Exhibitions

Much of our understanding of history comes from written accounts, but it is art and photography (and notably portraits) that really brings these people and events to life. Take the 18th-century English painter Thomas Gainsborough’s sensitive portrayal of Charles Ignatius Sancho, in which the prominent writer, composer and abolitionist appears elegantly dressed and gazes into the distance. To see the work is to get a sense of his presence.
Sancho, who was born on a British slave ship in around 1729, was in his late thirties at the time the painting was made, in approximately 1768. By then, he had been raised in England by three unmarried sisters before briefly working as a butler for the Duchess of Montagu and eventually setting up a grocery shop. In his spare time he wrote books and was a leading voice within the British abolitionist movement. As a property-owner, he became one of the very first Black British people to vote in a general election, in 1774.
The Gainsborough portrait is currently included in “Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition” at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England until June 1. The exhibition sets out to uncover the many long-buried histories of individuals and communities who helped bring an end to the transatlantic slave trade. Unlike Sancho, however, most of these figures were never the subject of a grand portrait by one of the leading society painters of their day. In some cases, there is no known visual record at all.
Thomas Gainsborough, Ignatius Sancho (1768). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
The show’s curators have filled this gap by spotlighting much more recent work by contemporary artists who have sought to redress this imbalance. In doing so, their work brings new attention to some of the revolutionaries and abolitionists that history has overlooked.
Three contemporary portraits included in the show were made by rising star Joy Labinjo in 2022. “I started off feeling sad and annoyed about the fact that these figures weren’t more widely known and that quickly moved to excitement,” the British-Nigerian artist recalled recently. “All of their stories are so rich and magical to the point of sounding fictional at points, I couldn’t wait to share and that gave me so much energy whilst making the works.”
In An 18th-century Family, which was acquired by the Fitzwilliam in 2022, Labinjo depicts the writer and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano with his family. The composition of the group portrait strongly echoes that of Gainsborough’s Portrait of the Artist and his Wife and Daughter (c. 1748), and Labinjo was also able to refer to a miniature portrait of Equiano from his lifetime. Although the original has been lost, the work is known to us via an engraved version that appeared as the frontispiece of Equiano’s 1789 book The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African.
The book recounts how Equiano, who was born in an Igbo village, was abducted and enslaved as a child and transported to Barbados and the U.S. He bought his freedom in 1766 and, after working as a sailor on British merchant ships, eventually settled in London in the late 1770s. There he befriended leading abolitionists who encouraged him to write a firsthand account of his experiences, most particularly of the Middle Passage. It became a best-seller, was published internationally, and gained many new supporters for the anti-slavery movement.
Joy Labinjo, Phillis Wheatley (2022). Photo: Stuart Whipps. Courtesy of the Artist and Tiwani Contemporary, © Joy Labinjo.
While painting, Labinjo turned to sources like David Olusoga’s Black and British a Forgotten History. “It was important to me that I had an accurate understanding of the lives lived and the historical context of the figures I’d chosen to bring to life,” she said. “I knew that it would be many viewers first introduction to the figures so I wanted to be sure I was sharing accurate information.”
Another important figure that the artist has portrayed is the poet Phillis Wheatley, who was born in West Africa, kidnapped as a child, sold into slavery, and transported to Boston. After being purchased by the relatively progressive wealthy merchant John Wheatley, she was taught to read and write by his children and, after traveling to London in 1773, published her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. She soon found fame and her work was read and praised by prominent figures like George Washington, who invited her to meet him. Sadly, after being manumitted by the Wheatleys, many of whom died just a few years later, Phillis fell into poverty and died of pneumonia at the age of 31.
Again, Labinjo was able to model her painting on a portrait of the author that was used as the frontispiece of Poems, in which Wheatley appears pen in hand and lost in contemplation. It is believed to be by the enslaved artist Scipio Moorhead, who was also from Boston.
François Cauvin, Toussaint Louverture (2009). Photo: © François Cauvin.
The Haitian-born, Montreal-based artist François Cauvin has created several imagined portraits of Haitian revolutionaries of whom there is no surviving visual record. These figures helped establish Haiti as the first independent Caribbean state in 1804. One woman rebel depicted by Cauvin is Sanité Bélair (2023), who appears standing proud in her lieutenant’s uniform like the “ferocious woman” she was once derogatorily described as. Her image has also appeared on Haitian banknotes and, in 2023, was featured in an exhibition in Paris dedicated to lesser-known historical figures who contributed to the abolition of slavery.
One of Cauvin’s most famous portraits on view at the Fitzwilliam is a 2009 painting of Toussaint Louverture, one of the military leaders who helped overthrow French rule. It aims to present the international statesman with a dignity he was not granted in earlier portraits, most particularly a 1832 lithograph by Nicolas Maurin, which as been described as a racist caricature. In Cauvin’s reworking of the image, Louverture’s large cockade hat has been replaced with a guinea fowl, birds which are seen as symbols of resistance in Haiti. After the non-native animal was introduced by colonizers to Saint-Dominque, it ran away and refused to be kept captive.
Joscelyn Gardner, Aristolochia bilobala (Nimine) (2010). Photo: Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Courtesy of the artist.
Based between Barbados and Canada, the artist Joscelyn Gardner made a series of hand-colored lithographs, the Creole Portraits III: “bringing down the flowers…” (2010–11), as a tribute to the many enslaved women whose names and faces remain absent from history. The anonymous heads are seen from behind, evoking a presence but prompting the viewer to use their own imaginations to fill in the gaps. Beneath the carefully braided hairstyles in each image is a hanging wildflower native to the Caribbean, after which the drawing is named.
These colorful plants were sometimes used by enslaved women as natural abortifacients, an act of resistance against unwanted pregnancies and exploitation. They are contrasted against chains and collars, representing the brutal forms of punishment used against these women if they were found out.
“Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition” is on view through June 1 at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. More

Impressionism started out 151 years ago out as a rebellious movement, derided by critics, but it’s box office gold these days, and museums worldwide celebrated its sesquicentennial with major exhibitions last year. Another big draw for museums? Shows that spotlight artistic friendships and rivalries, not only displaying artists’ great works but also revealing their humanity, and sometimes their foibles: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had a blockbuster with its “Manet/Degas” exhibition in 2023, for example.
Now, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will surely have a hit on its hands with “Manet and Morisot,” which it is billing as the first major museum show devoted to the artistic exchange between the French Impressionist painters Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot. The museum describes their relationship as the closest between any two artists in the Impressionist circle, and the exhibition traces their relationship from 1868 to 1883.
Berthe Morisot, Reading (1873). Courtesy Cleveland Museum of Art.
While their link is well known owing to Manet’s portraits of his younger colleague, the show takes the position that scholars have too often focused on her as a muse and a model, rather than an esteemed peer—and even an influence on the elder artist. Pairings and groupings of works by the two artists promise to reveal their impact on each other. 
Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872). Courtesy Musée d’Orsay, © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.
“The friendship between these two great artists—collaborative and competitive, playful and charged—really did have a determining effect on the course of art history,” said the show’s curator, Emily A. Beeny, chief curator of the Legion of Honor and curator in charge of European paintings, in a statement. “Its story is written in their pictures. Considering them side by side, we watch it all unfold: their shared interests and struggles, their mutual influence and understanding.”
After opening October 11 at the Legion of Honor, the show will travel to the Cleveland Museum of Art next year. Lenders include major institutions like the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Musée d’Orsay in Paris; the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; and the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio.
It all started when Morisot was copying masterworks at the Louvre in Paris in 1868, and a mutual friend, the painter Henri Fantin-Latour, introduced her to Manet, nine years her senior. He had achieved immense notoriety for his painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863–64); she was just 27 and still a student.
Édouard Manet, The Balcony (1868-69). Courtesy Musée d’Orsay © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.
She began posing that fall for his painting The Balcony (1868–69), and would sit for at least 10 more canvases over the next five years. This gave her many hours in the master’s studio, “observing his methods and exchanging ideas,” according to press materials. Manet would soon dub one of her paintings a masterpiece; he kept three of her works in his bedroom; and he even gave her the gift of an easel one Christmas. Their friendship and correspondence were so intense that there has been speculation that they were lovers.
Their relationship would become yet closer when Morisot became engaged in January 1874 to Manet’s brother Eugène, also a painter. But she would choose not to follow Manet’s advice later that year, when he counseled her against renouncing the Paris Salon, the exhibition that served as the bastion of the traditional art establishment, and exhibiting with the upstart Impressionist group. She went on to show her work in all but one of its eight group exhibitions, making her one of the most dedicated members. 
The show will start with The Balcony and other Manet paintings of Morisot. It will trace her growing influence on Manet in the early 1870s, exploring a series of motifs and compositions that the artists shared during that decade. In the 1880s, Morisot’s style became bolder and more sketchy, and Manet shifted his subjects decisively toward depictions of elegant women, which was already something of a trademark of Morisot’s. 
Édouard Manet, Boating (1874/1879). Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
For an example of Manet’s influence on Morisot, consider his Boating (1874/1879), from the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which shows a man and a woman in a small craft, positioned as though the viewer could climb in with them… 
Berthe Morisot, Summer’s Day (ca. 1879). Courtesy National Gallery, London.
…and then take a look at Morisot’s Summer’s Day (ca. 1879), from the National Gallery in London, which shows two women, similarly positioned, as if the viewer were seated in the boat. 
Berthe Morisot, Woman at Her Toilette (1875–1880). Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago.
There’s also Morisot’s Woman at her Toilette (1875–80), from the Art Institute of Chicago, in which a bare-shouldered woman is painted from behind, and Manet’s slightly later Before the Mirror (Devant la glace), from 1877, on loan from New York’s Guggenheim Museum, identical in subject and similarly showing a partially dressed woman from the back. 
Édouard Manet, Before the Mirror (Devant la glace) (1877). Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY.
The exhibition even continues to trace their relationship after Manet’s death in 1883, since she owned a selection of works by her brother-in-law that continued to influence her.
After Morisot died in 1895, her reputation declined, but feminist art historians shed new light on her work starting five decades ago; she was mentioned, for example, in Linda Nochlin’s epochal essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, published in ARTnews in 1971. Artists were also early adopters: Miriam Schapiro created a work in tribute to Morisot as early as 1976. She has since then been thoroughly canonized, and was the subject of a major touring exhibition starting in 2018, co-organized by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Dallas Museum of Art, the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie in Paris, and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
“Manet and Morisot” will be on view at the Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, 100 34th Avenue at Clement Street, San Francisco, October 11, 2025–March 1, 2026. It will then travel to the Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Blvd, March 29–July 5, 2026. More

When feminist art collective Hilma’s Ghost inaugurated Abstract Futures, their stunning 600-square-foot mosaic mural at the 42nd Street entrance to the 7 train in Manhattan’s Grand Central Station, they did so with a ritual, chanting whispers into the colorful glass artwork.
“There must be magic in that,” said Dannielle Tegeder, “that the MTA should support witchcraft,” Sharmistha Ray added, completing the thought. They told me their dedication of the space had been meant to open up the portals in each panel: “Please, when you go there, whisper into the wall to continue charging it.”
The two artists who make up the collective began working together during lockdown, channeling the once-obscure spiritual painter Hilma af Klint to create their own works responding to the Swedish artist’s pioneering abstractions. If painting is dead—as first announced by painter Paul Delaroche upon his first time seeing photography in 1840—Hilma’s Ghost looks to reanimate its very soul, breathing new life into contemporary art with a mystical feminine energy.
The duo made their debut at New York’s Armory Show in 2021. There, they enlisted art witch and psychic medium Sarah Potter to do readings using their limited edition tarot deck, Abstract Futures Tarot, while selling the 78 paintings on which it was based.
Hilma’s Ghost artists Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray with their new mosaic installation at 42nd Street MTA 7 Line entrance. Photo: courtesy of the artists.
Their big MTA unveiling came during Frieze Week, and I saw Tegeder and Ray later that night, at a feminist dinner they hosted with artist Eve Biddle, who also runs the Upstate New York artist nonprofit Wassaic Project.
The three women have been collaborating on dinner parties infused with magic and spirituality, as well as hosting a mystical after-hours event at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum earlier this year celebrating the “Harmony and Dissonance, Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930” show. (It was the Guggenheim’s 2018–19 af Klint blockbuster that first inspired Hilma’s Ghost to work together.)
Hilma’s Ghost, Abstract Futures at 42nd Street MTA 7 Line entrance. Photo: by Etienne Frossard, courtesy of MTA Arts and Design.
The “Cleopatra’s Pearl” dinner series takes its name from the legend of Egyptian queen dissolving and drinking a valuable pearl as a show of her wealth.
Last week’s gathering was held in Biddle’s childhood home in the East Village, which was also the studio of her late mother, feminist artist Mary Ann Unger (currently the subject of a solo show at New York’s Berry Campbell Gallery).
Hilma’s Ghost, Abstract Futures at 42nd Street MTA 7 Line entrance. Photo: by Etienne Frossard, courtesy of MTA Arts and Design.
The hosts assigned each guest the role of a notable woman from history, with place cards providing their biographical details. Tegeder and Ray cast a circle to welcome in the spirit of these foremothers, from the goddess Hecate to artists including af Klint, Unger, and Pamela Colman Smith, the original creator of the tarot deck.
Biddle did all the cooking, as well as making the ceramic plates and candle holders, one for each diner, for practicing candle magic. If you’re not familiar with candle magic, it can be as simple as making a wish when you blow out the candles on your birthday cake. This is the kind of forgotten feminine tradition rooted in pre-Christian goddess worship that Hilma’s Ghost hopes to renew with their paintings and their new subway artwork.
Hilma’s Ghost, Abstract Futures at 42nd Street MTA 7 Line entrance. Photo: by Etienne Frossard, courtesy of MTA Arts and Design.
MTA Arts and Design commissioned Hilma’s Ghost to create a mural for the subway two years ago. Their design, fabricated by Miotto Mosaic Art Studios, draws on symbolism from tarot cards, translated into abstract geometric forms, with diamonds, stripes, concentric circles, and radiating beams all arranged in orderly, symmetrical fashion. The colors are rich and vibrant, shades of green, purple, red, yellow, and blue flecked with shimmering gold.
“It’s essentially telling the story of the major archetype of the tarot. It’s all color magic and sacred geometries to tell the story of the heroine’s journey,” Ray told me.
Hilma’s Ghost, Abstract Futures at 42nd Street MTA 7 Line entrance. Photo: by Etienne Frossard, courtesy of MTA Arts and Design.
The artists first saw the work installed on Easter Sunday—fitting, given their interest in rebirth. They hope their piece speaks to New York as a place where growth is perpetual, new visitors constantly arriving and helping make the city their own.
The unveiling coincides with Hilma’s Ghost first solo show in Mexico, at Galería RGR in Mexico City. They’ve built a feminist altar in the gallery, highlighting the way in which their painting draws on the power of women creatives, such as af Klint, throughout history. But they are especially excited to have a permanent public art piece out the world, where anyone can see it, experiencing a little bit of beauty—and witchy spiritualism—on their daily commute.
Hilma’s Ghost art installation at 42nd Street MTA 7 Line entrance. Photo: by Etienne Frossard, courtesy of MTA Arts and Design.
“We love having work in museums and galleries, but this is something else,” Ray added. “In this time where everything seems so devastating, I just feel a little bit of hope in this moment.”
“La hora de la estrella: Hilma’s Ghost” is on view at Galería RGR, Gral. Antonio León 48, Colonia San Miguel Chapultepec, Mexico City, Mexico, April 12–May 31, 2025. More

The nonagenarian fiber artist Olga de Amaral is having a moment. Not just a present career high, but one in which her place and contributions to the history of art itself are being codified. Now, following its 2024 debut at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, a major retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, offers stateside audiences a rare opportunity to encounter the work of this defining—yet underappreciated—figure in contemporary art history.
The canon of contemporary textile art is still very much being wrought. While the medium certainly is not new (on the contrary, it is one of the oldest in human existence), understandings of it as a tradition of fine art, rather than simply craft, are comparatively in their nascency.
Amaral has been the common thread throughout the recent spate of museum exhibitions reassessing textile art’s place within the history and trajectory of art itself—from “Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” at the Museum of Modern Art, to “Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Installation view of “Olga de Amaral” (2025) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Artwork: © Olga de Amaral. Photo: © Kris Tamburello.
The crowning jewel of Amaral’s recent exhibition achievements is the ICA Miami retrospective. Following the success of “Olga de Amaral” at the Fondation Cartier, a new iteration of the show has been tailored to the ICA Miami’s building, and features work dating from across the full breadth of the artist’s career. On view through October 12, 2025, the show is a testament not only to Amaral’s career to date, but the promised significance of her work moving into the future too.
Amaral’s work feels both ancient and futuristic, at once unmistakably Colombian and universally transcendent. In their golden shimmer and woven density, these pieces hold space for memory, ritual, and wonder—anchors to the earth that somehow seem to float.
Olga de Amaral, Casa Amaral, Bogotá, Colombia (2024). Photo: Juan Daniel Caro.
Who is Olga de Amaral?
Born in 1932 in Bogotá, Colombia, as Olga Ceballos Velez, Olga de Amaral received a degree in architectural design from the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca, where she attended in the early 1950s. Between 1954 and 1955 she studied fiber art at the historic Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. It was here she first met Jim Amaral, fellow artist and her future husband.
After a year of study in Michigan, Amaral returned to Bogotá where she began her independent artistic practice, creating both decorative pieces as well as undertaking design commissions. Jim visited in 1956, and they were wed in 1957, both remaining in Bogotá and establishing a textile workshop.
In 1965, Amaral established and directed the Textile Department at the University of Los Andes, Bogotá, where she remained at the helm until 1972. In the year following, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Over the course of her career, she has been the subject of dozens of gallery and museum solo shows, and her practice has remained ever evolving and endlessly experimental; no two works or series adhere to a singular technical or conceptual approach but rather reflect an ongoing effort to push the boundaries of what the medium is capable of.
Installation view of Olga de Amaral, “Estelas” (1996–2018) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Artwork: © Olga de Amaral. Photo: © Kris Tamburello.
An exhibition experiment
The experimentalism inherent in Olga de Amaral’s practice is reflected and interrogated throughout her ICA Miami retrospective. Marie Perennès curated the Paris iteration, and returns for the Miami installment, teaming up with the museum’s Stephanie Seidel. Like the previous iteration at the Fondation Cartier, the show was designed by award-winning Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh.
Envisioning a metaphoric forest, each of Amaral’s works hang free from the walls of the gallery space, not only allowing visitors to fully circumvent each piece but necessitating it. The result is a physical act of discovery, wherein one work leads to the next, and the verso of each work becomes as much a highlight as the recto.
Installation view of “Olga de Amaral” (2025) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Artwork: © Olga de Amaral. Photo: © Kris Tamburello.
Carrying the forest metaphor are a series of custom benches and stools that are mirrored, which from a distance appear almost as small pools of light. Close up, they offer ever-changing reflections of the works hanging in their vicinity.
Hung largely at an angle throughout the museum’s third floor space, a wall of windows looks out over a small forest’s canopy. Like in Paris, the natural landscape viewable from within the exhibition played an important part in the development of the show’s design and parallels Amaral’s own practice of taking inspiration from nature.
Installation view of Olga de Amaral, “Brumas” (2013-2018) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Artwork: © Olga de Amaral. Photo: © Kris Tamburello.
The show is curatorially anchored by two multi-part, large-scale series: the “Brumas” (2013–2018), with individual pieces comprised of hanging linen threads that have been colored with acrylic pigment, and the “Estelas” (1996–2018), idiosyncratically shaped flat works nearly entirely enrobed in gold leaf. Each speaks to the way Amaral explores the third dimension.
In “Brumas,” the works seem to defy rules of opticality and space, with geometric forms hazily being revealed through slow circumvention of the piece. In contrast, the hanging “Estela” works challenge perception, more specifically, perceptions of weight. Covered in gold and in rough-hewn shapes, they appear almost as monumental totems, evoking pre-Hispanic archeological finds. Unravelling this assessment is their delicate hanging, seemingly hovering off the ground, bestowing a sense of weightlessness.
Installation view of “Olga de Amaral” (2025) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Artwork: © Olga de Amaral. Photo: © Kris Tamburello.
Marking the Art Historical Moment
Constantly experimenting with materials, space, construction, and composition, Amaral has crafted a multi-decade oeuvre that not only parallels but defines fiber and textile art making of the latter half of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. It stands apart from her contemporaries in its diversity and reach, in no small part due to her efforts teaching and engaging with subsequent generations of artists.
Beginning her career at the height of Mid-Century Modern popularity, and in the shadow of Bauhaus Modernism and Constructivism, Amaral emerged with her own unique visual, sculptural language informed by the prevailing movements of the time while remaining distinctive.
Installation view of “Olga de Amaral” (2025) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Artwork: © Olga de Amaral. Photo: © Kris Tamburello.
Incorporating everything from pre-Columbian and Indigenous weaving and craft traditions to straightforward knotting and braiding, as well as employing a diverse range of materials—such as wool, horsehair, linen, paint, cotton, gesso, gold leaf, and palladium—Amaral’s oeuvre evidences the singularity of her creative vision. It is no surprise that her work is consistently featured at the forefront of dialogues and exhibitions around the reappraisal of fiber and textile art as she was one of the first artists to approach it as the foundation of her practice, rather than auxiliary craft like some her contemporaries. As far as the art historical canon goes, the Fondation Cartier and ICA Miami make a convincing case that Amaral is the benchmark of the medium and will remain a key touchpoint for the practice well into the future.
More than a retrospective, this exhibition is a long-overdue recognition. Olga de Amaral hasn’t just contributed to the story of textile art—she’s helped write its most vital chapters.
Text by Annikka Olsen More

Italian artist and Arte Povera pioneer Michelangelo Pistoletto will stage new work at the Great Pyramids of Giza.
The 91-year-old artist has been announced as a headliner leading this year’s “Forever Is Now,” the annual outdoor exhibition that invites artists to create site-specific work using the ancient wonder of the world as a dramatic backdrop.
While full details of Pistoletto’s work are yet to be released, it has been described as a monumental installation that will bring together elements of ancient civilization with modern ideas by Art D’Egypte, the organization that stages “Forever is Now.”
“Having Michelangelo Pistoletto join Forever Is Now is a historic moment for Egypt and for global contemporary art,” Art D’Égypte’s founder Nadine Abdel Ghaffar said in a statement. “Bringing his voice to the Pyramids is not just symbolic, it’s visionary.”
JR, Greetings From Giza (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Forever Is Now. Photo: MO4NETWORK.
For decades, Pistoletto has incorporated social impact into his practice, a point emphasized by his Citadellearte foundation, which over the past 25 years has instructed professionals on the ways in which art can positively affect society. True to form, Citadellearte is involved in Pistoletto’s project at the pyramids. Artists living in Egypt are invited to apply for a fully-funded three-year bachelor course at the organization’s Unidee Academy in Biella, Pistoletto’s hometown in northern Italy, an initiative backed by the Italian Institute of Culture in Cairo and the foundation itself.
“Cittadellarte aims at making art as a bridge between peoples, across cultures and geographies,” Paolo Naldini, the director of Citadellearte, said in a statement. “I take the invitation from Art d’Egypte and the collaboration with Italian Institute of Culture as an opportunity to build a bridge across the Mediterranean Sea that connects Venice and Cairo.”
Born in 1933, Pistoletto began to receive international attention in the 1960s with his mirror paintings, which disrupted traditions of artistic perspective by integrating viewers into the artwork. Along with the likes of Giovanni Anselmo and Jannis Kounellis, Pistoletto was a protagonist in Arte Povera, a post-war movement that employed everyday materials to challenge the commercialization of the art world.
In 2003, Pistoletto penned Third Paradise, a manifesto that called for a balance between nature and artifice capable of leading to a “realistic utopia.” Its mark, an infinity symbol with three loops, has appeared across his work. Third Paradise is developed and championed by Citadellearte, which is set to hold an installation on the concept at the coming Venice Biennale.
Italian artist Lorenzo Quinn poses under his installation, entitled Together. Photo: courtesy Ammar Abd Rabbo/Art D’Egypte.
On the back of this work, Pistoletto was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in February of this year. The artist noted that the nomination carried a commitment to carry on his socially engaged work. “Art must take on a propulsive role for radical change, bringing about a shared, responsible concept of humanity.”
This year marks the fifth successive edition of “Forever Is Now”, which typically takes place in October and November. Previous highlights include photographer JR’s pyramid-shaped photo booth, Lorenzo Quinn’s giant pair of hands that broke out of the desert to touch one another, and Gisela Colón’s 30-foot-long bean of titanium that resembled a rising sun. More

A cup of coffee brewed with water freshly sourced from the Venetian lagoon has won a Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The project, “Canal Café,” from U.S. architectural firm Diller Scofidio and Renfro (DS+R), was selected as the best piece in the biennale’s 19th international exhibition, titled “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.”
Billed as “part espresso bar, part laboratory” on the firm’s website, the project filters Venice’s notoriously polluted canals before biennale visitors’ very eyes. The murky water passes through a series of filters that mimic the natural cleansing effect of a tidal wetland. Once the water is made potable, it is used—with an assist from Michelin-starred chef Davide Oldani—to make a classic shot of Italian espresso.
“‘Canal Café’ reaches beneath the photogenic surface of the city by converting these brackish waters into the comforting scent and taste of espresso—the irreducible Italian pleasure,” the firm said. “The public will drink Venice.”
Venice, of course, is famous for its picturesque waterways, situated on a lagoon that not only protected it from invaders, but also facilitated trade, making it one of Europe’s most historically wealthy and powerful city states. But over the years, industrialization and tourism have taken a toll on the canals, contaminating the waters even as climate change has led to increased flooding, endangering the city.
Diller Scofidio and Renfro, “Canal Café” (2025) at the 2025 Venice Biennale for Architecture. Photo: by Iwan Baan, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
DS+R originally planned to stage “Canal Café” for the 2008 biennial, curated by critic Aaron Betsky, who was an advisor for the realized project. It was impossible to get the permits 17 years ago, but improved filtration made it possible to serve up canal coffee at this year’s event.
“Regulations and technology have come a far way, and part of the big difference now was that the methodology involved has been one that uses biological filtering rather than chemical filtering, so it’s more organic and natural,” Betsky told the New York Times.
The project is set up outside, with a transparent pipe drawing water directly from the Arsenal Canal. You can see the filter at work, removing sludge and toxins.
Half the water is filtered by salt-tolerant plants called halophytes that form a kind of natural membrane bioreactor, or “micro-wetland,” preserving minerals in the water. The rest is treated with artificial filtration, reverse osmosis, and UV disinfection, producing distilled water. The water is combined then steamed to make a high-concept espresso shot, available for sale for €1.20 ($1.36). (Any extra water is used to irrigate plants in the Arsenale.)
Diller Scofidio and Renfro, “Canal Café” (2025) at the 2025 Venice Biennale for Architecture. Photo: by Iwan Baan, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
To design, test, and monitor the water purification system, DS+R enlisted the U.S. engineering firm Natural Systems Utilities, and the Italian firm SODAI. Oldani has selected the coffee blend and ground the beans to the perfect fineness to ensure the espresso meets Venetians’ exacting standards.
But this isn’t just about the perfect cup of joe. Developing new ways to keep water clean is a challenge of particular interest to the city of Venice, which has built a high-tech electromechanical flood protection system called the MOSE Project. Longterm, those barriers may be in near-constant effect, therefore requiring new technology to keep the lagoon’s waters clean.
“Canal Café is a symbol of how we can provide citizens with access to drinking water through innovative technologies that protect the world’s most precious resource,” Pietro Salini, CEO of Webuild, the project’s supporter, said in a statement.
Jurors Hans Ulrich Obrist, Paola Antonelli, and Mpho Matsipa chose “Canal Café” is the best of over 300 projects presented by an impressive 750 participants in the Arsenale, as well as across the grounds of the Giardini, where the central pavilion is currently closed for renovations.
The international exhibition was curated by the architect and engineer Carlo Ratti, a professor at the Politecnico di Milano and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab.
“‘Canal Café’ is a demonstration of how the city of Venice can be a laboratory to speculate how to live on the water, while offering a contribution to the public space of Venice. It also invites future speculation about the lagoon and other lagoons,” the jury said in a statement. “We also acknowledge the extraordinary persistence of the Canal Cafè project, which started almost 20 years ago. It’s an example that biennale can be a long duration project and go far beyond the event.”
“Heatwave,” Kingdom of Bahrain national pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale for Architecture. Photo: ©Andrea Avezzù, courtesy of the Venice Biennale.
The jury also awarded the Golden Lion for the best national participation to the Bahrain Pavilion, curated by architect Andrea Faraguna. The project, “Heatwave,” aims to employ shade and passive cooling to make places in extremely hot environments more livable.
The opening of the architecture biennale this weekend sadly coincided with news of the sudden and unexpected death of Koyo Kouoh, the curator for the organization’s upcoming 2026 art edition.
“La Biennale di Venezia Architettura 2025: Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective” is on view at the Giardini and the Arsenale, Sestiere Castello, Campo Della Tana 2169/f 30122 Venice, Italy, May 10–November 23, 2025. More

Given Bob Dylan’s reticent public persona, his art has long seemed the closest one can get to standing in the songwriter’s shoes.
Much of the octogenarian’s work may be done on the road, in moments Dylan himself says help to “relax and refocus a restless mind,” but it is most certainly not a whimsical hobby. His easy sense of line is too assured and his eye too keen for any such condescension.
In recent years, the art world seems to have reached this consensus culminating with a major retrospective of Dylan’s work staged across three continents in the early 2020s. It brought together decades of expressive landscapes, intimate portraits, and Americana-filled sculptural works that showed Dylan’s insight on America endures irrespective of medium.
One organization that boarded the Dylan train long ago is London’s Halcyon Gallery. It has worked with the artist for nearly 18 years and has seen, first hand, how public perceptions towards Dylan’s art has changed. “It has been an extraordinary experience,” the gallery’s founder Paul Green said in a statement. “To watch this cultural icon develop into such a critically revered and important visual artist.”
Installation view of “Point Blank” at Halcyon Gallery. Photo: Halcyon Gallery.
Dylan’s latest show, “Point Blank” opens on May 9 and offers nearly 100 original paintings on paper that are looser and more intimate than his previous work. As with an earlier Dylan show, “Drawn Blank,” the paintings began as sketches before being worked over with color.
“The idea was not only to observe the human condition,” Dylan said, “but to throw myself into it with great urgency.” They’re hazy, snapshot things and with Dylan remaining noncommittal as to which derive from reality and which from his imagination, the viewer is encourage to partake in a little storytelling of their own.
Four painting from Dylan’s latest show “Point Blank”. Photo: courtesy Halcyon Gallery.
We meet a cluster of three pale-faced men all holding books: one solemn, as if weighed down by the words in front of them, another appears performatively pensive, the third reads aloud with interest, his sleeves suitably rolled back. Elsewhere, there are portraits of devoted couples, some romantic, others platonic. They appear pulled from mantelpiece picture frames (or perhaps exuberant social media posts). Case in point: the well-dressed young couple that is locked in an amorous embrace, as though posing before prom night.
There is a grouping of nudes that seem to draw from European traditions of portraiture in the genre (minus the one with a dog) as well as brightly colored interiors of empty living rooms and bedrooms. All the same, the nods to mid-century Americana remain in the bucolic scene of a turquoise station wagon idling on a lawn, the pout of topless boxers, and the young man (shirt tucked-in) fixing his hair with a comb.
Painting from Dylan’s latest show “Point Blank”. Photo: courtesy Halcyon Gallery.
Dylan has reworked some of these as blue, red, and monochromatic studies for which he is inviting association with Picasso’s turn-of-the-century Blue Period. This might be something of a stretch, but there is without doubt a quiet discomfort and a heavy dose of isolation.
“People who attend the exhibition will discover that they provoke stories from our imagination,” the gallery’s creative director Kate Brown said. “These works on paper feel like memories, intangible windows into the life and imagination on of one of the greatest storytellers who ever lived.”
“Bob Dylan: Point Blank” is on view at Halcyon Gallery, 148 New Bond Street, London, through July 6. More