Author: Brynn Calloway
Jurors from the Kunstfonds Foundation, a prominent German body that funds contemporary art projects, have publicly denounced the country’s top cultural policy official after he requested the names of its current members. In a statement first reported by Der Spiegel, the art fund’s jury described the initial request from Minister of State for Culture Wolfram Weimer, made in March 2025, as “political interference” that had the potential to infringe on artistic freedom of expression. Weimer plays a key role in shaping Germany’s cultural policy and oversees the allocation of millions of euros in federal cultural funding to grants, awards, and projects. The…
That’s Udo Kittelmann speaking during a tour of “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem,” a presentation he organized at the disused Venetian style Variety Arts Theater, a six story Los Angeles palace. On view are selections from the holdings of Julia Stoschek, Top 200 collector who primarily focuses on time based media. Spaces from grand theaters to dingy basements, shadowy bathrooms to dusty hallways host 45 artworks from an international roster including Marina Abramović, Doug Aitken, Chris Burden, Paul Chan, Maya Deren, Cyprien Gaillard, Anne Imhof, Arthur Jafa, Paul McCarthy, Ana Mendieta, Precious Okoyomon, Jacolby Satterwhite, Sturtevant, and Jordan Wolfson. Stoschek’s collection, managed by a foundation she…
The Vatican will return several dozen cultural objects to Indigenous communities in Canada as part of a continued reckoning with the role the Catholic Church played in the oppression of Indigenous groups in the Americas. The objects include an Inuit kayak and are housed in the Vatican Museum’s ethnographic collection, which is known as the Anima Mundi museum. The collection has faced scrutiny in recent years from Indigenous advocates who say that cultural heritage stolen during colonial periods should be returned. The Vatican opened a dialogue about restitution for the first time under Pope Francis, who in 2022 made a papal visit…
She is the subject of a current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and an upcoming one at the Tate Modern. Netflix is planning an adaptation of her life. Her unibrowed face stares out from tote bags, murals, notebooks, enamel pins, refrigerator magnets, and dorm-room posters across the globe. A recent auction of The Dream (The Bed), 1940, helped send her market value into yet a higher strata. I speak, of course, of Frida Kahlo. Add to the list a new opera. El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, which recently opened at the Met, stages an oneiric reckoning with two famed…
Fasasi Pelumi is a young contemporary artist whose creative practice reflects a strong connection to nature, cultural heritage, and the world around him. Working across paper and canvas, Pelumi combines charcoal and acrylic to create artworks that are rich in texture, color, and visual depth. His approach demonstrates an interest in exploring the possibilities of mixed media while developing a distinctive artistic language shaped by observation and personal experience. At the heart of Pelumi’s work is a desire to capture the energy of his surroundings and translate it into visual narratives. Whether inspired by scenes from nature or elements of…
The first rooms of MoMA’s Marcel Duchamp retrospective almost dare the visitor to find in his early paintings some hint of the artist’s future travesty of those mediums. The picture with which the show opens a placid scene of the artist’s two older brothers, Gaston (Jacques Villon) and Raymond, engrossed in a game of chess telegraphs Duchamp’s future, temporary abandonment of art in favor of the game, which, he avowed, “could not be commercialized.” Look closely and there are more hints still if you squint. The ink and watercolor Woman Hack Driver (1907), distilling its subject to a mere chassis, likewise foretells his eventual…