Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, 1914–1916 Christie’s. On the night of November 21, 2025, the hammer came down after 20 minutes of heated bidding on Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16), the marquee lot at Sotheby’s New York auction house that evening. Expectations were high, considering that the painting was one of only …
Who Was Gustav Klimt and Why Is His Work So Important? Read More »
MacKenzie Thomas performs her four-hour show “I Said What I Said.” Courtesy of MacKenzie Thomas I saw a work this past week that I did not know how to critique. The premise of the performance was simple: MacKenzie Thomas, an internet personality with half a million followers across TikTok and Instagram, would read aloud everything …
Sandra Mujinga at the Park Avenue Armory, where she unveiled a new performance this past November. Photo Christopher Garcia Valle/ARTnews About a decade ago, when Sandra Mujinga visited Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she relished her time people watching, as travelers are wont to do. But Mujinga was not exactly …
Sandra Mujinga’s Shadowy Figures Hit the International Spotlight Read More »
Granda Moses (Anna Mary Robertson) at work on one of her paintings at age 95, Eagle Bridge, New York, September 1955 Getty Images. “Her primitive paintings captured the spirit and preserved the scene of a vanishing countryside.” So reads the epitaph of American artist Grandma Moses (aka Anna Mary Robertson Moses), whose lifetime remarkably stretched …
Lee Friedlander, New York State, 1965. ©Lee Friedlander/Fraenkel Gallery, Courtesy Eakins Press Foundation “Whether or not you’ve celebrated Christmas at any point over the past seventy years—roughly the period covered by these photographs—you have no doubt encountered some of the things Lee Friedlander shows us here.” So begins the afterward to Lee Friedlander: Christmas, a …
Christmas Through the Eyes of Photographer Lee Friedlander Read More »
Editor’s note: This story is an edition of Link Rot, a bi-weekly column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersections of art, technology, and the internet. It’s the end of the year. You know what that means: a list. For this end-of-year edition of LinkRot, I asked artists, curators, gallerists, critics, and technologists to pick the …
The Best Digital Art of 2025, According to Curators, Artists, and Critics Read More »
Erythemis simplicicollis dragonfly wing tip. ©Michael Benson Nanocosmos: Journeys in Electron Space is an otherworldly collection of images from a mysterious realm of the extremely small scale. With help from powerful scanning electron microscope (SEM) technologies that he started working with at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), artist Michael Benson went on a years-long …
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A demonstrator holds up a reproduction of Patrick Martinez’s Abolish Ice (2018/2021) at an anti-ICE demonstration in downtown Los Angeles, June 2025. Courtesy the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles We often look back on past moral crises and imagine ourselves acting differently: resisting sooner, refusing silence, choosing courage over complicity. It’s a reassuring fiction, …
How Artists Responded to 2025’s Surging ICE Raids Read More »
Mildred Howard in her Oakland studio, 2025. Photo Christine Cueto/Courtesy Oakland Museum of California The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) will stage a major retrospective for Bay Area artist Mildred Howard, opening next June. Titled “Poetics of Memory,” the exhibition will bring together work from across five decades of Howard’s career and will also debut …
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Four Figures Collage), 1961–67. ©The Estate of Minnie Evans/Collection of John Jerit We are coming to understand that art history rarely moves in a straight line. Whereas the canon was once seen in the West as a series of successive movements, now it is recognized as a cascade of different artists working …
10 Under-Recognized Artists Who Got Their Due in 2025 Read More »
