#art-and-belonging

#art-and-belonging

On May 2, 2025, arts and cultural organizations across the country received notifications that grants and funding promised by the National Endowment for the Arts were being rescinded. This was part of a larger initiative by the Trump Administration to dismantle not just the NEA, but also other arts advocacy programs including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

The ballroom design features impractical elements like a stairway to nowhere and fake windows, emphasizing a focus on flashiness over functionality.

This contract, the second in the industry, sets a standard for workers at Sage and Coombe and beyond, according to Architectural Workers United, which has been instrumental in organizing efforts.

Lachlan Turczan's practice sits in the space between physics, optics, and environmental art, as he works with lasers, water, mist, and custom-built lenses to produce sculptures made entirely from light.

April's lineup at the Brooklyn Museum includes programs around 'Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens,' designed for accessibility and interactivity, featuring stroller tours for caregivers and infants.

The project emphasizes the reactivation of spatial value within existing community structures, transforming building stock into community assets of public significance.

In frightening times, it makes a huge difference not to feel alone. Creating art with others in community enhances agency and strengthens self. Creativity requires an open heart; love enhances hope and diminishes fear.

Frida Kahlo, during her 1933 trip to New York, created a colorful haven in her hotel room by covering the walls with prints by José Guadalupe Posada, which depicted sensational news and political imagery.

Laura Berger continues her explorations of communion in a suite of staggering paintings that place her signature minimal figures in intimate fellowship with one another and the earth.

Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.

"These works are an exploration of the human body's elasticity and capacity to metamorphose. Informed by my own experience of pregnancy and the birth of my first child last year, these paintings are a meditation on physiological transformation and the body's underlying animalistic and mammalian nature."

As if demolishing the East Wing, gutting arts agencies, and slapping his name and face on several federal buildings weren't enough, the US president now wants to do away with a DC building known as the "Sistine Chapel of New Deal art." This week, we reported on a burgeoning campaign to save the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which houses murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, and other major American artists. We will continue to follow this story.