It's a doll, Ineke Schmelter, 71, often says as she walks down the street with a pram and someone peers fondly under the hood, asking: How old is the baby? Then she pulls back the blanket and reveals the doll. She points out the craftsmanship the little veins, the creases in the skin and explains that it can take as many as 20 layers of paint to achieve such a lifelike finish.
If you've walked around any of France's cosmopolitan cities in recent years, you're sure to have come across some stunning murals. Painted onto the side of buildings, in hidden corners, and just about anywhere an artist can paint, street art is booming. We're not talking old-school graffiti here, hastily sprayed names on walls, and anti-social stuff like that. Today's street art is commissioned by city or town councils and created by prominent street artists from around the globe says Suzanne Pearson.
On a daily ride between San Leandro and the Mission, a young poet found her page in motion. Sehinne's poem earned a rare sweep of nine-or-higher scores at the 2025 Brave New Voices festival, helping Team Youth Speaks Bay Area take first place. In the piece, the train becomes a steady, slightly offbeat presence part family member, part witness a place where writing happens in stolen minutes between stations.
Last year at Grace Cathedral's Carnivale, I found the plastic baby in the King Cake. Tradition dictates this brings good luck. In reality, it kicked off a spectacularly chaotic year where we were outbid on a house by a single minute, and then my daily professional life capsized. So, walking back into the cathedral this Friday night, now holding the keys to my first San Francisco home and owning The Bold Italic, felt less like attending a party and more like crossing a finish line.
In 2014, Scottish artist Andy Scott made international headlines with the unveiling of his colossal dual horse-head sculptures, The Kelpies. Completed in late 2013, they are installed in the Helix park in Flakirk, Scotland, and each of the steel heads measures 98-feet high and weighs in at a whopping 300 tons. The works have become iconic in their own right, but also exemplary of Scott's practice, which takes focus on animal forms and employs the visually and thematically weighty materials of steel or bronze.
Goliath and the curator Ingrid Masondo were to present a new iteration of the three-part, video-based project Elegy -a project begun in 2015 that has centred on femicide and the murder of LGBTQI+ people in South Africa. The version planned for the Biennale also addressed violence against women in Namibia and Gaza, and it was the new Gaza-related section that caused the controversy.
As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday amid attacks on civil liberties and marginalized communities, museums and galleries in the nation's capital are opening exhibitions that question what it means to be an American.The National Gallery of Art presents 115 works in Dear America while other shows focus on individual artists such as Mary Cassatt and Nick Cave, all in the pursuit of exploring "Americanism" as a facet of education, expression, and aesthetics.
The snippet carries the phrase "Fathers of the Senate!" which is nowhere found in surviving Washington documents. The expression is borrowed from ancient Roman Senate-specifically the Latin patres conscripti , or "Conscript Fathers"-and quite possibly wasn't the patrician tone Washington intended to set for a young republic. It is unknown why or how it was used in this case as the manuscript from which the fragment was cut is long lost.
Influenced by the works of Hopper and Hans Hofmann, Mitchell Johnson: Personal Color (Selected Small Paintings 1988-2026) is shaped by decades of visits to Paris and Cape Cod, two places that have anchored and evolved Johnson's painting over the course of his career. Hofmann, through his teaching, transported the aesthetics and concerns of the School of Paris across the Atlantic, eventually creating a group atelier curriculum that would expand the breadth of American Modernism through his theory of push and pull.
Monia Ben Hamouda's work weaves calligraphy, material transformation and ancestral memory into sculptures and installations that oscillate between language and form. In conversation, we traced the conceptual and sensory threads of her practice, unfolding through key works that reflect on heritage, embodiment and translation. Using materials such as iron, stone and pigment, her installations become sites where history is not only referenced but physically felt.
From brilliant new voices to seasoned icons, many of the past year's breakout works are by Black authors. In June, Great Black Hope, a coming-of-age story reckoning with privilege and belonging, made first-time author Rob Franklin a household name. And in July, Stephanie Wambugu's gorgeous debut novel Lonely Crowds, which explores the intimacy and frustration in the relationship between two lifelong friends, climbed bestseller lists.
These clothes are not secondhand, says Yin Xiuzhen, the Beijing-born artist known for creating large-scale installations out of found garments and keepsakes. I prefer to call them used' or worn', she explains. Clothes that have been worn' carry a lot of information like a second skin, imprinted with social meaning. In some of Yin's works the clothes are her own, telling a personal story. In others, the clothes are collected, stained and stretched across towering steel frames resembling planes, trains or organic forms.
It's typical for the Joffrey Ballet to seat a mixed-repertory concert near the beginning of the year. But the 2026 edition of such an evening (a series of loosely connected shorter works packaged together), breaks at least one habit. There's nothing new in "American Icons," running two weekends at the Lyric Opera House. Instead, the Joffrey has dug up a range of works showcasing mid-20th century innovation and the porous kinship between ballet and modern dance during that time.
The third Wednesday or Thursday evening of each month, comic book shop Books with Pictures ( 1401 SE Division St) hosts this open-invite book club devoted to a wide variety of graphic novels-from the Bitter Root series, about a family of sympathetic monster hunters during the Harlem Renaissance, to an illustrated retelling of the 1872 queer vampire murder mystery Carmilla. Sometimes artists and writers join to talk about their latest work.
A recent study has concluded that the Xalet del Catllaràs in La Pobla de Lillet (Berguedà) was designed by Antoni Gaudí. The findings attribute the original project to the celebrated Catalan architect, identifying distinctive methodologies and construction techniques that align closely with his known work. Research confirms Gaudí as author of the project The investigation was commissioned from architect Galdric Santana, director of the Gaudí Chair at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and current commissioner of the Gaudí Year commemorations. His study concludes that Gaudí was indeed the author of the original design for the Xalet del Catllaràs.
With ticket revenue not providing enough to fund the theater's operation, it has sought donations from multiple sources, including a recent push from individual donors through the theater's "Keep the Arts Alive in Antioch" campaign. The theater hopes to receive $50,000 from donors to continue operations through this year. Audience members can choose one of 640 seats, including wheelchair and companion seating, spread among three floors.
We're just a week away from Frieze LA, when East Coast dealers and local artists alike descend upon the Santa Monica Airport, but this isn't Renée Reizman's first rodeo. Since the critic and artist moved to the area almost 15 years ago, she's witnessed blue-chip New York galleries set up shop and sideline the irreverent, DIY spaces that shape the local art scene. Without these spaces, Reizman writes, she would not have discovered what art can be outside of the white cube.
The Oscar Wilde that entered Napoleon Sarony's New York studio in 1882 was fresh-faced, yet to pen the plays and singular novel that would make his name. But he was no unknown quantity. As captured by the photographer, Wilde was an aesthetic: his outfit of velvet jacket, silk knee breeches, and slippers crowned with grosgrain bows cutting the figure of a dandy who had captivated London society with his keen wit.
Even though most of us are eager for spring here in the Northern Hemisphere, we're happy to linger in winter a little while longer to take in Robinsson Cravents ' new project. The Colombia-based designer and illustrator recently released a pair of hand-drawn digital landscapes that take a bird's-eye view of Yosemite National Park. Starting with a wide aerial shot of coniferous trees, the films then journey down a stream up to a waterfall, capturing the majestic scenery with grainy, tactile detail.
After more than 12 years at the reins, Jeffrey Rosen is out as director of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, sparking accusations that President Donald Trump is once again seeking to control a U.S. cultural institution. Rosen, age 61, is a renowned legal scholar, and had played a key role in the museum's preparations for America 250, the national celebration of the semiquincentennial of the founding of the U.S.
The only thing most people know about epiphytes, if they know about them at all, is that they're rootless. That's not quite true - they develop highly specialized root systems adapted to wherever they land. In Epiphytic Elucidations at Patel Brown Gallery, Calgary-based artist Marigold Santos takes this fact as more than a metaphor. The exhibition uses epiphytes - plants that grow on other plants without harming them - as a framework for the expansive ways diasporas form through material labor.
It's not that advertising campaigns are never announced, but when they are, it's usually in advertising trade magazines, and generally by the agency that did the work. The client doesn't normally issue a press release that essentially says, "We are putting up some posters." Yet that is exactly what the Tate has done, issuing a general announcement that it will run an advertising campaign for its upcoming Tracey Emin exhibition.
The exhibition centers the visibility, agency, and radical joy of Black women, celebrating love as a generative force-of liberation, self-definition, and community. Through richly textured compositions and her iconic rhinestone-studded surfaces, Thomas depicts her subjects-friends, family, lovers, and cultural figures-with a confidence and sensuality that reclaims spaces where Black women have been historically overlooked or misrepresented. With this exhibition, she becomes the first African-American artist to receive a major solo presentation at the Grand Palais.
The art world has a real issue with making things overly conceptual, too complicated and using wanky jargon, says Trackie McLeod. It alienates people. So, for his latest show, Utopia, the 32-year-old Glaswegian has decided to create something more welcoming and familiar: a pub. Custom-built from scratch, the exhibition is a fully functioning boozer. McLeod will pull pints for punters, there's a dartboard where you can take aim at images of Thatcher or Trump,
"This occupation has had an incalculable impact on every single person here and the repercussions will be ongoing for a long time. Besides the separation of families, the legal battles to repatriate them and the persecution and arrest of constitutional observers, there will be ongoing massive economic effects for families trying to make rent, immigrant-run businesses who were forced to close and to the city as a whole."
