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 Qui f1onez (Marka27) fuses pop culture, graffiti, Indigenous imagery, and Mexican mural traditions into neo Indigenous portraits and sculptures. His traveling exhibition Ni de Aqu d ed, Ni de All e1debuted 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.
Bj f6rn Persson 19s 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.
