It’s a sunny October afternoon in Manhattan and the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are bustling with visitors. Tourists pose for selfies against the museum’s facade; street vendors sell chopped-up hotdogs in a nest of French fries; and the sound of saxophone music drowns into the symphony of splashing water fountains and honking cars on Fifth Avenue. So many types of people; the only ones missing are the Lenape whose land was stolen so we could enjoy this fine Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the steps of The Met. 

Inside the museum, a blockbuster exhibition about Abstract Expressionist painters Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock is jam-packed. The show is as much about their mutual influence as it is about their marriage, their most difficult collaboration. 

I hear a woman from behind accusing me of “White privilege” because I apparently cut her in line. I turn around and say, “What White privilege? Look at me.” She takes a quick look and corrects herself, “Okay, so male privilege.”

I turn on Democracy Now and listen to a 30-minute conversation about settler colonialism. I notice a Jeep Wrangler ahead of me with a sticker proudly announcing, “primitive man.” I shudder at first but quickly come to admire the driver’s honesty. War Secretary Pete Hegseth threatens to livestream an execution by firing squad. 

At the Brooklyn Museum, I pause by a display of Indigenous Kachina dolls that were given to Hopi girls and women living in what is now Arizona. Who made them and how they got here we don’t exactly know, but now they belong to the museum’s Center for Feminist Art. 

At the end of the day, my shoulders are tense and my brain cooked, and my only wish is to lie down idea-free, opinionless, primitive.

—Hakim Bishara, editor-in-chief

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News

• The Gochman Collection of Indigenous Art will open a new space in Katonah, New York, in November.
• The Karachi Biennale in Pakistan announces the cancellation of its fifth edition, citing logistical constraints and uncertainties amid “war conditions prevailing in the region.”
• Artist Tammy Nguyen will present the foreword to her debut opera Timaeus and The Teacher at the 61st Venice Biennale’s closing program on November 13 and 14, capping off an eventful edition of the international contemporary art festival.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan and the Musée du Louvre in Paris join forces to co-organize a major exhibition exploring Greco-Roman and biblical influences throughout Rembrandt’s practice.
• Danh Vo and Sandra Mujinga are selected for Met Museum commissions, a new leader is named for the Armenian Museum of America, Bernie Sanders weighs in on the AI art debate, and more in Art Movements.

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Two years ago, I encountered the infamous 1892 image of two men with a hill of buffalo skulls at the Baltimore Museum of Art. It was covered by a small wall-mounted curtain designed by Yurok artist Stormi Turner, and it gave the image, still shocking after over a century of circulation, the depth of tragedy that it warranted. Part of the Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum exhibition, it was a way of acknowledging the care that such a crime demands, in the same way that human remains are shown in museums today, often with warnings, behind doors you must open, or under covers that you must actively remove to see. Turner’s intervention was a way to honor an animal that many Native American groups and communities lived in symbiotic relationship with for millennia. That image came back to me when I walked into Cannupa Hanska Luger’s newest exhibition, American Traditional, at Garth Greenan Gallery in Soho, where the artist sets aside the participatory, ceramics-heavy projects he’s best known for and arrives at something more declarative — a synthesis of wood, ink, and archive that is his strongest work yet.

In Mari Sandoz’s The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men, first published in 1954, she explains that North American bison, also called buffalo, were far more numerous than humans on the continent and there was “apparently no disease on all the continent that threatened the buffalo in any number.” That charmed existence for the largest land animal on Turtle Island was interrupted by the eventual arrival of European settlers, who with their horses, guns, and railroads made their slaughter into an industrial-scale activity. 

Luger, who was born on the Standing Rock Reservation, places a black abstracted bison atop a blackened rendering of a 19th-century American wood dining table. An enrolled citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, he has deep roots on the Great Plains, and he knows the history of destruction that tore the bison from the tribes of the region that was, as Sandoz put it, “almost the sole subsistence of the Plains Indian — his shelter, clothing, food and fuel.” The Cree scholar Tasha Hubbard goes further than Sandoz was able to. For Plains nations the buffalo were kin, part of the First Peoples rather than a separate species, and the campaign against them was, in her account, a genocide carried out by proxy and a “second major wave of trauma for Plains Indigenous peoples,” after epidemic disease. The army said as much. Hubbard quotes Colonel Richard Irving Dodge’s advice to hunters — “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone” — and General Philip H. Sheridan understood it before the historians did. In 1875, when the Texas legislature proposed a bill to protect the bison, buffalo hunter John R. Cook recorded Sheridan’s objection: “These men [the buffalo hunters] have done more to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years … Send them powder and lead if you will, but for the sake of a lasting peace let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo are exterminated.”

Artavazd Pelechian said his piece, and his admirers have waited decades for the world to take notice. The Armenian filmmaker, active primarily during the Soviet era, has a concise oeuvre: 13 works, mostly shorts, with two features that barely crack an hour. Aside from 2019’s Nature, he has not released anything since 1994. International recognition came gradually, but it has grown enough that many of his films have received 4K restorations that premiered at different festivals over 2026. Recently, the Pelechian Project was showcased at the New York Film Festival (NYFF), with eight of the director’s restored works in the program.

At the storied All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow in the 1960s, Pelechian and his peers studied the work of titanic Soviet directors like Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov, who shaped cinematography and editing in cinema’s early days. Pelechian deviated from their example, developing an approach he described as “distance montage.” All his movies are montage-based, with intricate shot assemblages unified by distinct themes. Speaking with Scott MacDonald in the 1990s, Pelechian explained the distinction between distance montage and the familiar notion of a montage: 

In Eisenstein, every element means something. For me, the individual fragments don’t mean anything anymore. Only the whole film has the meaning. … Eisenstein saw editing as a means to get from here to there, [whereas] I see editing as a means for seeing where we are.

Two life-changing experiences lie at the heart of the captivating new oil-and-graphite paintings in Tanya Merrill’s exhibition, Land animal, house animal: The artist gave birth to her daughter in June, and her family recently relocated from New York City to upstate New York. 

In her new environment, Merrill decisively challenges a pervasive anthropocentric worldview that deems humans superior and animals lesser. She foregrounds local animals as sentient beings with their own motivations and desires, including a cat in two terrific paintings, a wide-eyed and inquisitive dairy cow, and the Northern harrier (or marsh hawk) with piercing eyes and luscious gray, white, and black feathers that she frequently observes from her studio (“Marsh hawk,” 2026). This bird painting echoes regional folk art and Audubon.

A life-sized statue of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis began melting soon after the climate advocacy group 350 Action installed it in front of a crowd of DeSantis supporters in Tallahassee on Tuesday, October 13.

The transformation of the gallium statue, aptly titled "DENIAL," into a skeletal base highlighted the elected official's longstanding rejection of climate change as Floridians prepare to vote for who will be DeSantis's successor on November 3.

The statue's placard reads, "I am not a global warming person," quoting DeSantis's proclamation during his gubernatorial campaign in 2018, and includes a reference to his 2024 signing of House Bill 1645, an energy law that axed the phrase “climate change” from Florida statutes and ended requirements for state agencies to prioritize climate-friendly facilities, among other rollbacks.

"Just as state legislation used bureaucratic language to erase 'climate change' from public law, we used civic branding to the public to witness climate reality firsthand," a 350 Action spokesperson and organizer told Hyperallergic. "The reaction speaks for itself: you can't deny the physical laws of nature, and you can't argue with the public record."

Whether scrolling past AI-generated “paintings” of Donald Trump as Jesus or videos of a mosque inside a shopping mall, the spiritual and holy coexist with the profane and commercial today. But decoding the meaning of our lives remains as alluring and difficult as it ever was. Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s 9 Temples to Heaven (2026), which recently screened at the New York Film Festival, takes a thoughtful approach to exploring the ways we choose to navigate these contradictions.

The film follows a family in Thailand, led by the middle-aged Sakol (Surachai Ningsanond), as they visit and build “merit” at nine Buddhist temples by making material offerings and prayers, in hopes of extending the life of his elderly mother, Sakuay, also referred to as “Grandma” (Amara Ramnarong). The trip is sparked by a premonition from Sakol’s employer — who has a history with prescient visions —  that requires him to finish this auspicious number of visits within a single day in order to maximize blessings.

The film is Chidgasornpongse’s debut feature narrative but highlights a knack for patient observation: He previously directed the documentary Railway Sleepers and has assistant directed with Apichatpong Weerasethakul. With its long takes and wide angles that often linger on the dichotomous architecture in and around Bangkok, 9 Temples to Heaven appears to matter-of-factly catalog how Buddhism functions in Thailand amid capitalism, patriarchy, and other mundane aspects of daily life. This stillness does not necessarily imply neutrality, though.

The film opens with a small, golden altar illuminated by candles in a dark room. As more lights flicker on, we see that the altar is part of a larger golden structure with radiant statues inside a temple. Outside, workers set up chairs and a speaker practices pronouncing Sakuay’s name. They’re preparing for a funeral.

The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the discovery of the remains of two enormous statues depicting King Ramses II in the village of Behbeit Al-Hagar, a known archaeological site in the Nile Delta. The artifacts were uncovered after a citizen notified antiquities authorities about finding a stone with hieroglyphic inscriptions on his property.

Behbeit Al-Hagar is best known for the ruins of the Iseion, an ancient Egyptian temple devoted to the goddess Isis.

Per the Ministry's press statement, the excavation yielded one carved stone head of Ramses II wearing the double crown that signified the pharaoh's unified rule over Upper and Lower Egypt. The head is around 5'3" (1.6m) tall, indicating that the height of the entire statue would likely have exceeded 27 feet (8.5m) — a scale connoting immense artistic significance. Remains of the upper portion of the statue's back pillar were also found nearby, bearing an inscription of the King's Horus name: “Hor-Ka-Nakht-Mery-Maat.”

Welcome to the 359th installment of A View From the Easel, a series in which artists reflect on their workspace. This week, Allan Wexler tinkers, saws, and paints in the woods of Long Island, in a studio he built himself.

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.

Allan Wexler, Southold, New York

How long have you been working in this space?

After living part-time on the North Fork of Long Island for decades, in 2001, we bought four acres of woods in Southold. I was trained as an architect, and so we, like most creative people, had always dreamed of designing and building a unique house and art studio. We completed the studio in 2006. We completed the house in 2009. I also have a small studio in Brooklyn.

Describe an average day in your studio.

I wake in my house and prepare coffee in my La Pavoni Espresso maker. By 9am, I commute for my one-minute walk on the well-worn path through the woods to my studio. There, Monday to Friday and often weekends, I spend the day, with time spent out for walks in the neighborhood or to the beach. I take occasional short trips back to the house for a coffee, lunch, or a bathroom break. Being in the studio, surrounded by past and current works and many yard sale collections, inspires the next work. I listen to public radio from morning until 2pm, then switch to music on Spotify for the afternoon. While I am at work, I am not consciously listening — but the ambient background sound keeps me company. When struggling, stagnant, or questioning the relevance of my work, I will change the music I have been listening to. A change from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” to a Mozart opera will push me in a new direction and renew my energy.

At age 98, Joan Kron has lived many lives. She invented plastic surgery journalism, helped Andy Warhol make his first perfume, hosted the Velvet Underground’s first Philly concert, and commissioned Roy Lichtenstein’s “Super Sunset Billboard.”

That 1967 artwork, a remake of which is on view in the late Pop artist’s exhibition at the Whitney, is one of countless projects she has wrangled into being from behind the scenes. In an exclusive interview today, the indefatigable Kron regales reporter Isabella Segalovich with a slice of those riotous stories, with more to come in her memoir titled The Renegade Housewives of Pop Art — I’ll be first in line at the bookstore.

Also today: WPA-era murals by Black artists in Harlem are finally restored, the art world descends on a champagne-soaked Frieze London, we recommend books on the rich histories of textile art, and critic John Yau finds echoes of Pop art in the paintings of Valerio Adami.

—Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor

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News

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan and the Musée du Louvre in Paris join forces to co-organize a major exhibition exploring Greco-Roman and biblical influences throughout Rembrandt’s practice.
• NYC Health + Hospitals’ Arts in Medicine department restore three New Deal-era murals and a John Rhoden sculpture held at its Harlem hospital on Wednesday, October 14.
• Danh Vo and Sandra Mujinga are selected for Met Museum commissions, a new leader is named for the Armenian Museum of America, Bernie Sanders weighs in on the AI art debate, and more in Art Movements.

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• War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s barbaric execution of a man by a firing squad will still take place; it just won’t be livestreamed after Trump’s intervention. [CBC]
• After the victim in the Cornell Seven case got doxxed, women around the internet stepped up to protect her with one simple phrase: “I am Jane Doe.” [New Yorker]
• Useful tips on how to get that art grant you so desperately need. [Instagram]

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Graduate applications are now open at the School of Art at the University of Arkansas for the 2027-2028 academic year. Applications will be accepted through January 15, 2027. 

The School of Art, housed in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, has four tuition-free graduate programs and offers graduate assistantships, stipends and scholarships, as well as access to funding for fellowships, research and travel grants and residencies. The school offers over $3.5 million in student support annually, which includes scholarships, conferences, research and travel funding.

As the first graduate-level art education program offered in the state of Arkansas, the M.A. in Art Education is designed for students who are seeking to deepen their knowledge of theory and practice in art education. The program trains art educators to use interdisciplinary, collaborative teaching and research to benefit students across Arkansas and the world. Students will learn the practice of art education across a range of educational sites, such as schools, museums and communities.

The M.A. in Art History, specializing in the study of the Arts of the Americas, boasts a unique formal partnership with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Graduate students have access to internship opportunities, archives, and a network of curators from across the world. The program encourages emerging scholars to reimagine what art history can be through hands-on learning, theme-based curriculum and opportunities for travel where graduate students have previously assisted faculty at statewide symposia and in curatorial projects at the Venice Biennale.  

Focusing on graphic and communication design, the Master of Design program prepares designers to build a better world through design and shapes students as designers by preparing them for emerging roles and educating them on designing with accountability. Graduate students have led professional development field trips for undergraduates to local design firms and have worked on design projects with local businesses like Houndstooth Clothing and the City of Fayetteville’s Arts & Culture Division. They have traveled for research projects, working with communities abroad in Bangladesh and Italy, among other countries.

The M.F.A. in Studio Art is designed to give students the space to further hone their craft and to learn rigorous theoretical inquiry, social awareness and research. Studio Art students choose a concentration — ceramics, drawing, painting, photography, printmaking or sculpture + experimental media. Alumni have won prestigious awards such as the Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Fellowship.

In 2027, the School of Art will add a new facility, the Gallery + Foundations building, which will house new galleries where students can exhibit work, and house the student-run Sugar Gallery which allows for all graduate students to enhance both arts administrative and creative practices.

Applications are open now until January 15, 2027. 

Visit art.uark.edu for more information or bring your questions to our School of Art Graduate Information Session at 5:30pm (Central Time) on October 28, 2026.

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

The Met's 2027 Genesis Facade and Great Hall Commissions

Artist Danh Vo was chosen for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2027 Genesis Facade commission, and Sandra Mujinga was selected for the Great Hall commission. Vo, who often entwines his experience as a Vietnamese boat refugee with questionings of modern history, will create new works for the four niches of the museum's Beaux-Arts exterior, on view starting in September. Mujinga, whose practice draws from the legacy of Afrofuturism, science fiction, and post-colonialism, will present a site-specific installation in the institution's interior next November.

“Danh Vo and Sandra Mujinga both treat history as something alive and unsettled and are deeply attuned to the ways objects and bodies carry meaning across time," Met Director and CEO Max Hollein said in a statement.

Sarah Hayes Named Deputy Director of Armenian Museum

Sarah Hayes, who had led the Armenian Museum of America's (AMoA) Development department since 2023, has been named deputy director of the Massachusetts institution. Her immersion in Armenian culture, history, and human rights goes back decades, when she served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the nation from 2005 to 2007. Hayes later worked as West Coast operations manager for the Armenia Tree Project in Los Angeles before joining AMoA. In her previous role at the museum, she helped secure key works for a landmark Arshile Gorky exhibition and is credited with strengthening the institution's financial sustainability.

What Else Happened?

There’s a reason the lexicon of textiles and fiber lends itself so well to storytelling — we thread the needle, weave the tale, spin the yarn. Writers have reached for these metaphors for centuries because they feel true to life, but artists know they’re also true to craft and its tangled histories. We’ve gathered a few recent books on embroidery, fiber art, weaving, and more that deserve a closer look, from Black Southern quilting and Korean bojagi to Palestinian tatreez and contemporary Diné weaving. Refreshingly, so many of these titles complicate or refuse reductive, familiar frameworks and open up new ways to understand the meditative and political dimensions of textile traditions, moving past the false dichotomy of “craft versus art” and sexist and tired notions of “women’s work.” You might even say these books piece together a new history of textile art, stitch by stitch. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor and books editor

Reparative Craft: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Textile Artist by Jason Edwards | Duke University Press, 2026

I know Eve Sedgwick from her deeply influential work in queer and literary theory, but it had somehow escaped me that she was also an artist. This book, which straddles literary and craft theory, examines her textile art between the mid-1990s and 2000s — the period in which she was also writing Touching Feeling. Some of those same ideas — particularly her preoccupation with Buddhism — can be found in her dreamy textile collages and sculptures meditating on illness, repair, and death. —Lisa Yin Zhang

Stories in the Seams: A People's History of Black Quilts and Their Makers by Sharbreon Plummer | Chronicle Books, 2026

In an opinion piece for Hyperallergic in June, Sharbreon Plummer argued that Black American quilts are inseparable from the inner lives of their makers. Organized into three parts, “memory,” “method,” and “medicine,” Stories in the Seams is the fruit of that pivotal reframing. This compassionate collection of essays, homages, and interviews with Black American quiltmakers centers their interiority as much as their technique. Plummer — who also participated in a roundtable in Routed West, featured in this list as well — traces these quilts’ influence on artists and writers like Romare Bearden and bell hooks. As she writes in her introduction, “Black quilts remind us that healing, connection, and creativity are still possible.” —Lakshmi Rivera Amin

NYC Health + Hospitals’ Arts in Medicine department wrapped up conservation work on three New Deal-era murals and a John Rhoden sculpture held at its Harlem hospital on Wednesday, October 14.

Located in the hospital's indoor mural pavilion, the Great Depression-era works were made during a pivotal period in United States history when Black artists advocated for and gained unprecedented access to major public commissions through the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) Federal Art Project. Among the commissioned works were Charles Alston's two companion murals, "Magic in Medicine" (1940) and "Modern Medicine (1940)," and Hayes's eight-panel mural, "Pursuit of Happiness" (1937), which have been restored as part of the preservation effort in Harlem.

"In 1936, when these designs were submitted, administrators at the time objected to them because they said there was 'too much black subject matter,'" Larissa Trinder, head of the Arts in Medicine program, told Hyperallergic in a phone interview. After artists publicly protested the verdict, the hospital commissioner reversed the decision. 

In 1962, the first-ever Pop Art exhibition on the East Coast was mounted at the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association (YM/YWHA) in Philadelphia. Just days before the Sidney Janis Gallery broke with Abstract Expressionism in its historic show The New Realists, the firebrand "housewives" of the Y had already featured many of the same up-and-coming artists, including Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg in Art ’63: A New Vocabulary.

Brushing off the scorn from Philadelphia’s then-conservative art world, the show’s organizers, Audrey Sabol and Joan Kron, would go on to claim more firsts. They made the first “multiples” by artists like Robert Indiana and Marisol and hosted the Velvet Underground’s first concert in Philadelphia — a scandalous affair that almost ousted Kron from the Y, but, years later, would become a badge of honor in the organization’s history. 

It was Kron’s idea to exhibit art on billboards that led her to commission Lichtenstein’s “Super Sunset Billboard” (1967), a remake of which is on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in its major retrospective Roy Lichtenstein: Like New. 

Kron went on to become a trailblazing journalist for New York Magazine, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and worked as a contributing editor at large at Allure. Now, at 98, she is working on her second documentary, and her stories of artists including Andy Warhol, Christo, Robert Rauschenberg, and more are detailed in her upcoming memoir The Renegade Housewives of Pop Art, which will be released this December. Our interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Hyperallergic: How did the Lichtenstein billboard come about? 

Joan Kron: I was invited to be on the committee for the 1967 Arts Festival of Philadelphia, and I presented the idea to put art on billboards on every artery in the city. People shot it down. The head of city planning was on the committee, and he said, “That's a terrible idea! We're trying to get rid of billboards.” So I said to my collaborator, Audrey Sabol, “Do you want to work with me just on this, just by ourselves? We started a committee to save billboards. We made the architect Robert Venturi chairman, who had a fight with the city planning guys. 

I was friendly with Walter Stait, who owned all the billboards around Philadelphia. He said, "I'll give you any free billboards I have, Joan. But they're all rented." So that was a dead end. We were sitting in Audrey's kitchen, looking out the back window and trying to figure out what we could do, when we remembered they had a handball backboard in the backyard. We were friendly with Roy Lichtenstein by then, and he had already offered an image of a sunset. The backboard was in the exact same shape as the image. So Walter Stait painted the billboard, and we had a big party to promote the idea of art on billboards. We got tons of publicity. 

Then, Rose DeWolf from the Daily News wrote up a story about how “Joan wants to put art on billboards from here to Chicago. Is she out of her mind?” Roy and I went on the radio show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with Ralph Collier. He made fun of us. He said, “No one is ever going to give you their billboards for art. That's never going to happen." 

There’s always some naysayer. Then, about 40 years later, in Great Britain, they had a program for two weeks called Art Everywhere UK. They took over tens of thousands of billboards around the whole country, plus thousands of signs on top of taxicabs and on the sides of buses. A year later in the United States, they had the same thing. It was vindication at last.

LONDON — Yesterday, October 14, the international art world descended on Regent’s Park for the opening of this year’s edition of Frieze London, where they mingled, sipped on Ruinart champagne and spent lots of money. A visitor, coincidentally dressed to match an orange-and-black sculpture by Teresa Solar Abboud, reaffirmed that the preview day was as much about seeing art as it was about being seen.

In many ways, the 2026 edition is a typical offering. There was the obligatory mirrored artwork-slash-selfie spot, this time in the form of Anish Kapoor’s stainless-steel “Green and Brandy.” There were indeterminate objects lying on the carpeted floors, which could either be works of searing socio-political commentary or discarded wrappers from someone’s overpriced sandwich. There were lots and lots and lots of paintings. 

A novel feature of this fair — and perhaps any art fair in history — were the loo-based installations taking the form of “urinal cakes and toilet rim blocks” that are intended to “diffuse a custom scent invoking the smells of Gray Wielebinski’s studio.” Frieze commissioned the artist to conceptualize the olfactory installations for its bathrooms, which were produced by the creative studio Dean's Bottom. Maybe it was the early symptom of a fair-week cold, but I personally couldn’t detect the “notes of pencil shavings, paint, dust and sweat.” Still, though, top marks for originality.