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.
Art News
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.
The art world is full of wonderful things to discover, but it can also be hard to keep up. New exhibitions open, artists gain attention, auctions make headlines, museums announce major shows, and important stories can easily get lost in the noise. Art & Object’s weekly newsletter helps make sense of it all.
Attention to detail, subtle shifts of perspective, angles of surface, and objects overlapping or jutted up against one another; Giorgio Morandi’s sheer inventiveness with ordinary objects is distinctive.
The Bruce Museum is pleased to announce Gisela Colón: Radiant Earth, on view in the Sculpture Gallery from January 24 through June 28, 2026. This exhibition presents a comprehensive primer of the internationally acclaimed sculptor Gisela Colón, featuring nine luminescent sculptures that explore the profound forces and energies of the natural world.
When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) opened its David Geffen Galleries on April 19, visitors were met with works from vastly different cultures and centuries hung together without the hierarchies that have long shaped how Western museums arrange their collections.
In the United States, the historical formulation of the “self-taught artist” is loaded with assumptions about class, race, and mental health that have obfuscated the figure of the maker. Because these artists practiced outside of conventional art school, gallery, museum, and peer-exchange systems, their works have oftentimes been interpreted through the lens of their discoverers and collectors.
