“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.
Art News
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.
A good art magazine should do more than show beautiful things. It should help readers understand why those things matter.
Western art history doesn’t move in a straight line toward improvement. It advances through breaks—moments when artists reject inherited assumptions and redefine what art is for. The visible changes are stylistic, but the deeper shifts are conceptual: how artists understand representation, what counts as truth, and the role the artist is meant to play. This account begins with the Renaissance because it sets the terms of the conversation.
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.
Studio Shop Gallery presents Roland Petersen at 100: A Life in Painting, a major retrospective honoring the celebrated Bay Area Figurative artist’s centennial year. Opening Friday, May 8, with a black-tie reception celebrating Petersen’s life and legacy, the exhibition traces eight decades of artistic innovation—from early 1950s abstractions to his latest painting completed in 2026.
Mid-morning January 7, 2025, a fire broke out in the Santa Monica Mountains. By the noon hour, fanned by intense winds with gusts up to 100 miles an hour, the fire had reached the perimeter of the Getty Villa property. Thus began a new odyssey for Getty, as we defended the Villa from the flames.
Since its start in 2009, Independent has been called the art world’s favorite art fair, and this year, there will be a lot more to like as it expands with a pair of major moves. This month, Independent’s contemporary art fair will migrate from its Tribeca digs to the much larger Pier 36 on the Lower East Side.
