It’s a familiar feeling: You start a text message, and your phone’s auto-complete function suggests several choices for the next word, ranging from banal to hilarious. “I love…” you, or coffee? Or you’re finishing an email, and merely typing the word “Let” prompts your app to suggest “Let me know if you have any questions”...
On opening night of Madama Butterfly at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, audiences were presented with a production that both honored and challenged one of opera’s most beloved works. As a first time viewer of Giacomo Puccini’s masterpiece, the experience was both emotionally powerful and intellectually intriguing. The evening offered the sweeping music and tragic...
In Zimbabwe, hunhu is a cultural belief system that instructs us to embrace our neighbours, honour our elders and respect each other’s rights. Also known as ubuntu, it’s a way of being that resonates with southern Africa’s interconnected but diverse communities, where generational wisdom and values are passed from elders to the young. Hunhu is...
A chance encounter off the coast of Malibu set artist Thomas Houseago on a mystical path ‘There was a whole mystical thing that occurred,’ Thomas Houseago says, when we speak ahead of his solo show at Xavier Hufkens gallery. He is talking about a serendipitous, maybe even ordained, series of events that led to Cosmic Snail (Shell Temple) (2025), his immersive...
We are all born naked, and sculptures of the human body in its natural state are as old as humankind. In the history of art, nudity does not have just one meaning; it can express everything from innocence to sexual desire, from triumph to defeat. The 20th-century art historian Kenneth Clark made a distinction between...
When a 5-inch-by-4-inch red chalk drawing of a woman’s foot by Michelangelo sold at auction for US$27.2 million on Feb. 5, 2026, it blew past the $1.5 million to $2 million it was expected to receive. Experts believe it to be a study for the figure of the Libyan Sibyl, a female prophet who appears...
Michelangelo’s fresco of “The Last Judgment,” covering the wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, is being restored. The work, which started on Feb. 1, 2026, is expected to continue for three months. The Sistine Chapel is one of the great masterpieces of Renaissance art. As the setting where the College...
Museums and universities around the world hold vast collections of cultural artefacts, artworks, objectified belongings and even ancestral remains. Many were not freely given but taken during colonial times, through force, manipulation, theft or violence. For decades, they have sat in storerooms and display cases, classified into categories like anthropology, natural history or ethnology, separated...
The artist Leandro Erlich has installed the first phase of Reefline, a submerged installation that aims to regenerate coral and marine biodiversity along South Beach A large installation by the Argentine artist Leandro Erlich, consisting of 22 submerged marine-grade concrete cars on the ocean floor that seem to drift towards nowhere as the current flows through...
Ahead of their presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach, we catch up with creative director, Kiya Tadele Yatreda (ያጥሬዳ) is an Ethiopian art collective led by creative director, Kiya Tadele, known for merging traditional craftsmanship with digital practice. Building handmade sets and costumes, Yatreda reinterprets historical figures, cultural knowledge, and myth through a distinctly Ethiopian...
