“The Smithsonian is not going to show somebody like me right now — specifically me,” Catherine Opie says in a recent Teams interview from Los Angeles, her voice matter-of-fact. “I’m not welcome right now in America.”
Art Galleries & Museums
In late January, the Smithsonian announced that it would return a Shiva Nataraja statue and two other Chola Dynasty bronzes to India from the National Museum of Asian Art under a “shared stewardship” policy introduced in 2022.
The idea that 18th and 19th century landscape painting could be the setting for one of art history’s fiercest rivalries may seem unlikely, but Turner & Constable: Rivals and Originals, the current exhibition at Tate Britain, explores the competitive relationship between two giants of British landscape painting, J.M.W.
“The pain passes, but the beauty remains,” said Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). In Sacha Guitry’s 1916 silent film, there is a chilling and moving excerpt of Renoir painting. The artist’s hands are severely and painfully crippled by arthritis as he holds a long paint brush and a cigarette.
Thailand’s first major institution dedicated to international contemporary art, Dib Bangkok, made a grand debut with a sophisticated crowd of museum directors, curators, collectors, critics, and artists attending the opening celebration on December 21, 2025. Guided by Purat “Chang” Osathanugrah, a prominent Thai business leader and educator, the museum preserves the legacy of his late father, Petch Osathanugrah, whose distinguished art collection forms its core.
The first major exhibition since 1955 of over 140 works by the great Florentine master Fra Angelico (1395-1455) was featured during the past year at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, a Medici-commissioned Dominican convent in Florence where Angelico lived and worked. The event has created an opportunity for a unique dialogue between institutions and the region.
As artificial intelligence continues to reshape everything from consumerism to creative expression, the world’s first museum dedicated entirely to the exhibition of AI-generated art is set to open this spring. DATALAND will offer visitors a multisensory journey through machine-created worlds in each of its five galleries at a Frank Gehry-designed complex in downtown Los Angeles.
Upside Down Zebra, the felicitously named exhibition at The Watermill Center (the storied experimental art venue and residency founded by the late Robert Wilson in 1992 on Long Island’s East End), is, in a word, dazzling.
A spacetime grid is a visual diagram in physics to grasp a four-dimensional reality—three dimensions of space and one of time.
In November, the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) opened its doors to international fanfare, unveiling the entire contents of Tutankhamen’s tomb, together for the first time since their excavation in 1922. The sprawling 5.4-million-square-foot complex near the Great Pyramids of Giza represents more than two decades of planning and an immense investment in Egypt’s infrastructure.
