Arts news

• For the First Time, Hong Kong Selects Not One But Two Artists to Go to the Venice Biennale

  16-12-2025 17:57 via artnews.com
  Hong Kong has typically sent a single artist to represent the special administrative region at the Venice Biennale, but in 2026, artists Angel Hui and Kingsley Ng, both Hong Kong natives who live in the city, will jointly take up the mantle. The Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA) and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) are collaborating for the first time on the presentation in La Serenissima. The artists will explore “the poetic rhythms of daily life,” per an announcement, i
  
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• Arnulf Rainer, Austrian Artist Known for His ‘Overpaintings,’ Dies at 96

  21-12-2025 18:32 via artnews.com
  Arnulf Rainer, the Austrian artist whose relentless drive for experimentation made him a key figure of Europe’s postwar scene, died on December 18 at 96 at his home in Austria. His death was confirmed by his gallery Thaddaeus Ropac.Born in Baden, Austria, in 1929, Rainer spent more than seven decades searching for new modes of expression, producing a body of abstract work that is most closely associated with the Art Informel movement. He is best known for his Übermalungen (&ldquo
  
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• Veronica Gosling obituary

  21-12-2025 18:21
  My grandmother, Veronica Gosling, was a writer, visual artist and curator whose life brimmed with curiosity and creative energy. To many, she was a distinctive artistic presence in Exeter, always asking “Why not?” and “What if?”Veronica, who has died aged 94, was drawn to found objects for their shapes, textures and hidden histories, liberating them from their original purpose and setting them loose in new imaginative lives. In periods of upheaval she turned to painting,
  
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• Tate’s greats are certainly not kept hidden from view | Letters

  21-12-2025 18:06
  Roland Rudd of Tate responds to an article by Jonathan Jones that questioned the organisation’s ambition and priorities. Plus a letter from Liz Goddard on Máret Ánne Sara’s installation at Tate ModernOne of the joys of art is that it never fails to spark debate. In that spirit, I always enjoy Jonathan Jones’s reviews, but I must disagree with his particular criticism that Tate has hidden its treasures (Don’t blame Maria Balshaw for Tate’s failings. Its
  
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• Manchester Museum seeks help to uncover hidden histories of African collection

  21-12-2025 16:00
  New Africa Hub confronts colonial-era silences by asking visitors to share insights on 40,000 objectsIt’s a rare thing for a museum to talk about what it doesn’t know. But unanswered questions and archival silences are at the heart of the new Africa Hub at Manchester Museum, north-west England, which is inviting people around the world to help fill the gaps.The museum holds more than 40,000 items from across Africa, many of which were traded, collected, looted or preserved during the
  
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• Robert Mnuchin, Goldman Sachs Power Broker Turned Influential Art Dealer, Dies at 92

  20-12-2025 20:15 via artnews.com
  Robert Mnuchin, the Wall Street pioneer who became one of New York’s most respected art dealers and a fixture at blue-chip auctions, died on Friday at his home in Bridgewater, Connecticut. He was 92. His death, first reported by the New York Times, was confirmed by his stepdaughter, Lisa Hedley Wick. Mnuchin was unusual in having two long and highly successful careers. At Goldman Sachs, he was a central figure in the rise of block trading in the 1960s and ’70s, helping buil
  
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• ‘Am I Next?’ protest art in downtown LA boldly asks who’s safe from ICE

  20-12-2025 18:00
  Public exhibition, featuring billboard-sized portraits projected onto buildings, calls attention to Trump administration’s attacks on civil libertiesEach evening, drivers on the busy 101 freeway in downtown Los Angeles pass billboard-size portraits of Angelenos that flash across the side of a building with a simple message next to their faces: Am I Next?Three Los Angeles institutions have teamed up to launch a response to federal immigration raids in the nation’s second-largest city,
  
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• ‘Geometric lines, strong colours and shadows created a striking image’: Anne Rayner’s best phone picture

  20-12-2025 12:00
  A sci-fi playscape at an exhibition in Gateshead had the photographer’s granddaughter entrancedAnne Rayner was enjoying a day out with her husband, Bob, and two-year-old granddaughter Phoebe when she took this photo. The three of them had headed into Newcastle city centre to find some fun, while Rayner’s daughter-in-law was caring for Phoebe’s siblings, six-month-old twin boys, at home.Walking along the quayside and crossing the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, they point
  
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• From Avatar to Amadeus: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

  20-12-2025 07:00
  James Cameron’s Smurftacular franchise is back for an action-packed third outing, and musical geniuses butt heads in the new TV adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s playAvatar: Fire and Ash
  Out nowJames Cameron comes down with a case of the Christmas blues, so to speak, as the director’s record-breaking franchise epic returns once more to planet Pandora for more internecine strife and respecting of the splendour of the natural world, rendered in dazzling motion-capture glory. Continue
  
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• Can the British Museum Lend Its Way Out of Criticisms Over Its Colonial Holdings?

  19-12-2025 22:25 via artnews.com
  The British Museum is sending some of its prized art and artifacts on long-term loan to countries that the British Empire previously colonized. While those nations have long called for the repatriation of objects they consider stolen, the institution may be hoping to blunt some of those criticisms by sending valuable historical items—though not always those that come from the recipients of the loans. A Mumbai museum, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), is now host
  
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• Kennedy Center Board Votes to Add ‘Trump’ to Embattled Institution’s Name

  19-12-2025 21:11 via artnews.com
  In a move that prompted immediate questions about its legality, the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., voted on Thursday to add President Donald Trump’s name to an institution he has roiled since taking office in January. The move, following a year-long fascination with a center that has not been a top-of-mind priority for other presidents in the way that it has been for Trump, was met with disapproval from members of Kennedy’
  
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• Check Out the New Francis Kéré-Designed Las Vegas Museum of Art, Opening in 2029

  19-12-2025 20:15 via artnews.com
  The Last Vegas Museum of Art (LVMA) has released renderings of its new museum building, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Francis Kéré. Kéré’s design for the 60,000-square-foot building is inspired by the nearby Mojave Desert, the surrounding Red Rock Mountains, baobab trees, and Las Vegas’s Guardian Angel Cathedral, a Catholic church with an A-frame design built by architect Paul Revere Williams in 1963.The museum’s mosaic-like faç
  
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• Trump Reappoints Mary Anne Carter, a Familiar Figure From First Term, as NEA Chair

  19-12-2025 18:47 via artnews.com
  The National Endowment for the Arts has a new chair: Mary Anne Carter, the same political operative who served in the post during Trump’s first term. The Senate voted this morning to confirm her along party lines, by a 53–43 margin.In keeping with his tendency to appoint agency heads who either lack subject-matter expertise or are openly hostile to the missions they are meant to support, Trump has reappointed a controversial pick with no other professional experience in the arts and
  
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• Photography Scholar Sarah Lewis to Organize Exhibition Asking ‘What If Emmett Till Lived?’

  19-12-2025 18:11 via artnews.com
  The Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) at Columbia College Chicago will host an exhibition next year titled “If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground” and guest curated by leading photography scholar and Harvard professor Sarah Lewis.Opening September 3, “If Emmett Till Lived” will feature works from MoCP’s permanent collection as a way to “visualize the life Emmett Till might have lived had he not been murdered in an act of racial violence in 1
  
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• Ceal Floyer obituary

  19-12-2025 17:32
  Conceptual artist whose work derived humour from shifting points of view, puns and double takesAround the time that Ceal Floyer, who has died aged 57 of a brain tumour, was arriving on the stage of the international art world in the 1990s, she was already developing the idea of a performance in a major concert hall that spoke to her nervousness and unease about her newfound status. However, when she approached the Sydney Opera House with her proposal as part of the city’s 1998 biennal
  
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• Ruth Foundation Names Recipients of $100,000 Ruth Awards, Including Yuji Agematsu and Will Rawls

  19-12-2025 16:00 via artnews.com
  The Milwaukee-based Ruth Foundation for the Arts has named the five artists who have won its 2026 Ruth Awards. They are Yuji Agematsu, Ranu Mukherjee, Will Rawls, Ellen Sebastian Chang, and Anna Martine Whitehead.The winners will receive an unrestricted grant of $100,000 each, which will be disbursed over a two-year period. Now in its third year, the Ruth Awards is open to artists working in North American and recognizes artists who “are accelerating the field forward, building deeper rela
  
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• Party with Picasso, wonder at the ancients and go wild with photography – the week in art

  19-12-2025 13:00
  The Spanish master’s angle on performance, treasures from Egypt and the year’s best wildlife images on Earth – all in your weekly dispatchMade in Ancient EgyptWonders to amaze and move all ages, in this magical exhibition that brings ancient Egyptians to life.• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 12 April Continue reading...
  
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• How Artists Responded to 2025’s Surging ICE Raids

  19-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  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, but a fiction all the same. Historical records have shown how readily authority can override personal morality, even when the consequences for others are dire. And yet, at a moment when the state is wielding its power with escalating force, punishing all forms of dissent, many artists are refusing that passivity t
  
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• Courtney McClellan Takes You Inside an Evangelical College’s Supreme Court Simulation

  19-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  When the United States was founded 250 years ago, it was all but for the purpose of protecting religious freedom—or, more candidly, protecting sects of Christianity frowned upon across the pond. The very first amendment established the separation of church and state, and this was about more than simple tolerance, with the founders feeling that government corrupted religion and vice versa. Now, that separation is under threat as in no other time in history.Courtney McClellan’s latest
  
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• ‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like other artists wield a brush

  19-12-2025 07:00
  In her day job, the ‘first lady of Croatian avant garde’ sliced up cadavers at Zagreb’s anatomical institute. In her studio, she used the same medical instruments to make art that surprises to this dayEdita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the late Croatian artist worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her studio, she made art that re
  
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• Qatar’s Mathaf Museum Announces Major Expansion, Led by Architect Lina Ghotmeh

  18-12-2025 23:23 via artnews.com
  Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha has tapped Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh to lead a major campus expansion. The news arrives as the Qatari institution celebrates its 15th anniversary, and figures into an ambitious phase of cultural development underway in the Arabian Gulf nation. “The Arab Museum of Modern Art is an unrivalled institution,” Ghotmeh said in a statement. “This expansion will offer a remarkable platform for presenting art and ideas, particularly by
  
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• Qatar’s Mathaf Museum Announces Major Expansion, Led by Architect Lina Ghothem

  18-12-2025 23:23 via artnews.com
  Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha has tapped Lebanese architect Lina Ghothem to lead a major campus expansion. The news arrives as the Qatari institution celebrates its 15th anniversary, and figures into an ambitious phase of cultural development underway in the Arabian Gulf nation. “The Arab Museum of Modern Art is an unrivalled institution,” Ghothem said in a statement. “This expansion will offer a remarkable platform for presenting art and ideas, particularly by
  
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• Rome Has Two New Metro Stations That Offer Underground Mini-Museums, With More On the Way

  18-12-2025 23:15 via artnews.com
  Construction projects in cities that have been inhabited for thousands of years often run into special challenges as work crews come upon ancient artifacts, and suddenly, what was a construction site becomes an archaeological dig. Officials in Rome have been at work for two long decades on a new subway line for just that reason, as workers excavating stations on the new Line C, which will link the city center with distant southern suburbs, have turned up more than 500,000 artifacts. The cit
  
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• Phillips Records 10% Rise in Global Sales for 2025, Taking $927 M. as Private Sales Surge by 66%

  18-12-2025 22:50 via artnews.com
  Phillips has closed 2025 with global sales of $927 million, marking a 10 percent increase against last year. The result follows impressive projected totals by Sotheby’s and Christie’s in 2025, with the houses registering a 17 percent and 7 percent increase, respectively.The narrative coming from the “big three” is quite rightly upbeat, with their balance sheets showing renewed confidence from collectors. At Phillips, auction sales this year accounted for $725 million, whi
  
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• David Oyelowo and Ava DuVernay Team Up for New Art Thriller, ‘Heist of Benin’

  18-12-2025 22:41 via artnews.com
  David Oyelowo and Ava DuVernay are reuniting for the new film, “Heist of Benin,” more than a decade after their Academy Award-winning film “Selma.”Oyelowo will star in the film, which is set in modern-day London and described as “a thriller that intertwines art, love and restitution.” DuVernay will direct from a screenplay by Jesse Quiñones, based on an original idea.The project was announced on Tuesday during Canal+’s ORIGINAL+ pre
  
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• New Report Shows a Rebounding Auction Market in 2025, With Impressionist and Modern Art Most Improved

  18-12-2025 22:21 via artnews.com
  The two biggest auction houses recently released their 2025 numbers, showing a 17 percent sales jump at Sotheby’s and a nearly 7 percent rise at Christie’s. Now, a year-end report from art market research and analysis company ArtTactic delves into the details of the art sales from all the major auction houses. The auction market rebounded to $4.55 billion, up some 11.1 percent from 2024, ArtTactic finds. Among Old Masters, Impressionist and modern art, the strongest historical c
  
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• New Report Shows a Rebounding Art Auction Market in 2025, With Impressionists and Moderns Most Improved

  18-12-2025 22:21 via artnews.com
  The two biggest auction houses recently released their 2025 numbers, showing a 17 percent sales jump at Sotheby’s and a nearly 7 percent rise at Christie’s. Now, a year-end report from art market research and analysis company ArtTactic delves into the details of the art sales from all the major auction houses. The auction market rebounded to $4.55 billion, up some 11.1 percent from 2024, ArtTactic finds. Among Old Masters, Impressionist and modern art, the strongest historical c
  
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• Texas State University Cancels Black History 101 Mobile Museum Visit, Prompting ACLU Challenge

  18-12-2025 21:13 via artnews.com
  A decision by the Texas State University (TXST) to cancel an appearance of the Black History 101 Mobile Museum at one of its campuses, scheduled for 2026 Black History Month, has prompted a First Amendment challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, according to a report by the University Star, TXST’s student-run paper. In a letter sent to TXST president Kelly Damphousse, the ACLU of Texas noted a 2023 Senate bill banning DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) at Texas
  
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• ‘Victims of Communism’ Memorial in Canada Will Leave Off Names After Findings Link Some to Nazism

  18-12-2025 21:09 via artnews.com
  A memorial to “Victims of Communism” in Ottawa, Canada, that was slated to be inscribed with the names of so-called victims will focus instead on more general thematic content related to its subject, after a government report prompted the Department of Canadian Heritage to change course. The reversal follows claims issued last year that connected more than half of the proposed 550 names to Nazism or fascist groups.As reported by The Art Newspaper, concern over links between the
  
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• Atlanta’s High Museum Adds 361 Works to Collection, Including Rediscovered Jacob Lawrence Watercolor

  18-12-2025 21:03 via artnews.com
  The High Museum of Art in Atlanta has added 361 artworks and objects to its collection in 2025. The acquisitions are part of a strategic plan to grow its holdings, now numbering over 20,000 objects, ahead of the museum’s centennial next year.“As we look ahead to our centennial in 2026, our curators have strategically acquired artworks that not only support where we’ve traditionally built strengths as an institution but that also signal where we’re heading in the next 100
  
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