In mid-2025, the Trump administration rescinded $9 billion in public media funding and foreign aid, including $1.1 billion slated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CBP). CBP, in turn, was responsible for distributing funding to organizations like National Public Radio (NPR), Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and their member stations across the nation. The corporation was established following a 1967 law called the Public Broadcasting Act, but just like that, when the funds were no longer there, CBP voted to dissolve. What did NPR have to say about that? Its “mission will continue, unchanged.”

NPR aims “to create a more informed public—one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas, and cultures.” While CBP-allocated funding amounted to only about one percent of the broadcaster’s annual funding, there’s a bit of a trickle-down effect. NPR relies heavily on fees from its member stations, plus endowments, cash contributions, and other revenues. And while one percent doesn’t seem like a lot, member stations—many of which are in rural areas—often depended on about 13 percent of their revenue from CBP, making them much more vulnerable to the cuts.

Reporting continues with vigor at NPR, despite some inevitable challenges, and the organization has doubled down on its mission to approach stories and news through the lens of curiosity and understanding. In collaboration with New York-based ad agency Mischief, a new campaign reimagines NPR’s logo into prompts aiming to ignite inquiry and investigation.

Mischief “creates work that makes a stir, because the riskiest thing a brand can do is be ignorable.” The campaign, titled For your right to be curious, is conceived as a way for NPR to “stand up for the public’s right to ask hard questions,” the agency says in a statement. Across a range of formats, from merchandise and the sign on NPR’s headquarters to billboards and ad screens on the New York City subway, the recognizable block letters transform into urgent and timely questions—many that listeners around the country are asking. “How does AI affect my electric bill?” “Why are groceries still so expensive?” “How is my farm going to survive?”

“Curiosity is the fuel of a functioning democracy,” says Mishka Pitter-Armand, NPR’s chief marketing officer. “NPR is essential civic infrastructure built to protect the right to inquiry. As a cornerstone of American life for over 50 years, this work is our pledge to the public: we will continue to provide the trusted context you need to explore the world, encouraging every American to keep listening and asking the hard questions.”

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In the spectacular, lofty photos of Dani Guindo, heavy clouds and mercurial pools glow amid an Icelandic landscape. The Spanish artist, based in Reykjavík, seeks unique relationships between light, form, and atmosphere. In Iceland, the vicissitudes of the weather and the stark, glacial landscape continually stoke his interests.

Guindo typically uses drones to capture a wide range of angles, from panoramas of glaciers and mountains to vertical shots of silty streams that appear almost abstract. His latest series, Terminus, captures a glacier’s many rivulets amid a rocky landscape, along with a ghostly, rounded outline revealing evidence of the glacier’s earlier phases.

The glacier is Múlajökull, which falls into a category scientists call a “surge-type,” in which periods of ice flow are interspersed with periods of inactivity or retreat. A semi-circle pattern of drumlins—hills formed below flowing glaciers—are filled with a number of lakes with water in a range of blue-green hues.

“Múlajökull is a very isolated glacier outlet, surrounded by a chaotic maze of rivers and marshlands, making an approach on foot almost impossible,” Guindo says in a statement. “With the right wind conditions, I was able to fly my drone close to the glacier, managing to capture some of my favorite shots to date.”

Find more on Guindo’s Instagram and Behance.

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There is an air of the spectral to Fiona Pardington’s recent photographs of birds. While they are actual specimens, captured in atmospheric light and exhibiting unique plumage and expressions, there’s something a little bit uncanny about them. Are they real? In a sense, yes, but they’re no longer alive. Some no longer even exist. For Pardington, who is of Māori and Scottish descent, natural history specimens provide a unique and striking look at nature. And the photos seen here, comprising part of her series Taharaki Skyside, are slated for the artist’s exhibition in the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year.

Pardington’s bold, large-scale portraits of birds native to New Zealand—known as Aotearoa in the Māori language—are all made in natural history collections around the country. The phantom-like depictions detail unique beaks, colors, and biological variations of the Fiordland penguin, with its bright yellow crest that looks like dramatic eyebrows, the South Island Takahe, which was thought extinct for a while before it was rediscovered in 1948, or the Tūī, with its tuft of white at the throat.

Pardington’s series also develops through a literary lens, especially in relation to the poetic works of Dante, who situates Purgatory on an island-mountain in the Southern Hemisphere in the Divine Comedy. The concept of crossing over from one realm to another is mirrored in the uncanniness of preserved animals in vitrines, illustrating the diversity of life while no longer possessing it. “Some birds, like the huia and whēkau (laughing owl), are long extinct; many others remain critically vulnerable,” says a statement.

Pardington’s images, set in museums, harken back to an earlier era of collecting, when egg-hunters and birders would seek prized specimens only to kill them and “preserve” them for posterity. This controversial practice occasionally rears its head, such as in the case of a researcher who killed an elusive kingfisher in 2015 to “collect” it for further research.

“Birds can symbolise familial love, romantic attachment, and ecological warnings. They can be intimations of mortality, and in my work, they can also represent individual people in my life. The ideas I am conjuring remind us of the integral significance of manu within te ao Māori (the Māori world) as sources of food and materials and intermediaries between human and divine worlds,” Pardington says.

Many of the endemic species she highlights are rare, such as the kākā kura, which is a color morph of the more common kākā parrot. And beyond their scientific significance, birds also play a sacred role for the Māori people, who refer to them as manu, messengers between this world and the next. “The ‘captured’ birds also reveal how museums classify, describe, frame, and celebrate or hide cultural narratives, influencing our understanding of the history and cultural legacies of Indigenous communities,” says a statement.

See Taharaki Skyside at the Venice Biennale from May 9 to November 22, and find more on Pardington’s Instagram.

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Around 1897, the French director Georges Méliès made a silent short film that, until last month, hadn’t been publicly viewable for more than a century. “Gugusse et l’Automate,” or “Gugusse and the Automaton,” is a 45-second slapstick piece featuring a magician and a Pierrot-styled robot as they duke it out.

Méliès is best known for “A Trip to the Moon,” a short film from 1902 that famously features astromoners landing their capsule into the eye of the moon. The director’s work is widely regarded as some of the first within fantasy and science fiction, with “Gugusse et l’Automate” being a long-lost addition to his canon.

This film resurfaced recently when Bill McFarland drove from his Grand Rapids, Michigan-home to the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, with a cache of reels that once belonged to his great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee. Passed down through the family, this collection was part of Frisbee’s traveling showbusiness, in which he packed up his horse and buggy in western Pennsylvania and traveled to nearby towns to screen these early “moving pictures” accompanied by music from a phonograph.

According to the library, McFarland’s copy of “Gugusse et l’Automate” is “a duplicate at least three times removed from the original. Library technicians spent more than a week scanning and stabilizing it onto a digital format, so that it can now be seen by anyone online—in 4K, no less.”

The collection also contained Méliès’ “The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match” and parts of Thomas Edison’s “The Burning Stable.” See more of conservators’ unraveling process on Instagram. (via Kottke)

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Is there anything more soothing than a sleeping baby swan—known as a cygnet? Or anything more illustrative of the relationship between nature and urban development in the U.K. than the red fox, which are seen in neighborhoods as often as in the wild? For this year’s British Wildlife Photography Awards (BWPA), photographers from around Great Britain and its islands—including young, budding documentarians—highlight some of the region’s most beloved creatures.

Paul Hobson’s black-and-white image of a leaping, silhouetted toad takes top honors this year, captured at a pond near his home in Sheffield. He snapped the photo from inside the pond, having built a glass box that could settle into the water and protect his camera as the active amphibians bounding over it. The right shot took some patience, too, as toads would often swim over the box and sit on top of it rather than jumping across.

Additional category winners include Barry Webb’s slime molds, Sarah Darnell’s dramatic feud between two brown hares in Norfolk, Alastair Marsh’s bold portrait of a pine marten amid the heather in Arnamurchan, Scotland, and Jamie Smart’s up-close snap of a leaf-cutter bee peeping out from its nest.

Smart’s bold photo won the 11 and Under category, in which kids get to show their stuff. There are also 12 to 14 Years and 15 to 17 Years categories. “I adore bees and have spent a lot of time this year studying them and finding out about what I can do to help the wild bees around our garden thrive,” Smart says. She built a bee hotel for her back yard and managed to capture the leaf-cutter specimen peeking out from its safe place.

See all the winning images in BWPA’s online gallery, plus a print publication. And if you’d like to submit your own wildlife photos taken in Great Britain, you have until June 7 to enter your own images to next year’s contest.

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“I think of playgrounds as a primer of shapes and functions; simple, mysterious and evocative; thus educational,” Isamu Noguchi said in a pamphlet about his Playscapes. Perhaps best known for his stone sculptures and Akari lamps, the Japanese artist and designer always had an eye on the spaces that define childhood, particularly public playgrounds and their influence on the young mind.

In 1933, Noguchi proposed redeveloping an entire New York City block into “Play Mountain,” an enormous topographical project that would be unstructured and open-ended. Rather than have swings and swift metal slides, for example, Noguchi wanted earthen steps, a bandshell, and a large hill for sledding and gathering. The idea was that it could be just as fun in the winter as in the summer and stimulate kids’ imaginations more than the prescriptive equipment typical in urban parks. Then-Parks Commissioner Robert Moses rejected the plan, though, and despite efforts to have the project and others of Noguchi’s designs built in New York, none were ever realized in the city.

A series of short animations recreates this lesser-known history. Using hand-painted celluloid under a Rostrum camera, Eastend Western imagines what these never-built playgrounds would have looked like—and how children may have interacted with the unconventional structures. There are concrete mounds with cavernous openings, labyrinthine sand gardens, and asymmetrical equipment that could teach users that “the rate of swing is determined by the length of the pendulum,” the film says.

The animations were produced in conjunction with the exhibition Noguchi’s New York, which is on view through September 13 at The Noguchi Museum. There’s also a new monograph that dives into the artist’s playgrounds and is a companion to a major retrospective at the High Museum of Art, available for pre-order on Bookshop. Find the full film series on YouTube.

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Olayami Dabls is careful to call attention to the distinction between material culture and fine art. After working as an artist and curator for the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in the 1970s, Dabls shifted directions and founded the MBAD African Bead Museum in 1994 to reintroduce African culture and healing into the Detroit community.

The artist had noticed that much of the African American history museum’s collections were regarded with fear and misunderstanding, particularly as they were viewed through a colonial, European lens. With MBAD, Dabls decided to honor ancestral creation and directed his energy to fulfilling “a need in our community to offer a true experience, free of European constructs and manipulation that furthers cultural differences.” He focused not on entertainment or profit but rather on the healing power of creation.

What emerged was a massive outdoor project spanning two blocks at the corner of Grand River and West Grand Boulevard. Comprised of dozens of assemblages and installations, MBAD focuses on four materials common throughout formerly industrial Detroit: iron, stone, wood, and mirrored glass. Each had a spiritual power, too. Iron and stone for their connection to our bodies and the Earth, and mirrors for their reflective properties. Wood, too, embodies the strength and grounding qualities of trees.

Perhaps the most recognizable of these works is the “Nkisi House,” from the Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust series. Nkisi are objects inhabited by spirits, a concept that originated in the Congo Basin and was brought to the Americas with the transatlantic slave trade. Covered in mirrored shards, painted panels, and other found objects, “Nkisi House” is both an alluring structure and a divine invitation.

Dabls considers public art to be one of the underutilized modes of healing in Western cultures, particularly as people gravitate toward treating symptoms rather than rooting out their causes. He believes projects like MBAD can “trigger things in people through sight and sound, such as forgotten memories and deep realizations,” connecting visitors to one another and those who came before. He says:

Our African ancestors used material culture to convey information about themselves, their identity, and to send messages for healing and protection. Material culture was used to share stories from the past to the present. It was used to heal, the same way we go to a doctor or psychiatrist today. Cultural materials like masks, textiles, and carvings communicate a very specific message to educate people, relieve stress, and act as medicine.

Unlike most museums, which separate curation from the gift shop, Dabls considers the bead store and exhibitions as one, offering visitors the opportunity to create within the space and take a piece with them.

Next month at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit Cosmologies presents 45 years of the artist’s practice, from his site-specific installations to found object assemblages. The retrospective attempts to reframe “how museums can hold history, ritual, and community,” while highlighting how MBAD remains an active, participatory site of cultural creation and memory.

MBAD is also one of several artist environments that began as a grassroots effort in Detroit and is now gaining institutional recognition. Tyree Guyton’s magical Heidelberg Project has seen similar accolades in recent years.

Detroit Cosmologies runs from April 25 to July 12. Find more from MBAD and Dabls on their website.

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While most of us will pass by stray stones and piles of rubble without much of a second thought, Elizabeth Saloka sees tons of potential. From a couple of rock piles outside of her regular supermarket to crumbling curbs or demolished structures, she sifts through a variety of shapes and sizes to find rocks that may eventually transform into vibrant mimics of common household items, boxed sandwiches from Pret a Manger, or Babybel brand snacking cheese.

“Last fall, I bought a ton of marble scraps off a sculptor in Woodstock for like, $10 off Facebook,” Saloka tells Colossal. “For sandwiches and cakes, crumbling asphalt parking lots are good. When I lived in Sunset Park, they demolished a building a couple blocks from my apartment, and there was a hole in the fence, so I’d go in there and find tons of cool shapes and textures of rubble.”

Using bricks, she creates humorously fat stacks of $1 and $5 bills, and cut pavers become Premium saltine cracker boxes. “That particular rock shape—a long rectangular cube—is to me the holy grail of rock shapes, because it doesn’t really naturally occur too much in nature,” Saloka says. When she finds a particular shape or cut that works well for certain objects, such as Pink Pearl erasers or popular candies, she collects as many as she can.

Pop culture items rule Saloka’s oeuvre, from recognizable grocery store brands to fast food mainstays to memes like the so-called “IKEA monkey” in its tiny shearling coat. There’s also an air of nostalgia for toys, analog film, and pantry staples that many of us associate with our childhoods or an earlier generation.

If you’re in New York, you can see the artist’s work in Snacks and the City at Gotham’s Chelsea gallery space, which runs from March 19 to May 3. Her work will also be including a group show at Galactic Panther, which will be on view from March 27 to May 21. And in June, she’ll participate in a two-person show alongside Kate Bingaman-Burt at Women’s Studio Workshop and a solo exhibition at Here to Sunday. See more on Saloka’s Instagram.

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A new home designed by Equipo de Arquitectura begs the question: is it a house in a forest or a forest in a house? The name of the project sheds some light on that, aptly titled “Un Bosque en la Casa,” or “A Forest in the House.” Bricks, steel, glass, and concrete combine in a single-story contemporary home that’s all corners, volume, and apertures, while the trees and tropical plants around it organically soften its angles.

Architects Horacio Cherniavsky and Viviana Pozzoli took the lead on this new home in San Bernardino, Paraguay, challenging the notion that nature is in direct opposition to development. “‘A Forest in the House’ proposes an alternative approach to harmonizing the built form with its natural surroundings,” the studio says. “Rather than treating existing trees as obstacles, the project embraces them as fundamental guides that shape the spatial program.” See more on the firm’s Instagram.

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Anyone who’s decried the seasonal blip we call autumn knows how rapidly nature can swing from verdant greenery to leafless branches. The same goes for the missed watering of an overlooked houseplant: skip a week and bear witness to browning edges that curl into a crisp. As quickly as these natural changes occur, so do their remedies or downfalls, and soon we’re spotting new buds or depositing the evidence of our negligence in the compost bin.

For Álvaro Urbano, the brief period between blossom and decay is one to be preserved. He sculpts common plants from metal, casting vulnerable life forms into a sturdy material and rendering their colors and textures in paint. It’s an act of making “small monuments of things that normally would disappear or change in a few days, or in minutes,” the artist says.

Drawing on theater and architecture, Urbano is deeply interested in creating not only standalone works but immersive scenes. His sculptures often leave a trail of leaves on the floor or appear to grow directly from the stark gallery wall, their knotted branches jutting out into the space. “The viewer can enter these situations as if they are witnesses (to) a scene that has already started,” the artist adds.

Urbano lives and works between Paris and Berlin and has work on view in the latter at Spore Initiative. Find more on Instagram.

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