Ask a seasoned collector about their first acquisition, and you’re likely to hear that they began with limited-edition prints. Often accessible in price point yet bearing the artist’s signature and maybe even hand embellishments, prints are the perfect entry point for people interested in living with art each and every day.

For the holidays, our partners at Joy Machine have graciously curated a special collection of limited-edition prints for the budding collector in your life.

Liz Flores: “Untitled” (2026)

Sentrock: “Better Days Ahead” (2026)

Mar Figueroa: “Untitled” (2024)

Anna Valdez: “Untitled” (2026)

Cody Hudson: “Self-Sufficiency Mono Print (Tangerine Variant)” (2024)

Stevie Shao: “Untitled” (2026)

Jess Ackerman: “Untitled” (2023)

Explore many more prints on Joy Machine.

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More than 15,300 submissions made their way to the judges for this year’s Close-Up Photographer of the Year, setting a record for the highest number of entries in the competition’s history. From uncanny insects to slime molds to unexpected animal interactions, photographs captured by amateur and professional photographers alike highlight the diverse and sometimes surreal flora and fauna all around us.

The contest winners will be announced in January. In the meantime, a photography challenge on the theme of “Close to Home” is open for submissions through the end of the month. Explore some of our favorites from the shortlist below, and learn more on the contest’s website.

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Plumbing the rhythms of the ocean and marine life, Amy Genser creates undulating abstractions that evoke swells, currents, reefs, and the sea floor. The artist composes elaborate wall works from rolled mulberry paper, acrylic, and wire in which patterns move and converge across swaths of blues and greens. The closer you look, the more colors emerge.

Although reminiscent of the sea in many ways, Genser’s works defy instant recognition. At first glance, they may appear topographical, as if a luminous, clear sea is being viewed from above. The rolling forms are redolent of waves but also perhaps the way corals cluster around rock formations. Then, details draw us nearer: bulbous forms with cavities resemble barnacles, and extended shapes could be tentacles.

The artist’s play on scale, texture, pattern, and depth draw us in and keep us guessing—not unlike the many enigmas of the ocean itself. And one recent project challenged Genser to work at a monumental scale. The Macallan, a single malt Scottish whisky company, commissioned her to create a monumental piece titled “Stars Below” for its Carta Nautica Collection.

Both the bottle release and the artwork celebrate the time-honored transatlantic journey of the wooden barrels used to age the spirit, which travel to Scotland from Spain and the U.S. “Through layered textures, flowing forms, and rich colors, I brought to life a mythical underwater world shaped by movement, discovery, and transformation,” Genser says.

See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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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,” says 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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