VENICE — Artists and cultural workers made history at the Venice Biennale today as they launched a major strike that disrupted the pre-opening of the international exhibition. It is the first cultural strike in the biennale's 131-year history.

At least 27 of the exhibition’s 100 national pavilions were partially or fully shut down this morning, May 8, while artists draped or altered their works in the main exhibition In Minor Keys as part of a 24-hour strike for Palestine and for workers' rights. The Arsenale complex, one of the two exhibition venues, was shuttered in advance of the protest.

Beginning at 4:30pm, a massive protest timed with the strike saw thousands of people marching on Via Garibaldi to the Arsenale, filling the city’s streets with Palestinian flags and banners. Upon arrival, they found the Arsenale completely shut down and barricaded by Italian riot police.

“I come from a family of genocide survivors, and genocide is personal, but also anyone, I think, with a moral conscience, should realize that what is happening is a genocide and should stand against it in whatever way they can,” artist Nina Katchadourian, whose work is included in the Biennale’s main exhibition, told Hyperallergic.

“So I’m doing a tiny piece today by deciding to mark my own work with a sign of solidarity and show up to this march,” she said.

Mohammad Joha, a Gaza-born artist based in Marseilles, is another one of the artists in the main exhibition. His mother was killed in her sleep when an Israeli air strike hit their home, he told Hyperallergic. His sister was killed, too. The family also lost 10 children. 

“Art should not be a cover for genocide,” he said at the protest. “I’m calling on all artists to rise up and resist art washing of mass murder.” 

Dozens of police officers blocked the entrance to the Arsenale as marchers approached the complex, where Israel’s temporary pavilion is located. A tense standoff ensued when protesters attempted to enter the Arsenale, raising their arms in the air to avoid touching police. Police beat back protesters using batons and blocked them with their shields.

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Today’s strike is the outcome of months of organizing by the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) together with local activist groups including Sale Docks, Mi Riconosci?, and Biennalocene. At least three Italian unions joined the strike, guaranteeing protection to striking members.

The fully or partially shuttered pavilions include Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy (performers only), Ireland, Japan (performers only), Korea, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Catalonia, Cyprus, Czech Republic and Slovakia, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey.

"No artist or cultural worker should be asked to share a platform with a state perpetrating genocide," the striking parties said in a joint statement today. They noted that the strike is also an expression of workers' indignation over "appalling" labor conditions in the cultural sector.

Among the artists striking and marching today was Gabrielle Goliath, whose exhibition for South Africa’s national pavilion was abruptly pulled by the country’s government. The presentation, which is based on her long-running performance project Elegy and mourns victims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, found an alternative home at the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in Castello.

“It was an experience prefaced with violent cancellation,” Goliath told Hyperallergic at the march.

“But what followed was a massive outpouring of support, and the independent exhibition that's happening here in Venice would not have been possible without the rallying of so many supporters and allies, courageous allies,” she said.

Members of the art world class who were roaming the Giardini to see and be seen were welcomed with shuttered pavilions and statements such as, "We stand with Palestine because we know by now that the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the world."

The Belgian pavilion blocked its entrance with a row of white plaques with the word "STOP."

The Japanese Pavilion posted a statement on its steps that partially reads, "No artwashing. No genocide pavilion."

"Genocide pavilion” refers to the Israeli pavilion in the activists' parlance.

The British Pavilion was also closed today, but it posted a more neutral statement attributing the closure to “the Italian cultural workers' strike.”

At the Arsenale section of In Minor Keys, the Biennale’s main exhibition, French Guianese artist Tabita Rezaire altered her installation Omo Elu and Mother Trinity (2024) to include several Palestinian flags. Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar displayed a poster that reads "Palestine is the future of the world."

The strike follows a loud but peaceful demonstration in front of the Israeli pavilion on Wednesday, May 6, joined by hundreds.

"The Biennale and the Italian government continue to support Netanyahu’s government," said ANGA in a statement, and wondered: "Why is the red carpet being rolled out for a state responsible for genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing?”

Editor’s note: This is a developing story. Check back for updates to this article as the event unfolds.

It feels appropriate that Mierle Laderman Ukeles operated mostly beneath the notice of the general public for decades. As a “maintenance artist,” she focused on marginal labor, such as the upkeep of public spaces or the unpaid maternal and feminine labor that for a long time wasn’t thought of as proper work, and sometimes still isn’t. In 2017, 40 years after she became artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, Ukeles received her first career retrospective at the Queens Museum, which brought her wider attention. Now, the documentary Maintenance Artist (2025) has hit theaters, offering an easily digestible biography to spread the word about Ukeles.

It’s opportune that the film releases so close to the Duchamp exhibition at MoMA, since his influence on Ukeles is one of the first things she references — she says he gave her “the gift of naming and renaming,” or recognizing how art could be made by recontextualizing the familiar. But, as she also points out, he and her other male heroes like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock “didn’t change diapers.” Indeed, it was during her struggle to continue working as an artist after having a baby that she drafted her 1969 “CARE” manifesto, in which she announced herself a maintenance artist. (There’s a funny bit in the film wherein Ukeles recounts Lucy Lippard calling her and asking, “Are you real, or did Jack Burnham make you up?” after Burnham published excerpts of the manifesto in Artforum.)

That emphasis on gendered expectations for artists recurs throughout Ukeles’s interviews. At one point, she bluntly tells director Toby Perl Freilich, “If I was a male artist, I wouldn’t be making maintenance art.” A significant part of her efforts go into recognizing the discounted labor in all fields. She talks of how Pop art and Minimalism “were infected by all sorts of strains of maintenance,” but did not “acknowledge that whatsoever.” As an example, she cites Richard Serra’s monumental sculptures. They “came out of worlds of work — steel makers and shipbuilders. But who are the people? Who does this? There is only the unique artist. That’s what bugged me.”

Performance artists tend to make for crowd-pleasing documentary subjects; there’s a reason the Marina Abramovic film did so well. Solely reading about a performance piece can make your eyes glaze over. It’s a form meant to be experienced, and if you can’t witness it in person, then a recording can work in a pinch. The documentary mode jells particularly well with Ukeles’s art because she’s already investigating the minutiae of labor, so an added layer of her explaining the logistics of each piece enhances it. 

Take "I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day” (1976), an enormous mosaic of 700 Polaroid photos taken of maintenance workers at a Financial District skyscraper. As Ukeles recounts, the Polaroids are more than an aesthetic decision — to gain the trust of the workers and reassure them that she wasn’t a spy from either union or management, she took pictures via a method that would leave no secret negatives. Such efforts translate into a camaraderie that is evident across both the archival and contemporary footage, in which she and myriad municipal workers address each other on a first-name basis with an easy cordiality.

While most artist documentaries glorify individuals, Maintenance Artist typically portrays Ukeles as just one actor within a broader community. That said, the film almost exclusively focuses on Ukeles’s work in New York City, sidestepping that she lives partly in Jerusalem and is active in the art community there, teaching at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. (She was also a signatory of a 2023 open letter criticizing the art world for not sufficiently condemning the October 7 attack.) The documentary might help more of us consider and appreciate the maintenance communities both in the art world and in our everyday lives, and what else still goes unnoticed or under-recognized.

Maintenance Artist (2025), directed by Toby Perl Freilich, is screening in venues across the United States through October 22.

Mary Frank charted a far different path from her male counterparts in the second half of the 20th century, who rejected the handmade in favor of fabrication. Frank, who is in her early 90s, and has been making work rooted in mythology and her study of dance with Martha Graham for decades, has long deserved to have her multi-genre work celebrated by a New York museum. The fact that this has not happened is not simply a matter of neglect or oversight — it is one of the many instances where, over time, prejudice against her aesthetic independence has become regarded as truth. Until that viewpoint changes, exhibitions such as Mary Frank at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects will have to do.

Curated by Harvey, the exhibition focuses on Frank’s sculpture done between 1958 and 1985, including 11 sculptures made of wood, bronze, and ceramic, ranging from ones that fit in your palm to a large ceramic head seen in profile. Complementing this group are 5 works on paper, three of which are rendered in black ink. The two exceptions are a monotype, “Lovers” (c. 1980), and an oil-on-paper work, “Chasm” (1990), of a landscape in which a scumbled yellow sky illuminates the narrow passage between two different-colored mountains.

At the outset of her career, Frank announced her interest in the mythic in “Winged Woman” (1958), a chiseled wood sculpture made from a single section of a telephone pole. She maintains an impossible pose, standing on one leg with the other leg raised and wrapped around her thigh. The mythic woman with agency has since become a recurring subject in Frank’s work. She is not a goddess, at least not as they have been described in Greek and Roman mythology. These women are not petty, jealous, or concerned with power. Instead, they are self-sustaining, survivors who have not lost their capacity for love or tenderness. 

Working in ceramic, Frank can go from incising lines in a wet, malleable surface to shaping it into a form. In “Entrance” (1975) and “Embracing Couple” (c. 1980), neither of which is taller than 14 inches (~35.6 cm), Frank carves her subjects into thin, free-standing, earth-colored ceramic slabs. The pared-down lines are delicate and firm. The figures, almost exclusively women, seem to exist in a realm found somewhere between the Garden of Eden and a Renaissance version of the idyllic, where sorrow and lament can fill the air. 

In the reddish-brown ceramic, “Dawn” (1975), Frank uses a thin slab of clay to shape a woman’s slightly upturned head in profile, resting on a section of wood. From one side, we see her with her eyes closed, dreaming. From the other side, we see a thin layer of clay attached to the hollow, shallow surface that resembles a head in profile, with incisions and indentations extending from where the profile’s eyes would typically be. A face within a face, suggesting the individual consists of layers of identity that have little to do with each other. Is this inner figure capable of channeling visions, as it seems to me? Anything feels possible in this elemental world Frank has concocted. 

Mary Frank continues at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (208 Forsyth Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through May 22. The exhibition was organized by Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in collaboration with DC Moore Gallery.

VENICE — A seagull nesting among the national pavilions of the Venice Biennale has become one of the exhibition’s most unexpected attractions. The bird has laid eggs outside Poland’s pavilion in the Giardini, prompting bemusement among visitors as photographs circulated online and in the art press.

According to the Biennale press office, organizers believe this is the first known instance of a seagull nesting in such a prominent area of the exhibition grounds. Officials said they only became aware of the situation after press coverage appeared and added that no formal guidance has been issued to visitors on how to interact with the bird or its nest. It is not known who has built a fence around the nest with a warning sign that reads “Attention! Bird Nest,” in both English and Italian.

Marta Carraro, 43, from Genoa, said it was “curious” and “unexpected” to witness the juxtaposition of crowds, artworks, and a bird that had seemingly claimed its own place at the Biennale.

Seagulls are not always beloved in Venice, where they are notorious for snatching pizza slices and sandwiches from pedestrians’ hands. At the Biennale, however, the bird has acquired the aura of an accidental artwork. Elisabetta, a Venice resident who declined to give her last name, said she found it “cute” and “sensitive” that a fence had been built around the nest.

Like many other national pavilions participating in a historic strike today, May 8, the Polish exhibition was closed in the afternoon. Without naming countries, a sign appended to the massive doors read, “We are not indifferent to the decision to include aggressor states in this year’s edition of the Biennale.” They encouraged everybody “to support the Ukrainian Pavilion.”

“Whether nature is healing, I don’t know,” Luca Orlandi, a 44-year-old artist and art director from Verona, told Hyperallergic about the seagull's presence at the event. “But perhaps anthropization has gone too far; we are everywhere, and it is therefore inevitable that our systems continue to overlap with the ecosystem.”

Each year, on Mother’s Day, I reflect on the endless reel of catchy maternal slogans that involuntarily cycles through my mind. A repeat offender in my own playlist of advice is an axiom from my grandmother, Barbara Sapienza, an abstract oil painter, for how to “unfuck” one’s life. (For the first 20 years of your life, you get fucked up by your parents. You spend the following 20 years "un-fucking" yourself. And then, if you’re lucky, you spend the next 20 years really living your life. You can grade your progress according to that curve.)

In anticipation of this weekend’s holiday, Hyperallergic asked artists to share the best piece of advice that they ever received from their mother, or a maternal figure in their life. Ranging from one-liners cautioning against pursuing a precarious career in the arts to affirmations of undying support, artists reflected on the maternal voices that edified their lives and crafts. We present over a dozen golden nuggets of advice below, some of which have been edited for length and clarity. May they harmonize with the cacophony of your own matrilineal slogans, as they have with mine. —Isa Farfan, staff writer

Pat Oleszko, multi-media artist, New York: My mom knew what she had on her hands and encouraged all creative ventures from music, sports, art, theater, and endless projects ... While I was running all the school clubs and artistic events, I flailed with boys, lost the class vice presidency to some dumb pretty chick, and declared my life over. My mother sagely advised that I would be appreciated in college, and she was right. My life turned from fraught to fantastic in the first week, though I still avoid the suburbs at all costs.

Maddy Inez, sculptor, California: Being raised by powerful matriarchs such as my mother, Alison Saar, and my grandmother, Betye Saar, it's hard to choose one thing they have taught me. My mother taught me how to cook, and through cooking, she taught me empathy. Food connects us all. My mom is always cooking dishes from all over the world and meals from our ancestors. She taught me that eating food from other cultures shows you a glimpse of others' lived experiences. Through food, you can be curious, ask questions, and listen. I carry that curiosity into my art practice."

Nathaniel Mary Quinn, mixed-media painter, New York: ... One day, sunlight beaming across her features, I — perhaps searching for her comfort, her approval—proclaimed, "Mama, I want to be an artist!" Smiling down at me with heartwarming conviction, almost angelic in its grace — because my Mama was a church-going woman — she assured me, "Baby, you can be the best artist you can be." Armed with those words, my faith in becoming an artist never wavered. Never again did I question my pursuit. That statement from my mother was all the assurance I needed. My mother believed in me, and that was that."

Shahzia Sikander, multi-media artist, New York: The first maternal friend I made as an immigrant to the United States in 1993 was the late artist Donnamaria Bruton, who came to my rescue when I slipped in the Rhode Island School of Design canteen and fractured my ankle. That year, she showed me how to file a claim, apply for a driver's license, braid hair, and advised that the best way to read bell hooks was to read her aloud.

Ali Banisadr, painter, New York: When I was very young and constantly drawing, my mother, a psychologist in Iran, introduced me to the work of Carl Jung. She would speak to me about archetypes, dreams, and the imagination as if they were living things, forces that moved through us rather than something we simply invented. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but I felt it. It made the inner world I was already building feel real, shared, and deeply connected to something ancient.

That early exposure shaped the way I think to this day. It set me on a path of searching – tracing images back to their origins, trying to understand how they carry meaning across time, and how they affect us both consciously and subconsciously. As a child, the idea of a collective consciousness was oddly comforting; it made me feel less alone inside my own imagination, as if what I was seeing and sensing belonged to something larger than myself. Looking back, this was both advice and a foundation. It gave depth and permission to my way of seeing, and it continues to guide my work in ways I’m still discovering. Thank you, Mom – and Happy Mother’s Day! Love you.

Eve Biddle, multi-media artist and founder of the Wassaic Project, New York: My mom [sculptor Mary Ann Unger] said to me: Don’t be an artist unless there’s nothing else you can be.

vanessa german, multi-media artist, North Carolina: My mother was an artist. She raised my siblings and I to be creative, independent, and brave. We made things with our own hands as a way to be alive. I think that one of the most profound trees of wisdom that my mother seeded in me is that I/we, as human beings are whole. We are whole the whole time. And that being human is more than having a body. My mother taught me that we are spirits IN a body — this made me feel like anything was possible.

Fares Rizk, painter and performance artist, New York: The best advice: Never wear plaid … If you dress in drag make sure you look pretty. Never compare yourself to anyone, be yourself always.

Elias Rischmawi, photographer, New York: I’ve been blessed to have been surrounded by maternal figures in my life ... As a kid, I was always near them, either on the floor or on my sitti's (grandmother's) lap. I have vivid memories of them laughing, singing together while rolling grape leaves or making maftoul from scratch. Their impact inspired me to continue their legacy by connecting and nurturing people through food.

Aaron Bogan, illustrator and art model, New York: Mom’s advice wasn’t anything too ostentatious. Her simple advice to me was, “Believe in yourself as an artist.” I've been hearing it for two decades, and now that I’m in the twilight of my 30s, it’s all starting to make sense.

Marilou Schultz, Diné weaver, Arizona: The best advice that my late mom, Martha Gorman Schultz, shared with me is: She always told me to learn to do things quickly with my hands, but correctly. If you learn to do things quickly, then you will also learn to weave a rug quickly and complete a task in a short amount of time. I have used this advice in everyday life in completing tasks, including my weaving projects.

Kameron Neal, installation and performance artist, New York: My mother taught me how to be silly. She taught me how to play, how to laugh until my face burns, and how to dance in the kitchen to "Believe" by Cher. I think this might be my only real skill.

Nicolás González-Medina, printmaker and immigration activist, California: I lost my mother in 2010, and it was at that point that I decided to fight for my dreams just as she did. I learned to work hard from a young age, and being creative was my escape. At times, she didn’t understand my passion for art, but she still let me take art classes at Yollocalli in Chicago for years. Even though my mom didn’t understand why I wanted to be an artist, she showed up for me and would be proud that I fought for my dreams.

Anna Veedra, artist and art model activist, New York: My mother and I had a unique relationship; we were separated at birth and then later reunited ... Her best advice: To me, as an artist, so much of creativity is learning to respond as life unfolds. I remember my mother holding my hand and saying, “Be careful, life is not what you think it will be.” After living through a war and having to give me up, she thought she would never see me again ... only for me to return years later down the road ... You can be certain of how you think things are, and then they will change.

Barbara Sapienza, painter and grandmother of Hyperallergic Staff Writer Isa Farfan, California: Don’t let the bastards get you down!

PASADENA — Printed Matter’s Los Angeles Art Book Fair returned to the Art Center College of Design last night with over 250 exhibitors — slightly scaled back from over 300 last year — roughly a fifth of whom were at the fair for the first time. Among the lavish monographs and eye-popping, risograph-printed zines, the archive was a common thread. Publications excavated and remixed appropriated media, collapsing time and giving historical ephemera contemporary relevance across the fair’s 13th edition, which runs through the weekend. 

“Clothe All Animals for the Sake of Decency!” declared a sign worn by David Senior, a librarian at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who stood at the entrance to the fair on opening day, Thursday, May 7. He was a walking advertisement for Inside SINA: The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, edited by Andrew Lampert and published by J&L Books in New York this year. The well-researched book chronicles an early-1960s hoax perpetrated by Alan Abel, who invented the satirical organization that expressed moral outrage over animal nudity. Abel drummed up many pranks in his lifetime, but “this was his most famous, it just wouldn’t die,” J&L’s Jason Fulford told Hyperallergic, likening its popularity to a form of pre-internet virality. 

RVB Books from France featured MAN (2025) by Erik Kessels and Karel de Mulder, a thick compendium of vintage photographs that feature a central male figure flanked by women on either side. In a cheeky subversion of male subjectivity, the man always appears in the book gutter, where the two pages meet, squeezed nearly out of existence.

Instead of the cache of vintage art books they’ve brought to the fair in years past, Downtown Los Angeles bookstore and gallery These Days showcased publications by VOID, a publisher based in Athens, Greece. The highlight was Fishworm (2025) by Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Jesse Bull Saffire, a haunting collection of found photos the pair scavenged from abandoned houses around their home in rural Maine. Juxtaposing family snapshots, amateur pornography, eerie interiors, and stark landscapes, the book renders a grim but affecting portrait of lonely, wild, weird America. (An exhibition of their work opens tonight at These Days.)

The archive takes on a personal resonance for Palestinian-American artist Sabri Sundos, whose cassette mixtape “Hand to Hand” assembles music from Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Growing up, Sundos would listen to the tapes his parents would receive from friends and family in the Middle East, sonic links to their homeland. He extends this chain with his own compendium, published by Aventures LTD, which traces back to his childhood in San Diego and further back through the Palestinian Diaspora. “These songs deal with leftist politics and class war,” Sundos told Hyperallergic, “but they’re all bangers.”

Artist-run press Armenian Creatives also engaged with diasporic threads, focusing on translation as a form of cultural resistance. Notably, co-founder Caroline Partamian’s slim volume Khaz Poems (2024, published under her imprint Weird Babes Press) transforms an ancient Armenian musical notation system into captivating typographical compositions.

A playground of pop culture and underground music ephemera filled the installation dedicated to Emily's Sasy Lime, the indie rock band formed in 1993 by teenage sisters Wendy and Amy Yao. It captures the adolescent exuberance and tight communal bond of creative subcultures. Ooga Booga, the now itinerant bookstore founded by Wendy Yao, occupies a nearby booth, representing a slightly more mature variant of the love of physical media.

Histories of resistance and solidarity are unearthed from the past and reframed for our current moment. At the stand of Taller California, Covers 1 & 2: Annotating the Archives of Heresies by Melinda Guillén digs into the influential feminist art publication printed from 1977 to 1993, responding to its essays through text and image. The Tijuana and San Diego-based imprint also published Evan Apodaca’s Insurgent Archives from the Secret City (2025), a graphic recounting of the little-known anti-Vietnam War movement within the military.

For other exhibitors, the act of printing and distributing books is itself a form of defiance and a way to form communal bonds. Coloured Publishing, the high-spirited publishing house run by artist Devin Troy Strother and designer Kahim Smith, told Hyperallergic they were planning to expand their operation with a brick-and-mortar bookstore. With all the uncertainty and strife in the world, what was their motivation? Considering that the world is essentially on fire, why now? 

“When everything is so digital, blown out by late-stage capitalism, it’s time to build a third space,” Smith told Hyperallegic.

Troy Strother simply replied: “To add fuel to the fire.”

Welcome to the 336th installment of A View From the Easel, a series in which artists reflect on their workspace. This week, Brenda Zlamany returns to her ancestral village near the Pollino National Park in Italy, where she paints in an old sausage factory and grows her own olives. (Fun fact: I walked by her 2016 "Portrait of Yale's First Seven Women PhDs" on many late nights as a student in the Sterling Memorial Library.)

Want to take part? Check out our submission guidelines and share a bit about your studio with us through this form! All mediums and workspaces are welcome, including your home studio.

Brenda Zlamany, Calabria, Italy

How long have you been working in this space?

Since April 2024 — but also for 45 years. The first time I saw this village I was a teenager on my junior year abroad at Tyler School of Art in Rome. I took a photo and wrote home to my mother: "Someday I will have a studio here." My grandfather left as an itinerant cobbler 100 years ago. I came back as an itinerant portraitist.

Describe an average day in your studio.

Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday the fruttivendolo comes up the mountain. To buy vegetables you go down to the piazza, where you will have coffee with every single person along the way, so you get pretty jacked up. Tuesday is the pescivendolo. The village has no cars — the passageways are so narrow you walk single file. Once I have provisions I return to the studio to paint. At night, the one bar. In August there is more happening in this village than in Williamsburg.

How does the space affect your work?

This is the place my grandfather left 100 years ago, and I am back exactly 100 years later. I hike every day and find myself remembering things — a kind of intense déjà vu, as though I'd always been here. There's such a thing as memory of a place you weren't born in. It's in the blood. I've never felt more at home anywhere.

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

I'm insider and outsider at the same time — expected to know the customs, but allowed to break the rules. The people closest to me here work with agriculture and animals. They understand the hours I keep. There's something about working the land that speaks to how artists work. That rhythm drives me.

What do you love about your studio?

I have a compound: an old sausage factory I'm converting to a studio, a forno building, and a house that came fully furnished with magical objects — I can sense the presence of the self-sufficient woman who lived here before me. I use her sheets after all. The building is 300 years old on the bottom, 50 years old on the top. This summer, my stonemason pressed olive oil from my own olives.

What do you wish were different?

There's a saying: "Be careful what you wish for." I wish it were easier to get up and down the mountain — but the reason this place is so untouched is because it's so remote. So: I wish there were public transportation. But I'm really glad there isn't.

What is your favorite local museum?

The Museo della Liquirizia "Giorgio Amarelli" near Rossano — a museum dedicated entirely to the Amarelli family's centuries-old licorice production. It's the only museum I've visited in the south of Italy, which tells you something about how I'm spending my time here. When people here ask me what I find interesting, I tell them: Rome has Michelangelo. We have the mountain.

What is your favorite art material to work with?

Oil paint, always. And I finally found a supplier in Naples who will send materials up the mountain. It reminds me of Steve at New York Central Art Supply in the early days, when there was still such a thing as customer service for artists.

VENICE — The 61st Venice Biennale may be marked by various protests as artists hum through the exhibitions, hundreds gather in front of the temporary Israeli pavilion in the Arsenale, and Pussy Riot makes their presence known in front of the Russian pavilion in the Giardini. More actions are planned for tomorrow, May 8, but the heart of the biennial art olympics — the international exhibition — beats on. 

Led by artistic director Koyo Kouoh, who died last May at age 57, and her handpicked team of collaborators, In Minor Keys opened for today’s preview with a somber curatorial press conference. Advisor Rasha Salti remarked that it was “not only an unusual biennale because the artistic director is not physically present … it is a biennale we were left with her absence, looking for her presence.” Research Assistant Rory Tsapayi said that the exhibition reflected Kouoh’s curatorial process and methodology of the “work of listening to artists,” adding that this Biennale is about "attunement and attention.” In Minor Keys was fine-tuned to meet that challenge; work by the 110 invited participants filled the main halls of the Arsenale and Giardini, asking us to look closer at new forms of representation, consider innovative models of measuring the world, and take time to ponder what may otherwise be overlooked.

Wangechi Mutu’s installations in the Giardini and the Arsenale are major achievements, while curatorial juxtapositions, like Ebony G. Patterson’s elaborate peacock with Kambui Olujimi’s North Star watercolors, are inspired. Throughout the exhibition hang banners with quotes from some of the most moving writers and poets of our time, from Refaat al-Areer to Toni Morrison and Ben Okri, that complement the sensitivity of the art all around. Together, they perform an unexpected symphony. 

Here is a first look at the massive exhibition that celebrates those tunes that artists may have once sung only to themselves, and now sing for the world to hear.

Giardini

Arsenale

VENICE — Alma Allen’s United States pavilion at the Venice Biennale says nothing, does nothing, means nothing, and goes nowhere.

Curated by Jeffrey Uslip, who resigned from a job in 2016 after accusations of “racial insensitivity,” the show is titled Call Me the Breeze. That's also the title of a 1974 Lynyrd Skynyrd song. 

A breeze is something refreshing, nourishing, mood-altering. However, I left Allen’s pavilion feeling the same as I did before. Nothing. 

The pavilion features a series of amorphous, nature-inspired sculptures — all untitled — made of bronze, wood, and stone. 

If there’s any essence to the show, it’s in the choice of specific materials. For example, Allen uses Colorado Yule marble, a brilliant white stone from which the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, was made. 

What do we actually see? It’s not always easy to tell. Some forms seem informed by living organisms, like worms. A large gold-coated piece at the pavilion rotunda evokes a cactus. There’s one sculpture in the front yard that can be seen as either a lamb or a pile of spaghetti.  

A young gallery attendant was kind enough to give me one piece of insight into Allen’s process: He tinkers with materials with his fingers without looking, letting a form take shape. If he ends up liking what's in his hands, he blows it up into a large-scale sculpture. 

Ultimately, his is the kind of art favored by some high-end collectors: inoffensive, expensive-looking, and great next to the obligatory collection of African masks.    

After monumental presentations by Jeffrey Gibson and Simone Leigh in the last two biennales searched the soul and history of this nation, how did we end up with this art from the land of the bland? 

Like all things touched by the Trump administration, a long-held selection process was upended and turned into a horrifying but dismally entertaining farce. The details aren’t fully clear, but here’s what we know in a nutshell: After excluding experts from the National Endowment for the Arts from the process, the US State Department picked curator John Ravenal and artist Robert Lazzarini to represent the country. Alas, Lazzarini’s proposal was ditched unceremoniously due to funding complications and vague behind-the-scenes politics.

Along came the American Arts Conservancy, an obscure new arts nonprofit led by Jenni Parido, a Floridian from the Mar-a-Lago orbit whose last serious job was running a pet food store. Somehow, Parido was entrusted with picking the artist representing the US at the world’s most important art exhibition. She hired Uslip, the curator, to find her an artist. According to reports, he approached Barbara Chase-Riboud and William Eggleston, but they said no thanks. He landed on Allen, a Utah-born sculptor based in Mexico. The sponsors of Allen’s pavilion were a mystery until the preview in Venice this week. A plaque inside the pavilion reveals a list of donors, including businessman John Phelan, who was recently fired from his position as US Navy Secretary, and fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger. 

“Alma Allen's biomorphic sculptures evoke the visceral realities of contemporary life and reveal the fragility and resilience of the human condition,” writes Uslip in the same plaque. I don’t know about that, but he’s right to add that the work “eschews finite positions.” 

My favorite piece in the pavilion is the one made with the white Colorado Yule marble. That was the closest I could get to feeling a “breeze.” Maybe that’s because it was shaped like a portal — something to zap me into a better US pavilion in a parallel universe. 

Alma Allen: Call me the Breeze continues at the United States pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale (Giardini della Biennale, Calle Giazzo, Venice, Italy) through November 22. The exhibition was curated by Jeffrey Uslip.

VENICE — In the middle of the second day of the Venice Biennale’s opening preview, Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons took the first step of a poetry caravan across seven locations in the Giardini in honor of Koyo Kouoh, the late curator of this year’s main exhibition, In Minor Keys.

“Today and forever, Koyo Kouoh, you are here with us… We are coming. Almost there, mother of the water. Almost there, mother of the ocean,” Campos-Pons announced to the growing crowd, some of whom were fellow artists that Kouoh selected for the Biennale. Many more were unsuspecting bystanders standing in line for free Illy-sponsored espresso, now forced to confront the conscience so often separated from commerce at this art-world spectacle. 

This was a gift to Kouoh, Campos-Pons continued, “a minor key to keep fighting and working for the center of our core, for the center that is what is to be human. And be a daughter, a son, of the original continent of humanity, Africa.”

After Kouoh died suddenly of cancer at age 57 last May, a five-person team of her assistants and advisers worked to channel her curatorial practice in her absence. They took to the ad hoc stage today, a slightly raised pavilion suddenly erected along the Giardini’s main promenade, indicating that while this procession was absent from an official schedule, it was sanctioned. 

Marie Hélène Pereira, curator and stand-in lead of the 2026 Biennale, explained that this poetry caravan takes inspiration from a voyage Kouoh took with nine African poets from Dakar to Timbuktu in 1999. 

“Today, we would like to convey prose as a form of expression, nascent from the unspeakable feelings which emanate from various streams of oppression around the world. We have gathered voices that hum, speak, sing, chant, and howl,” Pereira told the crowd.

More than a dozen people spoke under the hot afternoon sun, in several languages, among them the acclaimed poets Natalie Diaz, Robin Coste Lewis, Batool Abu Akleen, and Anne Waldman. “We must protect all the beauties of our civilization,” Waldman said before reading a work about the power of the archive. “We’re still waiting for the next level of transition, and this helps.”

There was poetry without words, too, from virtuosic kora player Saliou Cissokho, who seemed to bring a calm to the Biennale, and from Swiss saxophonist and composer Philippe Mall, Kouoh’s husband. He played an original composition titled “Wise One,” dedicated to his “beloved friend and wife,” as well as Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy.”

“That song has everything; it transposes the ‘minor feeling’ exactly,” Mall told Hyperallergic. “It’s a good thing that I can play an instrument, because when I try to talk about her [Kouoh] it’s almost impossible.”

Romanian photographer Radu Neacșu was on his way to grab food when he was pulled in by the slowly moving mass of bodies. 

“I am Orthodox, and it reminds me of the Easter tradition, of going in a group to church,” Neacșu said. “We are connected to one another through an invisible bind, and the world needs exactly these kinds of performances now.”

In between “Orange Elegy” by Bahamian-Trinidadian poet Christian Campbell — “I thought an elegy was appropriate in the context of mourning Koyo and a mourning of the world,” he told Hyperallergic — and remarks from Kouoh’s younger brother, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Anna M. Dempster, a curator and a Fellow at Cambridge University’s Wolfson College, mused that this poetry caravan was different from other gestures she’d seen at the Biennale.

“So much is about anger,” she said, recalling yesterday’s protest against the Russia Pavilion, staged by Pussy Riot and FEMEN. “This feels like a reflection of African culture’s joyfulness despite the depths of pain.”

Forty years ago, New York was almost the opposite of what it is today. Though the city had mostly pulled back from the brink of breakdown brought on by White Flight, bankruptcy, etc., by the early 1980s, whole neighborhoods still seemed to have collapsed. Little did I know at the time that, as bad as it was, the city had become a kind of canvas. Graffiti — the art movement of the day — filled the empty spaces. Walls, subway cars, you name it: Everything was covered with magic marker and spray cans. Most of it was tags, cryptic nicknames, and street numbers done hastily with spray cans and magic marker.

This was when Keith Haring’s work first appeared. And in this context, it seemed clever, upbeat, and lively. But to consider it art was different — it seemed to be trite, dashed off, sort of like the doodles that one might find in the margins of an art school notebook: radiant babies, Mickey Mice, and countless cookie-cutter figures. A recent visit to Keith Haring at the Brant Foundation, which focuses on his work from between 1980 and 1983, gave me an opportunity to recognize the dismissiveness of my youth. There really is more than meets the eye. 

Included in this exhibition are Haring’s signature glyphic figures on reproductive ancient clay pottery, biblical images of golden calves being worshiped, and human sacrifices (perhaps condemned prisoners?) stretching up to a UFO laser-beaming everything from nuclear power plants and the Pyramids to big-brained dolphins. A pair of laughing dogs sitting back-to-back (dog-to-god?) is a vessel inhabited by multiple humanoids, each on their own mysterious mission. In a later piece, the same dogs are free of their human hosts.

His work, which once seemed playful and energetic to me, now appears dark and possibly prophetic: images of overcrowdedness, torture, a general lack of human identity, unthinking obedience to higher powers. Overall, the subjects show no expression of empathy or grief, only a solitary image of vacant, wide-eyed glee. On the other hand, perhaps I’ve become prejudiced by an age defined by everything from recently declassified documents indicating the existence of UFOs to the rise of the mindless MAGA cult.

Haring’s free-handed yet perfectly fonted and justified style blows right through desktop publishing; it feels prescient now, in light of the upcoming AI cataclysm, a Nostradamus-by-emojis. Which isn’t to say that Haring is necessarily unique — consider the work of people like Mark Kostabi, Jeff Koons, and so many others, and you can see a hint of the apocalyptic there too.

One could spend a while searching through Haring’s many meanings or trying to locate his rightful place in the Pop Art-Andy Warhol Universe. But I will forever think of him as a young man in the still-empty landscape of Manhattan in the early 1980s, so removed from what it is today. It’s difficult to imagine him arising from any other time or place. 

Keith Haring continues at the Brant Foundation (421 East 6th Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through May 31. The exhibition was curated by Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer.

Art Movements, published every Thursday afternoon, is a roundup of must-know news, appointments, awards, and other happenings in today’s chaotic art world.

New Museum, New Artist Residents

Yun Choi, Alison Kuo, and Korakrit Arunanondchai will take up residence in the New Museum's Artist Studio, a dedicated space carved out by the polarizing OMA-designed expansion of the building. In an announcement today, May 7, the Lower East Side museum said the artists will participate in a series of residences at the 730-square-foot studio beginning this spring and continuing through winter 2027. They'll create new work and develop onsite exhibitions and public programs in a model reminiscent of MASS MoCA or Pioneer Works's in-house residencies; Kuo, for instance, will produce a new performance piece informed by Cantonese Opera culture, complete with sets and costumes, to debut later this fall.

2026 Forge Project Fellows

Forge Project, the Native-led nonprofit dedicated to Indigenous arts leadership, located in Taghkanic in New York's Hudson Valley, has named the recipients of its 2026 fellowship. Jay Bellis (Haida, Kootenay); Michael Bowman Sr. (Stockbridge-Munsee); Heidi Brandow (Diné, Kanaka Maoli); Charine Gonzales (San Ildefonso Pueblo (PoWohGeh Owingeh); Robin Maxkii (Mohican/Munsee-Lenape); and Tiare Ribeaux (Kānaka Maoli/Kānaka ʻŌiwi) will each receive $25,000 and complete a three-week residency with access to the organization's site, libraries, and collection of contemporary Indigenous art.

What Else Happened?

• David Zwirner Gallery now represents the estate of Robert Therrien, taking over from Gagosian after three decades. The news closely follows a major exhibition at the Broad that featured the artist's best-known works, oversized domestic objects that, as Matt Stromberg wrote for Hyperallergic, “tower over the viewer with a mix of cartoon absurdity and potential disaster.”
• Laurel Nakadate has been awarded the Maud Morgan Prize from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
• The Asian American Arts Alliance selected Clare Hu as the 2026 Van Lier Fellow for Visual Arts Practice, Jolene Fernandez as the Van Lier Fellow for Visual Arts Curation, and Nikaio Thomashow as the Jadin Wong Fellow.
• Jill Magid is now represented by Olney Gleason.
• The Santa Barbara Museum of Art appointed Briana H. Moncrief and Courtney Treut to its Board of Trustees.
• The HistoryMiami Museum is rebranding to the Museum of Miami and adopting a community-centered, “museum-without-walls” model focused on bringing art and programs directly to Miami-Dade County neighborhoods.

Wildcard

It may feel like we've just docked our gondolas, but Frieze New York is already on the horizon. The fair opens in just under a week, and this year's edition will kick off in style with a new staff uniform by Japanese artist Reika Takebayashi. Lucky art fair employees (never thought I'd type those words in my life) will get to don the t-shirt, printed with the artist's luscious 2025 painting of a wild, pink-hued jungle. Hyperallergic Associate Editor Lisa Yin Zhang, who once had to work the fair in her previous role at Frieze, told me via Slack: “Mad af bc they literally made me be one of those gallery assistants during the fair while i was assistant editor and it was just a plain black shirt.”

These folk want a fair contract.

Workers at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City joined three dozen UAW Local 2110 organizers to picket the museum’s annual gala at the Mandarin Oriental in Columbus Circle on Wednesday night, May 6, demanding higher wages and better benefits.

Union members marched in front of the Upper West Side luxury hotel for two hours, holding signs that read, “For Folk’s Sake” and “Self Taught, Not Self Funded” while chanting, “What’s disgusting? Union busting! What’s outrageous? Poverty wages!”

Staffers say they were forced to take action after negotiations for a new contract remained stalled for nearly two years.

“The museum can raise all the money it wants, but if it doesn’t pay its workers fairly, then the museum can’t function well,” Eve Erickson, the museum’s development associate for institutional giving, told Hyperallergic. “There’s no art without the museum staff.”

Workers have been bargaining with museum executives for higher minimum wages and benefits since shortly after they voted to join the UAW Local 2110 in June 2024. 

Frontline workers at the Columbus Avenue institution, who greet visitors, run the gift shop, and maintain the building, currently earn $19 per hour or $58,686 per year, about $12,000 below the living wage in New York City as calculated by MIT. Maintenance workers earn a similar rate at nearby art museums, including MoMA PS1, whose staff demonstrated for higher wages two years ago. (The American Folk Art museum’s CEO Jason Busch earned $321,882 in compensation during the 2024 fiscal year, according to the museum’s tax filings.)

In October 2024, American Folk Art Museum union reps requested that their employers grant a three-year contract and increase wages for these workers to $30 per hour by the end of the third year. But museum leaders only offered to raise wages to $21.50 per hour, and would not guarantee existing benefits, including health care and hybrid schedules, an outcome the union’s bargaining unit deemed unacceptable. 

Negotiations dragged on as the museum closed its 2 Lincoln Square building last fall for a six-month renovation funded by the building’s owner, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In the meantime, officials eliminated several unionized positions and outsourced the work to consultants and contractors, union reps said.

“The whole negotiations have been marked by antagonistic responses from the employer and bad-faith bargaining,” said Maida Rosenstein, director of organizing at Local 2110 UAW.

Staffers grew frustrated with the delays and high turnover. They distributed leaflets ahead of the museum’s reopening on April 9, celebrating its new exhibition, Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists, which features 90 works from the early 20th century through the present day. Last night, they rallied in front of the museum’s fundraiser, which was expected to draw 250 guests and raise several hundred thousand dollars, according to museum workers.

Museum officials would not reveal how much money the gala raised or say when they might complete negotiations.

“We respect our employees’ decision to unionize and are committed to working in good faith toward a fair and mutually beneficial contract,” a museum spokesperson said in a statement.

The protest was unusually intimate. Several trustees hugged unionized museum staff and took flyers and UAW buttons before they went inside the hotel. Artist vanessa german, one of the honorees at the Folk Art Museum gala, took five buttons, while other donors said they supported the demonstration.

Jean Seestadt, a former events manager at the museum who now works for the UAW, said she hoped the museum finalizes a new contract with higher wages soon.

“I love the museum. I hope they make a lot of money tonight so they can pay their workers more,” she said.

Strangers are constantly photographing my ass. Not on purpose, though — I’m sure they would much rather my backside not be in the frame as I stand contemplating some artwork in front of which they’re trying to pose. They fix their gaze on the camera, ignoring both me and the art itself. 

I’ve spent much of my life as a marathon looker. A morning in front of Théodore Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” (1818–19), an ecstatic afternoon in the frescoed garden room from the Villa of Livia. Marcel Duchamp’s 1918 piece titled “To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour”? I’ve done just that. 

I used to feel a sense of sneaking guilt after one of these reveries, since they didn’t result in any measurable product. I rarely emerged with material for teaching or writing; I rarely experienced much coherent thought at all. The Christophers (2026), a Steven Soderbergh-directed film about an encounter between two painters in modern-day London, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) and Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), makes the argument that courting and paying attention is precisely the point of art. 

I admit to an initial reluctance to see the film. Its poster, which sets Sklar and Butler glowering at each other, suggests that the story will be a Tár (2022) of the visual arts, rife with cancel culture battles between protagonists of different races, classes, sexes, and ages.

True, The Christophers poses similar questions about why we make art, and at what cost. But where Tár is a gloomy, tendentious horror film, The Christophers is a twisty, delightful yet profound comedy. It might just be the best yet in the line of confections that raise deep questions whipped up by its writer, Ed Solomon, who also wrote Men in Black (1997), with its meditations on memory and xenophobia, and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), which asks what we should retain from the past as well as what we should get from the food court.

Butler, the young painter, pays careful attention to everything: the landscapes she sketches, the customers at the food truck where she labors, and the work of long-dead artists she restores and sometimes forges. She rarely reveals her true feelings. Coel spends most of the film with a studiously blank face and her body muffled in layers of clothing.

Sklar, the old painter, does nothing but express himself. He, too, is dressed in layers — all the better to shuck them off. (“Ian McKellen!” I thought at one point. “Put your belly button away!”) McKellen tumbles through facial expressions as his character indulges in every possible reaction to the unfolding plot. His “heirs abhorrent,” as he calls his children (played, marvelously, by Jessica Gunning and James Corden), have hired Butler to complete a series of portraits of a model named Christopher that Sklar left unfinished at the height of his fame. Sklar’s multiplicity of conflicting reactions to this attempt to pad out his legacy makes him, in the end, just as hard to read as Butler.

Early in the film, Sklar performatively confesses that he has been “canceled.” In what is either the film’s greatest weakness or a special bit of cleverness — I can’t decide which — the precise reason for this cancellation is never detailed. The closest we get is hearing Sklar ask why, if the vast majority of art students are women, the same isn’t true of artists represented in museum collections. Depending on how you interpret the question, this might be a misogynistic crack against the idea that women cannot be great artists or something the Guerrilla Girls might print on a poster to protest the patriarchal art world.

Sklar’s larger problem is that he has stopped making art. He is full of self-expression but can no longer feel the freedom he insists comes from setting and solving one’s own artistic problems. Bitter, he has stopped paying attention to the art of others.

You might think this is a problem stemming from a long career, especially since both Soderbergh and Solomon are also men of a certain age. But by the end of the film, we see that Sklar has been fighting the same fight since he was a boy, while Butler is mired in equal but opposite problems. She pays so much attention to others that she tries to inhabit their skin rather than ever expressing herself. She, too, is failing to find real connections.

The film has a surprisingly clear-eyed view of the realities of art forgery; namely, that it happens fairly regularly and that no one — not forgers, not galleries, and certainly not buyers — wants it to be uncovered. The only unrealistic touch comes when Butler spends a night whipping up a batch of fakes that fool their intended audience the very next morning, though they surely must still have smelled like fresh paint.

When I finished my hour of looking through the distorting lens stuck into Duchamp’s sculpture with the commanding title, I started giggling in the gallery. Spending so much time with the piece (currently in a fantastic Duchamp retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) hadn’t changed what I saw. But asking myself why I had bothered made me realize how silly it was to follow orders just because they came from a famous artist. By trolling me from beyond the grave, Duchamp prodded me to come up with my own answers to the question of what exactly the point of looking at art is.

I’ve decided that I love to pay sustained attention to art because of the resulting feeling of a profound sense of connection with the artist. It’s as if I’m standing with Géricault as he puzzles out how to twist so many figures together into a heap of despair, or handing pigments to the ancient Roman painter who layers on shades of green to imitate leaves shaking in a summer breeze.

Like Duchamp, The Christophers will leave you with impish questions rather than answers. You’re just going to have to come up with those for yourself.

The Christophers (2026), directed by Steven Soderbergh, is screening in select theaters in the United States. It will be released in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland on May 15.