Inspiration

Pat Oleszko has been making a fool of herself full time for 60 years. Known for her satirical wit, surreal costumes, and performances in and around immense inflatables, the artist defies easy categorization. Using her body as the armature for a unique sort of walking, talking “pedestrian art,” Oleszko has inhabited incendiary and far-flung guises including a rapacious Coat of Arms(1972), a robed and miter-clad Nincompope (1999), and, in recent years, a caricature of Dumpty Trumpty (2018). For Oleszko, the performance never stops and the costume’s never off, whether on the street or onstage, nude or covered from head to toe. The upstart Midwesterner spent her formative years in the 1960s at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, then a crucible of experimental time-based art. In that milieu, she brushed shoulders with Andy Warhol, listened to lectures by visitors from Claes Oldenburg to the Velvet Underground, and went to performances collectively staged by the ONCE Group, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Judson Dance Theater. Realizing that she could express her ideas in the way she presented herself in the everyday, her wardrobe exploded to fit all occasions, and she began ma

The government of Belgium’s Flanders region has backpedaled on its plan to close down the M HKA in Antwerp and convert it into a new cultural center, temporarily ending a months-long controversy over what would become of one of Europe’s most beloved contemporary art museums. As part of a new plan for the institution that Flemish culture minister Caroline Gennez dubbed “M HKA 2.0,” the museum’s collection will now remain in Antwerp, meaning that the holdings will no longer be relocated to the SMAK museum in Ghent, as she previously stated. Moreover, M HKA can retain its status as a museum, enabling the museum to continue mounting programming. Under this new plan, M HKA “will thus constitute much more than today a bridge between heritage and the artistic field,” Gennez said. Gennez did, however, tease one change for the Flemish culture scene. She said she wanted to form what she called a General Assembly that would convene artists and other members of the region’s artistic scene, in an effort to spur on collaboration. She also said that SMAK will now be operated by the regional government, as was originally intended under her vision to remake the region’s museum landscape, according

SITE Santa Fe has appointed independent curator Ekow Eshun as the organizer of the next SITE Santa Fe International. The exhibition’s 13th edition is scheduled to open in summer 2027. London-based Eshun, a former director of the Institute of Contemporary Art London, has recently drawn acclaim for organizing a number of high-profile exhibitions in the UK. In 2022, he curated “In the Black Fantastic” at the Hayward Gallery in London, which included 11 artists from the African diaspora, among them Nick Cave, Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, and Ellen Gallagher. He followed that up with “The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure” at the National Portrait Gallery in London, which presented the work of more than 20 artists whose work rethinks representations of Black people in art history. That exhibition, which opened in February 2024, then traveled to the Philadelphia Art Museum later that year before heading to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh in 2025. “I think he’ll bring a new energy and a new vision for the International,” SITE executive director Louis Grachos told ARTnews in a recent interview, noting that he had been impressed by Eshun’s curation of “In the B

After correspondence between Jeff Koons and Jeffrey Epstein‘s representatives emerged last month via a newly released set of files, the artist distanced himself from the convicted sex offender. These new files appear to confirm rumors of the studio visit that were first reported in 2023 by the Wall Street Journal. When ARTnews reached out to Koons’s representative on Monday afternoon, the artist did not respond. Koons is merely the latest art world figure to appear in Epstein’s files, which include extensive correspondence about Leon Black, whose art collection Epstein appears to have had a hand in managing. (Black has said he did not have any involvement in Epstein’s crimes.) Emails in the newly released files show that Epstein was forwarded correspondence about Black’s art transactions with Gagosian, the gallery that represents Koons.

Former French culture minister Jack Lang and his daughter, film producer Caroline Lang, are the latest art world figures revealed to have had ties with Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender. Caroline Lang is revealed to have founded Prytanee with Epstein in 2016. She tells Mediapart that Epstein “told my father and me that he wanted to invest in young French and international artists, to help them. He offered to set up a fund and I said yes. I didn’t take care of anything. It was Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers who did everything, in terms of editing.” She described Epstein in her statement to the AFP as a “cultured man, passionate about contemporary art.”

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles announced two senior leadership appointments today: Michael Wellen will be chief curator, and Regan Pro will be chief of learning, engagement, and research, a newly created role. Wellen begins at the museum on April 6, while Pro will start on March 2. The chief curatorship at the Hammer, which oversees the museum’s contemporary art exhibitions and collection, publications, and registrar and preparator teams, has been vacant since 2023, when Connie Butler departed the museum to serve as the director of MoMA PS1 in New York. The new learning, engagement, and research role will put the Hammer’s public programming, community partnerships, and educational initiatives under one department.   The two roles form the museum’s leadership, alongside Ryan as director and Naoko Takahatake, the director and chief curator of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, which is housed at the Hammer. In filling the positions, Ryan was focused on how “all three would work together in synergy with one another,” she said. During this introductory period, Ryan said she would ask people what made the Hammer special. Often, they would reply that it was both their influentia

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., has announced a new, large-scale partnership with the Art Bridges Foundation. The initiative, called 50 for 50, will bring key artworks by American artists from the Hirshhorn’s collection to smaller museums throughout the US’s 50 states and Puerto Rico. The loans will be long-term, lasting three to five years, and will typically include several artworks chosen by each participating museum that will complement their existing collection or programming.Related ArticlesA New Model for Stewardship: Talladega College's Partnership to Share Hale Woodruff's MuralsD.C.'s Museums, Under Attack by Trump, Have Never Been More United in Their Purpose The project will allow for significant artworks that are typically in storage to be enjoyed by American museum-goers in places that don’t have collections nearly as robust as the Hirshhorn’s, which owns some 13,000 pieces across all mediums by giants of American art. “It’s Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Eakins, Joan Mitchell, Calder,” Melissa Chiu, the Hirshhorn’s director, told the New York Times. “We asked ourselves, how can we do more to make the Hirshhorn the national museum of modern and

Art Basel’s first edition in Doha opened this week with a noticeably different rhythm from the fair’s established outposts in Basel, Paris, Hong Kong, or Miami Beach. The Qatari fair’s format focused on fewer galleries, solo presentations, and a layout that encourages visitors to move slowly. The change was significant and widely praised on the floor by dealers and visitors. Disparate booths were suddenly in conversation with each other yet there was room for both the art, and the visitors, to breathe deeply. The atmosphere felt closer to an introduction than a full-scale commercial test. That was by design as, leading up to the big event, Basel executives waxed lyrical about how the iteration of the fair was equal parts meditation and commercial endeavor. ARTnews was told that many visitors, including collectors from the region, were attending an art fair for the first time, and the scaled-down format made the whole enterprise more easily digestible, both for veterans and the newly initiated. Art Basel leadership has been careful not to frame Doha’s debut purely in terms of early sales figures. Vincenzo de Bellis, the fair’s chief artistic officer, told ARTnews that the commercial

A painting by Camille Pissarro in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is under renewed scrutiny over the circumstances of its sale by its former owner, the department store magnate and art collector Max Julius Braunthal. As reported by the New York Times, seven of Braunthal’s heirs have filed suit in a French court, alleging that the painting, Haystacks, Morning, Eragny (1899), was sold under duress in 1941. The Met maintains that Braunthal received fair market value for the work, which depicts several domed haystacks in a verdant, tree-filled meadow in Eragny, the village northwest of Paris where Pissarro lived from 1884 until his death in 1903. Braunthal’s heirs cite a 2023 French law stating that all art sales made by Jews during the Nazi occupation of France are to be considered null and void. Braunthal sold Haystacks, Morning, Eragny for 100,000 francs to Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery during that period. The law allows “stolen art, books, and other cultural property in France’s inalienable public domain—even work looted beyond its borders—to be returned to its rightful owners,” Devorah Lauter reported in ARTnews. The plaintiffs argue that whether the 1941 price refle

In a new catalogue raisonné, scholar Christof Metzger argues that The Painter’s Father (1497), a painting in the collection of London’s National Gallery, is in fact an authentic work by Albrecht Dürer. The Painter’s Father, gifted to King Charles I of England in 1636, has long been thought to be a copy made decades after Dürer’s death in 1528, based on a lost original. But in the new publication Albrecht Dürer: The Complete Paintings, Metzger—a Dürer expert and curator of German art at Vienna’s Albertina Museum—contends that the face is “preserved so well that the painting’s formerly outstanding quality is still perceptible.” He told the Art Newspaper that the London work stands apart from at least seven known early copies of the portrait of Dürer’s father for its “experienced brushwork and masterful glazing technique.” Curators at the National Gallery have long taken a different view. In a 2010 catalog entry, Marjorie E. Wieseman, then the museum’s curator of Dutch paintings, wrote that the painting’s “quality and technique are not consistent with authentic works by Dürer” and that it “lacks Dürer’s sophisticated and highly realistic approach to the modelling of form.” Susan Foist

David A. Ross, a writer and curator who led museums nationwide, resigned on Tuesday from his position as chair of the MFA art practice program at New York’s School of Visual Arts (SVA), a post he had held since 2009, after ARTnews revealed that he makes a number of appearances in the newly released files related to Jeffrey Epstein. In an email to ARTnews, Ross explained that he met Epstein in the mid-1990s, when he was director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. “I knew him as a wealthy patron and a collector, and it was part of my job to befriend people who had the capacity and interest in supporting the museum,” writes Ross. When Epstein was jailed in Florida in 2008, says Ross, “I emailed him to find out what the story was because this did not seem like the person I thought I knew. … He told me that he had been the subject of a political frame-up because of his support of former President Clinton. At the time, I believed he was telling me the truth.” Epstein showed considerable interest in the art world. His connection to Ross, as revealed in the [...]

A fundraising appeal to protect one of Britain’s most enigmatic ancient monuments, the Cerne Giant, has drawn international support, underscoring the global fascination with the site. The 180-foot chalk figure carved into a hillside in the county of Dorset is a domineering presence, largely thanks to its erect appendage.  On Tuesday, the National Trust announced it had reached its target to purchase surrounding land near the giant, after donations from more than 20 countries, including Australia, Japan, and Iceland. The funds will be used to safeguard public access to the figure, protect local wildlife, and support further archaeological research into the monument’s origins.Related ArticlesUK National Trust Gets No-Strings-Attached $13.4 M. Donation, Largest Ever in Its HistoryPortrait of Anne Boleyn Was Meant to Rebut Rumors That She Was a Witch, Historians Say “The giant is a folk icon with a mystical quality that draws interest from all directions,” Luke Dawson, the National Trust’s lead ranger for west Dorset and Cranborne Chase, told the Guardian. He noted that the newly acquired land will allow researchers to investigate nearby features, including the Trendle, an Iron Age ear