Installation view of Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, on view March 25–August 17, 2025 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Eileen Travell, courtesy of The Met.
NEW YORK, NY.- Opening March 25, 2025, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the major exhibition Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie will radically reimagine the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens. When porcelain arrived in early modern Europe from China, it led to the rise of chinoiserie, a decorative style that encompassed Europe’s pervasive fantasies of both the East and the exotic along with new ideas about women, sexuality, and race. This exhibition interrogates the ways in which this mutable, fragile material that shaped European women’s identities in the past also led to the construction of abiding racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women. Shattering the illusion of chinoiserie as a neutral, harmless fantasy removed from the present, Monstrous Beauty casts a critical glance at inherited attitudes toward the style, exploring how negative stereotypes can be reclaimed as terms of female empowerment. ... More
Rita Deanin Abbey Art Museum entrance, courtesy of Rita Deanin Abbey Art Museum.
LAS VEGAS, NEV.-The Rita Deanin Abbey Art Museum will host Fiddle & Fern Ensemble, a string quartet concert on Friday, March 28 from 6 to 8 p.m. Marking the first-ever public concert at the museum, Fiddle & Fern Ensemble will be an evening of folksy, fiddly, fun, inspired by the music of GRAMMY-nominated group, Danish String Quartet. Following the concert, a special champagne reception will be available for attendees. Guests are also encouraged to explore the museum before and after the performance. “The ‘Fiddle & Fern’ concert will be a wonderful way to immerse guests in a beautiful medley of music, while simultaneously surrounded by Rita’s astonishing art,” said Laura Sanders, executive director of the Rita Deanin Abbey Art Museum. “We are honored to partner with such a talented group of musicians and are confident that attendees will feel inspired and uplifted throughout the performance.” ... More
NEW YORK, NY.- Christie's will present Jewels Online, open for bidding from 24 March through 2 April. The sale features a curated selection of diamonds and vibrant colored gemstones, with exceptional designs by renowned jewelry houses such as Bulgari, Cartier, David Webb, Van Cleef & Arpels, and more. Spanning a variety of price points and with many lots offered without reserve, the sale includes something for every collector and will be on view at Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries from March 27 to 31. Leading the sale is a striking light brown-pink Colored Diamond Ring of 18.72 carats (estimate: $300,000–500,000). The auction also features an array of richly saturated emeralds and sapphires, including a Raymond Yard Sapphire and Diamond Necklace featuring an oval mixed-cut sapphire of 8.85 carats (estimate: ... More
Nasser Azam’s Sophia is on display at Marea, 430 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills 90210
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.- Renowned contemporary artist Nasser Azam continues his exploration of portraiture as a vessel for cultural memory with Sophia, his latest work honouring Italian screen legend Sophia Loren. Now on display at the entrance of Marea Beverly Hills, the painting welcomes visitors to the newly opened West Coast outpost of the famous New York restaurant, offering an artistic reflection on fame, beauty, and cultural memory. Azam is known for capturing figures who leave a lasting impact beyond their time. Sophia Loren is not merely a celebrated actress but a symbol of resilience, elegance, and the evolving concept of beauty in public consciousness. Her legacy, shaped by decades of cinematic brilliance, fashion, and cultural significance, extends far beyond her filmography. making her an ideal subject for Azam’s unique blend of realism and abstraction. Sophia is not just a traditional portrait—it is a dynamic ... More
LONDON.- Tate today announces its programme of exhibitions for 2026 across Tate Modern, Tate Britain and Tate St Ives. Highlights include a survey of Tracey Emin’s astonishing career, an exploration of Frida Kahlo as an unparalleled cultural phenomenon, the biggest European retrospective of James McNeill Whistler in 30 years, and a dive into the raucous and rebellious decade that was the 90s. In addition, Tate will show works by Ana Mendieta that have never been seen in the UK, relocate Duncan Grant’s studio from his Sussex home to Tate Britain, and at Tate St Ives stage the first major exhibition of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s eight-decade career. Maria Balshaw, Director of Tate, said “2026 will be a particularly exciting year for Tate. From three extraordinary women artists spanning the year at Tate Modern to the glorious immersive work of Julio Le Parc, and from the celebration of leading figures of modern British art like Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Wilhemina Bar ... More
In their letter, members of the National Museum and Library Services Board reaffirmed its role in providing advice and recommendations on the IMLS’s policies, programs, and interagency coordination.
WASHINGTON, DC.- On March 24, 2025, members of the National Museum and Library Services Board sent a letter to Keith E. Sonderling, the newly appointed Acting Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), outlining the agency’s statutory obligations in light of recent directives from Executive Order 14238. Signed by 19 board members, representing both Libraries and Museums, the letter emphasizes the board’s advisory role and the legal mandates that the IMLS must continue to fulfill despite the executive order’s call for significant operational reductions. The IMLS, an independent federal agency responsible for providing federal support to the nation’s 35,000 museums and 123,000 libraries, has been under scrutiny since President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14238 on March 14, 2025. Titled “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy,” the order, published in the Federal ... More
HOUSTON, TX.- In January 2026, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will debut Frida: The Making of an Icon, featuring over 30 works by Frida Kahlo and more than 120 by artists from the 1970s onward; artists who were driven by her artistic legacy and personal history to adopt and adapt her work and her image to their own ends. Conceived and organized by MFAH curator Mari Carmen Ramírez, the exhibition will tell the extraordinary story of how Kahlo, little recognized during her lifetime, became one of the world’s most influential artists decades after her death. While she was practically unknown to mainstream audiences when she died, in 1954, from the mid-1970s onward varied social, political, cultural, and market forces converged to enshrine Kahlo as the only woman artist whose instant audience recognition and mass appeal rival those of male artist icons Van Gogh, Picasso and Warhol. Frida: The Making of an Icon, which travels to the Tate ... More
LONDON.- The National Gallery today announced Singaporean artist Ming Wong as its new Artist in Residence for 2025. Wong’s broad practice across film, performance, painting and installation draws on the history of cinema, pop culture and speculative fiction to uncover the politics of representation. In re-staging scenes from world cinema in his films and performances, Wong has explored the ways both individual and national identities are coded and constructed. Recent projects have engaged with speculative futures, Sino-American relations and cross-gender opera. Wong has been invited to respond to the collections of the National Gallery and this year’s partner museum, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea. He begins his residency in March 2025 and will work over the course of the year in the National Gallery’s on-site artist’s studio, benefiting from the close proximity to the collection and archives. This will culminate in a publication and a presentation in winter 2025, as we ... More
Portrait of Precious Okoyomon. Courtesy of Art of Change 21. Photo: Jerome Mizar.
NEW YORK, NY.- Gladstone Gallery today announced the representation of Nigerian-American poet and artist Precious Okoyomon. Okoyomon considers the natural world, histories of migration and racialization, and the pure pleasures of everyday life in their practice. A major exhibition of their work is currently on view at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, through May 25, 2025. Okoyomon plays with identity, colonial history and the relationship between the human species and nature, through sculpture, poetry and installation. Their expansive living environments composed of soil, plants, water, insects, music and sound, evolve over time. Okoyomon spotlights the ongoing impact of imperialism while offering alternative perspectives on coexistence, decay and renewal. Drawing connections between plant migration and human movement, Okoyomon often uses species with complex political status and history, such as kudzu, sugarcane, invasives and non-natives, ... More
BERLIN.- With the exhibition Caught in a Landslide, n.b.k. and the KINDL present recent works by international artists based in Berlin who received the Berlin Senate’s 2024 visual arts work stipend. Spanning two venues, the exhibition showcases current developments in Berlin’s art scene and explores contemporary artistic themes through video, sound, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. Central to many of the works is an engagement with states of ambivalence and uncertainty – both societal and personal. The artists explore internal processes, emotional landscapes, and imaginations sparked by radical change – be it migration, the collapse of a political system, or the onset of puberty. Several artists render these unconscious and hidden processes perceptible through speculative visualizations or by activating alternative sensory modalities, such as touch and hearing. Fragile moments of contact and transference emerge in the representation and staging of bodies a ... More
NEW YORK, NY.- Two days of competitive bidding from around the globe and a packed Rockefeller Center saleroom ended as Important Chinese Furniture and Works of Art totaled $22,768,068, 233 percent sold by hammer and premium versus low estimate, and 78 percent sold by lot. More than one in four buyers in the sale were Millennials, and almost 15 percent of bidders and buyers were new to the category. The sale was characterized by an especially strong selection of fine furniture, with many lots vastly overperforming their estimates, as well as important pieces of porcelain, bronzes, jades, statues and more. The top lots of the sale were a magnificent and extremely rare huanghuali ‘Official’s Hat’ Armchair that brought four times its low estimate, $3,256,500; a magnificent large blue and white iron-red ‘Dragon’ dish more than doubled its low estimate, making $2,772,500. Head of Christie’s Chinese Works of Art Department ... More
ATLANTA, GA.- For more than three decades, Dutch fashion artists Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren have explored the boundaries between haute couture and art with breathtaking virtuosity. The self-confessed fashion world outsiders have garnered critical acclaim for their unconventional designs that reveal technical prowess and a deep knowledge of fashion and history, and their creations have been embraced by artists including Cardi B, Lady Gaga, Madonna and Tilda Swinton. This fall, the High Museum of Art will be the exclusive U.S. venue to present “Viktor&Rolf. Fashion Statements” (Oct. 10, 2025-Feb. 8, 2026), the first major retrospective of their work, organized by curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot and the Kunsthalle Munich in Germany, where it debuted in February 2024. “Just like other important fashion exhibitions presented at the High, ‘Fashion Statements,’ featuring the stunning work of Viktor&Rolf, demonstrates ... More
Installation view. Courtesy of OSL contemporary. Photo: Uli Holz.
OSLO.- Over the past few weeks, while watching Mickael Marman complete the works for 'hello driver,' I have realized that this guy is not only good at making pictures but also obsessed with them. For Marman, it seems both a blessing and a curse. The intuitive and expressive nature of his paintings, which looks as if they are created impulsively or destructively, is, in fact, meticulous work around the clock. Messages and snapshots on WhatsApp, whatever hour, reveal the fact that every spot or stroke has been thoroughly considered – that every detail has been discarded, reconsidered, and altered in form, color, and material multiple times. After studio visits, emails, and extensive messaging, there is nothing about this guy that does not seem obsessive. Susan Sontag's famous quote, "Never worry about being obsessive; I like obsessive people; obsessive people make great art," also holds for me. And still, Marman’s pictures give the impression that he does not like to paint. It is as i ... More
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Paul Rosero Contreras's "The World Ablaze" opens, envisioning hope amidst environmental crisis GUAYAQUIL.- The Anthropological and Contemporary Art Museum opened The World Ablaze, a large-scale solo exhibition by Ecuadorian artist Paul Rosero Contreras. In the speculative world of Paul Rosero Contreras, biology and mythology meet at the precipice of time. His multimedia practice unravels fictional narratives combined with field-recorded data through sculptural and cinematic assemblages, providing us with a hopeful ground for speculating on the future. The title The World Ablaze refers to times of environmental collapse. We are witnessing an ongoing mass extinction along with extreme meteorological phenomena due to the man-made disequilibrium of the planet. A planet with millions of years of dramatic changes — from iceball Earth to fireball Earth — which resulted in chemical and physical conditions that gave rise to our evolution. From ... More
Gleaming again: Restored dome of historic Naples Chapel unveiled in Zacatecas GUADALUPE.- The beautifully ornate dome of the Naples Chapel in Guadalupe, Zacatecas, has been brought back to its former glory after a dedicated restoration project. Imagine the relief of the Franciscan brothers, the caretakers of this historic chapel, as the scaffolding finally came down, revealing the painstakingly repaired artwork within. The culprit behind the need for this extensive work? Those unusually heavy rains back in 2024, which took a toll on the delicate structure. The Mexican government, through its cultural heritage arm, INAH, made the dome's restoration a priority. This wasn't just any building; the Naples Chapel is a significant piece of Mexico's architectural and artistic heritage, especially as part of the historic Royal Road of Tierra Adentro. The restoration was a two-phase effort. First, crews tackled the crucial job of waterproofing the chapel's roof and the main ... More
Eiteljorg Museum amplifies "Voices from the Arctic" through powerful Inuit art INDIANAPOLIS, IN.- Inuit artists on the northernmost edge of the continent create distinctive, striking artworks reflecting their lives and experiences. You can see more than 80 Inuit artworks in a new exhibition at the Eiteljorg, Voices from the Arctic: Contemporary Inuit Art. Featuring works from the Eiteljorg’s permanent collections, works on loan from collectors from the Inuit Art Society such as Thalia Nicas and Lou Jungheim and a piece gifted by Joan Perelman, Voices from the Arctic will educate and inspire visitors about a region of the world most people will never visit. Inuit communities are found in northern Canada (from which all the works in this exhibit originate), as well as in Alaska, Greenland and Russia. In the far north where wood is scarce, Inuit artists always have carved sculptures from the mediums available, such as local soapstone and steatite stone, as well as caribou ... More
Frye Art Museum appoints Stephanie DeVaan and Rafael Soldi to Board of Trustees SEATTLE, WA.- The Frye Art Museum announced the appointment of Stephanie DeVaan and Rafael Soldi to the Board of Trustees; their official term began February 10, 2025. Their addition expands the board to eleven members. DeVaan brings extensive nonprofit board experience as well as connections to both the tech and film communities, and Soldi is the first working artist to join the museum’s board. “I am delighted to join the board of the Frye at this pivotal moment as the museum reimagines its space, expands its vision, and invigorates its programs with new voices and ideas that engage our community,” shares DeVaan. Soldi states, “As the first artist board member, I am invested in supporting the museum's commitment to amplifying the voices of living artists. My journey with the museum began as a young artist—when I could only afford to visit a free museum—and continues ... More
Rising star Rubin Jiang explores identity and connection in new artworks NEW YORK, NY.- In the vibrant world of contemporary art, Rubin Jiang is quickly making a name for herself as a visionary talent. A young artist hailing from a multicultural background in China, Rubin’s work is a captivating blend of vivid imagination and deep introspection. Her pieces have already graced galleries across the UK, China, USA, Spain, and Japan, and her art has been published in China, marking her as a creative force to watch. As a member of Generation Z, Rubin’s connection to the digital realm shapes her perspective, drawing inspiration from the endless stream of information and visuals online. This fusion of cultural heritage and modern influences allows her to offer a fresh take on identity, belonging, and the human experience. Growing up surrounded by China’s diverse cultures, Rubin developed a profound understanding of the nuances that define them. This environment ignited her early reflections on self-identity, a theme that resonates deeply ... More
Five new British Museum Trustee appointments announced LONDON.- The British Museum announced five new members from the worlds of history, academia, broadcasting and journalism are to join its Board of Trustees. The five new appointments are Lord Daniel Finkelstein OBE, Tom Holland, Dr Tiffany Jenkins, Martha Kearney and Claudia Winkleman. The new Trustees will take up their roles immediately and will attend their first meetings as Trustees this month. The British Museum Board comprises up to 25 members, 15 of which are appointed by the Prime Minister. These appointments come from that allocation. George Osborne, Chair of the British Museum Trustees, said: 'I'm delighted that this all-star collection of thinkers and communicators are becoming Trustees. It says something about the excitement and momentum at the Museum right now that we can attract such talented people to become part of our team.' ... More
MCA Australia opens an autumn season dedicated to the work of Australian contemporary artists SYDNEY.- The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) presents an exhibition program celebrating the breadth and diversity of contemporary Australian art. MCA Australia’s program showcases 34 artists from and working in Australia today with two new exhibitions - Warraba Weatherall: Shadow and Substance, the first solo museum exhibition by the Kamilaroi artist and The Intelligence of Painting, which showcases contemporary Australian painting through the work of 14 women artists, and the 2025 Circular Quay Foyer Wall Commission, The Civilisation of the Abstract (2025), by Naarm/Melbourne based artist Diena Georgetti. Completing the program are new displays of MCA Collection: Artists in Focus presenting the work of 18 Australian artists, including rare and significant works from First Nations artists from across the country. Suzanne ... More
Scraps, 1973 | From the Vaults
Flashback
On a day like today, French sculptor and painter Daniel Buren was born
March 25, 1938. Daniel Buren (born 25 March 1938) is a French conceptual artist. Sometimes classified as a Minimalist, Buren is known best for using regular, contrasting colored stripes in an effort to integrate visual surface and architectural space, notably on historical, landmark architecture. In this image: Daniel Buren unveils permanent artwork 'Diamonds and Circles' works 'in situ' commissioned by Art on the Underground at Tottenham Court Road Station, London. Photo: David Parry/PA Wire.
