Hyperallergic

After miles of legwork, dozens of espressos, too much pasta, and an astronomical amount of art at the Venice Biennale, I'm back at my desk in New York City. It was historical. It was political. It was thrilling and moving. Did the Biennale "implode" because of boycotts, resignations, and international disputes, as some critics have lamented? Quite the opposite — it was more alive than ever. An international exhibition at this scale would fall flat if it didn't reflect

If Frieze New York feels like an assembly-line salad this year, then the Independent art fair feels like the assembly line. Entering the fair, which continues through this Sunday, May 17, entails batting your way through a grid of flailing sheets of thick yellow plastic dangling from the ceiling, like going through a car wash. Pier 36, where it is being held for the first time, is warehouse-like and vast, with neat little booths ticking all the way down to the end of the sightline.On Independent

How do the wealthy choose their art these days?Do they adorn their walls with the masterworks of long-dead modernists and Pop Art icons that will only increase in value as the years unfurl? Or do they fill their townhouses with glossy hardwood tables, chic lighting fixtures, and dense statement sculptures that wow guests and can be used as a blunt instrument in an emergency?The answer is, perhaps, all of the above. There was plenty to dazzle the patrons of the Nouveau Gilded Age at The European

So much of my experience of visual art is rooted in interpersonal connection. It’s not that an artist needs to be standing directly in front of their work for me to appreciate it, I just always find myself latching onto their presence — whether it’s physical in the gallery or imbued within their creation. Future Fair, held this year at Chelsea Industrial from May 13 through 16, seems to capture this very spirit. The stereotypical press photograph of a major art fair usually

Every art fair season the question arises: If you aren’t an arts journalist or a patron looking to augment your collection, why attend an art fair at all? With regard to the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, which was founded in 2013 by Touria El Glaoui, the answer I find is that it keeps offering surprise and the genuine pleasure of discovery. Among the spring art fairs that take place in New York, 1-54, open at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Manhattan through Sunday, still features w

Austrian artist Valie Export, a powerfully provocative yet playful force in feminist art, died on May 14, three days before her 86th birthday. The news of her passing was confirmed by Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery.Export's performances and filmed media works subverted — nay, stomped on — notions of the male gaze and patriarchal society, reclaiming and reinterpreting the female body through guerrilla modes of delivery that bypassed the restrictions of institutional spaces. Her contri

Lucien Zayan came to Frieze New York on a mission. “I am looking for something very specific,” Zayan, the founder of the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, told me. I had spotted him standing near a large abstract painting saying something about lettuce to a booth attendant. Zayan was searching for food. Art and food, to be precise — works that examine their relationship, shared humanity, social tensions — as he curates the second edition of the NAFAS Festival in T

Welcome to the 337th installment of A View From the Easel, a series in which artists reflect on their workspace. This week, Lavett Ballard — artist and Barbie curator extraordinaire — organizes exhibitions and transforms wood in the former chemistry lab of a high school-turned-community center.Want to take part? Check out our submission guidelines and share a bit about your studio with us through this form! All mediums and workspaces are welcome, including your home

Thesis work by students completing master’s degrees at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) will be on display at RISD Grad Show 2026, the school’s annual graduate thesis exhibition. Celebrating the creativity that RISD’s newest graduate alumni will bring to the world, the exhibition and digital publication includes work by students in Architecture, Ceramics, Design Engineering, Digital + Media, Furniture Design, Glass, Global Arts and Cultures, Graphic Design, Illustration,

Lucid Perturbations: The Sewn Drawings and Books of China Marks at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, NM, presents over 200 artworks from China Marks’s sewn oeuvre, offering the broadest survey of the artist’s hypnagogic tableaux of storytelling to date. China Marks dedicated the last 23 years of her active art practice to producing more than 600 sewn works. Lucid Perturbations, on view from May 15 to July 11, reveals the depth of Marks’s artistic psyche and the rang

Abstract mixed-media painter Mary Lovelace O’Neal, who passed away this past Sunday, grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. At that time, cultural institutions like art museums were segregated: Black people were permitted to visit only on certain days of the month. How much has changed since those days — not least thanks to Lovelace O’Neal herself, who was active in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s under the mentorship of the likes of Stokely Carmichael and Jacob Lawren

In a surprise move, cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder's Neue Galerie will merge with the Metropolitan Museum of Art down the street on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. The rare merger will come into effect in 2028, The Met announced in a statement today, May 14. Neue Galerie holds a collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century artworks from Austria and Germany, including its star attraction: Gustav Klimt's gold-leafed "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907). It's al

Author and activist Zoé Samudzi writes in ArtReview about an exhibition in Ohio that takes a refreshingly political stance on American surveillance and xenophobia:In mid-March a show of paintings by Shiva Addanki and Nikholis Planck opened at No Place Gallery, an artist-run space in Columbus, Ohio. Deriving its title, American Inquisition, from lines written by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in solidarity with then-detained Algerian-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khali

Mary Lovelace O'Neal (all images courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery New York and San Francisco)Painter, educator, and Civil Rights activist Mary Lovelace O’Neal died on May 10 at age 84 in Mérida, Mexico. Her galleries, Jenkins-Johnson and Marianne Boesky, announced her death yesterday. She is survived by her husband, Chilean-American artist Patricio Moreno Toro, with whom she divided her time between Mérida and Oakland, California. Lovelace O’Neal’s monume

As the 61st Venice Biennale opens its doors to the public today, May 9, 54 artists in the international exhibition and 16 national pavilion teams have issued their withdrawal from awards consideration in solidarity with the jury's resignation. A complete list of artists, duos, and collectives that withdrew is included at the end of this article. The Biennale jury announced its resignation on April 30, about a week after stating it would not be considering “countries whose leaders are

After a lively art-world week humming with protests and resistance, from the Venice Biennale to the Met Gala to New York's American Folk Art Museum, we've made it to Saturday. Tomorrow, we celebrate the mothers in our lives, and to mark the occasion, Staff Writer Isa Farfan asked 15 artists to share the best advice they got from their moms or maternal figures. “My mother sagely advised that I would be appreciated in college, and she was right,” said Pat Oleszko, who &#x20

VENICE — Artists and cultural workers made history at the Venice Biennale today as they launched a major strike that disrupted the pre-opening of the international exhibition. It is the first cultural strike in the biennale's 131-year history. At least 27 of the exhibition’s 100 national pavilions were partially or fully shut down this morning, May 8, while artists draped or altered their works in the main exhibition In Minor Keys as part of a 24-hour strike for Palestine an

It feels appropriate that Mierle Laderman Ukeles operated mostly beneath the notice of the general public for decades. As a “maintenance artist,” she focused on marginal labor, such as the upkeep of public spaces or the unpaid maternal and feminine labor that for a long time wasn’t thought of as proper work, and sometimes still isn’t. In 2017, 40 years after she became artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, Ukeles received her first career

Mary Frank charted a far different path from her male counterparts in the second half of the 20th century, who rejected the handmade in favor of fabrication. Frank, who is in her early 90s, and has been making work rooted in mythology and her study of dance with Martha Graham for decades, has long deserved to have her multi-genre work celebrated by a New York museum. The fact that this has not happened is not simply a matter of neglect or oversight — it is one of the many instances where,