Art News. Vasari Codex

article culture schedule May 6, 2026 visibility 7 link 3 artists

How Fatinha Ramos Channels ‘Visual Activism’ in Her Richly Layered Illustrations

Fatinha Ramos, a Portuguese artist and illustrator based in Antwerp, describes her work as 'visual activism,' creating richly layered illustrations that give voice to minorities and address social issues. She collaborates with major clients including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Tate, Scientific American, the Anne Frank Museum, and MoMA, which commissioned her to illustrate an essay about being compared to Frida Kahlo. Born with osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bone disease), Ramos spent much of her childhood in hospitals, where drawing became an escape. After 12 years as an art director in advertising and publishing, she now focuses on her own practice, which challenges stereotypes around disability, climate crisis, sexism, and racism. She is currently working on a graphic novel and a series of anatomical glass sculptures based on brittle bone disease.

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museum exhibitions schedule May 8, 2026 visibility 3 link 1 artist, 1 gallery

Hilary Pecis Paints Saturated Snapshots of West Coast Life

Hilary Pecis presents a new series of acrylic paintings in her solo exhibition "Love Letters" at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, running from May 16 to June 20. The works capture everyday scenes—a backyard pool, a studio corner, a picnic with strawberry cake—using her signature saturated palette and meticulous attention to texture and pattern, working from photographs onto linen.

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museum exhibitions schedule May 8, 2026 visibility 2 link 1 artist, 3 galleries

Collaged Denim Sculptures by Nick Doyle Unravel American Mythology

Brooklyn-based artist Nick Doyle creates large-scale wall sculptures using layered and bleached denim, exploring American mythology and its contradictions. His solo exhibition "Collective Hallucinations" at Perrotin features works such as stylized cacti, landscapes, tarot cards, and a fortune teller's shop, all rendered in denim. Doyle's practice began after finding a discarded roll of denim in 2018, which he saw as a metaphor for the complexities of American history, including slavery, masculinity, and Manifest Destiny.

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museum exhibitions schedule May 5, 2026 source 2 sources visibility 11 link 23 artists

Summer Exhibitions Coming to West Texas & the Panhandle

Art galleries and institutions across West Texas and the Panhandle have announced their summer exhibition schedules. Highlights include the El Paso Museum of Art's "From the Collection: Portraiture, 1903-2021," featuring works by César Martínez, Edward Curtis, and Andy Warhol; Ballroom Marfa's solo show "Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers" with colossal stoneware sculptures; and The Grace Museum in Abilene's "Memory Painters: The Art of Memories," showcasing Texas intuitive painters. Other venues include the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts in Lubbock, and the Museum of the Southwest in Midland, with exhibitions spanning portraiture, student art, memory painting, and immersive installations.

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museum exhibitions schedule May 5, 2026 visibility 6 link 2 artists, 1 gallery

Wander through Adrienna Matzeg’s Embroidered, Late-Night City Explorations

Adrienna Matzeg’s solo exhibition "After Hours" at Abbozzo Gallery in Toronto presents embroidered textile works inspired by her late-night explorations of Kyoto, Tokyo, and Seoul during a July 2025 trip. The pieces capture quiet, illuminated scenes of convenience stores, markets, and roadside attractions, rendered on black linen with a diaristic, snapshot-like quality.

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museum exhibitions schedule May 6, 2026 visibility 5 link 2 artists, 1 gallery

Luscious Hair Sculptures Sprout Like Branches in a Symbiotic Exhibition

Artists Merryn Omotayo Alaka and Sam Frésquez have created a collaborative exhibition titled "Your Birth is My Birth" at Jane Lombard Gallery in Chicago. The show features synthetic hair sculptures made from Kanekalon, suspended from the ceiling and spread across the floor like organic growths. Five distinct "species" of sculptures—Listening Roots, Hearing Bells, Mother & Child, Stacking Pearls, and Umbra Pods—draw inspiration from epiphytes, non-parasitic plants that grow on host specimens. The works explore themes of symbiosis, interdependence, and genetic inheritance, with mirrored forms emerging within vertical tendrils.

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article culture schedule May 8, 2026 visibility 4 link 2 artists

In ‘Reverence,’ Three Decades of Paul Nicklen’s Remarkable Photographs Exalt Nature

Paul Nicklen, a renowned wildlife photographer and co-founder of the conservation organization SeaLegacy, is releasing a comprehensive book titled *Reverence* through publisher Hemeria. The volume collects 160 photographs spanning his three-decade career, including iconic images and previously unpublished works that capture the beauty and fragility of ecosystems from the Colorado River delta to the Arctic Bay.

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article culture schedule May 7, 2026 visibility 2 link 2 artists

Jake Messing’s Hyperrealistic Paintings Celebrate the Abundance of Nature

Jake Messing, a Northern California-based artist, creates hyperrealistic acrylic paintings that depict dense, maximalist clusters of flora and fauna, often combining creatures and plants in surreal arrangements. His works, such as "Coccinellidaes Hideaway 2" and "Bubbles and Blooms," draw on the tradition of Dutch Golden Age still-life painting while incorporating contemporary elements like color gradients and shiny fabrics.

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article culture schedule May 5, 2026 visibility 6 link 2 artists

Maxwell Mustardo Sculpts Ancient Ornamentation in Brilliant Glazed Forms

Maxwell Mustardo creates ceramic vessels that blend ancient Greek forms like amphorae, kraters, and kylix with organic, fungal-like surface textures in fluorescent oranges, pinks, and greens. Based in New Jersey, he works as studio manager at the former residence of artist Toshiko Takaezu, and his practice focuses on pushing classical ornamentation—such as gadrooning—back into its natural origins, blurring the line between cultural artifact and living growth.

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article culture schedule May 4, 2026 visibility 8 link 11 artists

We Spent a Week Quarantined on an Uninhabited Island with 80 Artists

A journalist from Colossal spent a week on an uninhabited island in the Balearic Islands with nearly 80 artists for a residency program called Quarantine, conceived by artist Carles Gomila. Participants follow a rigorous, opaque schedule of talks, workshops, and mentorship sessions, with phones and internet banned, and must stay on the island from early morning until late evening. The April 2026 edition, themed "Tears in Rain" after a Blade Runner monologue, began with a theatrical tour by an actor playing Captain Horacio Hollynwood, who introduced the historic Lazaretto of Mahón, an 18th-century fortress and infirmary.

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museum exhibitions schedule May 4, 2026 visibility 7 link 2 artists, 1 gallery

Vibrant Victorian-Era Transparencies Illuminate a Host of Microscopic Creatures

Osh Gallery in London is exhibiting 'The Hudson Transparencies,' a collection of 58 original illustrations by Charles Thomas Hudson, a 19th-century educator and amateur scientist. Created for his lectures, these large-scale transparencies (37.8 by 29.5 inches) combine painted paper and perforated pinholes to depict microscopic creatures such as rotifers, algae, protozoa, and marine organisms. When back-lit, the dark, seemingly unfinished images transform into vivid, detailed visions of life invisible to the naked eye, showcasing the intersection of Victorian-era optical innovation and scientific discovery.

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article culture schedule May 7, 2026 visibility 3 link 2 artists

Irina Werning Chronicles 18 Years of Photographing ‘Las Pelilargas’ in a New Book

Photographer Irina Werning has spent 18 years traveling across Latin America to document Indigenous women with exceptionally long hair for her series "Las Pelilargas." Her new book, published by GOST Books, features nearly 90 portraits taken between 2006 and 2024, starting with the Kolla community in Argentina. Werning sought subjects by posting signs in remote mountain towns and organizing hair competitions, capturing a tradition rooted in ancestral beliefs that hair connects to life, thoughts, and the land.

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article culture schedule May 5, 2026 visibility 8 link 1 artist

Janusz Jurek Embraces the Weirdness of Everyday Life in Captivating Street Photographs

Polish photographer Janusz Jurek, who works as a graphic designer and commercial photographer, creates candid street photographs that capture humor, happenstance, and the bizarre. He focuses on authentic moments outside the mainstream, often turning away from main attractions to observe people's reactions, small gestures, and strange coincidences. Jurek is preparing a photo collection titled "Look, Before It’s Gone," compiling five years of his street photography.

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article news schedule May 6, 2026 visibility 4

Bulldozer Plows Across Thousand-Year-Old Indigenous Land Art During Border Wall Construction

Construction workers building the Trump administration's border wall between the US and Mexico accidentally damaged a two-hundred-foot-long Indigenous land art figure known as the Las Playas Intaglio, a colossal fish etched into the earth near Ajo, Arizona, that is thought to be over a thousand years old. Satellite imagery showed bulldozer tracks cutting a sixty-to-seventy-foot-wide path across the intaglio, and a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson confirmed the disturbance, stating the remaining portion had been secured and would be protected in place.

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museum exhibitions schedule May 4, 2026 visibility 4

Gijs Van Vaerenbergh Gracefully Reimagines a 16th-Century Belgian Abbey Church in Steel

Gijs Van Vaerenbergh, the Belgian design studio founded by Pieterjan Gijs and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh, has created "CLAUSURA," a life-size steel sculpture tracing the footprint of the vanished 16th-century Gothic church at Herkenrode Abbey in Hasselt, Belgium. The ethereal framework of slender steel rods rises from the original site, offering a transparent, abstract reconstruction that evokes the abbey's lost architecture through suggestion rather than literal rebuilding. The first phase opens to the public on June 18 as part of a broader restoration led by Herita.

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