The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recently announced deal to merge with cosmetic billionaire Ronald Lauder’s Neue Galerie reflects a quietly growing trend among museums as limited funding and specialized collections press new priorities on leadership.
Art News
In the late 1970s, Herbert Zapp, an executive board member of Deutsche Bank, then headquartered in Düsseldorf, West Germany, fell in with the maverick artist and teacher Josef Beuys. Beuys was in the midst of creating his seminal installation “Das Kapital: 1970-1977” for the 1980 Venice Biennale, articulating his belief that art, as an expression of human creativity, is the true capital.
As the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Autry Museum of the American West is shifting the lens westward. In Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles, opening May 30, the museum reframes the founding ideals, not as settled history, but as questions still being argued over in Los Angeles.
There's no doubt that the statues by Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini were markedly sensual, which might seem paradoxical in the era of the Counter-Reformation and for an artist whose main patrons were part of the ecclesiastical aristocracy.
The Corning Museum of Glass will open its new exhibition Tough Stuff: Women in the American Glass Studio on May 16, 2026, as a major initiative of the Museum’s year-long celebration of its 75th anniversary. Tough Stuff is the first survey exhibition of work by women artists working in glass during the breakthrough decades of
“Fridamania” is reaching new heights as museums, opera houses, and cinemas across continents celebrate the enduring legacy of Frida Kahlo in 2026. This collective reckoning with her highly curated self-image and body of work comes at a time when many are searching for personal meaning and unity in an age of simultaneous hyper-connectedness and geopolitical division.
The Stars We Do Not See is the poetic, but also challenging, title of the biggest, most comprehensive exhibition of Australian Indigenous art to be exhibited outside the continent to date, some shown for the first time abroad. The title is partly inspired by the late Yolŋu artist Gulumbu Yunupiŋu from Yrrkala in Arnhem Land, known for her mesmerizing mappings of the night sky, several of which are in the exhibition.
At a Venice Biennale often defined by spectacle, scale, and geopolitical performance, some of the most consequential exhibitions of 2026 unfold quietly—through the language of vessels, memory, and care.
When American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s (1834-1903) portrait of his mother, Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler, was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1881, few could have predicted that it would become one of the most recognized images in the history of American painting.
Although museums have long housed clothing in “costume institutes” removed from their painting and sculpture galleries, a series of exhibitions and events is collapsing the distance between fashion and art this spring.
