At Blindspot Gallery in Hong Kong (Sep 15–Nov 7, 2026), “Soft Borders” gathers six artists—Igshaan Adams, Aiko Tezuka, Bi Rongrong, Kazuko Miyamoto, Angela Su, and Yee I-Lann—to probe how identities form within shifting cultural, technological, and historical frameworks. Works by Tezuka, Yee, Su, and Adams unravel histories, reframe colonial objects, measure time through the body, and map resilience.

The National Book Foundation named the finalists for the 2026 National Book Awards across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature. Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on November 18.

London-based artist Hannah Lim reimagines the snuff bottle through oversized, sculptural works that draw on Chinoiserie, classical Chinese literature, and her British-Singaporean heritage. Her materials include polymer clay and Jesmonite, with exhibitions including Reimaginings through November 14 at the Museum of East Asian Art in Bath, plus presentations in Paris and a forthcoming public artwork in Paddington, London.

Simon Laveuves 1/35-scale, post-apocalyptic miniatures balance on stilts and boulders, stocked with tiny essentials and absent of figures. His solo exhibition Ancre9 dans la roche runs November 12 to December 22 at Loo & Lou Gallery in Paris, with additional presentation during Luxembourg Art Week from November 20 to 22.

At the AIDS Monument in West Hollywood, ACTION = LIFE gathered five-minute performances co-presented by LACE and the Performance Art Museum as part of Circa: Queer Histories Festival, presented by One Institute. The night connected a century of performance art lineage to the site’s AIDS-era activism, with artists including Jerri Allyn, Gabrielle Civil, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Sheree Rose, Ben Cuevas, and Dacity.

Para Site will leave its Quarry Bay base and, on its 30th anniversary, launch a citywide “nomadic” program throughout 2027, while continuing its June-launched initiative Elsewhere in Me with commissions by Justin Talplacido Shoulder (Phasmahammer) in November and Yim Sui Fong in December.

The Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao opens a €45m Norman Foster and Luis María Uriarte expansion on 6 October 2026, doubling exhibition space, adding a light-filled atrium, and strengthening links to the nearby Guggenheim Bilbao.

New Mexico-based artist Max Lehmans Ancestral Androids at Hecho a Mano merges Pre-Columbian references with sci-fi, presenting vividly colored ceramic figures that imagine future archaeology and question how AI and archives will shape what endures. The exhibition includes works from 2026 such as The Aubergine Oracle from the City of Caracol and The Duchess of Digital Data, and remains on view through November 1 in Santa Fe.

On October 24, 2026, during Art Basel Paris, Artcurial will auction A shared Modernity from the collection of Louis Grandchamp des Raux, gathering nearly 75 works by 44 artists across movements from Impressionism and the Nabis to Symbolism. Star lots include Maurice Denis’s L’Île Chevalier (estimate €700,000–1,000,000), alongside works by Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Berthe Morisot, Fernand Khnopff, and Léon Spilliaert.

NAZA is drawing packed theaters, fierce debate, and scrutiny from lawyers: it topped the Italian box office, will stream for free on The Guardian in late November, and may feed into South Africa’s ICJ filing even as the IDF disputes core claims.

At The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Sharif Bey: Homecoming presents ceramic and mixed-media works from the Guardian Series and Crown Series, pairing them with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat and on view through October 12. The sculptures reference African and Oceanic visual culture and the Benin Bronzes, using materials like ceramic beads, rusty nails, spikes, and chains to evoke histories of violence and resilience.

The Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards 2026 names 40 finalists selected from more than 10,000 entries by photographers in 112 countries, with winners to be announced on December 8 and voting open for the Sterna People’s Choice Award.

Fahey Klein Gallery’s Bruce Weber: Try a Little Tenderness, timed to Taschen’s “My Education,” brings 60+ photographs into quiet focus—highlighting portraits from Sir Ian McKellen and Peter Johnson to Nina Simone—while a Chet Baker soundtrack nods to Weber’s Let’s Get Lost. The show runs April 9–June 6, 2026, in Los Angeles.

The MacArthur Foundation has named mixed-media artist Christine Sun Kim one of its 2026 MacArthur Fellows, awarding her USD 800,000 over five years. Born in California in 1980 and based in Berlin, Kim’s internationally exhibited practice spans performance, music, and interactive installation.

Jay Miller launched the Yard in Hackney Wick by posing as a property developer, offering free night-watchman service to secure a space. The three-month pop-up ran 14 years, propelled Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum Dreams to the National Theatre, and has just reopened after a £7 million rebuild.

At Haus der Kunst, Tome1s Saracenob4s Ancestral Futures spans more than two decades of work, from spider web installations and a bike-powered plastic-bag cavern to a collaboration with Indigenous communities of Red Atacama around The Sanctuary of Water in Salinas Grandes. The exhibition is on view in Munich through February 7.

Gaia Alari crafts elaborate, tactile animations drawn frame by frame from thousands of handmade drawings on paper, using oil pastel and charcoal. Meandering botanicals, gestural bodies, and sweeping birds flow in fluid loops, and her practice spans brand collaborations, personal projects, and static illustrations.

Asher Hartman traces a path from early theatre and fashion design in Tokyo to performance and visual art, favoring non-narrative work, year-long rehearsals, and integrity to the writing-driven process over conventional audience expectations.

At the 16th Gwangju Biennale, titled “You must change your life,” works by James T. Hong, Goldin+Senneby, Maya Watanabe, Mona Benyamin, Sohrab Hura, Amanda Heng, Bhenji Ra, Saodat Ismailova, and Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork probe how transformation plays out across bodies, histories, and tempos.

Berlin-based artist and inventor Niklas Roys Glashtte Trash Clock, built from scrounged materials like tape, cardboard, a yardstick, and plastic, runs for about half an hour and features a paperclip-escapement, a glass bottle gong, and a random complication that plays with chance.

World of WearableArt’s 2026 edition, GLO!, crowns Kayla Christensen (New Zealand) for “Sacred Nightfall” and features works ranging from Ashish Dhaka’s “Enchantress” to an iridescent insect by Katherine Bertram. Performances continue through October 4 at TBS Arena in Wellington.

Kristine Schomaker remembers artist Scott Froschauer—an early Shoebox artist known for his public sign works and a reflective practice that made viewers part of the piece—following his sudden death.

Guadeloupe-born, Montre9al-based artist Eddy Firmin uses ceramic sculpture and sound-minded installations to probe the legacies of slavery, resistance, and consumerismfrom a mobile DJ booth made with Ge9raldine Entiope to self-portraits that confront corporate power. His work appears starting October 9 in After the Island: Caribbean Canadian Ceramics at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto.

At the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, teamLab: Everything Exists in Infinite Continuity presents new and recent works that respond to touch, daylight, and seasonal change, including a preserved edition of The World of Irreversible Change. The exhibition is on view through February 21.

A former senior executive at the National Gallery of Victoria has been accused of diverting approximately AUD 8 million from a work account between September 2019 and September 2025 to buy and resell smartphones. After a year-long IBAC investigation, the man faces eight charges and is due at Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on October 20; NGV reports its collection was not affected.

Jon Chings solo exhibition Path of Least Resistance opens at KP Projects in Los Angeles from October 3 to November 7, bringing meticulously rendered hybrids of flora and fauna that channel elemental forces and symbolic themes across works like Dandilion, Thin Air, Force of Nature, Ajnas Path in Bloom, and 1984.

In Busy Bodies, animator Kate Renshaw-Lewis channels Rube Goldbergs chain-reaction logic into a hand-drawn assembly of tiny, hat-wearing creatures producing red rubber gloves and vague fish products. Made with inkjet and screen printing, the short won the Grand Jury Prize for best animated short at Slamdance Film Festival and was nominated for Best Film at Sundance Film Festival.

A major retrospective, Graciela Iturbide: Between Two Worlds, surveyed more than five decades of black-and-white photography at SFMOMA from July 11 through November 29, 2026, tracing the artist’s close collaborations with communities across Mexico and beyond.

Olivier Marty of Studio KO details the transformation of Tashkent’s 1912 tram depot and diesel station into the Centre for Contemporary Arts Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s first permanent contemporary art institution, emphasizing material legibility, revived techniques, and contextual design. Early programming has activated the basilica-like halls, and the opening drew 5,650 visitors on the first day.

Lookingglass Theatre named David Catlin and Ericka Ratcliff co-artistic directors, appointed David Schwimmer producing director, and brought Philip R. Smith back as executive director, alongside new board leadership. Plans include a return to a four-show season, expanded co-productions, a State of Illinois–funded lobby improvement, and a newly approved marquee at the Water Tower Pumping Station on Michigan Avenue.

A monumental gold coil by Plastique Fantastique appeared on the High Line earlier this month during New York Fashion Week. Commissioned by Bulgari for its Serpenti Infinito series, “auroBOROS: Urban Memory and Collective Dream” marked the studio’s first U.S. exhibition.

A cross-section of October 2026 artist opportunities includes Arch Enemy Arts’ January 2027 group exhibition, The Hopper Prize’s $13,000 in grants, juried shows, prizes, and residencies from New York to Wausau, with deadlines concentrated in early to mid-October and extending into November and December, plus several rolling grants.

In an unlikely Pasadena setting, Antonio Gallery presents Lady Praxis by Grace Carter Mercado-Quinn, an SAIC undergraduate, from May 16–June 16, 2026. Founded by Georgia Fernandez and named for her father “Mister Banjo,” the gallery champions early-career artists and channels the experimental spirit praised by Pae White.

A photo of President Donald J. Trump with a Kennedy Center DEMOLISH poster and a protest days later frame a governance crisis at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center, where Trump now chairs a restructured board, lawsuits are before Judge Christopher R. Cooper, and agencies have aligned with the White House as courts test the remaining checks. Performance revenue has fallen since February 2025, even as Congress approved US$257 million for repairs and a judge says only Congress can authorize adding Trumps name to the building.

Journal of Therolinguistics transforms Descanso Gardens’ Boddy House into a color-coded exploration of interspecies communication, curated by Oscar Salguero and on view March 21–July 5, 2026. Works span beaver toothmarks, birdsong constellations, beetle glyphs, Jagube vine symbols, bat–datura pollination games, and glowing lichens.

During Seoul Art Week, Henri Alexander Levy presented his first solo exhibition, “Final Achievement is Ruin,” at Shinsegae Gallery with paintings, sculpture, and metal-cage installations. The Enfants Riches Déprimés founder reflects on discipline, function versus autonomy in art, recurring motifs, and his Paris “Anti Public Library.”

At Prospect Park, Molière in the Park presents Don Juan for free to thousands this September, reflecting Lucie Tiberghien’s case for funding culture with the same conviction as parks: excellence, access, and sustained investment go hand in hand.

Henley Spiers takes Overall Winner at the 2026 Bird Photographer of the Year for an underwater image of a diving northern gannet off the Shetland Islands, as more than 24,000 entries showcase avian behavior across categories. The competition also highlights threats like habitat loss, poaching, pollution, and bird flu.

The Huntington’s Doyle Lane: Master of Clay, curated by Lauren Cross, PhD, assembles more than 100 works from the ceramic innovator’s career, on view from September 13 through March 1, 2027, and traces his path from exclusion to architectural-scale triumphs.

At the India Pavilion in the Arsenale di Venezia, “Geographies of Distance: remembering home” (May 9–Nov 22, 2026), curated by Amin Jaffer, assembles works by Sumakshi Singh, Asim Waqif, Alwar Balasubramaniam, Skarma Sonam Tashi, and Ranjani Shettar to explore how home endures through materials, memory, and ritual.

Beginning this month, the Metropolitan Opera will give away 10,000 tickets a month — about one in ten seats for the season — to New Yorkers who haven’t set foot inside since 2019 under Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “Opera for All,” which he tied to Fiorello La Guardia’s 1943 “People’s Opera” that sold seats for 75 cents.

A new Louisiana Channel release, “Remedios Varo: The Painter of Magic,” brings together three artists and two writers—including Samanta Schweblin—to reflect on the Spanish-Mexican Surrealist Remedios Varo (1908-1963), focusing on her precise approach to alchemy and the veil between the physical and spiritual. Interwoven artworks and commentary trace the lasting resonance of her imagery, from owl-like figures to uncanny, brush-handed machines.

Harriet Mena Hill’s series Soft Concrete and The Aylesbury Fragments reframe London’s Aylesbury Estate, translating its architecture into wool portraits and intimate paintings on salvaged concrete amid a phased demolition that began after a 2005 decision. Regeneration started in 2013 and is less than half complete; Hill has made more than 150 paintings to date.

The Broads Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind (May 23October 11, 2026) is the artists first LA museum show, mixing participatory works, historic performances with REDCAT and LACO, and key pieces from across her career, from Half-a-Wind to Apple and FLY.

Diriyah Biennale Foundation names four lead curators for the Islamic Arts Biennale 2027; Imelda Cajipe Endaya becomes the first woman National Artist for Visual Arts in the Philippines; Creative Australia announces 16 Fellows; Yona Lee receives PICA’s 2027 Judy Wheeler Commission; Alicja Kwade’s Tai Kwun installation is restored after vandalism.

At Halberstadt’s St. Burchardi Church, Mark Swed witnessed a new pitch added to John Cage’s 639-year Organ2/ASLSP performance, then reflected on stepping down as Los Angeles Times music critic and the Cage-inflected threads linking Disney Hall, LACMA and the coming Colburn Center.

Sarah Lee’s solo exhibition Deeper at Albertz Benda gathers dreamy, uncanny landscapes—moons, fissures, and diffused lightning—to explore ecosystems and the tension between clarity and concealment. Works like “Emerald Sky” (2026) and “Before Dark” (2026) anchor the show, on view through October 10 in New York.

South Korean artist Taehyoung Maria Jeons digital Plant Series transforms apartment flora into uncanny compositions with purple veins, red outlines, and starry accents. Dozens of works appear in Folium, her first monograph from Volume, a publisher that asks readers to back projects before printing.

Hospital of Emotions transforms four floors of St. Vincent Medical Center, Los Angeles, with 70 artists interpreting themes from Resilience to Fear; highlights range from Guy “Dioz” Bloom’s graffiti-dense Room #20 to a moving film in Room #75 by Paul Anand and Veterans Stand Together. On view through July 31, 2026, the exhibition engages the building’s medical infrastructure and anticipates its planned shift to a center for behavioral health.

Artists Unite Against Pax Silica (AUPAX) is protesting a roughly 1,600-hectare AI manufacturing hub planned by the US-led Pax Silica initiative, with exhibitions and a rally at the proposed New Clark City site drawing hundreds. The coalitions actions coincide with calls from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Pope Leo XIV for greater oversight and global regulation of AI.

Filmmaker John Wilsons debut feature, The History of Concrete, opened in select U.S. theaters last Friday with a trailer that asks, Do you ever think about concrete? The documentary traces the materials ubiquity in sidewalks, buildings, and homes, using it as an unlikely lens on New York and its denizens.

Kanako Abes intricate paper collages depict wolves, bunnies, and deer in relief, framed by foliage-filled portals, and extend into a forthcoming book with Caryl Lewis, The Paper Girl, published by Frances Lincoln Ltd. The book is slated for release on October 6, alongside upcoming presentations at Giant Robot Gallery and Childhoods End Gallery in Olympia, Washington.

Crocker Art Museum’s Rebels with La Causa: Royal Chicano Air Force Art and Activism, 1970–1990 surveys RCAF posters, a room-sized Day of the Dead altar, and archival materials, on view in Sacramento from February 22 to June 28, 2026.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has begun construction on the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing, a roughly 12,000-square-meter expansion for modern and contemporary art led by Frida Escobedo and targeted to open in 2030. Funded in part by a USD 125 million gift from Oscar L. Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang, the project adds nearly 50% more exhibition space and reorients access toward Central Park and the Upper East Side.

Chicago-based artist Emmy Star Brown creates large-scale murals of vibrant, amorphous shapes, squiggles, and occasional geometric lettering across interior and exterior surfaces. Her work—rooted in visual communications and advertising—is currently on view alongside Danym Kwon in The Peace of Wild Things at Joy Machine.

Nikon’s Small World in Motion concluded its 16th cycle with top honors to Dr. Ning Xu (China) for a video of abnormally beating airway cilia from a child with Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (PCD). More than 340 entries from 40 countries were evaluated, with additional recognitions highlighting subjects from jellyfish larvae to MSG salt crystals.

National Symphony Orchestra musicians and management ratified a four-year contract with a 9% wage increase over the first three years, running through September 2, 2030. The deal coincides with Kennedy Center renovation votes, a weeklong safety closure after September 4 storm damage, and aligns with Gianandrea Noseda’s term to 2031.

Mexico City-based artist Clotilde Jime9nez layers magazine clippings, Mexican craft paper, and fabrics into collages that probe family history and silence, with works like China de Mayagfcez (2026) and The Nightcall (2025). The collages appear in c9ramos silencios, on view through October 31 at Marianne Ibrahims Chicago gallery.

GrandPalaisRmn marks 200 years of photography with Grand Angle, a series of 11 themed, traveling exhibitions drawn primarily from the GrandPalaisRmn and MPP archives, presented with partners including Cnap, the IOC, and Fisheye. The program, which includes Ruralités in Roubion and a Willy Ronis solo at the Châtel-Saint-Germain library, runs through September 2027.

Multidisciplinary artist Liang Shaoji, known for installations using live silkworms, died on September 14 in Shanghai at age 81, according to ShanghART. His career spanned soft sculpture training in Hangzhou, the long-running Nature series, international exhibitions and biennials, and major awards in 2002 and 2009.

In the group exhibition Thresholds at the Haggerty Museum of Art, Daniel Minter presents community-made brooms and vibrant carved assemblages that he frames as vessels for spiritual and ancestral knowledge, with nature-coded galleries and a totemic sculpture offering a service of hope. The show is on view through December 19 at the Haggerty, part of Marquette University in Milwaukee.

At Metro’s Wilshire/Fairfax station, Ken Gonzales-Day presents a glass-mural installation drawn from LACMA’s collections, while his Erased Lynching series removes victims from historical images to examine the spectators, postcards, and systems that sustained the spectacle. His research spans 354 lynchings in California and engages with histories documented by the NAACP and others.

At the Hepworth Wakefield, Mrinalini Mukherjee: Unbound Forms—Women Sculptors of India and Bangladesh (May 23–Nov 1, 2026) presents works by Leela Mukherjee, Meera Mukherjee, Pilloo Pochkhanawala, Novera Ahmed, and Mrinalini Mukherjee, spanning mythic nagas, kinetic blooms, and charged figuration. Highlights include Novera Ahmed’s Snake (1973) and Un serpent nommé désir (1972), Mrinalini Mukherjee’s Adi Pushp II (1998–99), and references to the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.

At GRAY Chicago, Jaume Plensas Beyond Silence centers on two monumental wood-and-steel reliefs, Julia and Maria, each measuring 28 feet wide and seven feet tall, alongside elongated faces from the Clouds series in cast iron and granite stone. The exhibition marks Plensas tenth solo with GRAY and coincides with Remote, Serene, Ethereal at the gallerys New York location; both are on view through December 19.

Forthcoming from Phaidon, Another View: The Vibrant World of Contemporary Black Artists opens 20 studios through nearly 200 pages, with 150 never-before-seen photographs, exclusive interviews, and an introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The book features artists including Nick Cave, Nina Chanel Abney, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kerry James Marshall, and is slated for release on October 28.

Sovern LA presents Into the Pluriverse from June 25–October 8, 2026, featuring works by Nia Lee, April Bey, and Jessica Taylor Bellamy, curated by Nordia Simmonds. The exhibition spans textiles, sculpture, painting, and installation to explore Afro-indigenous histories, ecological witness, and multiple realities.

At Abbazia di San Gregorio in Venice, A Necessary Fiction: Maps, Art, and Models of Our World (May 63Nov 22, 2026) gathers historical cartography and contemporary worksfrom Monira Al Qadiri and Qiu Zhijie to Reena Saini Kallat, Nasser Al Salem, and Yoko Onoin a collateral exhibition commissioned by the Saudi Ministry of Culture. Loans include the Saudi National Museum, the King Abdulaziz Public Library and archive, Yale University, the Bodleian of Oxford, and Leiden University.

From New York Fashion Week’s outdoorsy mood to a San Francisco Opera strike settlement, a day’s cultural roundup tracks shifts toward the tangible — with preservation fights over murals, a judicial pause before demolition, and the death of Duncan Sheik at 56.

Charting Jill Sykess evolution from early abstractions to botanically driven paintings and installations, this profile follows works from Blue Cymbidium (2001) and Polo (2013) to The Marchers (2017), Justice (2020), and the Yucca Forest project at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History.

From a Hiroshi Sugimoto–designed garden opening at the Hirshhorn on October 31 to new Villa Romana Fellows, Tokyo Jazz Club’s November debut, the 2026 Praemium Imperiale laureates, and an Asia-focused Contemporary Istanbul, here are the week’s key art updates.

Pablo Luna Studio, based in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia, creates climate-responsive hospitality and wellness spaces that blur indoor-outdoor boundaries, including the bamboo-built Lotus Shala in Ubud and the Manta Shala on Nusa Penida.

Catherine Opies Holding Blue at Regen Projects (May 28July 3, 2026) draws on a 2024 road trip along Norways mountains, presenting cerulean, unaltered photographs grouped as Clich and Vernacular. The Los Angeles-based artists trajectory from incisive self-portraits to emptied landscapes anchors this contemplative exhibition.

Chiharu Shiota has been appointed Officier and Mami Kataoka Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres at a ceremony in Tokyo officiated by Be9atrice Le Fraper du Hellen. Their careers include major exhibitions, awards, and leadership roles spanning the Mori Art Museum, international biennials, and programs linking Japan and France.

Measuring 33 feet wide by 52.5 feet high, the in situ “Great Mosaic” at the Museum of the Baths of Trajan in central Rome may be the largest in the Roman world, while the “Painted City” fresco—uncovered in the 1990s—goes on view for the first time.

In a September 16, 2026 letter, Grace Ebert, Editorial director, Colossal, defends human-made art amid accelerating A.I. and details the magazine’s hand-run process by a team of four. She notes that less than 0.5% of weekly readers contribute, and that reaching 1% would secure Colossal’s long-term future after 16 years.

At the Visual Arts Center in Visalia, Dean De Cockers Cyphers and Codes in the Coral Sea traced machine-inspired forms from airplane wings and propellers to Pearl Harbortitled prints, closing August 1, 2026. Works from 2002 to 2024 revealed a consistent abstract vocabulary built from historical references and precise craft.

Alexei Ratmansky and Tatiana worked with the Ukrainian National Ballet in Kyiv, rehearsing between runs to a bomb shelter, reported The New York Times, while the Kennedy Center board voted to shut the building indefinitely after a presidential call, with its resolution citing “certain fiscal collapse within weeks,” according to the Washington Post.

At Pb7Pb7Ob7W in New York through October 24, Hew Lockes The Wanderers suspends a miniature flotilla from the ceiling and presents ornate Parian ware busts depicting figures like Queen Victoria and George Washington, all invoking global trade, exploitation, and the afterlives of empire.

In The Spectacle, a short documentary from The New Yorker, director Yasmin van Dorp contrasts serene Norwegian vistas with crowded scenes of tourists at sites like Kjeragbolten, awash in phones, selfie sticks, and drone controls. The film foregrounds the tourism industry and questions our impulse to experience spectacular places through screens rather than in the moment.

Altadena-based artist James Griffith paints wildlife and starscapes with asphalt from the La Brea Tar Pits’ Pit 91, a volatile medium he calls “painting with death.” His process, influences, and community life—from the Folly Bowl to a post-fire regrouping—unfold through quotes, methodical detail, and select works.

Altadena-based artist James Griffith makes paintings with tar from La Brea Tar Pits’ Pit 91, carving wildlife and astral scenes into inky surfaces he calls “painting with death.” His process mixes solvents and patience with scrimshaw-like precision—and a philosophy distilled in the question, “Where are we?”

Bob Mackie, the Monterey Park–born costume designer celebrated as the King of Camp, died Monday at 87 in Palm Springs from pneumonia. Over a career spanning decades, he dressed stars from Cher to Diana Ross, earned nine Emmys, three Academy Award nominations and a Tony, and left an indelible mark on stage, screen and fashion history.

Frederich Kunaths The Nearest Faraway Place, presented by Pace in Seoul and continuing through October 24, blends romantic landscape traditions with pop culture cues. Quotes from the artist and gallery frame themes of distance and longing, with works such as The most beautiful world in the world (20202026) and Sometimes Im Almost There (2026).

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art has named Ching-Ling Wang, currently a curator at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, as the inaugural Nancy Chang Lee Curator of Chinese Art. Wang, who will assume the post in November, aims to broaden access to NMAA’s Chinese art holdings of some 13,000 objects through collaborations across disciplines, institutions, and countries.

Corey Helford Gallery celebrates its twentieth anniversary with a two-part program in 2026: an August Edition (Aug 8–Sept 12) and a September Edition (Sept 19–Oct 24), spanning a main anniversary exhibition, an archive survey in Gallery 2, and solo shows by Molly Devlin and Ornélie in Gallery 3.

The Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University presents The Otherworld is Home, a free museum-wide initiative inspired by a Yorùbá proverb and anchored by three simultaneous exhibitions on African art, identity, and spiritual passage. Highlights include more than 40 works in African Art: Ancient Roots, Enduring Values, Iké Udé’s Sartorial Anarchy, and Thresholds featuring Aisha Tandiwe Bell, Portia Cobb, Stephen Hamilton, and Daniel Minter.

At PFFFestival 2026 in Stuttgart, The Was series A Kid Could Do It turns an empty house into a bold, childlike drawing, extending earlier experiments on Europes WWII concrete bunkers along the Atlantic Wall. The artist follows one simple rule: the unfiltered creative logic of a child, and began the series working alongside his mother.

Throughout the 2020s, Hiroko Yoshimoto has developed two nature-centered series, Biodiversity and Of Infinite Variety, spanning hard-edged abstraction and looser, representational forms. Works such as Biodiversity #118 (2019) and Scream (2026) anchor To Abstract or not to Abstract at the Ojai Art Center in Ojai, California, alongside silverpoint floral panels.

Artist Hannah Buechler transforms rubber loom bands, wool, and felt into framed textile reliefs that resemble gestural paintings, assembling thousands of loops over a felt substrate. Recent works include ‘The Space Between’ (2024) and several 2025 pieces photographed by Spencer Higgins.

PÉPET, a palm-size “paper friend” produced by TAKEO Co., Ltd. and originally designed by Masae Nagao, is built from more than 400 layers of colorful paper. TAKEO will release a new apple-inspired edition called “Pomme” on October 14, following characters like “Dandel,” “Fuji,” and “Sky.”

At Tyler Park Presents, Pau Pescadors Amor Prohibidospanning 118 photographs and a videopushes back against surveillance-era demands for a legible, cisnormative identity through humorous photographic grids, intimate Polaroids, and a semi-narrative film.

Sara Anstiss solo show Pastels at Olney Gleason gathers small-scale soft pastel drawings that weave medieval and early Renaissance references with dreamlike scenes, on view through October 24 in New York City.

In Roberta Gentrys solo exhibition Blood Orange at Track 16s East Hollywood location, running through October 24, symmetrical grids meet biomorphic forms and references to the 16th-century La Dame e0 la licorne tapestries, from a velvet gown and towering pipe organ to orange trees.

As reports from Fast Company and Nature frame the shrinking value of average-quality work, institutions from the BBC to Netflix revisit which metrics matter, while Detroit’s symphony and Bristol Old Vic retrench and Nairobi’s acrobats turn gridlock into a stage.

Artist Hannah Beuchler reimagines loom bands as painterly reliefs, looping thousands of rubber bands onto wool roving on felt substrates to create framed works that read like expressive brushstrokes. Recent pieces from 2024–2025 range from 26.75 x 19.75 inches to 77 x 72.5 x 2 inches, with photos by Spencer Higgins.

In Shapeshifter, Anna Ortiz draws on Mexican-American heritage and Mesoamerican nagual lore to paint jungle terrains in concentrated blues, greens, and pinks, populated by double moons, an explosive volcano, and reflective pools. The exhibition is on view through October 31 at Chart Gallery in Tribeca and echoes Gloria Anzaldfa
40a
fs 1992 essay The New Mestiza Nation.

At Chicago’s Intuit Art Museum, Karla Wong’s Journeys of Being brings together Day of the Dead–evocative figures, alebrijes, and agave-studded deserts with surreal portals, reflecting her Oaxacan roots, Chinese heritage, and life between the U.S. and Mexico. The exhibition includes oil-on-canvas works from 2024 to 2026 and is on view through January 10.

Oceanographic magazine and Blancpain’s Ocean Photographer of the Year named Julien Anton the 2026 overall winner for a black-and-white seahorse portrait made in Moorea, French Polynesia, with category highlights including Jenny Stock (Female Fifty Fathoms Award), Gergo Rugli (Adventure), and Rui Filipe Cardoso Duarte (Human Connection). Finalists featured Matty Smith, Steven Lopez, Sun Qingsheng, and Andrea Michelutti.

Philadelphia Fringe now counts 350-plus shows in 100-plus spaces, while in South Carolina the arts commission funded all but two of nearly 180 panel-approved applicants, then asked Greenville Gay Men’s Chorus and Proud Mary Theatre Company for extra evidence of “artistic merit,” according to The Post and Courier.

Phaidon’s Fungi: The World of Mushrooms, out October 15, gathers more than 200 photographs, artworks, and historical objects across 200+ pages, with imagery spanning several millennia and featuring figures like Riitta Ikonen and Anni Koponen, Hilma af Klint, and Carsten Höller.

A week in arts news spanned a fallen ceiling at the Kennedy Center, the Lucas Museum’s opening bet on comics, illustration and film, a two-film tally for women in Venice, Stanford’s case for art-AI accountability, a national-security argument in the OpenAI lawsuit, and a globe you can listen to.

Clio Sze To’s solo exhibition Échos at Crèvecœur in Paris, on view September 4 to October 10, brings together oil paintings shaped by her walks through the city, where dusk, street lamps, and tree-filtered shadows drive the compositions. Works from 2026 include “Englobés,” “En musique,” “Rendez-vous,” “Vers minuit,” “Boîtes mystères,” “Arc de nuit,” and “Fête.”

Across the U.S., stories from Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington show cultural support shrinking or used as leverage, while Scotland, Edinburgh, California, and Toronto are building stable funding channels that treat culture like infrastructure.

Jacob Hashimoto’s largest installation to date, Giant Arc, suspends nearly 75,000 bamboo-and-printed-Japanese-paper kite-like elements at SFMOMA. The work fills the ground floor gallery, shifts with the daylight, and remains on view through mid-2028.

Forthcoming from Delmonico Books, Inploration: Art Exploring Space to Understand Earth brings together work by nearly 100 contributors, edited by Lawrence Azerrad and Richelle Ellis, to consider how cosmic inquiry can sharpen our attention to the planet. The volume features artists including Cannupa Hanska Luger, Tavares Strachan, Wangechi Mutu, Cai Guo-Qiang, and James Turrell, among others, and is due at the end of October.

Florida Studio Theatre has launched a search for a new Artistic Director, a role within a reimagined leadership team, with programming oversight across Mainstage, Stage III, Children’s Theatre, and New Play Development. Management Consultants for the Arts is managing the search; FST targets Spring of 2027 for a decision, Fall of 2027 for transition, and lists a starting salary of $160,000 with full benefits.

A behind-the-scenes video from Blackwing traces the making of its signature pencils across specialized factories in Japan and a final assembly in Stockton, California, where a proprietary machine attaches each eraser before hand inspection and boxing by the dozen.

At Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore from September 5 to October 3, Ronald Jacksons An American Fiction presents oil-on-canvas portraits titled like a casting sheet, extending themes raised by the Oscar-winning film American Fiction. The series reprises Jacksons mask motif and includes works such as Pervis Brown (2026) and Guy Story (2026).

A roundup of recent arts stories frames Tom Service’s Guardian question about calling the Berlin Philharmonic “the best orchestra in the world” alongside cases where attention — not age or quality — determined survival, from Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences to Boston Ballet and Edinburgh’s visitor levy.

Ed Sayers’s Super Nature brings together 40 collaborators in 25 countries across five continents to create a collective ode to the planet, shot entirely on Super 8. Released by BFI Distribution, the film screens in the U.K. and Ireland this month and features voices in 11 languages stitched from scenes at home, underwater, in air, and on land.

Erin Milezs expressive, densely composed paintings explore crowded urban spaces and quiet detachment in Everything the Light Touches at Monya Rowe Gallery, running September 10 to October 24 in New York. Referencing George Tooker, Jacob Lawrence, and WPA mural language, works like A Giving Tree, Pick Your Plot, and Subway press figures close while keeping them inwardly absorbed.

The 2026 Audubon Photography Awards named Francisco Castro Escobar and Jacqueline Burke as grand-prize winners for Chile/Colombia and U.S./Canada, respectively, alongside category honorees that reveal avian behaviors and human-made risks. Highlights include images from Chile, Florida, the Shetland Islands, and beyond.

Hans Op de Beeck presents Vanishing Point at Almine Rech in Brussels from September 10 to November 7, featuring monochromatic, often life-size sculptures that foreground form and mood over color. A statement frames the title as a metaphor for memory, imagination, introspection, and slipping briefly outside time.

The five-volume Worlds Unfolding: Science on the Page, published by Princeton University Press, draws on The Huntington’s archives to present more than 625 illustrations spanning the 10th century to today, with an introduction by Bill Nye and volumes titled Above, Below, Within, Beyond, and Alive. Highlights range from Ruth Rowland Nichols in 1931 to Nikola Tesla in 1899, Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies, and a 1980 Voyager 1 image of Saturn.

Cornwall-based illustrator Ashley Percival turns poodles, rotund birds, and boot-wearing insects into pattern-rich characters, often arranging multiple versions of a species in grid formations. Recent bird works were inspired by three months in Spain and France, and he notes, I dont think about the colors I use. Its all free flow, he tells Colossal.

From a critic’s call for an “extra-human” review in San Francisco Classical Voice to AP’s report that The Met Museum canceled its Galliano show, recent stories map the shifting forces—human and algorithmic—that shape taste and authority.

Chicago artist Isaiah Lee builds dollhouse-scale paintings where toys turn uncanny, shadow widens the unknown, and faith and memory collide. His solo exhibition A Thief in the Night opens October 16 at crosswalk in Chicago, with additional works on view through November 1 at Hyde Park Art Center.

Victor Quif1onez (Marka27) fuses pop culture, graffiti, Indigenous imagery, and Mexican mural traditions into neo Indigenous portraits and sculptures. His traveling exhibition Ni de Aquded, Ni de Alle1debuted at Boston University in 2025, was briefly shown then shut down at the University of North Texas in Denton, and opens at Institute of the Arts and Sciences in Santa Cruz this October, featuring the I.C.E. Scream series confronting the Trump administrations immigration crackdown.

Tate Modern’s Frida: The Making of an Icon (25 June 2026–3 January 2027) brings together over 30 works by Frida Kahlo, 200+ works by peers and later artists, and a ‘Fridamania’ finale, organised with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Tickets start at £25 (free for Members), with an optional £5 smartphone audio guide and extensive accessibility provision.

Tate Britains retrospective of James McNeill Whistler runs 21 May 27 September 2026, the first major European exhibition of his work in 30 years, with celebrated paintings shown alongside rarely seen pieces and a a35 smartphone audio guide.

In an August 27, 2026 op-ed, Chad Cooper argues that expanding arts education organizations would strengthen New Yorks economy, with the piece accompanied by a photo of the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music credited to Buck Ennis.

More than 65,000 images from 121 countries have been narrowed to a 100-strong shortlist for Wildlife Photographer of the Year, with winners to be announced on October 13 and an exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum from October 16 to July 11, 2027.

A curated roundup of September 2026 opportunities spans a four-week Hayama Artist Residency in Japan, major open calls like CraftForms 2026 and the Dobell Prize for Drawing, and grants including Innovate Grant, the 1858 Prize, and more, with deadlines throughout September and early fall.

In Handmade Utopia, David Jacob Kramer and Michael Schmelling document Northern California’s back-to-the-land architecture—improvised dwellings in redwood and salvage, geodesic echoes, and ad hoc additions—while tracing the ideals that shaped them. Published by D.A.P./Edition Patrick Frey, the book arrives September 1.

In An Apple for the Road, Antwerp-born Ben Sledsens layers saturated color and methodical pattern across quiet, intimate scenes. The exhibition runs September 3 to October 10 at Tim Van Laere Galler in Antwerp and features works like Swan and the Willow (2025–2026) and Evening Light (2026).

Minyoung Kim centers black felines in meticulously composed paintings that invite a mischievous “Wait, what?”—from paws poised near cutlery to motifs that morph into moth wings, water droplets, and webs. She is preparing a solo booth at Untitled Art, Miami Beach with Enari Gallery.

Devon-born, London-based artist Xanthe Burdett layers lush greenery over faint figures, invoking mythology and ancient cosmologies through a green-driven palette and a Renaissance-era transfer method. This fall, she will be in residence at Soho Revue to develop a series exploring Daphne’s metamorphosis amid climate catastrophe.

Bjf6rn Persson19s forthcoming Rizzoli book, The Earth We Share: Extraordinary Photography of Our Vanishing Species, spans the Tanzanian grasslands around Mount Kilimanjaro to Antarctica and includes a preface by the late Dr. Jane Goodall. Slated for release on September 8, it frames endangered wildlifefrom running giraffes to a stoic American bison and family scenes of lions and cheetahsas a hopeful call for conservation amid poaching, habitat loss, and the climate crisis.

Leslie Waynes The Unintended Blues presents large-scale paintings of melting icebergs in the Arctic Circle, Manhattan, harbor construction, and vulnerable U.S. coastlines, installed back-to-back on metal posts to invite viewing in the round. Part of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Counsels 2026 River to River Festival, the exhibition is on view through September 27 at the Arts Center at Governors Island.

In his ongoing series Ticket non remboursable, Luca Battaglia photographs carousels across Europe with 20–30-second long exposures, dissolving their ornate structures into bands of light that evoke memory and public space. Locations noted with the images include Toulouse, Grenoble, Paris, Nice, Marseille, Dijon, Deauville, Honfleur, and Tikkimäki.

Joy Machine stages The Peace of Wild Things, a duo exhibition of Emmy Star Brown and Danym Kwon, on view August 28 to October 17, 2026. The show links Browns abstraction with Kwons surreal domestic scenes, including Kwons 2026 works such as Our Favorite Path and What We Hold Dear.

Reports spotlight a deference-heavy model in classical music teaching, entry-level writing work lost to automation, a potential Boston Symphony strike, a renewed appetite for CD players, country’s edge on the Billboard charts, and the LAPD probing a Nicolas Cage film that went missing at Netflix.

From August 13 to 16, Brussels’ Grand-Place hosted the 24th Flower Carpet, unveiling Hiro Sugiyama’s “Neo Hokusai,” a 14,000-square-foot design of more than 750,000 dahlias marking 160 years of friendship between the nation and Japan. The project reimagined The Great Wave Off Kanagawa and partnered with Bloemencorso Loenhout, with the parade kicking off on September 12.

Pew found that more than a third of web pages published since ChatGPT’s launch show signs of machine authorship, as traffic to the ten largest US news sites fell by a third in two years. In the same week Google shipped a detector for AI fakes and Harvard closed its writing center, a filmed Hadestown grossed $20.7 million after extending to four weeks, and Ragtime set a Lincoln Center Theater box office record.

Drawn from nearly 4,000 entries by 1,338 photographers worldwide, four images have been shortlisted for the Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize 2026. The winner, to be announced on November 3, will receive £15,000 and a commission for London’s National Portrait Gallery, which hosts an exhibition from November 5 to January 17.

In Folded Memories at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, Estefania Ajcip builds sculptural paintings from birch plywood, paper mache, small LED lights, and acrylic to trace the fractures and longing of a family split between Guatemala and L.A. The exhibition is on view through August 22.

Traffic to the ten biggest US news sites is down by a third in two years, while more than a third of post-ChatGPT pages show signs of machine authorship. As hoaxes spread online, Hadestown breaks Hamilton’s box office records, ICA San Diego cuts nearly half its staff, a study tallies 4,500 Los Angeles jobs lost to the Paramount-Warner merger, and America’s first jellyfish museum opens in Pompano Beach.

Paris-based Lou Beneschs solo exhibition The Magicians Room at Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco, on view through August 22, channels the tarots Magician into surreal mixed-media works on vintage board games, chalkboards, and antique paper.

At ICD Brookfield Place in Dubai, Craig & Karl debut Under the Sun, a canopy of smiling inflatables—flowers, beach balls, inner tubes, and a radiant sun—suspended in the atrium as a new chapter of their Mateys universe. The duo, based in New York and London, describe their cross-continental process as a two-way conversation.

From Google’s new image-assessment tool and Harvard’s writing center closure to the L.A. Jazz Festival’s collapse, Ragtime’s record at Lincoln Center Theater, and Gia Kourlas seeing dance in a champion surfer, this roundup traces where trust in culture is won—or lost.

Grace Baldwin is constructing a lifelike junk drawer at monumental scale, filling it with hyper-real versions of everyday items and crowdsourced suggestions from social media. She plans to keep adding objects, hopes to find a place to display the work, and is exploring materials beyond her usual woodworking.

Sharbreon Plummers richly illustrated book, Stories in the Seams: A Peoples History of Black Quilts and Their Makers (Chronicle Books), traces Black quilting from its roots in slavery through today, combining archival imagery, historical context, and works by artists including Ruth Clement Bond, the Quilters of Gees Bend, Bisa Butler, Basil Kincaid, and Faith Ringgold. The volume is slated for release on October 6.

In 2024, Damien Hoar de Galvan created 362 daily sculptures from reclaimed wood in his Milton studio, a project that later earned him the 2025 James and Audrey Foster Prize and an ICA/Boston exhibition titled I dont think Im ever gonna figure it out.

Turin-based artist Francesco Pirazzi paints atmospheric, dreamlike scenes where light organizes space and reveals absence, featuring recurring subjects like trees, street lamps, and houses. Works from 2024 and 2025 will be on view at Luce Gallery in Turin starting Octobe 28.

Austin, Texas-based artist Alejandro Aguilar Canela channels difficult emotions into graphite and mechanical pencil drawings on paper and vellum, embracing smudges and unplanned marks as part of his process. Several works appear in this year’s Critic’s Choice exhibition at Ki Smith Gallery in New York, on view through September 6.

Research by Jonatan Sodergren suggests digital preservation, restoration and 0foreverisation keep the past so available that brands may be selling familiarity rather than nostalgia. Gaming illustrates the shift, with Nintendo, PlayStation and Nightdive Studios returning classics to everyday play.

Phoenix-based Wiley Wallace conjures desert mystique in glowing acrylics for Night Bloom at Arch Enemy Arts, a solo exhibition of gem-like works that range from 16 inches wide to 6 x 6 inches and continues through August 30 in Philadelphia.

In The Calabashes We Never Drank Amasi From, Sipho Mabona transforms calabashes with recycled milk cartons, mirrors, and audio of his father, Mongameli Mabona, creating an audiovisual tribute displayed on earthen plinths that reference rondavel huts. An installation view from 2024 appears at Kunstmuseum Luzern.

The Rumpus has launched El Alboroto, a Spanish-language vertical dedicated to commissioning original work—across criticism, essays, interviews, fiction, poetry, and comics—led by Alejandra Márquez and Vasthi Jean-Michel. The initiative follows a revival by Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman and aligns with a broader Rumpus 2.0 strategy rooted in California.

Captured at 416 nm by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on Maui, the highest-resolution image of the Sun’s photosphere reveals Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability and features smaller than 12 miles across, offering new clues to magnetic energy build-up and solar heating.

Suzanne Jongmans fashions Renaissance-style portraits from padded packaging, fruit mesh, and even copper coils salvaged from appliances, pairing humble materials with velvet, deep backdrops, and composed sitters. Works like In Resonance, Kindred Spirits  Childhood, and a pandemic self-portrait, In the Midst of It All, explore femininity, concealment, and the place of wonder in a technologized age.

Spotify will tag AI “personas” and remove them from recommendations, Anthropic says all model outputs carry watermarks, and Suno added watermarks and opened a vinyl waitlist. Meanwhile, Time projects half its revenue from live events, public radio’s audience is up 9.6% in two years, poetry is booming live, Ari Emanuel’s Mari acquired ATG for a rumored $6 billion, and the National Symphony expects roughly half its budgeted ticket revenue.

Vancouver-based artist Jennifer Latour pushes her ikebana-style, hand-built floral sculptures outdoors for her Bound Species series, battling wind to photograph the ephemeral works. Her images are currently in group exhibitions in Montreal and Palma, Mallorca, with trips to Arizona and the U.K. seaside ahead and a solo show planned for 2027.

Presented by Oceanographic magazine and Blancpain, the Ocean Photographer of the Year highlights finalists across categories like Adventure, Human Connection, Ocean Unseen, and Conservationwhich is split into Hope and Impact. Winners will be announced in September.

Drawn from the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Turn the volume up! surveys free speech and civic action across five themes and features works by Spider Martin, Kara Walker, the Guerilla Girls, Carrie Mae Weems, Kiki Smith, Bruce Davidson, and more. The exhibition opens on August 27 and continues through July 11, 2027.

Phaidon’s Great Women Photographers surveys work from 68 countries across nearly 200 years, highlighting more than 250 women in an alphabetically organized volume with new texts by leading scholars. The book, introduced by Fiona Rogers and due October 14, 2026, follows Great Women Artists, Great Women Painters, and Great Women Sculptors.