For Lankton, dolls were more than just kitschy objects - they were powerful, emotional extensions of herself. "(My dolls) are all freaks. Outsiders. Untouchables," she once said. "They're like biographies - the kind of people you'd like to know about. Really interesting and fucked up." Lankton's dolls were born as much from necessity as from imagination. "She wasn't allowed to have a doll as a kid," Monroe tells Dazed. "So, she made them - first with flowers, then with socks.
Confirming earlier reports that his selection had been delayed by the 43-day United States government shutdown, the US State Department on Monday (24 November) confirmed that the Utah-born, Mexico-based sculptor Alma Allen will represent the US at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Allen's US Pavilion exhibition, Alma Allen: Call Me the Breeze (9 May-22 November 2026), is being organised by Jenni Pardo, the pavilion's commissioner and the founder of the organisation , and the independent curator Jeffrey Uslip.
Báez's monumental 2021 painting Untitled (Colonization in America, Visual History Wall Map, Prepared by Civic Education Service) sold for $1,111,250, setting a new record for the Dominican-born artist whose work interrogates colonial histories through layers of archival maps, Caribbean symbolism, and swirly swaths of paint-in this case, densely rendered feathers. Brown's After the Alcatraz Swim #2 achieved $596,900, a benchmark for the Bay Area Figurative artist whose psychologically charged self-portrait draws from a near-fatal 1975 swim in San Francisco Bay.
What makes this work so compelling is how it plays with reflection and perception. The polished aluminum surface doesn't just sit there looking pretty. It actively engages with its surroundings, capturing the shifting desert light, the blue Egyptian sky, and the ancient stones in a constantly changing display. Depending on where you stand and what time of day you visit, you're basically looking at a different artwork. It's responsive design taken to a literal, sculptural extreme.
'Sanctuary' is a reminder of just how singular an artist Puryear is. It's a serious work of contemporary art that seems to have fallen out of a fairy tale-not the monophonic Disney kind but the capricious, found-object kind collected by the Brothers Grimm, in which the moral is oblique, anything can come to life, and nobody leaves unscathed. Born in 1941, Puryear came of age at a time when sculpture was flexing its muscle through intimidating scale, conceptual rigor, and protractor-perfect geometries.
For artist ektor garcia, no piece is ever truly finished-only paused. His sculptures, built from hours of crocheting, weaving and casting, resist the idea of permanence. In Loose Ends, garcia's first solo museum exhibition in his home state of California, San José Museum of Art presents his sprawling installation, and more works, that embody his ethos of continual transformation.
De Lara transforms everyday tools, plants, and furniture into anthropomorphic and surreal forms. These works act as vessels of memory, resilience, and humor, but also as pointed reflections on the immigrant experience, queer identity, and the liminal space of DACA status, the temporary US policy that offers young undocumented immigrants protection from deportation and the ability to work legally, though without a path to permanent residency or citizenship.
"My fascination with inflatable structures began when I realized how absurd, tender, and unstable they could be-all at once. Unlike rigid materials, inflatables breathe, wobble, collapse, and revive."
Artists Saman and Sasan Oskouei create abstract landscapes that visually intertwine elements of nature with contemporary industrial materials, offering a thought-provoking commentary on human-nature relationships.