Video Art That Chases the Rainbow

Most queer people aren’t privileged with having queer parents, so many of us look to those who came before as role models. In Homage: Queer Lineages on Video, artists draw upon the legacies of folks who opened the doors we now get to walk through. It’s...

Refik Anadol’s Soulless AI Tribute to Leo Messi

Refik Anadol set himself up for failure. For his latest work, the artist best known for his shapeshifting AI installation at the Museum of Modern Art set out to immortalize a moment of sports legend: Lionel Messi’s 2009 towering header goal for FC Barcelona, which...

The Friendship That Transformed Frida Kahlo 

Frida Kahlo, “Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (Autorretrato con pelo cortado)” (1940), oil on canvas (Digital Image © 2025 MoMA, N.Y.; © 2025 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)...

Chicago Nonprofit Celebrates a Decade of Serving Unhoused Artists

CHICAGO — Do people need art? I know I always have, as something to enjoy, discuss, learn from, be puzzled by, and sometimes create. Obviously, I need food, shelter, and clothing first, but beyond that, art has given me a myriad of ways through which to engage with...

The Queens Phone Repair Shop Meets the Museum 

The For You page, as the popular TikTok comment goes, is getting too local. I, for one, am grateful. Umber Majeed’s exhibition J😊Y TECH draws from the visual vernacular of phone repair stores in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens — their densely packed...

The Communal Roots of Ben Shahn’s Social Realism

Ben Shahn, “Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco,” detail, from The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti series detail (1931–32), gouache on paper on board (all photos Isabella Segalovich/Hyperallergic) What makes a prophet? Whether or not we believe that Isaiah,...

Magali Lara Stitches Together the Personal and Political

The first thing that came to mind when I looked at Magali Lara’s 1990 “Y entonces escuché el fuego” (“And then I heard the fire”) was the art of J.M.W. Turner. The painting, part of the artist’s survey Stitched to the Body at the Institute for Studies on...

Saya Woolfalk Toys With Future Worlds

In Caryl Churchill’s short play Imp, which ran at the Public Theater through May 25, an older British woman is soothed by the belief that she has an imp, or a mischievous spirit, trapped in a corked bottle. That belief gives her comfort, as her life in her armchair is...

The First Homosexuals Is a Defiant Celebration of LGBTQ+ Life

CHICAGO — The history of art, stated curator Jonathan D. Katz, “is both the world’s largest archive of the history of sexuality and its least tapped.” This may be a good place to begin to unpack the immense, important, ambitious, challenging, and intellectual...

An Absurd Take on Masahisa Fukase’s Darkness

Few of Japan’s great photographers had a career as bold and multifaceted as Masahisa Fukase. Though largely defined by his black and white magnum opus Ravens (1986), a book of photographs in which the photographer casts himself as the grim black bird, Fukase managed...

Ruth Asawa Showed Us the Way to an Artistic Life

SAN FRANCISCO — Ruth Asawa’s infant son, Paul, lies on a blanket in a tender ink drawing entitled “Untitled (FF.1234, Paul Lanier on a Blanket)” (c. 1962–63). Paul takes up just a small portion of the overall composition, his clothing rendered through hatch marks that...

The Renaissance, but Make It Game of Thrones

A documentary can sometimes tell a viewer more about the time it was made than the one it recounts. This holds especially true for films about the Renaissance, which has been so meticulously covered that new revelations are farther and fewer between. The three-part...