Inspiration

On view at the New Orleans Museum of Art from April 4 through August 10, the exhibition will then embark on parallel tours to venues in North America

Get the latest art news, reviews and opinions from Hyperallergic. My studio is a multipurpose workspace. As an interdisciplinary artist who teaches, writes, curates, and creates, there isn’t a set daily routine. Each day is different depending on the projects. I usually have a cup of homemade chai down at the dock/lakeside to ground myself for the day. A morning walk in nature or dance class ensures that creativity flows. I do not listen to music or podcasts while I work; I have found that I crave silence. Also, since much of my work is digitally based, I need full attention if I am editing video and/or sound. I am usually working on many projects at once. I like to balance the longer projects with short, experimental play in the studio to bring a balance and avoid creative burnout. I have beautiful light and my space is filled with art, collected objects, books, and ephemera that inspire creativity. Facing the window, my desk is made from an old refinished wood door, and the texture brings me pleasure and a feeling of groundedness. The hardwood floors are perfect for dance breaks during the day. Fort Worth, Texas, is my closest IRL [...]

I’m not remotely immune to the appeal of Ghiblifying pictures. Seriously. Some of them really are adorable. People have loved anime filters for years, and I don’t think most of these images were created with ill intent. But filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, whose name is synonymous with the animation studio, is one of the most famously anti-AI artists in the world. He’s widely quoted for calling an earlier version of AI animation “an insult to life itself,” and there’s no sign he approves of ChatGPT being used to imitate his signature style probably thanks to training on his art, let alone OpenAI selling subscriptions off the back of it. Using Ghibli’s work specifically for publicity, as Blood in the Machine author Brian Merchant explains, is a power move. It loudly tells the artists whose creations make ChatGPT function, We’ll take what we want, and we’ll tell everyone we’re doing it. Do you consent? We don’t care. Get the latest art news, reviews and opinions from Hyperallergic. Boulder stood out to organizers as an artsy, walkable and medium-sized city close to nature. It has one of the highest concentrations of professional artists in the U.S. and is home to the University of Colorado,

LOS ANGELES — That one of the best art shows in Los Angeles right now is an empty room might come as a surprise to most. Bruce Nauman would beg to differ — just as he has for the entirety of his 60-plus-year career. A formidable figure in modern and contemporary art, his practice runs the gamut, from performance to sculpture to video, and beyond, all united by his conceptual interrogations of art itself. But what may seem heady on paper is surprisingly — and refreshingly — simple and even earnest in person. At Marian Goodman Gallery, an exhibition focusing on the artist’s Pasadena Years (1969–79), when he lived in East LA, displays works that he created specifically to center the viewer’s experience of architecture, the body, and art — sometimes making use of nearly vacant galleries. These pieces are the stuff of art history legend (and many college courses), but what, if anything, do they mean to us now?  Much of Nauman’s art cuts to the core of our engagement with art past and present, looking at foundational interactions between viewers, art objects, and art institutions. In “Performance Corridor” (1969), he exaggerates the sense of confinement in exhibition spaces, [...]

If dreams were elaborate theatrical productions, what would their trailing wires, the bits that don’t make it to the stage, look like? I imagine something like Abraham Lincoln Walker’s paintings.  His images are fantastical and phantasmagoric and frequently combine the features of landscape, abstraction, and portraiture, but are unconcerned with being finely finished. The actual paint formula is unknown, but to my eye seems like a combination of oil intended for canvas, enamel, and perhaps house paint. Walker’s lack of care for painterly fine tuning is, of course, a hallmark of naïve painting, which has been of the moment for the last few decades. But too much of this work betrays artists’ desire to appear unbothered by artistic etiquette, while too little of it has paid attention to the meanings conveyed by marks. Walker, a Black, self-taught artist who died in 1993 after spending his professional life as a house painter, could have slotted into this zeitgeist easily, but he seemed to be after something else.  I spend a long time looking at his “Girls and Things” (1976). It’s almost a portrait, almost a landscape; ultimately, it’s a scene with characters in varying hues of teal, t

We’re all partial to a cool rock. I’ve certainly amassed a collection of some neat stones from driveways and beaches in my 27 years. But are they art? If so … Is nature the artist? At the Elizabeth Myers Mitchell Art Museum (stylized “/m” for short) at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, an exhibition of gongshi, naturally shaped rocks valued by Chinese literati since the Tang dynasty, broaches this very question with the help of its inaugural scholar-in-residence — Bai Jo, the Giant Oranda goldfish (also known as the “bubble-headed” goldfish). You can check your calendar all you want, but Bai Jo’s residency is no April Fools’ joke. Reportedly hailing from Anne Arundel County’s Stormwater Infrastructure Management administration team after clearing his civil service examination in 2023, Bai Jo (also known as “Parsley” to the /m team) assumed the new role at the museum during its Nature’s Readymades exhibition. Organized by Peter Nesbett and Shelly Bancroft, the exhibition brings together a selection of gongshi from the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum in Washington, DC, and continues at the museum through Sunday, April 6, though Bai Jo’s residency has been extended through J

The world loves few things better than a controversy involving an artist. Such brouhahas are nothing new; Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin (c. 1605–06), for instance, was rejected by the Church fathers who commissioned it for the chapel of Santa Maria Della Scala in Rome because of its brutally realistic depiction of Mary—for whom a prostitute served as model, according to some sources. Clashes became more regular during the 19th century, when épater les bourgeois became a rallying cry. The stark nudity of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–63) shook up the Parisian public, while Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866)—a closeup of a woman’s anatomy between spread thighs—continues to startle to this day. The trend only accelerated with the accession of modernism during the 20th century, when the avant-garde transformed the shock of the new into a feature instead of a bug. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), with its angular, Africanized prostitutes in a brothel, parading their wares, appalled viewers and critics alike; it even gave Henri Matisse pause when he first saw it. The Futurists went out of their way to instigate riots by insulting

Stewart indicated that he believes—despite two years of a soft market and a particularly challenging 2024 for Sotheby’s—market trends are moving in their favor. He pointed toward a “tsunami” that could bring “hundreds and hundreds” of major art collections to market as Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation shift assets and wealth to their Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z children. That “Great Wealth Transfer,” as its called in financial circles, is well documented. The most recent Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting said $84 trillion will pass to younger generations over the next 20 years. In 2022, Sarah McDaniel, then the head of Morgan Stanley’s Art Resources Team, similarly told ARTnews that they expect the wealth transfer to see a lot of art go to market. “What we’ve found is that with the Great Wealth Transfer and the economics of taste in the art market, many collectors’ children don’t have the same taste in art as their parents,” McDaniel said. “In the past collecting categories and who’s collecting them tended to last longer so there was potentially less of a disconnect when a collector was passing away or disposing of their collection.” As Maneker noted in his [...]

THE SMITHSONIAN DRAMA CONTINUES, with the Washington Post reporting yesterday that Kevin Young, the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, has been on leave since March 14 and will be out of office indefinitely. It’s unclear whether Young’s leave was related to President Donald Trump’s March 27 executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution, which runs the NMAAHC and many other museums. In that order, Trump claimed that the Smithsonian is showing “anti-American ideology” in its galleries, something that many have since said is not true. Yesterday, also in the Post, Monica Hesse wrote of going to the Smithsonian’s museums in search of “corrosive ideology” and said she more or less didn’t find it. Meanwhile, Smithsonian secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III affirmed in a memo to staff that the institution will “remain steadfast in our mission to bring history, science, education, research and the arts to all Americans,” Courthouse News reports. THERE’S DONOR CONTROVERSY IN CHICAGO, with Art Institute of Chicago now under scrutiny for what preceded the recent return of a 12th-century Buddha sculpture to Nepal. ProPublica  reports that the museum failed

Frieze New York is set to return for its 13th edition on May 7 to 11 in Chelsea, featuring newly commissioned performances and public art projects by Pilvi Takala and Asad Raza. The 44-year-old artist, who represented Finland at the Venice Biennale in 2022, has gained a following abroad for pieces that deal with social discomfort. According to press materials for a show she did at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, in London, Takala’s work has been described as a “stress test” on the constructs of normal day-to-day interactions. (Details about the plot of the piece by Takala, titled the The Pin haven’t been disclosed.)

The 20-foot-long painting, one of the artist’s most significant works, was unveiled Thursday. It now hangs alongside Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals. Jorge M. Pérez, a billionaire real estate developer, has donated or pledged more than $100 million to museums, including Miami’s major public art institution, which was renamed the Pérez Art Museum Miami in his honor. Speaking to the BBC, Pérez said he and his wife wanted their collection to be seen by as many people as possible, adding that Iva “resounds” when displayed next to Rothko. “And it’ll be there forever,” he added.  Beyond Iva, the Pérez donation includes a multimillion-dollar endowment for Tate’s curatorial research and a forthcoming gift of works by artists from Africa and the African diaspora, including Yinka Shonibare, El Anatsui, and Malick Sidibé. The couple emphasized the importance of championing female artists and diverse voices in shaping the global art landscape.

Following the Palisades and Eaton wildfires in California earlier this year, the Getty Trust has decided to sell $500 million in bonds to enhance museum protection against natural disasters such as fires and earthquakes, according to an official filing. As tens of thousands of people evacuated and large swaths of Los Angeles neighborhoods burned to the ground, the Getty Villa remained remarkably untouched—even with the fire reaching its doorstep. Though some vegetation was scorched, the museum, its employees, and its valued collection were unharmed. This was no accident, as the Getty made swift moves to deploy its irrigation system (with a million-gallon on-site water tank), seal off museum galleries and library archives, and to keep all nonessential personnel off its grounds. It also has a double-walled construction and stone rooftop, as well as advanced smoke and fire detection systems, that provide further protection. Consistent brush clearing ahead of the wildfire season and emergency preparedness were among other measures taken in the institution’s favor. The Getty is boasts one of the most robust art collections in the world, with the Getty Center alone containing more than 4

Val Kilmer, the actor who died at 65 this week, was known widely for his star-making experiences in films such as Top Gun and The Doors. But beyond having a significant screen presence, Kilmer was also an artist, maintaining a painting practice that he considered an important part of his work. Kilmer’s big breakthrough as an artist came in 2017, when New York’s Woodward Gallery gave him a solo show. Titled “Valholla” (a reference, a release explained, both to Valhalla, a fixture of Norse mythology, and to Kilmer’s Norse ancestry), the show featured abstract paintings, with splashes of colorful enamel laid on metal sheets. It wasn’t Kilmer’s first gallery show—Yoko Ono helped him get an exhibition in Tokyo during the 2000s—but it was the one that gained the attention of the Guardian, Artnet News, and W, among other mainstream outlets. “Val Kilmer was not just a talented actor and author, but also a deeply passionate artist whose creativity extended far beyond the screen,” Woodward Gallery wrote on Instagram. “His work as a visual artist showcased his unique vision and boundless imagination.” He had turned increasingly to art while undergoing cancer treatment, he told W. His practice

The Smithsonian Institution’s leadership is standing firm after the Trump administration ordered a review last month of its exhibits, accusing the museum network of pushing a “race-centered ideology.” In an internal memo to staff Friday obtained by Courthouse News Service, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch III told employees that the institution would continue to operate “free of partisanship” despite White House efforts to reshape its programming. “We remain steadfast in our mission to bring history, science, education, research, and the arts to all Americans,” Bunch wrote. The executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directs Vice President JD Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian’s board of regents, to remove “improper ideology” from its more than twenty museums and research centers. The order also gives Congress the power to cut funding for any Smithsonian program deemed to “divide Americans based on race” and mandates that the women’s history museum exclude transgender representation. In another recent executive order targeting the Smithsonian, the White House insisted that federal museums should be “solemn and uplifting” tributes to American heritage, n

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California will present a retrospective for the late artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha next year, making it the first show of its kind in two decades. The exhibition, titled “Multiple Offerings” and on view from January to April 2026, will be the largest to date dedicated to Cha, who died in 1982 at age 31. The exhibition will then go on a national and international tour, with venues to be announced later this year. BAMPFA has been the home to much of Cha’s art and archives for over three decades. The forthcoming exhibition will feature many previously unseen works alongside her well-known pieces. “Cha is a fairly elusive artist for many people,” BAMPFA senior curator Victoria Sung, who is organizing the show with curatorial associate Tausif Noor, told ARTnews in an interview. “She’s an artist who defies easy categorization.” Cha is widely known for Dictee, her 1982 book that blends poetry, memoir, and other formats. Published just before her murder, Dictee has long been more widely known that Cha’s art. Sung said the “hybridity” of Dictee is a model for understanding Cha’s practice as a whole, with the retrospective [...]

His family will preserve the remaining artworks in his possession, according to a spokesperson for Pioneer Works, which featured his work in a 2018 exhibition on Port-au-Prince artists. Pèlen’s carved stone sculptures—oversized heads with serene expressions—were a centerpiece of Pòtoprens: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince, a survey of contemporary Haitian artists. A New York Times review described the presence of the carvings as a “carnivalesque antidote to the classical sculpture courts of Western museums.” The exhibition spotlighted members of the Atis Rezistans collective, including Jean Hérard Céleur, André Eugène, Guyodo (Frantz Jacques), and Evel Romain. Though not part of the group, Pèlen was a known figure in the neighboring grassroots movement of Rivière Froide, a riverside town in Port-au-Prince, where he was born, lived, and worked. In a statement to ARTnews, Pioneer Works’ artistic director Gabriel Florenz recalled that when visiting his studio, he asked Pèlen how he conceived his stone sculptures. Pèlen replied that ideas often came to him in dreams and visions during walks along the river. “He is one of the most mystical artists I’ve ever met,” Florenz said. Raised

 VCU’s Mohamed Gad-el-Hak says the swirls depicted in the painting do not follow the rules of flow physics after all.Peer-Reviewed Vincent van Gogh may have painted one of Western history’s most enduring works, but “The Starry Night” is not a masterpiece of flow physics – despite post-Impressionist artist painted the work (often referred to simply as “Starry Night”) in June 1889, and its depiction of a pre-sunrise sky and village was inspired in part by the view from van Gogh’s asylum room in southern France. The painting is part of the permanent collection of the size of whirls/eddies, but also their relative distance and intensity in his painting,” the paper read.However, those conclusions are unfounded,