At Windsor Castle, a one-of-a-kind architectural marvel isn’t a structural part of the building itself or even a full-size feature. Here, you’ll find Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, widely regarded as the largest and most famous in the world. Designed by architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, the house was built between 1921 and 1924 and contains items and furnishings conceived of by hundreds of the leading craftspeople and artisans of the day.

Queen Mary, consort to King George V between 1910 and 1936, was an enthusiast of all things miniature. Her dolls’ house even contains scale versions of nearly 600 real books in its library, including works by literary giants like A.A. Milne and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Commissioned from publishers around the U.K. and farther afield, many of these books are also held in the collections of the V&A, where they have been on long-term loan since 1916.

A recent video produced by the museum glimpses some of these tiny treasures with the expert guidance of National Art Library Assistant Librarian Amy McMullan and Catherine Yvard, Curator of National Art Library Collections. Examples include a red leather-bound Bible published in 1896 by Glasgow-based David Bryce & Son, in addition to a Quran, a collection of poems by Robert Burns, and more.

The National Art Library is housed within the V&A, and more than a million publications related to art, design, and performance comprise an archive that spans the 8th century to today.

Many more miniature books comprise the museum’s holdings, in addition to Queen Mary’s collection. Little almanacs in their embellished folios were published annually and included notable dates, such as sunrises and sunset times, holidays, and other practical information. Many of the titles sport gilt edges, marbled papers, and even metal cases that double as lockets so that they could be worn.

The collection includes diminutive dictionaries, a souvenir of The Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, and children’s books—including a number of tunnel books, or paper peep-shows. These accordion-style tomes look at first glance like any other publication, but they expand into long tunnels through which viewers can take in a layered, dimensional scene.

The oldest object in the V&A’s collection is an early 1700s silver-bound miniature prayerbook in French that’s embellished with the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli. And the tiniest is fittingly called The Smallest Book in the World, published in 2002 and measuring 2.4 by 2.9 millimeters. It was designed by a German typographer and is so tiny that it’s accompanied by a small pamphlet showing what you would see if you could page through the book. As McMullen explains, the physical size of the book begs an interesting question: “Is it really a book if you can’t read it?”

Visitors are welcome to peruse the online catalogue and interact with items in the collection in person in the V&A East Storehouse’s reading rooms. Explore more on the museum’s YouTube channel.

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Joy Machine is pleased to present Life Forms, a solo exhibition by Janny Baek, on view from March 20 to May 9, 2026.

How do we conceive of change? With fear, excitement, or uncertainty? As Janny Baek builds sculptural ceramics of speculative beings and imagined landscapes, she grapples with these questions. The work follows its own dream logic, one that accepts incongruity and dissonance as necessary to play and experimentation. Marbling hunks of colored clay, coiling bases, and molding a singular material into something new is part of an exploratory practice that embraces transformation and its often strange outcomes.

Life Forms emerges from this dual meaning, invoking both the act of creation and the fantastical works it produces. Neither wholly abstract nor representational, Baek’s sculptures draw on natural structures and processes and invite us to question how we interpret the world around us. Recognizable forms like open blossoms, birds, and creatures are met with the unexpected. These lively components make even the more abstract works appear animate, like ambiguous organisms that might decide to scuttle away. They evoke something primordial and yet are exhilaratingly new.

Baek paints in the way she sketches, as a means of developing ideas and visualizing their potential. For her ceramics, she incorporates hand building alongside the Japanese pottery technique known as nerikomi, which involves splicing and designing patterns with strips of colored clay. “My material choices are a way of thinking about natural processes: color gradients as the continuous nature of change, a multitude of colors as potential, abundance, and vitality, and patterns as signals and communications,” she says.

Hovering between worlds, Baek’s work populates a speculative environment in which beings morph, mutate, and blossom, their individual features forming an otherworldly lineage that’s recognizable but not identical. While “temporarily and imperfectly captured in a moment of many possible transformations,” the works beckon us into a world in which change is not only inevitable but also the most alluring proposition.

Life Forms is Baek’s Chicago debut. An opening reception will be held on March 20, and the artist will be present. See more from Baek previously on Colossal.

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What is a web to the spider? A home, a tool, simply something they cling to? Tomás Saraceno presents these questions in a new segment from Art21, in which filmmakers visit his Berlin studio and examine the machinations of his collaborative practice, extending from a team of people to the tiny critters beneath our feet.

Saraceno continually considers how humans occupy space and how such environments inform the ways we connect with the world around us. This short documentary, which is part of the “Realms of the Real” episode, reviews several of the artist’s projects, from his suspended installations to his more participatory community projects.

Several artworks presented in the film have been previously featured on Colossal, and the film offers insight into the evolution of Saraceno’s thinking over several years. Much of his work strives for connection and empathy building, which he explains through the structure of the web. “It’s really trying to extend the ability of understanding who is our family, right? Who is our brothers, sisters, and grandfathers?” he says. “By allowing others to admire these incredible webs, they will become more empathetic.”

Find more Art21 films on YouTube, along with some of our favorites previously on Colossal.

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Leipzig, Germany-based artist Alexander Endrullat has traded traditional Intaglio printing plates for discarded laptops. His ongoing series titled Off the Grid emerged from a familiar yet annoying scenario: owning an older device that can no longer be updated, rendering it practically unusable. Endrullat’s frustration led him to a moment of impulsivity as he pushed his device through a printing press, coincidentally discovering the distinctive technique.

“One of the most interesting aspects of the process is how clearly the progressive destruction of the devices becomes visible after each print,” the artist explains. With each pass through the device becomes increasingly altered, revealing details about its internal structures and their previous owners—worn keys that must have been used the most, traces of sticker residue, or remnants of webcam covers. Wiping off ink in between prints also becomes more challenging throughout the process, as glass screens and touchpads begin to crack.

The artist’s studio printing press is just about one hundred years old, introducing a fascinating contrast between the longevity of tools—both robust and enduring or short-lived, perhaps even reminiscent of planned obsolescence. “The series reflects on materiality, consumption, and the hidden architectures of
digital devices,” he says. “Although I might also simply enjoy the sound a laptop makes the first time it runs through the press.”

Endrullat hopes to experiment with printing entire computer setups, complete with mice, keyboards, monitors, and more, which would eventually call for a different type of press. Take a peek at the artist’s process and find more work on his Instagram.

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In the practices of Beverly Price and Gordon Parks, photography operates on a continuum. Images, for them, are both dynamic and archival, documenting a singular moment that continues to communicate with the viewer long after that time has passed. A Language We Share, opening this month at the Center for Art and Advocacy, probes these expansive and evolving interpretations of the practice by putting Price and Parks in direct conversation.

One of the most lauded photographers of his time, Parks (1912-2006) embedded himself in American life from the 1940s onward, creating distinctive images for magazines like Ebony and Glamour and embarking on projects rooted in civil rights and social justice. He considered his work not only a way to capture the realities of what was happening in homes, offices, and the streets from New York to Washington D.C. to Chicago but also an urgent means of advocacy. “I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs,” he said. “I knew at that point I had to have a camera.”

When Parks died in 2006, Price was just being released after being incarcerated and wouldn’t pick up a camera for another decade. But when she did, she entered into a dialogue with the late photographer. Price, who was a 2023 fellow at the center, similarly considers her practice advocacy for those who might not otherwise be heard, particularly focusing on prevention and the children most affected by the same issues Parks had grappled with.

As Price began to create images around her Washington D.C. neighborhood of Southeast Anacostia, a geographical overlap developed between the two photographers. In A Language We Share, we witness the affinities between Price and Parks in a presentation that explores how these particular social and cultural landscapes have evolved and the people most affected by their realities.

One throughline is that both photographers frequently focus on children. In an Anacostia housing project, Parks captures an adorable troupe of young dancers and their synchronized movements. Price, too, homes in on a moment of joy and reverie in an image of two drenched boys enjoying an open fire hydrant on a presumably scorching day. Childhood, in their works, is both sacred and vulnerable, and compounding forces like police violence, poverty, and discrimination threaten its sanctity.

The wide-reaching impacts of the carceral system also permeate throughout the exhibition. In an image from 1963 Harlem, Parks captures a young boy casually leaning up against a temporary barricade, while another photo from that time documents a protest against the police state. There’s also his striking look into a Chicago jail in which a man rests his hand through the steel bars, his shadow framed by the cage on the wall nearby.

Price, too, nods to policing with a tightly cropped photo of someone showing off an Air Jordan, an electronic monitor fastened just above the sneaker. “Photography, for me, is a powerful tool for social justice—a means to document truth, challenge perceptions, and advocate for change,” Price says in her artist statement. “It is my hope that through my work, viewers will gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of the black experience and join in the collective effort to create a more just and equitable world.”

A Language We Share runs from March 20 to June 19 in Brooklyn.

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From unassuming hunks of Carrara marble and limestone, Matthew Simmonds carves realistic, miniature gothic cathedral arches, stairwells, and colonnades. Often based on architectural details of real places, such as cities around Tuscany and Germany’s Bamberg Cathedral, the sculptures portray intimate details of corners, vaulted ceilings, arcades, and stairwells that can sometimes be peeked through additional apertures. The artist’s meticulously carved marble and limestone forms reveal smooth, ornate interiors while highlighting the natural quality of the stone.

Lately, Simmonds has been working consistently on a range of commissions, and he’s taking advantage of a current quiet period to return to experimentation in the studio. He tells Colossal, “I am interested in clarifying what I want to say with various themes in the work, in particular the role space and light play and how this can express a sense of the sacred in the inner world of the sculpture.”

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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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