Inspiración

Karachi-based artist Amin Gulgee’s three-decade-long oeuvre spans metal sculptures, bold performance art, and collaborative curation. A well-structured new volume on his work, titled Amin Gulgee: No Man’s Land and edited by John McCarry, is neither fully academic nor a catalogue raisonné; it balances the two approaches with plenty of images, candid writings penned by Gulgee’s art comrades, and overly brief semi-scholarly essays. I’ll borrow writer H. M. Naqvi’s words from his own engaging essay on Gulgee’s extravagant performances: The opulently illustrated hardcover “demands attention,” as does the artist himself.  Here’s why: Only a handful of books have presented a critical discourse on Gulgee’s stimulating art practice. In the seminal 1998 book Image and Identity: Fifty Years of Painting and Sculpture in Pakistan, the late Pakistani art historian Akbar Naqvi hinted at his disdain for the artist’s characterization of his own work as “Islamic art.” Twenty-six years and several catalogs later, No Man’s Land amends this gap by revealing pluralistic perspectives on Gulgee’s work. Get the latest art news, reviews and opinions from Hyperallergic. From couture jewelry and biomorphic fo

April, dear April, lovely spring arrives with you! While the news cycle discloses an ever-shameful round of alarming updates, we turn to the timeless care of Mother Nature as she ushers in warmth and chilly rains at a whim. Upstate New York is alive with aesthetic delights, including the dynamic group show FREE STYLE – Idiosyncratic/Eclecticism at the interdisciplinary Garner Arts Center in Garnerville. LABspace in Hillsdale features Cathy Wysocki’s bright, fantastical paintings that lift the spirits, while a show at Robin Rice Gallery in Hudson presents soothing cloud-inspired works by Paddy Cohn. I Was Here at SEPTEMBER gallery in Kinderhook includes mixed media artworks as “autobiographical traces” and Familiar/Unfamiliar at Bill Arning Exhibitions in Kinderhook is a fun show of four dynamic artists whose work toggles between the two descriptors in its title. Curator Liz Lorenz presents a dynamic vision of art-as-cure with dismantle at Susan Eley Fine Art in Hudson, and a show at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester explores video gaming as a means for “genre-expanding experimental play.” Despite the utter disaster of world reports, let us rejoice in the healing powers of art th

PHILADELPHIA — Of all the important private art collections in the United States, the Neumann family’s coffers may be the most unique. Amassed by four generations during the past seven decades, this treasure chest of nearly 3,000 20th- and 21st-century artworks swells with abundant examples by little-known newcomers and celebrated elders such as Man Ray, Keith Haring, Hannah Höch, and Claes Oldenburg. After Modernism: Selections from the Neumann Family Collection, currently on view at the University of Pennsylvania’s newly renovated Arthur Ross Gallery, presents 56 works from this distinctive, rarely exhibited trove.  Hubert Neumann’s late parents, Morton and Rose, began collecting in 1948. They acquired Picasso, Matisse, and their contemporaries on view in After Modernism. Over time, their son added more recent art to the family collection. In many cases, he’s befriended artists at the start of their careers and purchased several of their works.  Get the latest art news, reviews and opinions from Hyperallergic. One of Joseph Beuys’s signature felt suits, from 1970, unnervingly arrests attention in the tiny entryway to the Ross’s sizable gallery. Large, flamboyant paintings of rece

Between the early 1960s and his death in 2018, Irving Petlin established himself as both an artist and an activist. He began hitting his stride in the turbulent ’60s, working with such organizations as the Artists Protest Committee in Los Angeles and the Art Workers Coalition in New York. He confronted a wide range of issues by taking part in Civil Rights and antiwar protests, as well as making a painting about the 1962 Charonne massacre in Paris and working on a poster addressing the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, without taking a one one-size-fits-all approach. For him, art was not the only vehicle for change. Get the latest art news, reviews and opinions from Hyperallergic. Petlin took a different tack in his oil paintings, pastels, and drawings — on view at Art Paris from April 3 through 6 — refraining from direct depictions of brutality, suffering, and physical pain. Instead, he turned to symbolism, metaphor, and memory, as well as allusions to well-known works by James Ensor and Odilon Redon, and his own imagination, to convey a world where savagery and distress are rampant. Inspired by writers and poets, many of whom were his friends, Petlin’s work was [...]

I BECAME INTERESTED in Norma McCorvey after my own experience with making art from abortion while an undergraduate student at Yale University in 2008. My project, Untitled [Senior Thesis], involved a precise bodily intervention over the period of an academic year: From the 9th to the 15th day of every menstrual cycle, I used semen (collected from “fabricators”) to privately self-inseminate; on the 28th day of my cycle, I would ingest an herbal abortifacient, and experience cramps and heavy bleeding. This bleeding could have been either a normal period or a very early-stage self-induced miscarriage: The process was intentionally carried out so that not even I knew which. I used the term “self-induced miscarriage” because I was interested in what it meant to attempt reproduction “wrongly” on the body, specifically the queer body, and to use my biological capacities to create art. As far as I know, I am the only artist who has made artwork from the intentional bodily act of abortion (others, please get in touch). That work caused enormous controversy, which was difficult to navigate for many years. I was denounced by both the left and the right, received death threats, and was told by

From Renaissance Milanese court painter Bonifacio Bembo to the Surrealists and even contemporary artist Claire Tabouret (who painted her home’s ceiling with images from an early-20th-century tarot deck), tarot—a centuries-old set of 78 cards—wafts in and out of art history. Between 1979 and 1998, French avant-garde artist Niki de Saint Phalle built a sculptural installation called the Tarot Garden outside Rome, and a newly opened show dedicated to British Surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun at Tate St. Ives culminates in her version of a tarot deck. The first historical overview exhibition in England dedicated to tarot, “Tarot—Origins & Afterlives,” recently opened at London’s Warburg Institute, co-curated by the institute’s director, Bill Sherman. The Warburg Institute, a center for the study of art and culture, has a unique tarot collection: Its founder, German art historian Aby Warburg, was one of the earliest modern scholars to study its evolution, collecting decks and books on the subject beginning in the early 1900s. He devoted a panel of his unfinished photographic project, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1927–29), to tarot, spanning 15th-century Tarocchi di Mantegna to the pop

AUSTRALIA’S VENICE CONTROVERSY CONTINUES, with Khaled Sabsabi now telling the Guardian that Creative Australia’s controversial decision to suddenly drop him from as the country’s representative for the 2026 Biennale is “dismantling” his career. “Nobody should have to go through this torture,” he added. Creative Australia’s board nixed Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino’s pavilionearlier this year, just a few days after their selection was publicly announced. The decision came following criticism of the Lebanese Australian artist’s past artworks, and it already appears to have had a ripple effect for Sabsabi, whose show at Monash University was indefinitely postponed  last week. Sabsabi this week told the Guardian that Creative Australia reacted with a “kneejerk” response based on a misrepresentation of his practice, and added that he does “not support or endorse any form of terrorism or racism or antisemitism or Islamophobia.” ARTSY ANTICS. Two men from Germany smuggled portraits of American President Donald Trump and Friedrich Merz, the politician expected to become the next chancellor of Germany, into the Louvre and stuck them on the wall in the same room as the Mona Lisa, the

“DOGE is targeting a small federal agency that—with an annual appropriation that amounts to a rounding error in the U.S. budget—has a positive impact on every congressional district,” the National Humanities Alliance, a nationwide coalition of universities, museums, state councils, and cultural organizations advocating for the humanities, said in defense of the NEH in a statement on Tuesday. “Cutting NEH funding directly harms communities in every state and contributes to the destruction of our shared cultural heritage,” it continues. “This puts unnecessary barriers in the way of the agency’s mission to distribute federal dollars to American communities.” Founded in 1965, the NEH has awarded more than $6 billion in grants to museums, historical sites, universities, libraries, and related organizations. Through its grants, the NEH has long supported a variety of creative initiatives and projects. Earlier this year, for instance, it announced its most recent round of recipients, including museums like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which totaled $26.6 million in funding. Its budget was $211 million last year.

Over the last twenty years, the U.S. State Department has seen WMF as a diplomatic tool, giving the group around $25 million in grants towards heritage projects.  (It is unclear the extent to which WMF’s efforts to document and protect at-risk heritage will be stifled or if the projects will be supported through other private funding.) Among those previously approved efforts is the restoration of Old Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, a historic institution undergoing transformation into a music school. Another is the conservation of Cairo’s Takiyyat Ibrahim al-Gulshani, an Ottoman-era site that has also served as a training ground for Egyptian conservators. In Ukraine, the organization’s Ukraine Heritage Response Fund has done assessments of cultural sites damaged since Russia’s invasion and created a database of 1,400 at-risk sites.

“The Elizabeth Street Garden is an entirely unique public sanctuary, where art, nature, literature and activism peacefully abide,” Smith previously wrote in an August 2024 letter to Mayor Eric Adams lobbying on the garden’s behalf. “I have been privileged to read poetry and sing in the Garden’s serene yet celebratory gatherings, attended by people of all ages, friends and neighbors, tourists with their children.” Smith continued, “The Garden is not only an oasis of greenspace within our city, but truly stands as a work of art. The effort to save it is reflective of a mass effort to preserve the nature and ever evolving character of New York City.”

A Texas lawmaker has proposed a bill that could be used to keep certain kinds of art off view, the Fort Worth Report reports. On March 6, representative David Lowe filed House Bill 3958, which outlines a proposed civil penalty against any museum showing “certain obscene or harmful material.” The Texas Penal Code defines “obscene” as any kind of performance or material that depicts sexual acts without literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. If passed, Lowe’s bill would ensure that museums could be fined up to $500,000 per item and day that an “obscene” display remains on view. Additionally, those found in violation of the law could also be forced to pay injunctive relief and attorney’s fees, as well as costs related to investigations and litigation. Lowe has explicitly mentioned a recent investigation into photographs by Sally Mann as an inspiration for his bill. The photographs were taken off view after Texas politicians denounced them, with some labeling them “child porn” because the pictures feature nude children. Mann’s photographs do not contain any sexual content, however, and the charges against the artist and museum were ultimately dropped. “The bill was introduc

The Post reported that a museum spokesperson said Young would be out for an “undetermined period.” Young has been director of the museum, one of many run by the Smithsonian Institution, since 2021. His leave began before President Donald Trump issued an executive order in which he targeted the Smithsonian Institution, whose museums also include the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among other art museums. In that order, Trump denounced what a fact sheet described as “anti-American ideology” within the Smithsonian’s galleries. He specifically took aim at an exhibition about race, monuments, and sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and appeared to take issue with texts issued by the NMAAHC that labeled “hard work” and “individualism” as being part of “White culture.” “Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” Trump wrote in his executive order, which he issued on March 27. He later issued a separate order in which he suggested he may make cuts to the Nat

Seph Rodney, PhD, is a regular contributor to the New York Times and a former senior critic and opinions editor for Hyperallergic. He has also written for CNN, NBC, Artforum, the Guardian, and several other publications. In 2020 he won the Rabkin Arts Journalism Prize and in 2022 won the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. He is also a curator of contemporary art exhibitions, including co-curating Get in the Game, at SFMOMA in 2024. Located in the heart of LA’s Little Tokyo neighborhood, the museum embraces the Japanese-American experience in all its permutations, including aspects that other persecuted and marginalized communities can recognize. Hyperallergic is a forum for serious, playful, and radical thinking about art in the world today. Founded in 2009, Hyperallergic is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York.

America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States. “We ask if you could carry this history with you, understanding that it is not a Japanese-American history, this is an American history, then maybe you can prevent it from happening again.” The answer to the question “Who belongs here?” — that is to say, who is considered part of the community that the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) serves — may seem obvious on its face. The Japanese-American community that surrounds it comprises a historic and essential constituency in the area of downtown Los Angeles known as Little Tokyo or J-town. It was founded at the turn of the 20th century and is home to the largest Japanese-American population in the continental United States. It is larger and more populous than the two other majoritarian Japanese ethnic enclaves in the US: San Francisco and San Jose. According to Kristen Hayashi, the museum’s director of Collections Management & Access, prior to World War II, perhaps 90% of the Japanese-American commun

Karyn Olivier’s work can often read as elusive. An expansive artist whose practice floats across various mediums, her works take many forms: a white column that rests on a historical table, a set of 15 stacked orange construction barriers, heaps of found clothing or fishing nets, an aesthetically pleasing piece of driftwood resting atop sheets of steel, photographs that are partially obscured by asphalt. They typically come off as quiet or deceptively straightforward, slowly unfolding to reveal their nuances. But, the idea of her work “bearing witness” appears repeatedly across these seemingly disconnected works, she said in a recent interview. There is something keenly observant in the way her work behaves, particularly in the way it reveals how everything and everyone—people, neighborhoods, infrastructure, structures of oppression, and even trash—are inextricably imbued with history. Whether we reciprocate that attention or not is part of what her work brings to the fore. There is a distinct corporeality to her oeuvre, one that elicits a powerful sense of empathy. Her work seems to ask, if we can listen to the things that are constantly whispering to us, what would we hear? And w