper. Starting October 1, 2025, through January 31, 2026, these works will be displayed at the top of every hour on various digital billboards along Sunset Boulevard, with specific locations and schedules for each piece.
Artist Maya Lin, in collaboration with the non-profit Art 2030, has launched a public art campaign titled "What If?" across New York City during Climate Week (21-28 September). The project features large-scale posters at the United Nations Headquarters Plaza and on JCDecaux-owned bus shelters, posing probing environmental questions and galvanizing answers to inspire curiosity and action. Additional activations include a mural by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya at the Nest Climate Campus, a caption contest for Tom Toro's New Yorker cartoon at the Climate Museum, and new didactic interventions at the American Museum of Natural History's dioramas highlighting climate change threats.
A partnership exhibition titled "Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits" has opened at Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi, featuring 29 Korean contemporary artists from the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) collection. Organized with the Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation (ADMAF), the show includes works by Nam June Paik, Haegue Yang, Lee Bul, and others, and runs until 30 June. A reciprocal exhibition of Emirati artists, "Intense Proximities," will open at SeMA in December 2025. The curators, Maya El Khalil and Kyung-hwan Yeo, chose to present each country's art scene separately to allow full appreciation on its own terms.
Casa Miraflores presents the RADAR section titled "Porous Systems" at Pinta Lima 2026, curated by Ilaria Conti. The section features Guatemalan center La Galería Rebelde and artist Angélica Serech, whose textile works draw from Maya Kaqchikel knowledge, alongside artists Diana Eusebio, Luciano Giménez, Alberto Casari, and Carlos Luis "Pajita" García Bes. The exhibition explores permeability, process, and the meeting of inherited knowledge with contemporary languages.
An exhibition titled 'Xa jun ruk’oxomal qanima—A Shared Heartbeat' at La Nueva Fábrica in Guatemala brings together the work of two Kaqchikel Maya artists, Rosa Elena Curruchich and Angélica Serech, for the first time in their homeland. It features over 100 paintings by the late Curruchich, a pioneering self-taught painter, alongside recent and newly commissioned textile sculptures by Serech, creating a dialogue between painting and weaving.
CULTURED magazine hosted a panel and cocktail reception at People's, an art salon and evening club in New York's Greenwich Village, on Tuesday evening. The event featured a discussion on the state of the art world, including social media's role in market movements and art education, moderated by advisor Anne Parke, with panelists including New Art Dealers Alliance Executive Director Heather Hubbs, AWG Art Advisory Founder Alex Glauber, artist Aglaé Bassens, and CULTURED Editor-in-Chief Sarah Harrelson. The gathering attracted a crowd of artists, advisors, writers, and patrons, and guests received a copy of the CULTURED at Home design issue and a custom tote bag by artist Jay Miriam.
Florida Atlantic University’s University Galleries opened a new exhibition titled “America 250: We Hold These Truths: We Walk These Grounds” at the Schmidt Art Gallery on its Boca Raton campus, marking the United States’ 250th anniversary. The show features work by six contemporary American artists—Carlos Betancourt, Daesha Harris, Doug Mills, John Hitchcock, Melissa Sclafani, and Yves Gabriel—and runs through March 29, 2026. The exhibition reinterprets familiar American symbols such as apple trees, wild horses, and presidential portraits, using objects and materials to explore themes of patriotism and American history.
Zen Crafart, an Indian art company, presents Viveek Sharma's solo exhibition 'Silence Please' at Bikaner House in New Delhi from November 20–30, 2025. The show features large-format paintings, intimate compositions, sculptural works, and limited edition art plates, exploring stillness and psychological interiors. Rashmin Majithia, Partner at Zen Crafart, and Chief Guest Jyoti Mayal, Chairperson of THSC, spoke at the opening. A second exhibition, 'Sacred Gestures,' is scheduled for December 2–8, 2025, at Jahangir Art Gallery in Mumbai, focusing on movement and expressive emotion.
The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas will present 'Living Here,' an exhibition running from June 20 to December 20, 2025, featuring 26 artists from the East and Southeast Asian diasporas. The show explores how food, clothing, movies, and everyday objects carry the sensory and emotional weight of diaspora, with works ranging from painting and sculpture to video and installation. Artists include Eliza O. Barrios, Ching Ching Cheng, Jiha Moon, Stephanie Shih, TT Takemoto, and Christine Wong Yap, among others. The exhibition incorporates oral histories from the Reflections: The Las Vegas Asian American and Pacific Islander Oral History Project at UNLV Libraries.
Three emerging artists—Anisa Mosaiebiniya, Maya Davis-Stokes, and Crow Dillon-Parkin—have secured solo exhibitions at the artist-led space Stryx JQ following their completion of the 'Get Gallery Ready' Bootcamp. The program, delivered by Solihull College & University Centre and funded by the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA), was designed by art historian Ruth Millington to provide creatives with professional portfolio-building skills and storytelling techniques necessary for career advancement.
Coburn Gallery at Ashland University will host its annual faculty art exhibition from January 22 to February 20, 2026, featuring two-dimensional and three-dimensional works by ten faculty members from the AU Department of Art + Design. An opening reception will take place on January 22 from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., with free admission to the public.
Archaeologists and geologists have uncovered a Postclassic Maya settlement at the Birds of Paradise field complex in the Rio Bravo floodplain of Belize. Utilizing LiDAR mapping and 20 years of field research, the team discovered exceptionally preserved wooden architecture, stone structures, and domestic artifacts dating from 800–1500 CE. These findings reveal that Maya communities successfully migrated to wetland environments after inland urban centers were abandoned due to prolonged droughts.
Portugal has repatriated three pre-Columbian artifacts to Mexico, marking the first time the country has returned unlawfully acquired antiquities to the Mexican government. The returned items include a Shaft Tomb Culture female figure, a Maya painted vessel, and a Zapotec funerary urn representing the deity Cocijo. The objects were recovered through the cooperation of Portuguese judicial authorities and the Mexican embassy after being flagged at auctions and in various cities including Lisbon, Guimarães, and Évora.
Archaeologists working on the controversial Maya Train project in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula have discovered a 2,000-year-old limestone face carving. The 18-inch-tall sculpture, featuring deep-set eye sockets, a flat nose, and a cleft lip, was found in Sierra Papacal near Mérida during construction of the Mérida-Progreso Railway Bypass. The carving was attached to the foundation of an ovoid building with a west-facing entrance, suggesting it served as a ceremonial marker. Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) is overseeing the excavation of 15 other nearby structures, and the artifact will be transported to a laboratory for conservation.
The African American Museum in Dallas reopens on May 1 after temporary renovations, featuring the exhibition "People Who Make the World Go ‘Round: The Legacy of Sepia Magazine." The show highlights influential Black icons such as Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Maya Angelou, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Thurgood Marshall through photographs from the museum's archive of over 40,000 images. Sepia magazine, founded in Fort Worth in 1946, chronicled Black life and culture for nearly four decades, offering a Southern perspective that rivaled national publications like Ebony and Jet.
Trinity College's Widener Gallery is hosting its first fully student-curated exhibition, 'Reshaping Tradition: Contemporary Explorations in East Asian Art.' The show, open through April 2026, was produced by students from the 'Art History 205: East Asian Art, Now to 1850' course, who selected the artists, refined the theme, chose the works, conducted artist interviews, wrote catalogue essays, and designed the exhibition layout, all under the guidance of gallery director Lisa Lynch and professor Michael J. Hatch.
A posthumous retrospective of Pakistani modernist painter Mashkoor Raza (1948-2025) was held at Mainframe Gallery in Karachi, showcasing his prolific output from the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition featured abstract and semi-abstract works, equestrian paintings, and a recreation of his studio, drawing from his family's collection. Raza, a graduate of the Karachi School of Art and later a teacher there, was known for decorative abstractions in oils dominated by whites, reds, and blues, as well as cubist-style horse and figure compositions. The show also included a display of press clippings and art books, highlighting his influence and the critical reception of his era.