Inspiration

Bang & Olufsen opened “The Residence of Beautiful Sound” in Copenhagen, a four-room exhibition tracing the brand’s ongoing dialogue between design heritage and contemporary craft. The experience brings together beloved and recreated classics, bespoke listening environments through the Bang & Olufsen Atelier program, and collaborations with three Japanese artisans: copper workshop Gyokusendo, paper makers Nao Washi, and furniture atelier Karimoku. English painter David Hockney was instantly recognizable in his signature cap, round glasses, and checkered attire. He was a rare figure who caught the attention of both the general public and the art world’s more resistant critical establishment without adjusting for either. He painted what he loved: the people and places accumulated across a life divided between London, Los Angeles, East Yorkshire, and Normandy. Speaking to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 1984, he described his pictures as mirroring the workings of memory: subjective, accumulated, experienced through the body rather than from a fixed point. Yinka Ilori has built his practice on the language of joy: vivid, communal, and celebratory. His first solo exhibition,

Art Basel opened its doors in Basel, Switzerland on Tuesday, June 16th with an invite-only preview, and the market wasted no time making a statement. This year’s flagship fair brings together 290 galleries from 43 countries, and early sales signaled broad-based demand across price points, generations, and categories. The headline transaction of the day came from contemporary and modern art gallery Hauser & Wirth, which sold Pablo Picasso’s Le peintre et son modèle dans un paysage (1963) at an asking price of $35 million. Works by David Hockney and Louise Bourgeois also found buyers on the first day, with placements reported with major institutions and foundations across Europe, Asia, and North America. Colombian curator José Roca has been named curator of the 37th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, set to take place in 2027. One of the oldest biennials in the world, the Ljubljana Biennale was established in 1955 and is organized by MGLC, the International Centre of Graphic Arts in Slovenia. Roca brings an expansive curatorial vision to one of printmaking’s most prestigious platforms. Currently serving as inaugural curator-at-large of Latin American and Latin diasporic art at the H

Sotheby’s Paris will offer a rare glimpse into Karl Lagerfeld’s creative process this summer with the auction of more than 1,000 previously unseen personal sketches from his estate. The online sale runs from July 2–8, with an accompanying public exhibition. The drawings span decades, with works dating back to the 1970s. Many remained private during Lagerfeld’s lifetime, including working documents and satirical political illustrations never intended for public view.  The sale extends beyond works on paper. Among the lots are his signature fingerless gloves and approximately 200 iPods, each one used to categorize specific audio genres and curate soundtracks for his runway shows. This marks the sixth and final estate sale Sotheby’s has organized from Lagerfeld’s personal holdings, following previous installments in Paris, Cologne, and Monaco. Nigerian visual artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby has painted the Obamas’ first official portrait together. The Obamas: Springing Forth (2026) was unveiled this week ahead of the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, where it will be permanently installed in the Hope and Change Lobby.  Working from an original photograph she took her

The People’s Runway, an initiative led by KidSuper founder Colm Dillane in partnership with Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, will return to New York Fashion Week this September as a public platform for emerging designers from the borough. The program provides selected participants with mentorship, funding, and runway exposure, with five designers receiving $5,000 grants and the opportunity to present collections that explore themes including identity, immigration, heritage, and community. Staged as an open-air event at Brooklyn Borough Hall and positioned as an alternative to fashion’s traditional gatekeeping structures, the project reflects Dillane’s broader effort to use his platform to elevate young creative talent and make New York Fashion Week more accessible to both designers and audiences. The Chancery Rosewood and the University of the Arts London (UAL) have announced the inaugural winners of the Creative Transformation Award, which recognizes emerging talent whose work demonstrates innovation, cultural relevance, and transformative thinking across art, design, fashion, communication, and material practice. Three graduates—selected from a shortlist of 20 finalist

The women in Anoushka Mirchandani’s paintings are always on the threshold of something. Born in Pune, India in 1988 and emigrating to the United States at eighteen, she has spent the years since building a visual practice rooted in the experience of holding two worlds at the same time: the one left behind, and the one still being learned. Her paintings, mostly of women, created in oil stick and pastel, take on a space between presence and boldness. Now, with her debut institutional exhibition in New York, “Everyone You Love Lives Here,” on view at the FLAG Art Foundation through July 31, and her debut institutional exhibition show, “My Body Was A River Once,” running at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José through August 23, Mirchandani sits down with us to discuss memory, and what it means to paint identity as something always in the making. The title of your newly-opened FLAG Art Foundation exhibition, “Everyone You Love Lives Here,” feels both intimate and expansive. What does the phrase mean to you, and how does it connect to the works on view? My practice lives between self and archetype, intimacy and anonymity, inviting viewers in and mirroring them back. [...]

Now open in Toronto’s Port Lands, the Lassonde Art Trail brings contemporary art into one of the city’s largest waterfront redevelopment projects. Set across more than four kilometers in Biidaasige Park on the island of Ookwemin Minising, the trail combines permanent commissions, long-term loans, and rotating installations across newly created public parkland, with the art built into the larger redevelopment plan itself. The works are distributed through new parkland, wetlands, and public space, tying the trail directly to the larger remaking of the waterfront. It’s the individual projects that show how wide that range is. Kent Monkman’s contribution is his first permanent public sculpture and centers Indigenous presence and the significance of water at the site. Monira Al Qadiri’s First Sun, initially presented at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park, came to Toronto through a co-commission with Public Art Fund and connects the trail to a larger North American public art network. Hamilton’s work, developed through York University’s L.L. Odette Sculptor in Residence program, brings research on organic materials and site ecology into the mix. Emin’s work arrives through a loan fr

Now open at the National Museum in Oslo, “Asta Nørregaard: Truth and Beauty” is the first museum exhibition devoted to the Norwegian painter, whose portraits made her one of the most recognized artists of her day—and yet virtually unknown to many today. Nørregaard built a career as an artist at a time when very few women had such an opportunity. She studied in Christiania, Munich, and Paris, exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1881 and 1882, and later at the Paris World’s Fair in 1889. She also painted leading figures from Norwegian cultural and public life, including Edvard Munch, women’s rights activist Katti Anker Møller, and King Haakon VII. The exhibition, spanning work from the 1870s to the 1920s, includes those portraits, but it also broadens the view of her work with interiors, landscapes, religious paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and archival material. A large portion comes from private collections and has rarely been shown publicly. Her attention to dress, fabric, and surface once made her a sought-after portraitist, but it also led to her being written off as something frivolous—simply a woman painting fashion scenes. Thankfully, the show reconsiders that part of her work,

On the evening of June 23, a marquee cast of cultural and philanthropic figures will congregate in London’s Kensington Gardens for the Serpentine Summer Party 2026. The invitation-only annual event, a centerpiece of the summer social season, celebrates Serpentine’s annual architectural commission and raises funds for the institution’s exhibitions and programming, all free and open to the public. For this year’s pavilion, Mexico City–based LANZA atelier designed a snaking crinkle-crankle wall titled a serpentine. The studio (founded by Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo) will also collaborate with conceptual culinary artist Laila Gohar on the summer party’s sensorial experience—from a bench commission to the gastronomic direction. “For several years, we’ve worked to draw the Pavilion’s architect deeper into the Summer Party,” Bettina Korek, CEO of Serpentine, shares, “and this year LANZA atelier and Laila Gohar have shaped the evening together—the bench, the food, the energy of the night. Both took their cue from the spiral at the heart of LANZA’s Pavilion, a form of creation and renewal that even echoes in Jesús Rafael SOTO’s sculpture nearby.” Gohar, whose recent Salone del Mob

This summer, Stowe, Vermont’s The Current will host two exhibitions that make a compelling case for the institution’s curatorial range. “Exposed,” now in its 35th edition, transforms Stowe Village into an open landscape for contemporary sculpture, installed across public and private spaces. This year’s edition honors Vermont sculptors Christopher Curtis and John Matusz, whose work helped shape the exhibition into what it is today, and features four invited artists alongside a selection chosen through open call. The second belongs to Miles Greenberg. The New York-based artist makes his Vermont debut with a solo exhibition of two immersive video installations, LE MIROIR and TЯUTH. In LE MIROIR, presented in the United States for the first time, six large monitors arranged in a circle pull the viewer into a surreal, durational performance shot between Marrakech’s El Badi Palace and the Emirati Desert. TЯUTH is three-channel video installation filmed during a seven-hour live performance in Brooklyn, where viewers enter the work and move through a shallow reflecting pool that explores the themes of slowness, repetition, and the limits of human endurance. Plus, The West Hollywood Edition