From the markets of Dakar and Lagos to the sidewalks of Abidjan and the Beherawi neighborhood of Addis Abab, a bold new book by Nadine Barth and Azu Nwagbogu travels from country to country to present a vast portrait of life on the continent. Street Photography Africa compiles hundreds of images from 33 photographers who each turn their lens to public spaces, documenting cultural moments with musicians and dancers alongside more everyday fashions and routines. While vast in scope, location, and style, the nearly 300-page survey is connected by the central premise that “the street becomes a stage.”

Street Photography Africa is out this month from Thames & Hudson. Find your copy on Bookshop.

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In 1963, following nearly 70 years of British colonial rule, Kenya declared independence. The nation was not alone on the African continent; in the 1960s, Gambia, Guyana, Malawi, Nigeria, and others freed themselves from Britain’s control in a watershed period of democratic redevelopment and socio-cultural shifts. Wangari Mathenge, who was born in Nairobi, looks to the not-so-distant past in an ongoing series of vivid oil paintings.

Many of the works shown here are part of the artist’s current solo exhibition, Re-membering at Lévy Gorvy Dayan. Inspired in part by scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 2009 book Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, Mathenge examines her own cultural identity through the lens of Kenya in the first half of the 20th century. Something Torn and New focuses on the long-lasting impacts of colonialism and slavery in Africa.

The artist’s recent work depicts herself as all of the women, who each interact in domestic spaces. Toys, books, maps, and the occasional uncanny scenario, such as the green ladder in the wall of “Re-membering XI (To Leave This Steady Unendurable Land),” nod to a period of significant change in Africa. The figures often play with or alter the items in front of them, such as documenting a transatlantic vessel or jostling a teddy bear in an activity that blurs gutting and mending.

Sometimes, Mathenge’s protagonists meet the viewer’s gaze directly, almost confrontationally, while in other settings, she or he relaxes amid an array of items. Through the lens of cultural memory, the artist gathers symbols of resistance and healing. The compositions are sometimes paradoxical in their depictions of toys and nostalgic items with an underlying tension, like “Re-membering XIII (May the Wind Be Always at Your Back)” in which one of the figures readies an arrow in a bow.

“Re-membering signifies not merely the act of recall, but the active gathering and reassembly of what has been fragmented: cultural memory, inherited forms, histories, and ways of seeing,” the artist says in a statement. The exhibition continues through October 24 in New York. See more on Mathenge’s Instagram.

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In Fustat, a historic district of Cairo that was once the ancient Islamic capital of Egypt and a major trading center, centuries-old pottery known as Fustat ware has been excavated throughout the area. Typically featuring a luster glaze in a wide range of hues to produce an iridescent effect, the surfaces were sometimes incised with designs. For artist Ibrahim Said, who was born in Old Cairo and grew up observing the ceramics industry in the dozens of workshops comprising the area’s Pottery Village, past meets present in richly ornamented sculptures.

The artist’s new solo exhibition, Shaping Time at Yossi Milo, delves into traditional craft with a contemporary twist. Said recently completed the inaugural Metropolitan Museum of Art and Vacheron Constantin Artisan Residency, which granted the artist access to The Met’s collection over an 18-month period and influenced this new body of work.

Said considers time “not as a fixed progression from past to future, but as a layered condition in which histories and imagined futures continually overlap,” the gallery says. Drawing on Islamic and ancient Egyptian art, the artist expands up on the definition of a vessel, creating ceramic bodies linked by concave pillars or curved bands in a dualistic dance.

In addition to time, Said explores traditions associated with life after death and relationships between the permanent and the ephemeral. The precision with which he approaches symmetry and layers the sculptures with patterns such as latticework also serves as a reminder of passing time in the inherently labor-intensive process. The gallery says, “His works look backward and forward simultaneously, treating time as material, and suggesting that shaping an object is also a way of shaping our relationship to time.”

Shaping Time opens today and continues through January 9 in New York. See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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Bondi Beach, a neighborhood east of central Sydney, is about as iconic a surf spot as they come. Its eponymous crescent beach glows with golden sand, and its cliffs frame stunning scenery. In December 2025, it was also the site of a tragic terrorist attack, when two men opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration, killing 15 people. (Gun deaths, let alone mass shootings, are exceedingly rare in Australia, especially compared to the U.S.) At Bondi, heroism and a sense of community converged in its beautiful setting, reinforcing pride of place. And it’s again home, at least temporarily, to “the world’s largest free to the public sculpture exhibition.”

Sculpture by the Sea organizes an annual outdoor presentation of dozens of sculptures every year along a 1.25-mile stretch of coastline, highlighting work by artists from around the world. Styles and materials vary greatly, from geometric abstraction to myriad representational forms. Emma Anna’s “DREAM_N” resembles a giant Scrabble letter rack, while Andre Braun’s “Surface Breach” depicts a giant hand breaking free from the earth.

The show remains on view through November 2. Explore past editions and watch a video of sculptures from last year’s exhibition below. See more on Instagram.

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Anyone who has driven Interstate 25 between Denver and Colorado Springs knows that traffic can get… hairy. And it’s not just drivers whose safety is at risk, as animals like elk, bears, coyotes, and more also need to use the highway to access 39,000 acres of habitat. Cars and pronghorns just aren’t compatible. That’s why Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) set out to build a wildlife-only bridge, the largest of its kind currently in North America, which it completed in December 2025. Within the first nine months since its opening, wildlife-vehicle collisions were already down a whopping 91 percent.

Before the crossing opened, dozens of animals were killed by vehicles every year, often up to one per day during migration seasons. The overpass spans I-25’s six lanes and is completely covered in grass so that critters have uninterrupted access to habitat on both sides of the highway—and drivers face less risk and expense due to collisions. The project is one of several in progress across the U.S., including a handful more in Colorado that include underpasses and smaller bridges. Brandon Marette, a wildlife biologist with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, told CBS News, “One of the most heartwarming moments for me was when CDOT sent me a picture of an elk mama taking her calf under I-25.”

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Nested in a natural lava cave in Mexico City’s Pedregal de San Ángel region, a sprawling, mosaic-laden domicile was once home to Juan and Helen Fowler O’Gorman, an architect and artist, respectively. The pair designed the icon of modernist Mexican architecture, called Casa Cueva, in 1954, although it was largely destroyed after the couple sold the home in 1969.

At Museo Jumex, Álvaro Urbano presents an homage to the innovations of Casa Cueva, drawing on its gardens and the legacy that Helen left behind, particularly through her 1961 book titled Mexican Flowering Trees and Plants. Written and illustrated while she lived at Casa Cueva, the rich volume documented a variety of the region’s native specimens. For Urbano, these vegetal renderings became the basis of a new body of metal sculptures.

The artist’s solo exhibition, Helen, suspends his signature painted plants in a delicate arrangement. Floating against a diaphanous curtain, the lifelike sculptures appear almost as apparitions, hovering in mid-air to guide viewers through the dreamy space.

Each specimen is based off of one that appeared in Helen’s book, and a site-specific installation reveals variegated stone amid a floor of square pavers. Like Casa Cueva, the exhibition unfolds organically, creating a continual dialogue between space, plants, and those able to witness both.

Helen is on view through February 7. Explore more of Urbano’s work on Instagram

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For the last decade, our good friend and collaborator Jeroen Smeets of The Jaunt, has facilitated journeys for artists to some of the most far-flung places on Earth as part of week-long residencies in destinations of their choosing. Building on the limitless inspiration of travel and seeking to grow The Jaunt community, Smeets first hosted a Winter Camp in 2024 that invited four artists to spend time together in close quarters, hemmed in by winter weather and providing a welcome respite for the cross pollination of ideas, art, food, stories, and adventures.

For the third iteration of Winter Camp, Joy Machine and The Jaunt teamed up to bring four artists from balmy California to the frigid tundra of the Midwest, subjecting them to a proper winter for the first time in their lives with frozen lakes, sledding, snowballs, and temperatures reaching a sublime 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The destination? The historic and picturesque Camp Wandawega, located just a short trek north of Chicago in Elkhorn, Wisconsin.

Wyatt Hersey, Melissa Lakey, Esther Pearl Watson, and Anna Valdez joined us in the lodges, kitchens, and bunk houses of Camp Wandawega for five days of arctic magic and only superficial frostbite. The grounds of Camp Wandawega date back more than 100 years and first served as a speakeasy and brothel during Prohibition, before being converted to a summer camp by the Latvian Catholic church. Nowadays, it operates as a truly unique retreat with all the hallmarks of a traditional sleepaway camp, a place that exudes Americana and hearkens to endless days of communion and play that feel so sorely lacking in our digital age. Encased in February ice, we explored every frosted meadow and outbuilding of the camp on daily hikes, wrapped in layers of nostalgia. Did we mention it was also cold?

At camp, the artists were immediately drawn to a cozy attic storage room called the Department of Objects, quickly dubbed The Green Room (or “the warmest space we can reasonably be expected to work”), which is an extraordinary lending library of old magazines, vintage fishing lures, plaid everything, dusty books, patches, and all matter of camp ephemera from generations past–some of which joins us in the gallery. A genuine treasure trove of inspiration and this exhibition’s namesake, the Department of Objects provided countless of hours of painting and drawing that manifested in the work you see here.

You can RSVP to the opening reception of The Department of Objects from 6 to 8 p.m. on October 23 or sign up for the collector preview. All four artists will be present! 

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Claes Oldenburg’s (1929-2022) most famous piece of writing is his statement titled “I Am For…” which graced an exhibition catalogue in 1961 and starts:

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. / I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero. / I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still comes out on top. / I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary. / I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

In all, the statement runs about 700 words. The piece is worth reading all the way through, especially for anyone stuck at a creative impasse, as Oldenburg later described it as a “slightly satirical ode or paean to the possibilities of using anything in one’s surroundings (mostly urban) as a starting point for art.” “I Am For…” is often described as a manifesto, although the artist insisted it was not. I happen to have the last line quoted above tattooed on my arm anyway.

Claes Oldenburg’s large-scale installations are iconic, typically taking everyday items and tools and ramping them up to a monumental size. Perhaps the most famous, “Spoonbridge and Cherry” (1988), was made in collaboration with his wife and fellow artist Coosje van Bruggen and has pride of place over a pond in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. At the entrance of the Denver Art Museum, “Big Sweep” (2006) depicts a broom whisking crumpled paper into a dust pan. And in the Sculpture Garden of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X” (1998-99) depicts a giant vintage eraser with a small attached brush used to manually edit typewritten texts.

The latter motif is also one of Oldenburg’s “Six Themes,” explored in-depth from the 1970s onward. These subjects, which spurred myriad artworks apiece, consist of Geometric Mouse, Three-Way Plug, Fagends, Clothespin, Typewriter Eraser, and Standing Mitt with Ball. Sketches and material explorations prompted numerous interpretations of these seemingly mundane objects.

Oldenburg scaled up the clothespin, for example, so it stood like a giant figure, and he also produced soft prototypes made of stuffed, sewn canvas. He said that “a requirement of any subject is that it be extremely adaptable, especially in scale, so that a small clothespin would be as interesting as a clothespin a hundred feet high.”

The artist was also sensitive to objects’ potential for dynamism where we might not expect it. In “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X,” the round rubber wheel appears to careen across the lawn, its bristles getting blown back in the wind. (The first time I saw one of the Typewriter Eraser works, I thought it was meant to be a wheel that had absconded from its vehicle.)

Oldenburg privileged re-creating objects rather than utilizing found examples, so although they have a readymade-like quality, they’re anything but. He studied his source material from every angle, working with a team to fabricate giant installations that retain the familiarity of the original but challenge viewers to see them afresh. Over time, as some of the original objects have become obsolete—namely the typewriter eraser and the movie film projector, the profile view of which inspired the Geometric Mouse works—they’ve assumed an unintentional abstraction.

Several sculptures from the series go on view next month at Paula Cooper Gallery in the aptly titled Six Themes, which in turn takes its name from the landmark survey exhibition staged at the Walker Art Center in 1975. Afterward, the show traveled to the Denver Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

The new Six Themes is an ode to Oldenburg’s seminal pieces that have not been celebrated collectively since they were first shown 50 years ago. The exhibition includes significant works representing each of the half dozen subjects, including rarely seen examples from the artist’s estate and private collections. The show opens on November 5 and continues through December 19 in New York.

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In surreal tableaux, mythological creatures interact with flora and fauna within dream-like realms. Insects, stars, metaphysical tendrils, and all-seeing eyes accompany human bodies with the heads of raptors. Rithika Merchant’s strange yet alluring symmetry contains what may be esoteric rituals or communions with the natural world. Each speculative, fable-like narrative taps into our collective anxiety about the environment and hope for healing.

Merchant’s vibrant new body of work centers on hybrid creatures and a sense of the sacred, comprising the Mumbai-based artist’s solo exhibition The Dreaming Realm at Galerie LJ. She harnesses elemental phenomena like the earth, plants, fire, water, and the stars to emphasize both volatility and strength. Amid scenes of floods and eruptions, individuals participate in enigmatic activities or ceremonies exemplifying cooperation and determination.

Merchant incorporates “theoretical, historical, and iconographic references, drawing notably on the notion of empirical experience based on sensory perception, the Greek concept of Kairos to question the subjectivity of time, as well as research on the Beguines of the Middle Ages,” the gallery says. The Beguines were a unique lay community of financially independent Christian women who occasionally practiced mysticism. Some communities in western Europe still exist today.

In The Dreaming Realm, the artist nods to symbols of consciousness and transformation. For example, the luna moth evokes the power of intuition and transitions, while ravens represent wisdom, foresight, and a bridge to other realms. Communality forms a conceptual nucleus of Merchant’s paintings, especially in her ongoing series Interspecies Care, which focuses “on social organization, interdependence, reciprocity between species, and knowledge sharing,” the gallery says.

The Dreaming Realm continues through November 21 in Paris. See more on Merchant’s Instagram.

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Combining elemental rhythms with human-made materials, DRIFT’s latest sculptural choreography invites visitors to consider their connection to nature in an interactive experience influenced by the planet’s intrinsic processes and systems. “Aeolus” is named for the ancient Greek deity of the wind and comprises an environment characterized by numerous glass rods with tiny lights inside. These are activated by visitors’ movements.

“Like wind itself, the work only fully exists through interaction,” say Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, founders of the Amsterdam-based design studio in a statement. “It is both still and in motion, fixed yet constantly changing.” Light and glass were chosen to further represent ephemerality and transitions. Glass can be so light and clear it appears spectral, and light is immaterial like the wind: it may be here one moment and gone the next.

“Aeolus” remains on view through October 25 at Carpenters inside of Ladbroke Hall in London. The studio has also announced the forthcoming DRIFT Museum, an 8,000-square-meter space inside of the Van Gendt Hallen in Amsterdam slated to open in early 2027. Follow updates on DRIFT’s Instagram.

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