Artists make California vibrant, innovative and culturally rich, yet our state ranks 35th nationally in per capita arts funding. When the state budget allocates just 53 cents per person to the arts, it's clear how little we're investing in the creative workers who shape the state's identity and economy. California's artists are delivering extraordinary value with minimal investment. Imagine what a stronger commitment to the arts could do for our communities, our economy and our future.
With most of us, 90 minutes of reminiscing wouldn't make for scintillating theater. Gert Boyle, as played by Wendy Westerwelle, is the exception to that rule. The late Gert came to fame when she took the reins of Columbia Sportswear after her husband's death in 1970 and also became the "One Tough Mother," with gray hair and glasses, of its comedic '80s and '90s ad campaigns. In one, she put her son, Tim, through a carwash to test the durability of a coat.
Taking over the colourful Casa Gilardi, Luis Barragán's last commissioned residence, built for the advertising executive Francisco Gilardi in the mid-1970s, the German artist Gregor Hildebrandt transforms the house's stylish rooms with an ever-expanding exhibition of his enigmatic works across various media. Known for transforming outmoded analogue recording media-including audio cassettes, VHS tapes and vinyl records-into paintings, sculptures and large-scale installations, the Berlin-based artist's conceptual works explore themes of memory, nostalgia and the physical representation of intangible sound and sight.
Mnuchin, an investment banker who found a second career as a dealer of Modern and postwar art, died in December at 91. His gallery on Manhattan's Upper East Side was a powerhouse, known for museum-quality exhibitions of top artists. It will shutter at the end of February. Its final show was a survey of Julian Schnabel 's famed plate paintings, which ended on Saturday. The gallery remains accessible by appointment.
The fact that it was Schulich who instigated the decision not to acquire Goldin's work-first revealed by Toronto-based independent journalist Samira Mohyeddin on X-was later reported by the . The newspaper reviewed further documentation indicating that an unnamed person in a decisive meeting of the gallery's Modern and contemporary curatorial working committee likened Goldin to Leni Riefenstahl, the Second World War-era German film-maker and Nazi propagandist, and called Goldin a "liar" based on her outspoken advocacy for Palestinians.
Behind its seemingly polished framework, To Empty Out emerges as an exhibition beautifully rife with contradictions that overlay serious and playful themes according to Grzybacz, who often sets out to "clash the forces" of gravity and levity through his chosen subjects. Through sublime florals, bawdy scenes, and raw portraits of social life, Grzybacz balances contemplation and observation, navigating between painterly precision and intuitive expression in this deeply personal exhibition.
Before Zona Maco's launch in 2003 consolidated Mexico City as a global arts capital, artist-run spaces like La Panadería and Temístocles 44 attracted a generation of Mexican artists-among them Minerva Cuevas, Sofía Táboas and Pablo Vargas Lugo-interested in developing their practices beyond a commercial context through installations, self-published periodicals and time-based media. In the 1990s, the city's artist-run spaces created important blueprints for dozens of independent and underground venues that animate the contemporary arts scene across Mexico today. Bold and unconventional works coming out of that ecosystem will be on display across the city at three important fairs during Art Week: Salón Acme, Clavo and Material Fair.
But they also miss what makes his approach distinctive. Chang worked with objects that industrial culture designed to be identical: records pressed in millions of copies, portraits drawn according to strict house style, coins minted for perfect interchange. His interest lay in the precise moment when the promise of sameness begins to fail, when time and human handling leave marks that transform supposedly identical objects into singular things.
Happy Birthday: Look for opportunities and jump at every chance you get to engage in something that excites you. The people you encounter this year will help shape your future. Partnerships, joint ventures and the lessons you learn will change your perspective on life, love and your purpose. Trust your instincts, and question what others want you to contribute. Strive for balance and integrity, and you'll discover your bliss. Your numbers are 6, 10, 22, 25, 34, 41, 48.
The 2025 sale came in just above its low estimate (all estimates calculated without fees), making $14.4m ($17.2m with fees) from 140 lots with a patchy 67% sell-through rate by lot. This year, by contrast, was a more concise offering, with 67 lots of fine art that landed a healthier sell-through rate of 89% and a hammer total of $15.4m ($19.5m with fees), near the pre-sale high estimate of $16.6m.
Known for his romanticized depictions of the American West, the wildly successful 19th-century painter and sculptor captured cowboy culture in its nascency, helping to etch its ethos of rugged individualism into the American psyche. This nocturne, created toward the end of this career, represented a shift in his style from narrative depictions of frontier battles to more atmospheric renderings of the North American landscape.
The 2026 Vilcek Prizes in Fashion & Culture acknowledge those who preserve fashion history and enrich its documentation through photography, museum curations, historical database development, and educational programming. As part of its mission to uplift US immigrants working in the arts and sciences, the Vilcek Foundation has awarded $250,000 to five immigrant fashion professionals: Tanya Meléndez-Escalante, Diego Bendezu, Jalan and Jibril Durimel, and Natalie Nudell.
The artist is known for his absurdist paintings of animals with overly long legs, contorted bodies, or myriad mutant-like heads or limbs. They're often set amid woodlands or meadows evocative of 18th- and 19th-century academic landscape paintings or depictions of formal hunts. Instead, both domesticated and wild animals graze as normally as they would without dozens of heads or udders attached in unnatural places around their bodies.
The portrait of Albrecht Dürer's father that has been sitting in the collection of the National Gallery in London for over a century has long been regarded as a copy. However, an art historian argues, in a recently published book examining the Northern Renaissance painter's oeuvre in great depth, that the painting is real.
Forty years after The Last Resort photobook was first published, the photographs that brought the late Martin Parr to international attention-and criticism at home-will be the focus of an exhibition at his foundation in Bristol. Timed to coincide with the anniversary of the photobook and its exhibition at London's Serpentine Gallery in 1986, the show marks the foundation's reopening following the British photographer's death late last year.
I first saw Stalker in the mid-1980s. I grew up in a very rural community, but I had a group of friends who all wanted something that we couldn't really get where we lived. With film, that was a possibility. I'm in my fifties now. I keep trying to figure out what I'm doing as an artist and how to keep going.
London-based, multidisciplinary artist Jana Frost is making "inspiration for fever dreams". Merging fashion photography with collage-art sensibilities, Jana employs cut-out animations, large-scale installations and a directorial style that prioritises several elements coming together to build physical, dreamlike environments. In a nutshell, Jana takes the aesthetic of pop-up books and makes them life-sized, turning dream imagery into physical reality. Sourcing public domain images from libraries and archives, Jana reworks materials then unifies them - and in the process, creates photographic works that play with time.
What gives me encouragement to continue to use my family as inspiration is that, if you look back in history, the famous portraits that Van Gogh did are portraits of people he knew, the postman or his friends. Intimate friends that, once you get that distance of time, you don't think, 'Well, this is someone he knew and that's kind of boring. It's portrait, in and of itself.
Spalding Gray used to perform a show called Interviewing the Audience. The celebrated monologist would invite a stranger he had met in the lobby to join him on stage. Through a sequence of innocuous questions, he would get them to open up about their lives. At one performance, a guest broke the audience's hearts by talking about her daughter's murder. At benefit nights, people living with HIV shared their tales. Other times, the anecdotes would be eccentric or amusing.
From April 10-26, the Big Umbrella Festival returns with nearly three weeks of free and pay-what-you-can performances, workshops and installations, all tailored for neurodivergent audiences. Big Umbrella, which launched in 2018, was the first large-scale performing arts festival of its kind and it's only grown more ambitious since. This year's edition spans dance, theater, comedy, music, visual art and outdoor installations, welcoming kids, adults, families and first-time arts-goers into spaces designed to be flexible, relaxed and judgment-free.
