October 24 – November 30, 2024

October 29 – December 18, 2024

How a drawing reveals the era's ideas about nudity, shame and the perfect woman

October 26 – November 24, 2024

October 14 – November 30, 2024

This film of the musical's first half shows it shouldn't have been split in two

Please Give Generously

This year we’ve published iterations of our Closed/Paused Spaces Project and the Contemporary Art Quarterly archives of Monica Majoli, Suse Weber and Kerstin Brätsch and added hundreds of thousands of images to Contemporary Art Library. To fund next year’s efforts, please make a donation right now.

Jennifer Lawrence and Malala on their film about the women resisting the Taliban

October 24 – November 23, 2024

How a UK Member of Parliament faked his own death and disappeared in 1974

How a mindful, less-is-more approach to our clothing can help with our wellbeing

Gregory Maguire reveals how he wrote the story that became a phenomenon

The poignant and powerful story still resonates, 55 years on

September 5 – December 7, 2024

'Expense isn't luxury': Creative director Clare Waight Keller talks fashion

Santiago Yahuarcani’s visual vocabulary is neither derivative nor dependent on Western art history. His paintings—including three of them currently starring in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale— are a testament to the consciousness, affection, and intelligence of the rainforest and its inhabitants that invite us to see beyond the parameters of settler coloniality. Through the overlapping of bright-colored figures in dense groupings that combine symbolic or descriptive references to colonial violence and spiritual worlds, they encapsulate the memories of Yahuarcani’s ancestors, the sacred knowledge of medicinal plants, the voices of the elders, and Amazonian stories of life’s origins, all in a manner that demands attention and respect.

A self-taught painter, Yahuarcani belongs to the Aimeni (White heron) clan of the Uitoto people of northern Amazonia. His mother, Martha López Pinedo, was a descendant of Gregorio López, the only member of the Aimeni who emigrated from La Chorrera (today part of the Colombian Amazon) to the Ampiyacu River region (now northern Peru). Gregorio was one of the survivors of the Putumayo genocide (1879–1912), during which nearly 30,000 Indigenous people from the Bora, Uitoto, Andoque, and Ocaina Nations were cruelly annihilated by the Peruvian Amazon Company at the peak of the rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th century—a period of colonial expedition, extraction, and commercialization of rubber in the Amazonian territory of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia. Although the rubber business ceased to be profitable around 1925, continued subjugation, extraction, and privatization devastated Indigenous populations and destroyed areas of the Amazon that, until very recently, did not have laws that protect Indigenous peoples.

Orally transmitted to the artist by his grandfather, this episode of ethnic cleansing and greed left a deep impression on Yahuarcani, who in the last two decades has insistently returned to this moment to reclaim justice and confront the perpetrators’ impunity. In one of his most poignant works, Amazonia (2016), Yahuarcani portrays a Uitoto person fully covered with wounds and incisions like those made in the bark of a tree to collect sap. Tears and red blood turn into white rubber as they leave his body. “Mother Earth is bleeding, Mother Earth is crying. Her tears are like the sap of the trees,” the artist said in an interview three years later. In a detailed, cartoon-like style, his anti-colonial paintings confront the long-lasting effects of the Western assaults on Indigenous minds, bodies, languages, and identities, demanding recognition of stories that, for a long time, were not heard or acknowledged.

Yahuarcani started to paint at the age of 10. In the 1980s, he made paintings and wooden sculptures to sell to tourists near his hometown, Pebas, close to the Amazon River, where he still lives and works. Although the need for economic subsistence drove many of his early creations, his layered and deeply inventive pictures progressively became a reservoir of collective memory and complex representations of Uitoto worldviews. His inspiration came from childhood experiences, such as encounters with wild mushrooms, that sparked his imagination and led him to see himself as a painter of sounds, as he called himself at a conference in Brazil in 2013:

I also research when I walk through the jungle and go to my farm. I’m looking at the trees, which are full of drawings. I approach a tree and stay two or three hours looking at it. The tree is painted; it is covered with different types of figures. That is how I go around and choose figures for my paintings. These figures coincide with a sound, for example, with the word “kbnshu.” For me, that is the sound of an animal that jumps into the water and sticks out its long tongue. I am turning the sound into a being.

Billionaire art collector Kenneth C. Griffin is among the top donors to outside spending groups for the 2024 election, which resulted in former President Donald Trump winning a second term.

The founder and CEO of the investment firm Citadel donated $100 million to conservatives, the fifth-largest amount for individual contributions to federal election spending, according to data released by the Federal Election Commission and analysis from Open Secrets, a non-profit research and government transparency group based in Washington, DC.

Open Secrets publishes data on campaign finance and lobbying. The organization was founded in 1983.

Griffin’s largest disclosed donations were to the Senate Leadership Fund, on four separate occasions, totaling $30 million. He also made donations totaling $15 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, $15 million to the Keystone Renewal PAC and $10 million to Maryland’s Future, a single-candidate super political action committee in support of Republican Larry Hogan for the US Senate.

It’s worth noting that Griffin’s contribution of $30 million to the Senate Leadership Fund was more than one-quarter (25.8 percent) of its total raised ($116.5 million), the second-largest amount raised by an outside spending organization and the largest focused on electing conservatives in the 2024 US federal election.

There was a lot of talk about portals earlier this month at MASS MoCA, the enormous art space in Western Massachusetts now playing home to an eye-popping, shape-shifting installation by artist Jeffrey Gibson through the winter of next year. Gibson had already been granted access to a big stage when he was chosen to represent the U.S. in this year’s Venice Biennale—the first time a Native American artist has done so with a solo show since the exhibition’s inauguration in 1895. But this is a bigger stage still, at least in literal terms: MASS MoCA’s storied Building 5, a vast column-free space in a former factory complex described as the size of a football field.

Gibson’s commissioned show “POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT” is different than his offering in Venice—more antic and animated, with an emphasis on performative gestures and an engagement with “two-spirit” states of being that figure in Indigenous LGBTQI+ culture. The exhibition is boisterous, with clubby electronic music and kinetic videos that bring life to outsize ceremonial garments hung from the ceiling above illuminated sculptures that double as dance floors.

“It was different from filling a space like in a normal exhibition,” Gibson said during a public talk at the opening. “It was more about: how do we fill this space with all the ideas of what’s happening in the work?”

While the amount of space is otherworldly (19,000 square feet in Building 5, across two floors), the art within it is earthy and homegrown. During his talk to introduce the show, Gibson said he had been inspired by the kind of collective and communal activity that he grew up with in churches and, later, dance clubs. “We talked about a disco/church,” he said of early conversations about the project. “A lot of it has to do with faith based-practices, regalia, queerness—a very welcoming space.”

Sharing the stage was Albert McLeod, a human-rights activist and director of the Two-Spirited People of Manitoba who Gibson invited to discuss notions of two-spirit identity that date back to the term’s origin within Indigenous queer activism. “Spirit-naming is a historic tradition, and usually children receive a spirit name when they’re born,” McLeod said. “The implication is that the spiritual realm is benevolent to humans, so we ask for a guide for that child throughout their life, because there’s lots of brambles and wolves with sharp teeth. You need a spirit guide to help you, and there’s power in the belief that we, individually, are never alone, because there’s a spirit that walks with us for the rest of our lives.”

Invergordon, a small town in central Scotland, could see its coffers filled following a decision by county committee to sell a marble bust made by the French artist Edmé Bouchardon in 1728 that, a quarter of a century ago, was propping open the door of a storage shed.

The bust, which was bought for roughly $6.31 in 1930, could fetch more than $3 million through a private sale brokered by Sotheby’s, which appraised the sculpture at the request of the local government last year. 

While the sculpture was originally purchased for display, a series of mysterious events led to it be placed in a storage shed “with other discarded council paraphernalia.” Former Invergordon community councilor Maxine Smith, who now serves on the broader governmental body the Highland council, told the Guardian last October that she found the bust while digging around the shed for a set of ceremonial robes that had gone missing.

“I found the robes…” she said “and also a wee white marble sculpture thing holding open the door. It could have been binned quite easily.”

According to USA today, the proposed sale had to go through a number of bureaucratic hoops before it was approved. After it was appraised last October the Invergordon Common Good Fund, pushed for the sale, arguing that the bust could provide the local community with revenue that it wouldn’t normally have access to. 

With the US presidential election behind us and the marquee New York evening sales just a few days away, collectors, advisors, and all manner of art world professionals have been combing through the full list of auction house offerings, ARTnews included. 

This November, works by art historical heavyweights David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Ellsworth Kelly, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jean Michel Basquiat (of course) take the stage behind auctioneers who hope to coax out as many bids as possible from buyers in the room, on the phones, and watching online from across the globe. 

ARTnews has already revealed a number of the consignors behind this season’s biggest lots, including Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982), courtesy of the Peter Brant’s Brant Foundation, and Yayoi Kusama’s 2018 picture Infinity-Nets (RDUEL), which has ties to disgraced art dealer and forthcoming biopic subject Inigo Philbrick.

But there is always more to learn. Further investigating has revealed more names of collectors that we believe to be unloading while interest rates are (relatively) good. And while high-net-worth individuals have cut back their spending over the last 12 months, we are in a “collector’s market,” according to many market-watchers. If the work is good enough, the bidders are sure to raise their paddles. 

The first lot at Sotheby’s The Now and Contemporary evening sale, Yu Nishimura’s 2020 work Pause, seems to come from the esteemed collection of Dallas collectors Howard and Cindy Rachofsky. The work was featured as part of the Allan Schwartzman-curated show “Open Storage: 25 Years Of Collecting” which ran from August 26, 2022 – April 29, 2023, at the Rachofskys’ contemporary art space in Dallas, The Warehouse. The Rachofsky’s did not return a request for comment, while a Sotheby’s spokesperson told ARTnews that “as a policy, we don’t comment on consignors’ identity since that’s confidential.”