Son Lux’s newest music video is an atmospheric mini-epic. Last month, the video premiered at MASS MoCA—the piece is a joint commission by the museum and Pioneer Works and made in collaboration with Alex Cook—as an immersive, 17-minute installation titled “Out Into Us (Slow Down),” complementing the release of the band’s ninth studio album.

“In the last decade, social media has created a reality in which music is often eclipsed by visuals, served up in an endless buffet of bite-sized and contextless flavors,” says a statement. For this multimedia work, the artists leaned instead toward deeply felt human experiences, like how long it can take to do or understand something. Portraying a multigenerational family seated around a table and passing the time in one another’s company, the video transports us back at least a century as scenes of a giant dust cloud evoke the Dust Bowl.

Cook conjures tension, atmosphere, and moments of disrupted reality in a slippage of past and present. The Dust Bowl itself was inherently linked to an intense period when homesteaders, dreaming of prosperous lives for themselves, plowed vast swaths of prairie for their farms. In the process, they uprooted native grasses that held the topsoil in place. Then, exacerbated by drought, millions of acres of topsoil eroded completely from the Great Plains’ persistent and powerful winds, sending farms and habitats into ruin.

Taking surprisingly meta turns, the the sound and visuals provoke curiosity, togetherness, hope, and grief. The family passes delicious dishes around the table and works on a puzzle depicting an idealized landscape in the tradition of the Hudson River School—a far cry from their depicted reality, yet a type of historical propaganda that helped entice homesteaders to the plains. These bucolic tableaux and their romantic ideals could even be said to have functioned something like social media does today, as a way to spread information. Instead, Cook and Son Lux confront us—watch to the end—with quite another definition of a screen.

“Sound can create a sanctuary—a space in which we can remember what it feels like to be present in our bodies and lost in our thoughts,” says the band’s guitarist, Rafiq Bhatia. “When you decrease the playback speed of a piece of music, you can really linger in its hidden corners and shadows: passing tensions and moments of release become whole rooms you can step into and stay for a while.”

See more on Cook’s Vimeo.

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Tattooed with verdant foliage, the central figure in Kelly Sinnapah Mary’s portraits is both a product of and subsumed by the plant life that surrounds her. Born in the French Caribbean territory of Guadeloupe, the artist conjures the mythic stories of her home through surreal scenes in which humans, flora, and fauna find a sort of hybrid harmony.

Sinnapah Mary’s recurring figure is named Sanbras, which the artist derived from a derogatory children’s book popular in the 19th and 20th centuries. Through uncanny compositions that rely heavily on saturated color and delicate, organic textures, Sanbras appears as a subversive figure who morphs across various bodies of work and nods to the artist’s enduring questions: how relationships between all living beings manifest and the ways political forces—European colonialism and anthropocentrism, in particular—shape such connections.

Melding various forms of knowledge and cultural symbols is a central part of Sinnapah Mary’s work, which emerges from her own evolving understanding of her family history. “As a child, the artist identified as Afro-Caribbean but later discovered that she is a descendant of indentured workers from the South Indian state Tamil Nadu, who were brought to the Caribbean following the abolition of slavery to replace enslaved labor,” her gallery, Noor Cohan, writes in a statement.

How a familial history informs one’s understanding of place and identity appears in the tender portraits of The Book of Violette, which is named after artist’s grandmother. Often centering on lone protagonists, this series unfolds through folklore and references to the ways ancestral memory is passed through generations.

Sinnapah Mary has described her grandmother’s magical garden of medicinal plants, for example, which appears as luscious flowers with human heads sprout from a plaid coverlet in “Violette’s Garden: My Father’s Shoes.” Holding a book with gilded pages and smoking a pipe, the schoolgirl stares at the viewer with a third eye, a symbol of wisdom and spiritual connection in Hinduism. “When I paint, I am channeling both my family mythology—the stories that have been told to me, the memories I have—and broader histories and cosmologies to imagine a new world,” the artist says.

Save the date for Sinnapah Mary’s Between earth and sea opening in February at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Until then, find more on Instagram.

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Not unlike the way a pearl grows inside a mollusk, wherein an irritant or parasite is gradually coated in a mineral called nacre, Amy Liu’s paintings comprise layers of oil pigment over underpaintings. This preparation technique dates to the early Renaissance, its first use attributed to Jan van Eyck, who added a monochrome glaze to the surface of panels to establish tonal values before building up the picture.

In her solo exhibition Pearled Chiaroscuro at Harper’s, Liu taps into the Renaissance in more ways than one. She highlights the convention of deep contrasts and bright highlights known as chiaroscuro, Italian for “light-dark.” It’s an aesthetic we see most famously in the works of Caravaggio, Leonardo da Vinci, Artemisia Gentileschi, and others, where rich shadows recede behind figures that are dramatically lit and sometimes appear to glow from within.

Liu focuses on women wearing embellished gowns and draped in elaborate jewelry, with an emphasis on pearls. She also invokes the spirit of a night at opera, drawing on her own background as a trained soprano. Rather than highlighting the identities of the figures, whether performers or spectators, the artist focuses on their elaborate and luxurious garments.

“Il Bacio di Venere,” for example, which translates to “The Kiss of Venus,” features an elaborate face covering with giant pearls and rubies, creating an impractical yet eerie, almost alien look. And in “Colei che Danza col Vento” (“She Who Dances with the Wind”) a cluster of the organic gemstones densely covers the eyes.

By concealing the women’s identities and viewing them through their sartorial choices, Liu explores how high fashion is a channel of not only status but one’s sense of self, where in turn, the garments literally and figuratively mask the person wearing them. “Figures are abstracted and their identities deliberately concealed, as if supporting the ornamentation rather than the other way around,” the gallery says.

Pearled Chiaroscuro continues through December 19 at Harper’s Apartment on the Upper East Side, New York City. See more on Liu’s Instagram.

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“Wind knows neither North nor South. Neither East nor West. It moves freely across territories, indifferent to the categories that divide them,” Amine El Gotaibi says. The Moroccan artist positions nature’s apathy toward national boundaries as an entry point for unraveling the forces that shape our perceptions and memories of a place.

El Gotaibi’s most recent body of work is on view this month at Southern Guild. Presented in an exhibition titled Wind From the North, a suite of sculptures made of metal and wool speak to the tensions between the land and the state and the ways we mark change. Many of the works emerge from panels of copper or steel weathered to reveal the oxidized patinas only possible with time. Affixed to these aged backdrops are tufts of beige and rust-colored fibers, which are either wound into tightly knotted tufts or left free-flowing.

Echoing the undulating terrain of mountains and the countryside, the cascading fibers tether to the artist’s interest in examining the landscapes of his home country and Northern Africa, more broadly. Wool is significant in the highlands, as textile production is one of the oldest craft traditions in this part of the continent. For El Gotaibi, this material significance directly links to his desire to challenge the idea that Africa’s cultural contributions are most likely to emerge from the central and south.

Instead, Wind from the North, an exhibition statement says, “extends this proposition beyond fixed coordinates, imagining geography as porous and interconnected, shaped as much by what passes through it as by the lines drawn around it.”

Wind From the North is on view through January 9 in New York. Find more from El Gotaibi on Instagram.

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Say you’re on the hunt for a drawing of a duck wearing a hat or a glimpse at Morocco in 1850 or a clip of people celebrating in the streets. Whatever imagery it is you’re searching for, Arkivism has likely got you covered.

An accessible antidote to generative AI, Arkivism is a new public domain index that catalogs millions of artworks, illustrations, photos, video, and more from dozens of museums and archives around the world. While many digital collections exist online, the “visual library of Alexandria,” as its creator dubs it, is searchable with a phrase, a mode of research that’s become commonplace with the proliferation of chatbots. Simply describe what you’re looking for and be presented with an array of human-made results.(via Open Culture)

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It’s not uncommon for artists and architects to espouse a desire for breaking conventions and pushing boundaries, but so few have embodied such a mandate as James Wines. An unparalleled devotee of wit and play, Wines is behind SITE (Sculpture in the Environment), a New York-based studio founded in 1970 with a portfolio that spans commercial construction, urban infrastructure, public art, and more. No matter the project, SITE’s approach is rooted in questioning the division between art and architecture and defying expectations.

In the preface to the new book, What Else Could It Mean?, Wines describes how he spent months in Rome after college soaking in the religious designs and civically unified architecture, which inspired what became his signature mode of working. When he returned to the U.S. to continue teaching at New York University, he asked his students to create with the opposite approach, one that tapped into a fractured and diverse contemporary landscape. “What else could it mean?” became a driving ethos that centered around “architecture as a critique of itself, as an inversion of design expectations, as humorous insights and the absorption of context as a motivating source of ideas,” he writes.

Published by Skira, What Else Could It Mean? showcases dozens of projects from the SITE oeuvre. The most iconic of the studio’s works are designs for BEST Products Company, a big box store that operated for four decades. Owners Sydney and Frances Lewis tapped Wines to create unconventional structures for their showrooms, which included a building that appeared to sink into the ground at an angle and another that split open as the base fractured from the rest of the facade.

The BEST designs are just a piece of SITE’s broader commentary on commercialization. There’s also “Ghost Parking Lot,” an enormous, immovable public art project in Hamden, Connecticut, that buried twenty cars beneath asphalt. Forever halted outside the shopping mall, the immobile vehicles became ghostly signals of endless consumption and urban sprawl.

What Else Could It Mean? collects Wines’ drawings, renderings, and writings across five decades, presenting these rarely seen documents alongside archival photos of realized projects. SITE’s ethos has particular relevancy today, especially as it challenges the inherent accessibility of art and architecture and advocates for a more democratic approach to collective life. Designer and curator Phillip Denny writes in the introduction:

These are works that engage their context, invite participation, and reward curiosity regardless of one’s background. It is art and architecture for the popular public that anyone can stop in front of, be surprised by, laugh at, and think about without a guidebook. Often ironic but never cynical, always generous and ecumenical, SITE created art where people least expected to find it, in the “junk-culture world of the commercial strip and suburban sprawl.”

Get your copy of What Else Could It Mean? on Bookshop, and explore more of SITE’s works on its website.

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Just because something doesn’t have a purpose doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. “I made a film in Excel” by London-based Maria Tomazou might be “pointless,” as she says, but it’s also a quirky, fun, and inspiring project made for the purest of reasons: just because Tomazou wanted to. “It took ages to put together, to keep going, and keep creating something,” she says. “I hope you enjoy?”

Tomazou is also behind this stunning feat of stop-motion animation, and you might want to check out these Japanese landscapes made with Excel, too.

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In today’s art world, provocation and controversy are part and parcel of the market. Think recent pieces like Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian,” a.k.a. the duct-taped banana, or Damien Hirst’s diamond- and platinum-coated 18th-century human skull titled “For the Love of God.” And while art has never been immune to controversy, it hasn’t always been, let’s say, expected.

At the turn of the 20th century, art—especially the “high” mediums of painting and sculpture—were viewed and taught through the lens of deeply ingrained conventions about what made art good. Chief among these was representation: people look like people, landscapes look like landscapes, and rooms look like rooms. That is, until Henri Matisse created “The Red Studio.”

A prized painting in MoMA’s collection in New York, “The Red Studio,” or “L’Atelier rouge,” was so unexpected that, according to a wonderful new video from Great Art Explained, Matisse may not have really been able to grasp what he’d done either, at least not right away. The documentary short by art historian James Payne traces the history of this paradigm-shifting painting, from the artist’s personal influences to the societal and technological shifts experienced by the art-viewing public. “The painting seemed to break almost every established rule of Western painting,” Payne says.

No one else knew what to make of the work either, which stretches more than seven feet wide. Matisse flattened the picture plane, removing the usual cues about perspective and depth with a quickly applied swath of Venetian red. (Payne delves into an interesting story about that, too.) Here, color itself defines the composition in place of line and contrast, drawing on friend, mentor, and Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau’s advice that color, as Payne describes, “should be thought, dreamed, and imagined.”

“When Matisse painted ‘The Red Studio’ in 1911, it was one of the strangest pictures anyone had ever seen—a room almost completely consumed by red—furniture reduced to outlines, paintings hanging on walls that barely seem to exist, and a grandfather clock with 12 numbers but no hands,” Payne says. “Even Matisse wasn’t entirely sure what he had created, and nobody wanted to buy it.”

“The Red Studio” didn’t sell even at the famous International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show of 1913, where it was in the company of experimental styles like Fauvism and Cubism, not to mention Marcel Duchamp’s proto-Dadaist “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2).” Although “The Red Studio” traveled to numerous exhibitions, it was broadly panned by critics. Matisse hid it away for about a decade before the piece experienced an unlikely stint at a London nightclub. It took decades for the unorthodox work to be recognized not as repulsive but revolutionary.

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When Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson (1940-2015) was born, her family moved to Columbus, Ohio’s brand new Poindexter Village. The public housing estate, dedicated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, was one of the first federally funded projects of its kind to specifically support African Americans. (In 2028, a new museum is slated to honor its history.)

Other than a few years’ stint in Boise, Idaho, while she was married to a man serving in the U.S. Air Force, Robinson spent her life in Columbus, where she had also studied art in college. The 1970s spurred a period of growth in the artist’s creative practice, during which she worked for the city’s recreation and parks department and often facilitated workshops. Then, during a study trip to Egypt in 1979, a holy man tendered the name “Aminah,” which she legally adopted and preferred to go by thereafter. In the early 1980s, she exhibited her work for the first time.

In collaboration with the Columbus Museum of Art, where Robinson’s work is a highlight of the collection, Fort Gansevoort presents 40 of the late artist’s works later this month in Beaded and Bound. Spanning a collection of mixed-media books and embellished textiles and dolls, the exhibition features embroidery, appliqué, writing, painting, and drawing in which “the artist wove personal memories, family histories, and local narratives into richly tactile, sometimes peculiar, and always moving works alive with the histories of the African diaspora,” the gallery says.

Robinson’s interest in storytelling is matched by her experimental, almost stream-of-consciousness approach. She described the practice of creating the narrative, textile-based works comprising sculptural reliefs and bookmaking as “RagGonNon,” which she considered to be interactive, constantly evolving, and open to interpretation in the way that literature evokes different things for different readers. She viewed her vernacular visual narratives the same way.

The artist also concocted unique combinations of materials, not only assembling different elements such as shells and buttons but also creating distinctive structural substances. Notably, Robinson used a mixture she called “hogmawg,” which consists of clay, leaves, twigs, mud, lime, animal grease, and glue—a process she learned from her father, who had initially taught her the craft of bookmaking. She picked up sewing and needlework from her mother.

Robinson also found a fruitful creative connection with fellow Columbus artist Elijah Pierce, whom she described as a spiritual mentor and friend. “He was a great person, a great artist, and a person who walked with integrity, and he passed on so much of that wisdom to me,” she once said. “We just generally like to be around each other. There was just a connection there.”

Through textural, whimsical narratives, Robinson’s books and dolls are simultaneously autobiographical and universal. “A Holy Place: The Elijah Pierce Barbershop,” for example, depicts her friend in his place of work, nodding to a meaningful personal relationship but also celebrating more broadly the barbershop as a “sacred” place of connection and joy in African American communities. “Women in Poindexter Village, Button Beaded Book” references fellow residents of her housing development, including a special tribute to her mother tucked inside.

Beaded and Bound opens on November 19 and continues through January 16 in New York City.

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From his studio in Athens, Stelios Pupet renders meditative paintings that place organic elements within a subtle grid. The artist always begins with a structural matrix that he builds upon, sometimes leaving a square angle for a cloud or section of grass and other times manipulating the form into a natural curve.

In recent months, Pupet has begun to experiment with different media like pastel pencils and plans to incorporate oil pastels into his larger works on canvas. The shifts in his practice have been small, and “I think that just things got a little bit more wise,” he tells Colossal. In addition to a trio of works in progress in his studio, Pupet has several murals planned for 2027, which you can keep up with on Instagram.

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