Artist Gloria Blancato was asleep in her bedroom on the early evening of June 24 when she was abruptly awakened by violent tremors. The shaking was so strong that the panes of her windows shattered, exploding into glass shards on her bedspread as the walls collapsed around her.

She held on tightly to the doorknob, the ground quivering beneath her, before finding a pair of shoes, slipping them on, and jumping out the window of the two-story building in the port city of Catia La Mar in La Guaira. Her feet are still swollen and her legs bruised from running among the debris, and she and her family have been sleeping outside for the last week.

“I send this with my eyes filled with tears,” Blancato said in a text message in Spanish to her friends, which she forwarded to Hyperallergic. “I love you, don't forget me.”

Blancato is among the tens of thousands of Venezuelans impacted by the 7.5- and 7.2-magnitude “doublet” earthquakes that struck the nation last week, devastating the northern coast and reverberating across densely populated urban areas.

Hyperallergic spoke to a dozen artists and cultural workers located in the hard-hit coastal region of La Guaira and in the capital city of Caracas. Many of the quotes in this article have been translated from Spanish, and we have included links to some artists’ social media profiles, where they are posting updates and sharing ways to send help.

Over the weekend, the official death toll surpassed 1,700, likely a drastic undercount, as at least 50,000 people remain unaccounted for. Many more are displaced and unhoused. Facing a narrowing window for finding survivors and a major humanitarian crisis, everyday citizens have become rescue workers, family WhatsApp groups have turned into fundraising operations, and close-knit artistic communities have mobilized ad hoc search groups and mutual aid networks.

The day after the earthquakes, friends and relatives of Onai Quiñonez marshaled to try to save the beloved painter, who was trapped under the rubble of his residential building. Sources close to Quiñonez told Hyperallergic that he did not survive.

“It was a beautiful effort, it came from the heart,” said artist Francisco Schutte, who works with concrete and helped source jackhammers and other tools to cut through slabs and beams.

Many of the most heartbreaking testimonies come from the coastal city, Venezuela's main port, known for its sandy beaches and for artist Carlos Cruz-Diez's multichromatic public artworks that tower over the glittering Caribbean Sea. But La Guaira also holds the history of another deadly catastrophe — the 1999 Vargas tragedy, a series of landslides and torrential rains in the eponymous state that killed thousands and destroyed entire neighborhoods. For many survivors, the earthquakes have reopened a painful wound.

“I was 11 years old at the time, and I lost everything, but I didn’t lose any family members,” said local textile artist Siul Rasse. “I’ve lost three relatives in the earthquakes, a niece and two cousins. I feel that I am reliving a trauma.”

Rasse was working on one of her intricate embroideries in her home and studio in La Guaira when her cell phone lit up with an urgent alert. Puzzled, she walked to her sister’s room, where the pair exchanged just a few words before the first earthquake hit.

“The shaking was extremely aggressive,” she told Hyperallergic in an audio message. “I ran toward the door and stayed there, waiting for it to pass.”

Rasse told Hyperallergic that her house in La Guaira is still standing, and she is grateful for the help she has received from friends and acquaintances in recent days — food, water, and some basic supplies. She mentioned that another artist, the photographer Azalia Licón, whose brother was killed in the earthquakes, has also been receiving donations thanks to the organized efforts of people in their community.

But Rasse and her sister are so nervous that they are taking turns sleeping, a bag packed with necessities at the ready should they have to run out again.

“I have moments when I'm calm, I have moments when I'm crying,” Rasse said. “Any little sound makes us anxious.”

The back-to-back tremors, the strongest in Venezuela in over a century, struck a nation woefully unprepared for such a disaster. Decades of crippling economic sanctions, hyperinflation, and mismanagement under the state regime have weakened the country's infrastructure and emergency response capabilities. Following the US abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the installation of Delcy Rodríguez as acting leader, President Donald Trump has leveraged foreign aid strategically, motivated by the nation's oil reserves.

The tragedy has been exacerbated by widespread power and internet outages that hamper communication and access to information. Armando Velutini Suñer, a Caracas-based sculptor who runs the technology incubator Artedita Studio, said that in the days since the earthquakes, he has pivoted to installing satellite antennas along the coastline.

“We’re doing this so that people can be in touch with their loved ones and have some peace,” said Velutini Suñer. “I’ve been very moved by the civic action and how artists have organized to help each other and move forward.”

“Us Venezuelans, when we support each other, anything is possible,” he said.

Stories of improvised aid efforts are so common within Venezuela's creative sectors that they appear to be the norm rather than the exception.

At the Universidad Nacional Experimental de las Artes in Caracas, a public university with programs in visual and audiovisual arts, theater, and dance, community members have established supply drop-off sites across several locations. Dozens of students enrolled at the school reportedly remain unaccounted for.

Polyriddim, Poliritmo, a Caracas-based cultural collective, had spent the spring running a series of events pairing talks and film screenings on the late philosopher Mark Fisher with DJ sets in the city's unconventional venues. To promote the gatherings, organizers had set up a WhatsApp group that was urgently repurposed last week. After several organizers witnessed a building collapse in the Los Palos Grandes area, the chat became, almost overnight, a lifeline for emotional support and the coordination of medical supplies.

“I think we had never experienced an emergency of this magnitude, where the diaspora of more than 9 million Venezuelans and the millions of Venezuelans living there had to collaborate so urgently,” said Berlin-based Venezuelan artist Ana Alenso, who is working with the group from afar.

“The frustration of not being there to help directly doesn’t go away, but I want to focus on the fact that there are many ways to support,” she said. “The big challenge now is sustaining these initiatives, because this will take time and there is still much to be done.”

In a moving photograph shared by artist Michael Wong, who attended the vigil for Onai Quiñonez, the late painter’s father holds up one of his son’s canvases recovered from the wreckage. Another photo shows a broken pottery wheel tray belonging to Quiñonez’s wife, Laura Silva, a ceramicist who survived the earthquake and led the rescue initiative.

Wong told Hyperallergic that “it is essential not to stop creating.”

“Something stuck with me that I heard at an exhibition opening: ‘Artists live to live’ — they never die. And Onai [Quiñonez] is proof of that. I never met him in person, but I knew his work, and after getting involved in the rescue effort, I feel him as a close friend and a great loss for art, not just for Venezuela, but for the world,” he said.

“I personally don’t like dwelling on the subject of death,” Wong continued, “but I’d like to be remembered the way I remember Onai today.”

Following the recent seizure of several objects from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection in June, the total valuation of looted artifacts surrendered by the museum now stands at a whopping $95 million. In addition to hundreds of small-scale items linked to smuggling schemes, investigators have seized 120 objects worth between $20,000 and $26 million from The Met's holdings since 2017.

The Met told the New York Times that the ongoing object recovery is a mutual effort between the museum's own provenance research team, which was instituted in 2023 and recently expanded to a 12-person operation led by former Sotheby's restitution head Lucian Simmons, and investigators from the Antiquities Trafficking Unit at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.

Per the Times, investigators had subpoenaed object records for museum-acquired pieces linked to trafficking networks and dealers suspected of fudging or omitting provenance information altogether. They later presented The Met with the evidence and supporting research to facilitate restitution.

Hyperallergic has contacted the Manhattan DA's Office and The Met for comment.

Investigators explained that the museum's own curatorial records, including condition reports and other notations identifying objects that had arrived at The Met encrusted in dirt, functioned as reliable evidence of illegal digging and trafficking on more than one occasion.

With origins across Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Turkey, several ancient sculptures and vessels acquired between 1971 and 2001 were among the objects recently extracted from The Met's collection this June — some of which have already been recorded as restituted on the museum's website. The museum clarified that the aforementioned objects weren't literally seized, but instead sent from the museum's holdings to the DA's office after being flagged as improperly acquired.

As investigators continue to identify, inventory, and appraise dozens of trafficked artifacts and antiquities from the museum's collection, The Met also noted to the Times that it has independently initiated 18 object restitutions since 2017. The museum also underscored its role in brokering the restitution of over 150 Cycladic antiquities from billionaire Leonard Stern's private collection to Greece in 2022 — though the Greek government agreed to allow The Met to continue displaying the sculptures through a 25-year loan.

Simmons said in a statement that the in-house assessments for each artifact are neither straightforward nor speedy, while Matthew Bogdanos, who steers the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, told the Times that the continued seizures at the museum “spoke for themselves.”

In Memoriam is published every Wednesday afternoon and honors those we recently lost in the art world.

Rune Mields (1935–2026)
German conceptual artist

Rife with geometric forms, musical notes, and monochromatic grids, Mields's body of work lingers in the space between order and expression. The self-taught artist spent five decades nurturing her interest in mathematics, ornamentation, and symbols across diagrammatic paintings and drawings. Her boundless creative energy even extended to her own gravestone at the Artists' Necropolis in Kassel, which she designed in 1992 and titled "La vita corre, come rivo fluente" (Life flows, like a fluctuating river).

Bae Young-whan (1969–2026)
South Korean contemporary artist

Bae, who represented South Korea at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, was known for his inventive use of materials, including cotton, glass bottles, turntables, flower petals, and even lyrics from K-Pop songs released during the 1980s pro-democracy movement — a major focus of his practice. His work has been exhibited at the New Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, among others.

Julia Jones Daniels (1931–2026)
North Carolina art and museum philanthropist

Daniels was a cornerstone figure in the art and culture ecosystem of Raleigh, along with her late husband, the newspaper publisher Frank Daniels Jr. Dubbed a "professional volunteer," she played a key leadership role at institutions such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the North Carolina Museum of Art, where she helped fund the steel tree sculpture that now stands at its entrance.

Brian McFeely (1977–2026)
Scottish street artist

The Edinburgh-based street artist and musician left his mark on bars, public spaces, galleries, and other buildings across the world. His first foray into graffiti over three decades ago brought him into an international network of artists. He completed his last mural in April in Næstved, Denmark.

Mustafa Monwar (1935–2026)
Bangladeshi artist and puppeteer

After the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 displaced millions of people, Monwar brought handmade puppets into refugee camps and staged performances for children. He continued his mission of sparking the imaginations of young people through his 12-year television program, introducing millions of Bangladeshi children to playful puppets who eventually became national symbols of joy and creativity.

Song Burnsoo (1943–2026)
South Korean printmaker and textile artist

A luminary mentor and former director of the Daejeon Museum of Art, Song helped build institutional support for future generations of Korean artists while cultivating his own practice across lithography, textile art, and other media. One of his favorite motifs was a rose and thorn and the shadow they cast — a vehicle for his explorations of symbolism, spirituality, and the Division of Korea.

Clara Straight (1919–2026)
Missouri art professor and watercolorist

The 106-year-old artist captured the natural beauty of Missouri, where she began making art with shoe polish at age three. After decades of travel and teaching, including at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Cornell University, she returned to her hometown of Yarrow to continue her daily watercolor practice.

Onai Quiñonez (1993–2026)
Venezuelan painter

Known for his gestural paintings and visceral still lifes, the Caraballeda-based artist pushed the boundaries of figuration in his work. Inspired by French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Quiñonez explored questions of fragility and empathy in contemporary life by focusing largely on the subject of raw meat. He was killed after two deadly earthquakes hit northern Venezuela on June 24, collapsing the building where he lived. He is survived by his wife, artist Laura Silva, and their dog, Petra.

This July, Los Angeles is rife with exhibitions that confront present-day challenges and conflicts in ways that are both pragmatic and poetic. Radical Kinship features eight women artists whose practices highlight informal communal networks, while Eva Aguila looks at the essential but contentious roles played by Mexican workers in the United States, framed by her own familial legacy. A career-spanning show on beloved Angeleno artist Barbara Carrasco at Charlie James Gallery showcases her lifelong synthesis of art and activism. And at Cevera Yoon, Jaime Pattison and Maura Brewer adapt the language and tools of the information economy to create haunting soundscapes and geometric abstractions.

Vincent Ramos: Notice of Demolition or The Horror-Vacui Heavy Haunts House Band for The Haunted House 

as-is, 1133 Venice Boulevard, Pico-Union, Los Angeles
Through July 18

By mining popular media and material artifacts, artist Vincent Ramos creates assemblages and collages that examine the affinities and frictions between Mexican-American culture and mainstream American culture as a whole. His evocative patchworks often pay homage to Latine performers or artists who achieved crossover success, such as Anthony Quinn (born Manuel Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca in Chihuahua) and Linda Ronstadt, as well as Herb Albert, a Jewish musician raised in Boyle Heights who helped introduce Latin American music to White audiences. Witty and insightful, Ramos’s poetic pastiches wade through the muddy hinterlands of hybridity, raising questions about which narratives are adopted, or excluded, from the mainstream.

Barbara Carrasco: On The Edge

Charlie James Gallery, 969 Chung King Road, Chinatown, Los Angeles
Through July 18

Throughout her five-decade career, Barbara Carrasco has been a leading voice in the space between art and activism, from her role as a muralist with the United Farm Workers and her once-censored mural “L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective” (1981), now on view at the city’s Natural History Museum, to bold, graphic portraits of Civil Rights icons such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Dolores Huerta. On the Edge presents new paintings of children detained under the US’s increasingly draconian immigration policies, each pictured with a butterfly, a hopeful symbol of liberation. The exhibition also features a selection of Carrasco’s historical works, highlighting her poignant juxtapositions of the personal and political.

Erotic Terrains 

The Loved One, 1634 West Temple Street, Historic Filipinotown, Los Angeles
Through July 24

The Loved One is a new art bookshop and gallery co-founded by publisher Hat & Beard Press and curatorial platform Wienholt Projects. (Art-savvy Angelenos may remember the building as the site of the Enzo Art Fair earlier this year.) Its inaugural exhibition, Erotic Terrains, is a group show primarily featuring LA-based artists who explore liminal spaces and the uncanny through painting, sculpture, photography, and collage. Highlights include Wyatt Mills’s figurative surrealism, Alex McAdoo’s suburban psychedelia, and Francesca Gabbiani’s cut-paper palm tree on fire in “Mutation XLVI” (2023).

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the City Council will provide the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) with its highest-ever yearly appropriation as part of the city's Fiscal Year 2027 budget.

A spokesperson for the Mayor's Office told Hyperallergic that the city government will give $323.8 million to the agency, which administers public funding to arts institutions throughout the city. The appropriation marks a nearly 7% increase from last year's then-record $299.6 million investment.

In the hours before the July 1 official budget deadline, Mamdani struck a “handshake” deal with City Council Speaker Julie Menin and other members of the Council on how to distribute $125.8 billion across the city government. The funding package is one of the first tests of Mamdani's progressive campaign promises to make life more affordable for everyday New Yorkers.

In a statement to Hyperallergic, Mamdani referred to the city's artists and cultural institutions as New York's “beating heart.”

"They fill our streets, stages, galleries, and neighborhoods with art and ideas that draw people from around the world," Mamdani continued. "But a crushing affordability crisis has threatened to drive out the very artists who have long defined life in this city."

The approved DCLA funding is over $100 million more than the amount City Council had initially proposed in a preliminary plan for the 2027 budget. Each year, the budget is shaped during a months-long dialogue between City Council and the Mayor's Office.

Already serving as the largest municipal funder of culture in the United States, the DCLA distributes hundreds of millions of dollars to New York City arts institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and 38 other members of the Cultural Institutions Group. However, in recent years, arts advocates have called out borough-based inequities among DCLA-funded institutions.

The agreed-upon budget also establishes a "Cultural Stability Fund" that would make a $10 million pool available to struggling cultural organizations each year through the 2029 fiscal year. According to a press release, the fund, which will be managed by the DCLA, will be available to "assist eligible organizations experiencing emergency circumstances."

The fund’s creation comes months after art leaders urged City Council to establish an emergency resource for artists whose public arts grants were in jeopardy under the Trump administration.

During one hearing last November, local arts leaders, including playwrights Annie Dorsen and Lynn Nottage, expressed concerns that queer artists and artists of color would be erased from cultural life as a result of the Trump administration's erratic and ideologically fueled grant recisions. An emergency fund, Nottage argued, could "serve as a powerful rebuttal to the federal efforts at suppression."

"My administration is proud to make a historic, record-level investment in New York City's arts and cultural organizations," Mamdani said. "Because we believe the people who make this city what it is should be able to build their lives here.”

Hyperallergic’s monthly Opportunities Listings provide a resource to artists and creatives looking for funding and community support to further their work.

Residencies, Workshops, & Fellowships

Paul & Daisy Soros — Fellowships for New Americans 2027
Up to $90,000 for immigrant & New American visual artists, architects & designers pursuing MFA, MA, PhD & other graduate degrees in any field at any accredited US institution. Read more on Hyperallergic.
Deadline: October 29, 2026 | pdsoros.org

Ucross – Spring 2027 Artist Fellowships
General Studio Fellows and Native American Fellowship recipients enjoy uninterrupted time and space, private studios, meals, and a $1,500 stipend on a 20,000-acre ranch in Wyoming. The application fee is $40; this is waived for NAF applicants.
Deadline: July 15, 2026 | ucrossfoundation.org

Peters Valley School of Craft Residency
This program is open to artists working in blacksmithing, ceramics, fibers, jewelry and fine metals, wood, and printmaking. Residents receive a $600 or $900 stipend to work in fully equipped studios for two or three weeks. Housing is included. There is a $10 application fee.
Deadline: July 31, 2026| petersvalley.org

Wave Hill — 9th Annual AnkhLave Garden Project Fellowship
Now accepting applications from NYC-based, BIPOC artists. Applications are welcome from artists who work across media. Six artists will receive $1,800 stipends for the Winter Fellowship.
Deadline: August 10, 2026 | wavehill.org

Grants & Awards

2026 AICA International Incentive Prize for Art Critics
Critics are invited to submit a 2000–3000 essay on the theme "Art criticism and eco-socially engaged practices: new writing, new challenges?" First place will receive €2000, second place €1000, and third place €500.
Deadline: August 6, 2026 | aica.org

The Bennett Prize – 2026/2027 Award Cycle
For women figurative realist painters. The grand prize winner receives $75,000 and a solo exhibition. The first runner-up receives $10,000. A five-person jury will select 10 finalists to be featured in a group exhibition that will travel the US. The application fee is $50. Read more on Hyperallergic.
Deadline: September 19, 2026 | thebennettprize.org

Hyundai Motor Group – The 7th VH Award
A global award for emerging media artists engaging with the context of Asia, featuring grants, a residency with Ars Electronica, and global exhibitions. Read more on Hyperallergic.
Deadline: July 21, 2026 | vhaward.com

Leeway Foundation – Art and Change Grant
This grant provides up to $5,000 to fund art for social change projects by women, trans, and/or gender nonconforming artists and cultural producers living in Greater Philadelphia.
Deadline: August 3, 2026 | leeway.org

To feature an opportunity from your organization on Hyperallergic, get in touch at hyperallergic.com/advertise.

Philip Guston loved poets. In 1968, after he and his wife, the artist and poet Musa McKim, and their teenage daughter moved to Woodstock, New York, he began to radically shift his work from abstraction to a cartoonish world of people and things. This change coincided with his beginning to collaborate with a close circle of poet friends, particularly Clark Coolidge, who lived nearby. From then until his death in 1980, he did drawings for many poems, including ones by Coolidge, Bill Berkson, and William Corbett, and also gave drawings to illustrate covers of inexpensively printed little magazines and poetry books published on a mimeograph machine. His generosity to poets was unmatched by other artists. With few exceptions, he was scorned by critics, artist friends, and the art world. It was the poets who saw the change, supported, and celebrated it, because they agreed with the sentiment expressed by a line from Robert Kelly’s poem, “Finding the measure” (circa 1968): “Style is death.”

Life With P. - Philip Guston: Paintings and Drawings 1964–1978 at Hauser and Wirth brings together work from this time when he pared down his drawings to a line or two and began again. Drawing, particularly the bare line, was central to Guston’s practice. This period of questioning resonated with Coolidge, who wanted to move beyond his early poems, which were sonic and decidedly non-descriptive, without giving up his love for sound. While the exhibition focuses on the transformation that Guston’s work underwent, it calls attention to the principal support he got from McKim as his lifelong partner, inspiration, and a poet in her own right.

Three large easel paintings in one room are about Philip and Musa. In “Untitled” (1976), a large cadmium-red head, set against a dirty grayish-pink ground, is rising from a red horizon, eyes looking up. “Blue Cover” (1977) shows the couple pressed close together in bed, under a plain light blue cover, their heads in the blanket, underscoring their mortality. “Two Hearts” (1978) depicts a black heart pierced by a gray arrow lying on top of a red heart with a row of stitches placed on a low blue pedestal. The black and red hearts are a motif by Guston that I have never seen before; it is heartbreaking, intimate, wounded, and desperate. His use of pinks, blues, and cadmium reds adds a contradictory note of sweetness to his melancholy, desperate subject matter. Lush and forlorn, Guston’s art is full of contradictions.

What can the pigments of Paleolithic cave paintings tell us about the artists who painted them? Deep in the ancient caves of Spain and Portugal, scientists have discovered evidence of ancient human DNA on cave walls. The find proves for the first time that DNA can survive for millennia within the paint applied to rock walls, opening a future pathway to recovering the identities of ancient artists from thousands of years ago. 

A new study published in the journal Nature Communications on June 23 examines ancient DNA preserved within pigment samples extracted from 24 rock art panels within 11 caves across Spain and Portugal. The team, led by Alba Bossoms Mesa, is largely from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, but the research is a part of a much larger, multinational project called First-Art. The consortium includes a network of archaeologists, geologists, scientists, and cultural heritage specialists in Spain, Portugal, Italy, China, Germany, and the United Kingdom, each working to date and examine the chemical composition of prehistoric rock art. The discovery of DNA in this artwork has created a new window into the past that goes beyond researchers’ previous reliance on human bones, sediment, teeth, and faunal remains to reconstruct Paleolithic communities. 

The researchers examined simple marks found in nine sites of the eleven total caves, as well as hand stencils discovered in the Maltravieso Cave at Extremadura and figurative paintings at the Cave of Altamira in Cantabria. Although only a limited amount of these samples contained human DNA, the scientists note that “given the diversity of rock art techniques and contexts, it remains possible that rock art from other sites, periods, or styles could more consistently yield ancient DNA.” Some of the most spectacular rock art known today is outside of Europe and China, in South America. It is possible that the methods developed in Spain and Portugal may now give us more insight into the artists who painted the Cueva de las Manos (Santa Cruz Province, Argentina), which contains hundreds of handprints dating between 13,000 and 9,500 years ago.

Whether it is the chemistry needed to create synthetic pigments like Egyptian Blue or the understanding of kiln thermodynamics necessary for ceramicists to fire their pottery, science and visual art have often had a symbiotic relationship. Monica Green, a specialist in the history of science and ancient DNA (also called “aDNA”), noted the importance of this area of study in comments to Hyperallergic:   

“Retrieving molecular evidence of the past — whether of humans themselves or the lifeforms they interacted with — has been revolutionizing our understanding of everything from mass migrations to pandemics,” Green said. “‘Data’ can come from anywhere: from the plaque on teeth to the floor of a cave.”

Green and many others have long contended that the developing field of archaeogenetics offers more opportunity than ever to recover the histories of people, pandemics, and migration. New analyses of everything from the linen strands of the Shroud of Turin to the artworks of Leonardo da Vinci also illustrate the latent potential of aDNA analysis for the field of art history. 

While there are definite limits to what archaeogenetic data can and cannot reveal, microscopic clues are telling us more than ever about prehistoric, ancient, and medieval artists — and even the forgeries of yore. As we are only starting to understand, artworks carry much more than a visual message. They are also biological archives that provide access to our past. 

You might have grown up being told you were doing the most — but on the ballroom floor, that's the point. Posing, strutting, voguing, and flaunting the parts of yourself the world might have shamed are celebrated.

If you've ever been to a ball, you know the night always gets initiated with an L.S.S. (Legends, Statements, and Stars), a cocktail hour dedicated to toasting the members of the scene who are paving the way. The commentator, the grand marshal of the night, starts calling out members according to hierarchy. As the commentator calls out each legend, statement, and star to perform, the crowd claps, tilts their heads to one side, and snaps their fingers as a form of respect when the performer lands a dip — the period at the end of every performance sentence. A “Legend” is a master of their category, a “Statement” is cementing their place in the scene by dominating their category, and a “Star” is causing a buzz in their respective category. And if you’re lucky, you might just bear witness to an icon or pioneer — the OG elders who built ballroom into what it is today, many of whom we lost during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

If Icon Andre Mizrahi Clark is in attendance, you’re in for a treat. 

The commentator will cue the DJ to pause the music. In anticipation of what's to come, the DJ hits a double beat crash — dun-dun. “When you talk about Ballroom Royalty” — dun-dun. “When you talk about an Icon, a Pioneer” — dun-dun. “When you talk about a Hall of Famer” — dun-dun. The commentator gives us easter eggs, hoping the crowd catches the clues before getting specific … “Seven. Letters.” Dun-dun-dun-dun.

As the music revs back up, we cheer because we know exactly who they’re referring to. The crowd parts like the Red Sea. Amid all of the kitty-kat meow of today’s Vogue Fem performers emerges the stern, calm energy of a lion tipping on its toes that is Icon Andre, founder of the House of Mizrahi.

In a funky hairdo and eclectic ensemble, the Brooklyn native became the first performer to vogue at the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1999 and is still breaking the beat decades later. The kids in the scene all gasp as a performance language they may not be familiar with fills the room — a type of language that could only have come from the struggle the elders dealt with decades prior. This Old Way flare has hints of karate, b-boy, and popping and locking, and derives from a category called “Pose, Pose, Pose,” which, legend has it, originated with the queer kids incarcerated on Rikers Island recreating poses from magazines. And yet it still carries the spirit of New Way, a category Andre first became a Legend for and best describes his performance style. 

I sat down with him at the heart of where it all began: the Christopher Street Pier, a historic playground for New York's queer community. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Hyperallergic: What is your relationship to the piers? 

Icon Andre Clark: My mother had 13 kids and I was the youngest boy.
People always saw femininity in me 'cause I was always running around with all the girls, jumping rope. My best friend from Brooklyn, Sean Coleman [founder of Destination Tomorrow], told me that he was gay.
And I was like, “Okay, cool. That's you or whatever.” I thought he was setting me up to tell my mom I'm gay.

After about a week, I finally said, “Yeah, I think I am.” He took me to the village — where we’re sitting now. It was the place where everybody hung out: gays, trans, drags, butch queens, studs — it was so diverse. I said, “Wow, there is a place for me.” Trust me, it looked nothing like this! It was beat down, dirty, trash everywhere. We used to vogue by the entrance. Nobody would ever be back here unless it was for sex.
In the 2000s, they cleaned everything out. 

For the past three decades, pioneering gender and queer theorist Jack Halberstam has redefined his fields of study through unconventional perspectives and cultural forms — as he puts it, “tell[ing] stories slightly differently than the way they’ve been told in the past.” In his seminal 1998 book Female Masculinity, he argued for masculinity in people other than cis men as a category all its own rather than a quality inherent to “maleness.” Since then, he has examined the myriad ways that queerness and gender nonconformity manifest in our surrounding world through subjects as diverse as Lady Gaga and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963). 

For his forthcoming book, Anarchitecture After Everything: A Trans Manifesto (MIT Press, 2026), Halberstam shifts his attention to the built environment with a focus on radical architectural and bodily interventions by visual artists, including Gordon Matta-Clark and Cassils. In exploring the concept of anarchitecture —  a term Matta-Clark coined to describe the dismantling or deconstruction of structures — in relation to transness, Halberstam asks readers to imagine how we can make a better world by first unmaking it. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Hyperallergic: I should start by asking you about your new book. How did you get to the idea of anarchitecture and its relationship to transness? 

Jack Halberstam: I came across Gordon Matta-Clark about 10 years ago when there was a big retrospective of his work at the Bronx Museum. I didn't have any particular expectations about this show because I didn't know much about him, and I didn't see how it would relate to my own interests. But I had been given the ARCAS prize to write about sexuality in the built environment, and this seemed like it might help me think about how to approach that topic. I went back several times over the course of the show, and by the time I was finished really sitting with the work, I felt like I had caught a glimpse of a new language, a different language. 

What stayed with me is that when Gordon Matta-Clark was creating these shapes in abandoned buildings, I felt like he was inscribing some kind of hieroglyphic script across the city, and in that script there's a narrative about transness, that's one way of saying it. The narrative is something like this: If conventionally the house has been cast as a kind of female entity, a body that houses people, and the architect is conventionally — within architecture itself, but also in the works of people like Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead — cast as not just a man, but a superman, an übermensch, who knows how to build the world, then this counterintuitive action against the house that Gordon Matta-Clark takes could be read as a kind of sex reassignment surgery, to put it in the most basic terms. 

I published an article called “Unbuilding Gender” in Places Journal as a result of the ARCAS prize. After I finished that article, I realized I was not at all done with this topic and with this gift of anarchitecture. Now I have a whole book exploring the logic of anarchitecture, the relationship between its understanding of the city and the politics of urban gay and lesbian life in the city, and ultimately the rendering of transness that is available to us through anarchitecture, which is radically different from the rendering of transness that we get through the law or through the analysis of medical discourses and so on.

As negotiations for the second contract with the Guggenheim Museum in New York City enter their sixth month, unionized staff across several departments have voted to authorize a strike if necessary. Organized under UAW Local 2110, the Guggenheim's union has been pushing for increased job protections and higher pay following the abrupt layoff of 20 employees in February 2025.

After filing a grievance with the National Labor Relations Board regarding the layoffs, the union is zeroing in on additional job security measures and improved severance pay. Union chair Drew Reynolds, who works as a museum educator, said in a press statement that the layoffs that affected 14 union positions were implemented “chaotically,” and alleged that the impacted workers were made to leave the museum “with no advance notice and no union representation.”

“The cuts to staff created hardships for those of us remaining because we were forced to pick up a lot of extra work,” Reynolds continued. “Workers took the brunt of the cuts while museum leadership did not give up a penny in their salaries.”

Reynolds pointed to the Guggenheim Foundation hiring Melissa Chiu as the museum's incoming director this September, among other executive-level hires, while entry-level staff continue to make less than $50,000 annually. According to the union, over half of the museum's workforce earns less than $71,000 annually. The minimum amount that a single adult with no children must earn to keep up with the cost-of-living threshold in New York City is $70,334, according to the Mayor's Office.

The Guggenheim is currently offering a four-year contract with a 3% pay increase retroactive to January and scheduled 2.75% increases for the following three years. However, the union's bargaining team says that the proposed increases don't line up with NYC's current inflation rate of 5.1%, and also don't account for skyrocketing healthcare costs.

The union is advocating for a three-year agreement with a 5% retroactive increase for 2026, and 4.25% bumps for the following two years.

The union is also seeking a “modest reduction” in healthcare costs for employees making less than $75,000, saying that annual coverage for a single adult begins at $1,600 — a figure that nearly triples for employees with families. Concerns regarding healthcare premiums and financial instability were highlighted at a union rally outside the museum during the reception for Carol Bove's solo exhibition earlier in March.

In a statement to Hyperallergic, a spokesperson for the Guggenheim said that the museum is “currently at the bargaining table to negotiate in good faith towards a renewal of the contract” and that the museum and the union bargaining teams have reached an agreement on “a number of issues.”

Archivist Anton Sherin emphasized that union members are deeply committed to their work, but they “need management to understand that what they are offering is unsustainable.”

UPSTATE NEW YORK — At Scenic Hudson’s River Center on Friday, saris hanging from clotheslines billowed gracefully in a serene, tent-like installation. Organized by Eve Morgenstern, founder of the climate and art nonprofit Soon is Now, Museum of Fishes & Greens was the result of a collaboration between the Food Studio Collective and local artists in the Sundarbans forest in India, who are featured in a short documentary discussing how they navigate ecological precarity while sustaining households, markets, and biodiversity.

This conscientious show kicked off my romp through the seventh annual Upstate Art Weekend (UAW), a celebration of art around the Hudson Valley region and beyond held from June 25 to 29. With exhibitions, site-specific installations, performances, and curated activities offered by over 160 organizations and artists to choose from, my self-designed itinerary brought me through the flourishing art scene that reflects the bounty of the interconnected arts community in New York. If UAW’s unusual format is any indication, many of us in the region embrace an “outside-the-system” approach to presenting and enjoying art.