Inspiration

The 2026 edition of EXPO Chicago closed with strong sales, nearly 35,000 visitors, and participation from more than 130 galleries. Helmed by Director Kate Sierzputowski and Curator Essence Harden, the fair emphasized a more intentional format, with sections like Focus and Profile highlighting emerging voices and tightly conceived presentations. A key partnership with the Obama Presidential Center—offering a preview of upcoming museum commissions—alongside new initiatives like EXPO Projects, underscored the fair’s push toward institutional collaboration and community-driven programming. The 16th edition of the Circulation(s) Festival of Young European Photography is on view at CENTQUATRE-Paris now through May 17, showcasing work by 26 emerging photographers from 15 countries. Without an established theme, the exhibition instead captures the diversity, urgency, and experimental approaches of a new generation. Positioned as a key platform for discovery, the festival highlights early-career talent and evolving photographic practices, reinforcing its role as a barometer for the future of European image-making.

At Salone del Mobile.Milano 2026, running April 21–26, the exhibition “Abito” (Italian for “dress”), curated by Milan-based studio Palomba Serafini Associati, will explore the evolving relationship between women and evolving role in society, alongside fashion and design. The exhibition—which included photos taken by Palomba Serafini cofounder Roberto Palomba—outlines the connection between clothing and culture, and how it has developed in tandem with living spaces. Following its premiere at Salone—within the Fiera Milano Rho exhibition grounds‚ “Abito” will likely travel to other cities. A rare fragment of a Mary Magdalene painting attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi is heading to auction at Vienna’s Dorotheum, highlighting an unusual survival story of a damaged Old Master work. The canvas—once part of a larger composition and likely cut down during wartime upheaval in Berlin, with the figure’s head removed—was later rediscovered in a private collection and restored.Identified as an autograph replica related to a version in Florence, the fragment underscores both the continued market interest in Gentileschi and the complex histories of artworks shaped by war, loss, and reconstructi

MoMA PS1 will celebrate its 50th anniversary with a free, daylong block party on April 18 in Long Island City, activating the museum’s plaza, courtyard, and galleries. The event—held during the opening weekend of its “Greater New York” exhibition—features artists, musicians, DJs, workshops, and local vendors, alongside talks and family-friendly programming. Framed as a large-scale community celebration, the block party highlights MoMA PS1’s legacy as a hub for experimental art and neighborhood engagement over the past five decades. Melissa Chiu, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden since 2014, has been appointed director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where she will begin her role on September 1. Her move is part of a broader leadership restructuring at the Guggenheim Foundation, as current director Mariët Westermann shifts focus to overseeing the institution’s global network, including Venice, Bilbao, and Abu Dhabi. Chiu, widely credited with transforming the Hirshhorn into a leading contemporary art institution, brings extensive international experience and a track record of expanding audiences and programming to one of the world’s most prominen

That pattern will sound familiar. Prints have been one of the more resilient corners of the market in recent years, driven in part by younger buyers and collectors priced out of painting and sculpture but able to scope up prints by blue-chip names at lower price points. Much of the growth has come from volume rather than trophy prices—a lot of works moving at levels that still feel within reach. You could see that mix in the crowd, too. The fair drew more than 100 curators to a newly launched summit and hosted a slate of programming with artists including Julie Mehretu, Hank Willis Thomas, and Derrick Adams, alongside a benefit honoring Christophe Cherix, director of the Museum of Modern Art since September and the museum’s former chief curator drawings and prints. 

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.The HeadlinesHISTORIC VOTE. France’s lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, unanimously voted late last night in favor of a long-anticipated bill to facilitate the restitution of artworks looted during the colonial era, making good on a nearly decade-old pledge by president Emmanuel Macron. ARTnews attended the lively late-night debate, where many lawmakers described the legislation as “imperfect,” yet still a meaningful step toward confronting France’s colonial past and returning cultural goods that were unfairly, and often violently, seized in the 19th and 20th centuries. Why “imperfect”? A central issue is that the bill does not explicitly mention the word “colonialism,” despite being conceived with that context in mind. Instead, it specifies that artworks looted between 1815 and 1972 are eligible for a fast-track restitution process to countries that submit formal requests. The issue remains politically charged. Conservative lawmakers argued that the bill could open a “Pandora’s box” of claims, potentially leading to a wave of restitutions and depriving the French

The initiative broadens what was once a tightly packed week of openings into a more distributed model: 16 gallery exhibitions, public art commissions, and more than 100 talks, performances, and events unfolding over five weekends. Among the opening shows are Green Art Gallery’s group exhibition “All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset” that examines the persistence of imperial power through work by artists like Michael Rakowitz, while Efie Gallery will debut a public-facing viewing room with art by El Anatsui and Aïda Muluneh, among others.  At The Third Line, Sara Naim’s solo exhibition will feature paintings that move between figuration and abstraction and will be paired with a video work that breaks language down into gesture and sound. At Leila Heller Gallery, Douglas White’s The Great Wave translates Hokusai’s iconic print into monumental sculpture made from discarded tires, capturing a moment of suspended force that mirrors a period of ecological and geopolitical strain.  The broader context is hard to ignore. The US and Israel’s airstrikes against Iran have also led to strikes against the UAE, and Iran has restricted use of the Strait of Hormuz, which as of Monday was under a b

Last night, France’s lower house of parliament unanimously voted in favor of a long-anticipated bill to facilitate the restitution of artworks looted during the colonial era, making good on a nearly 10-year-old pledge by French President Emmanuel Macron to return African heritage to the continent. The vote, which came following a lively debate that went late into the night, comes after the Senate’s adoption of the bill in January, and sets it on a smooth path to be enacted as law, likely before the summer. However, left-leaning representative Sophie Taillé-Polian repeatedly warned that omitting the word “colonialism” from the legislative text weakened it, and instead strengthened the same racist logic that had underpinned colonial rule itself. Rather than stirring feelings of “guilt,” Taillé-Polian argued that directly naming colonialism in the text was a matter of historic rigor, not repentance. “To refuse to [do so] is to sugarcoat, and to sugarcoat is itself already a refusal to understand,” she said. Still, the unanimous vote marks “a profound change in mentality, and in that sense, it is a true historic monument,” art historian Bénédicte Savoy told ARTnews. With Felwine Sarr,

This is the foundation’s 101st class of fellows. The class spans 55 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, with fellows chosen from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants. Fellows are divided into creative arts, social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. The creative arts portion has 30 fellows for fine arts, 19 for photography, 19 for film & video, 10 for fiction, and six for drama and performance art, among other disciplines. Among the winners in the fine arts category this year are sculptor John Ahearn; new media and installation artist American Artist, who last had an exhibition at Pioneer Works in 2025; Kenneth Tam, who is featured in the upcoming edition of “Greater New York” at MoMA PS1; Japanese German artist Kota Ezawa, who has had exhibitions at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and the Cummer Museum in Florida; fiber artist Sonya Clark, whose exhibition “We Are Each Other ” traveled to the High Museum of Art and the Cranbrook Museum of Art; and multidiscplinary artist John Miller. Other winners include Juana Valdes, Fia Backström, Allison Janae Hamilton, and Francis Ruyter.

Each Venice Biennale brings with it the debut pavilions of nations who’ve never before shown at the world’s biggest art exhibition, and these are typically causes for celebration. But in the run-up to the show’s opening in May, the inaugural Somali Pavilion has instead become a source of controversy, with artists from the country saying the organizers “neither meaningfully consulted nor included” representatives of the Somali art scene. In an extended statement posted on Monday, four Somali art spaces—the Somali Arts Foundation, Arlo Artspace, Shaneema Banaadir, and Baciid Center—issued a statement criticizing the show for failing to include artists who are based in Somalia. The pavilion is titled “SADDEXLEEY,” a reference to a form of Somali poetry, and is being jointly curated by Mohamed Mire, curator at the Fotografiska photography museum in Stockholm, and Fabio Scrivanti, a Venice-based project manager. Abdirahman Yusuf is the pavilion’s commissioner. “The art sector in Somalia has been rebuilt through the commitment of artists, cultural workers, independent institutions, collectives, and organisers working under extraordinarily difficult conditions, often with little to no ins

Though small in scale, the college has had an outsize effect on the art world, with its art department graduating a number of painters, sculptors, and photographers who went on to achieve fame in the years after their undergraduate education there. The alumni list includes Christina Quarles, a painter who is now represented by Hauser & Wirth and has shown at the Venice Biennale; Math Bass, a painter who has had shows at the Hammer Museum and MoMA PS1; and Every Ocean Hughes, an artist who has staged exhibitions and performances at institutions ranging from the Whitney Museum to the MIT List Center for Visual Arts. Non-artist alumni of the college include filmmaker Ken Burns, actress Lupita Nyong’o, and the writer Eula Biss.

“I don’t think that anybody ever starts with a clear plan to sunset, but nor did I think that this would necessarily institutionalize in a way that would make it exist forever,” artist and Chloë Bass told ARTnews in a recent interview about Social Practice CUNY, the initiative she has co-directed for the past five years. “Somewhere in between those two things comes the decision to sunset.” The decision, which they described as “the result of a very intentional process,” comes partially from changes within the personal lives of Bass and her co-director Greg Sholette. Bass stepped away from a full-time teaching job at Queens College at the end of the 2024–25 academic year to focus on her art practice, and Sholette, also an artist and professor at Queens College, is soon retiring from teaching. Bass added, “Although Social Practice CUNY has behaved like an institution, it’s really an artist-run project.” Bass and Sholette also wanted to think about how social practice manifests both of outside their classrooms and “the ways in which this work takes place far outside the way that the art world presents it,” Bass said. “That can include the ways that the art world presents it, [...]

Under the title “The Ear Is the Eye of the Soul,” the works by 24 artists will be presented in two venues: the Mystical Garden of the Discalced Carmelites, in the Cannaregio district of Venice, and the Complesso di Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, in Castello. The exhibition is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers, in collaboration with Soundwalk Collective. The idea behind it was “conceived in response to Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial proposition for Biennale Arte 2026 to slow down and attune to a quieter register,” according to a press release. In the Mystical Garden, Biennale visitors will be able to stroll while listening on headphones to sound works “responding to Hildegard’s chants, writings, and visionary images through voice, instrumentation, and at times, silence.” The press release attributes part of the thinking behind the pavilion to a quote from Pope Leo XIV: “The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what ‘works,’ but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable.” The Complex of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice will play home to the final work by the German filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge, who died last month at the age of 94, as well as an

Aware that Native Americans have a long history of dice games, Madden created a checklist of specific attributes of historical Native American dice to reclassify older artifacts. “We had a body of literature that carried [the use of dice] all the way back to about 2,000 years before the present,” Madden told CSU’s The Audit podcast, “but it broke down at that point. That got me interested in seeing what I could do to trace this back. How old is this actually?”

The awards will pivot from a project-based grant of $100,000 to an unrestricted grant of $100,000 that will go directly to each of the four selected artists. Accompanying the $100,000 unrestricted grant is a $40,000 grant that will go to a Great Lakes–based nonprofit organization, selected by a winning artist, that will help them “help realize, expand, or deepen their work in the region,” according to a release.