VOLTA New York launched in March 2008 as a satellite fair of the long-running Armory Show. This year, VOLTA will once again be in alignment with Frieze art fair, presenting galleries from over 18 countries. VOLTA’s focus on cutting-edge contemporary art encompasses several themes—among them, science and nature—from galleries with a wide-ranging international perspective.

Barcelona-based Out of Africa (OOA) Gallery champions work by contemporary African artists. Their presentation will highlight work by Oluwole Omofemi, Matthew Eguavoen, Médéric Turay, and Moses Zibor. These artists, part of a young, dynamic generation of global African diasporans, showcase African pride, tradition, and culture in their practice.

At SEIZAN Gallery (New York/Tokyo), Japanese artist Motohide Takami revisits cultural legacy and collective trauma. The Great Earthquake of 2011 occurred during the artist’s time as a graduate student at Tohoku University of Art in Yamagata. The disaster and its aftermath became a signature trope in his oil paintings. A recurring image of flames by the riverside refers to the Japanese expression “fire on the other side of the river,” meaning something is someone else’s business. This motif underscores human disinterest in tragic events that do not directly impact you, ever pertinent in today’s world.

Venezuelan artist Starsky Brines, presented by the Frankfurt-based Galerie Heike Strelow, explores identity through personal biographical iconography. His anthropomorphic characters are influenced by his

domestic life with his mother, who crafted colorful puppets for Caribbean carnivals. He pairs this visual language with an art historical knowledge of Latin American figurative art, German Neo-Expressionism, the Italian Transavantgarde, and the CoBrA group to create paintings that oscillate between abstract and figurative.

Korean artist Vlad Ogay is inspired by his time spent studying theater in Russia. His “readymade” practice involves collaging together objects and artifacts from everyday life. His works will be presented at VOLTA by the Latvian gallery CUT ART.  A multi-disciplinary artist, Ogay has received prestigious awards in Venice and Cannes for his film projects and is preparing for his first solo show, to be curated by Gianluca Marziani (a consulting curator of the 2011 Venice Biennale and Banksy’s biographer).

Meanwhile, LAMINAProject present a series of collage-based works by New York artist Jody Rasch that explore radio astronomy, a sub-genre of astronomy specializing in celestial objects at radio frequencies.

Artist Natalie Collette Wood has a different take on the organic in her elusive assemblages and layered paintings of fantastical forms. The artist’s work will be presented by Vellum Projects. Among works by five artists exploring topics of mythology, popular culture, environmental activism, and conservation, Wood’s pieces are a particular highlight.

The origin of the name of VOLTA denotes a turn of thought or an inflection point. The fair distinguishes itself in the marketplace with its commitment to creating an environment of discovery for art collectors, with this intention precisely guiding its curation. VOLTA serves as the platform for ambitious international galleries to enter the global art markets of New York and Basel. In turn, the fair offers both burgeoning and established collectors a place to discover the art of now, to grow their collection, and ultimately to connect with and support new talent.

Beyond stand-out group presentations, 14 galleries will feature solo exhibitions at the fair. Among these highlights are: the South Korean Gallery Bhak presenting work by artist Yissho, (AV17) Gallery presenting sculptures by Lithuanian artist Mindaugas Junčys, Catalysta Gallery presenting artworks by Dominican artist Manuel Mera, and Stone Step Gallery presenting Irish artist Paul Hughes.

United by the healing power of creativity, VOLTA New York will collaborate with non-profit partner Fashion Fights Cancer to host an art auction and fashion fundraising event on Thursday, May 18, from 6 to 9 PM, co-hosted by New York Fashion Week’s Fern Mallis and Gary Wassner, CEO of Hilldun Corporation.

The full exhibitor list is available at this link. VOLTA New York is on view May 17-21 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea.

VOLTA New York is followed by VOLTA Basel (June 12-18) at Klybeck 610, Basel, Switzerland.

Follow @voltaartfairs for updates.

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“Reclaiming Home” expands the conceptual framework of Native American art made in Florida today and provides a fuller understanding of art made by the Seminole diaspora. “This exhibition is an imperative step toward establishing a meaningful relationship with the Native American artistic community,” said Ola Wlusek, the Ringling’s Keith D. and Linda L. Monda Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “We are honored to be able to present the work of these incredible Native artists at the Ringling.” The Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes of Florida are represented by visual artists who work, or have worked, in textiles, film, woodworking, beadwork, digital drawing, and painting. Their works offer an intimate look into the artists’ lived experiences, exploring issues of ancestry and identity, their relationship with the environment, and interfaith and traditional ways of knowing in Florida’s Native communities. Drawing from photo-based and digital collage techniques, performance, video, installation, and mixed media, artists from the Seminole diaspora offer diverse perspectives on the themes of memory, history, health, and representation as expressions of Native visual sovereignty.

Artists in the exhibition include the late Noah Billie (Seminole), Wilson Bowers (Seminole), Houston R. Cypress (Miccosukee), Elisa Harkins (Cherokee/Muscogee [Creek]), Alyssa Osceola (Seminole), Jessica Osceola (Seminole/Irish), C. Maxx Stevens (Seminole/Muscogee [Creek]), Tony Tiger (Sac and Fox/Seminole/Muscogee [Creek]), Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Taskigi/Diné [Navajo]/Seminole), Brian Zepeda (Seminole), Corinne Zepeda (Seminole /Mexican), and Pedro Zepeda (Seminole/Mexican). 

As part of the Ringling’s ongoing commitment to add work by artists with a connection to Florida, the museum unveils a recently acquired three-part ceramic work by Jessica Osceola. Portrait One, Portrait Two, and Portrait Three (all 2017) are the first works by a Seminole artist to be added to the Ringling’s collection of modern and contemporary art, thanks to the generous support of the Daniel J. Denton Florida Art Acquisition Fund. This exhibition will include several important loans from the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum of Seminole culture and history, located on the Big Cypress Indian Reservation. “We are grateful for the generous loans of artwork by the artists and lending institutions and, in particular, the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum for their support of this important exhibition,” said Steven High, the Ringling’s executive director. “We look forward to partnering on projects in the future.” Additional lending institutions include the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis. “Reclaiming Home” is accompanied by an exhibition catalog with scholarly texts by Durante Blais-Billie and Dr. Stacy E. Pratt, published by Scala Arts Publishers.

This exhibition is supported, in part, by the Gulf Coast Community Foundation, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Endowment, the Mandell and Madeleine Berman Foundation Endowment, and the Bob and Diane Roskamp Endowment, and sponsored in part by the State of Florida’s Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture; the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wlusek’s research and travel related to this exhibition and publication project was generously supported by the Curatorial Research Fellowship awarded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

For more information visit ringling.org for more information.

By the time Art Toronto comes around in late October, art fair hoppers will have have traveled throughout Europe and will be planning their Miami itineraries. One might ask why a Canadian stop is needed in an already jam-packed art fair schedule?

For one, Art Toronto is home to over 100 galleries, ranging from the best in Canada to some of the hottest names in the international market. Galleries like Patel Brown (Toronto), Cooper Cole (Toronto), Daniel Faria (Toronto), Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Catriona Jeffries (Vancouver), Galerie Hugues Charbonneau (Montreal), Royale Projects (Los Angeles), Fazakas Gallery (Vancouver), Pangée (Montreal), and Galerie Pici (Seoul), along with many others, are participating in Art Toronto this year, and will test collectors’ appetite for up-and-coming talent. During Art Toronto’s 24-year history, collectors have purchased work by Tau Lewis, Sara Cwynar, Manuel Mathieu, Shannon Bool, June Clark, Wanda Koop, Dominique Fung, and many others—all at pre-market prices.

What makes this opportunity to connect with emerging talent unique is the involvement of Art Toronto director Mia Nielsen. In her four short, yet challenging, years overseeing the fair, Nielsen is re-imagining Toronto’s place within the art world and growing her vision of creating the most anticipated fair in North America—big shoes to fill, especially when New York is your neighbor. But watch out! As the popularity of Canadian music, art, and film grows, the creative energy in Canada is thriving and driving international talent to the North. Call it the “Drake-effect,” combined with a low Canadian dollar: Toronto is becoming a cultural destination.

This year, legendary curator Kitty Scott has joined the Art Toronto team and will curate the fair’s 2,000-square-foot “Focus” exhibition, which will present new, ambitious artworks by artists shown at the fair alongside important historical work. Staying true to the art-fair model, all works featured in “Focus” will be for sale. Scott’s decades-long career with Canada’s leading art institutions makes her one of the most respected curators in Canada. A champion of Canadian artists, Scott curated the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017, featuring an installation by Geoffrey Farmer, and co-curated the Liverpool Biennial in 2018.

In keeping with the goal of acting as a springboard for young talent, Art Toronto is launching Discover, a new section dedicated to exhibitions of work by emerging artists. Presented by principal partner RBC, Discover aims to create opportunities for galleries to showcase the dynamic practices of up-and-coming artists and to introduce them to new audiences.

Art Toronto runs October 26–29 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre located in the heart of downtown.

Learn more at the arttoronto.ca.

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SINGULART turns this model on its head. At this premium online art and furniture shop, the discovery comes first. The search, in comparison, takes no time at all.

SINGULART enables clients to buy artwork and furniture by more than 12,000 artists from 110 different countries. To navigate this massive collection, SINGULART allows potential buyers to customize their search by myriad specifications. First, users identify the medium they’re seeking, whether painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, works on paper, or “miscellaneous.” From there, they can filter by country of origin, price, size, orientation, genre, and even dominant color scheme.

With SINGULART’s broad offerings and powerful search function, customers are all but guaranteed to find a work perfectly suited for their space. The company even handles framing and shipping.

“Our aim is to digitally democratize art,” a SINGULART spokesperson told ARTnews.

SINGULART was launched in 2017 by Véra Kempf, Brice Lecompte, and Denis Fayolle. Though she initially pursued a career in politics at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, Kempf nursed an abiding interest in art: At an early age, she was hugely inspired by the work of photojournalist Robert Capa; and Kempf herself studied central European art. She parlayed her erstwhile dreams of starting an NGO into entrepreneurship, participating in Startup Weekend in 2015. Fayolle, a serial entrepreneur, served as one of the jurors. He and Kempf stayed in touch, then connected with Lecompte, an insatiable traveler who first caught the art bug during a stint in India. Upon returning to France, he met Kempf and also came onboard.

SINGULART was founded on a principle of gender equity that still defines the platform five years on: Forty-nine percent of its participating artists are women, compared to just 11 percent in brick-and-mortar galleries worldwide. Any artist can apply for a SINGULART account, but they must be approved to exhibit on the platform. SINGULART’s sister site, balthasart, which launched in 2021, is more open, allowing any EU-based artist to upload and exhibit their work. Geared toward new buyers and up-and-coming artists, balthasart caps art prices at €1,000.

Both sites operate similarly for artists: Once a work is purchased, the artist sends it to the buyer through SINGULART’s prespecified shipping vendor—usually DHL, UPS, or an art shipping specialist—along with a certificate of authenticity. After the artwork is received by the buyer, the artist gets paid. Of that sum, SINGULART takes a 30 to 50 percent commission of the total price, depending on the artist’s renown.

Many of the artists currently exhibiting on SINGULART’s platform are, indeed, quite well known. Filtering by “Acclaimed Artists” turns up works by the likes of Tomi Ungerer, Richard Caldicott, Canal Cheong Jagerroos, Sol Kjøk, and Hassan Massoudy.

But if that’s not your thing—much less your budget—numerous other filters allow you to seek out up-and-comers: “Invest In” artists, “Emerging Artists,” artists who are “Only on SINGULART” and those who are “New Online.”

Those filters are also applicable to SINGULART’s mouthwatering furniture offerings, which range from light fixtures to functional pieces to decor. Much like SINGULART’s fine-art search function, furniture options can be further filtered by dimensions, material, and style, including midcentury modern, Art Deco, rustic, Scandinavian, industrial, and more.

Whether you’re a first-time buyer or a veteran collector seeking out new artists in your area, SINGULART is a stress-free sandbox to play in. Buying art has never been so easy—or so fun.

Learn more and buy art at singulart.com.

The city’s instantly recognizable character, an alchemical fusion of ineffable mystique and laid-back spunk, stems from a cultural continuum that links Indigenous peoples and European settlers to the multivalent influence of Santa Fe’s newest transplants. Though it remains modest in size, the city has supplemented its ever-ascending cultural cachet over the past several decades with robust dining and shopping scenes, making it a global destination for all.

Today, Santa Fe’s unique cultural offerings are acclaimed worldwide. Money.co.uk named it one of the world’s top cities for art and culture lovers,  alongside art capitals like Florence and Vienna. Encompassing traditional and contemporary, outdoor and indoor, invigoratingly immersive and breathtakingly intimate, Santa Fe is a place with something for everyone, where opportunities for exploration, reflection, and adventure abound.

The beating heart of the city’s art and culture scene is Santa Fe Plaza, a pueblo-style forum in the middle of downtown, crowned by the 17th-century Palace of the Governors. Step beneath the covered portal on the plaza’s north edge and browse scores of craft objects fashioned by Native artisans who set up shop there year-round. Across the street, the state-operated New Mexico Museum of Art holds one of the nation’s most emblematic collections of Southwestern art.

History aficionados will be particularly rewarded by a trip to Museum Hill, on the city’s southeastern side, where visitors can spend hours exploring Santa Fe’s most venerated art museums. Delve into the collections of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture and the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art to unearth the region’s past and discover how the creativity of these cultures shaped Santa Fe’s modern-day identity. This is also a timely moment to visit the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, New Mexico’s oldest nonprofit museum, which in 2022 is celebrating its 85th year. 

Another recognizable institution currently marking a major milestone is IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), a bastion for contemporary art made by Native American, First Nations, and other Indigenous creators, and has in its holdings some 9,000 artworks comprising painting, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, media arts, and more. Both MoCNA and its parent organization, the Institute of American Indian Art (IAIA), cap off a year of anniversary celebrations (50 and 60 years, respectively) with open studio and cultural events that allow visitors to explore Indigenous cultures through art.

In 2005, Santa Fe earned the distinction of being designated a UNESCO City of Craft and Folk Art, making it the first UNESCO Creative City in the U.S., thanks in part to vaunted institutions like the Museum of International Folk Art. But the quantity and variety of cultural and fine arts in Santa Fe also makes for bountiful opportunities to reexamine such labels. For example, form & concept, a gallery space that invites guests to deconstruct the siloing of fine art, craft, and design, is championing that notion through its influential programming and artist residencies.

Despite its deep historical roots, Santa Fe is also a hub of contemporary art theory and practice. Its epicenter is the Railyard District, hailed as one of the nation’s best civic art districts and home to the world-famous SITE Santa Fe. This museum’s contemporary architecture, itself sculptural in nature, encloses similarly cutting-edge work in the forms of innovative exhibitions and acclaimed biennials. Around the corner is Art Vault, the city’s newest exhibition space, which specializes in various art forms, including video, algorithmic, and time-based media. Railyard Park, at the center of the district, is the venue for dozens of events each year, from interactive-art festivals to concerts and other performance art events.

The breadth of Santa Fe’s creative trove can’t be contained by indoor spaces alone. In addition to the murals and public art installations that dot the city, local artists and their creations seem to spill from their studios to mingle with visitors on the street. At least, that’s the case on Canyon Road, where more than a hundred adobe and Territorial-style buildings house galleries, boutiques, and restaurants along a walkable half-mile stretch that also hosts some of Santa Fe’s most user-friendly outdoor festivals. Venture a little farther outside of town and you’ll encounter Shidoni Gallery and Sculpture Garden, whose eclectic array of freestanding pieces makes it the premier site for outdoor art in the area. 

The city’s continuity with the desert landscape is never lost on its visitors. Expansive vistas, unique yet subtle color palettes, and enchanting geological forms make the region’s topography an art form in itself. It’s no surprise, then, that artists across epochs and around the globe have drawn inspiration from this environment. The legacy of Georgia O’Keeffe, one of New Mexico’s most famous residents, has left a deep mark on the area; her work threads through a host of regional venues, from the downtown Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to nearby Abiquiú’s Ghost Ranch, the artist’s longtime estate, whose 21,000 acres yielded subjects for some of her most iconic landscape paintings. By contrast, the Santa Fe Botanical Garden is a de facto plein-air gallery that offers verdant sanctuary for introspection amid the dusky hues of the arid terrain.

For thrill seekers and social media mavens, the Instagram-worthy visuals don’t end with desert sunsets and mountaintop views. Experience Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return, an interactive-art funhouse that invites guests to duck, crawl, and climb through its 70 rooms of eye-popping installations. Stick around until after dark for live concerts right in the heart of the mind-bending venue, or continue the adventure right outside in the surrounding Siler Rufina Nexus district, formerly an industrial neighborhood that’s now a hotbed for Santa Fe’s artists, performers, craftspeople, and makers of all kinds. 

This wide range of artistic traditions, media, and disciplines, all weaving together in a cogent way, is the key to Santa Fe’s magic. The spirit of the city’s diverse art scene lives in the spaces between dichotomies of old and new, physical and immaterial, dynamic and fixed. At seemingly every turn, there’s a chance to experience the wealth of possibilities found along these axes—and in them, boundless opportunities for discovery. And that’s just what makes The City Different.

Learn more and plan a Santa Fe visit at www.santafe.org.

Similarly, when Guggenheim donated Mural to the University of Iowa in 1951, it signified a kind of arrival for the public university’s already prestigious art department. Mural and the University of Iowa have since become interchangeable symbols of artistic excellence; yet for the past 14 years, Pollock’s magnum opus has been only tenuously tethered to its Midwestern homestead since a devastating flood struck the university’s art museum in 2008 and displaced its collection. While all the works were recovered, they were left without a permanent home, and many of the university’s linchpin holdings—including Mural—were forced to take up temporary residence in galleries and storage units around the world.

But on July 14, 2022, after years of restoration work and tours throughout the United States and Europe, Mural returned to the University of Iowa, kicking off a celebration a decade and a half in the making.

The University of Iowa’s reputation as a world-class enclave for fine art dates back more than a century. The university began offering formal curricula in fine arts in the late 19th century, but planted its stake as a pioneering institution for arts education in the 1920s with the introduction of the “Iowa Idea,” the then-novel concept that artists and art scholars ought to practice alongside one another within an academic context, allowing each to study and be challenged by the other’s work. The university’s School of Art and Art History was founded in 1938 with the Iowa Idea as its guiding principle, and defined a graduate-level art theory and practice program that became the blueprint for the modern master of fine arts degree.

The decades that followed were marked by key acquisitions for the university’s fine art holdings through strategic purchases and gifts, including major works by Joan Miró and Max Beckmann, as well as the first entries to its now-legendary collection of African art. By the time the art museum at the University of Iowa opened in 1969, the foundation had long since been laid for the modern-day Stanley Museum of Art to hold one of the premier university art collections in the United States.

The Stanley’s grand reopening this year has provided an opportunity for the University of Iowa to reassert its excellence and reexamine its values, starting with the building itself. Designed by architecture firm BNIM Iowa, the striking, brick-clad Stanley Museum of Art building integrates gallery and event space with multipurpose education suites. Students learn just steps away from artistic masterpieces, ensuring that the Iowa Idea is built into the museum’s design.

“The architects also understood that, as a teaching museum, the new Stanley would serve as both a library of global visual culture and a laboratory for experiential learning,” said Lauren Lessing, the museum’s director since 2018. Like a library, the museum is intended as an inclusive space. Gallery texts throughout the Stanley are presented in English and Spanish, and museum admission is always free.

Upon entering the Stanley’s first-floor lobby, visitors are greeted by Surrounding (2022), a luminous mural by Nigerian-born painter Odili Donald Odita, who spent part of his childhood in Iowa, in close proximity to the university. Odita’s work, which is the first in a series of temporary installations by Iowa-affiliated artists entitled “Thresholds,” was composed as a response to Pollock’s Mural.

That juxtaposition is a fitting introduction to the Stanley’s inaugural exhibition, “Homecoming,” which opened concurrently with the museum’s dedication on August 26. Supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, “Homecoming” illuminates conversations between artistic traditions across eras and continents through a series of installations that feature more than 600 artworks from the museum’s permanent collection. “This exhibitionoffers fresh views of familiar artworks and recent acquisitions,” Lessing explained. “Our goal is to challenge past interpretations, inspire new questions, and point toward the future growth of the collection.”

Many such familiar artworks are on display in the installation “Generations.” Comprised of six thematic galleries, “Generations” places longtime touchstones of the university’s collection alongside rarely shown and recently acquired works. It also celebrates the university’s venerable history as an American art stronghold with works by notable alumni and faculty, including Grant Wood, Elizabeth Catlett, Oliver Lee Jackson, Hans Breder, Ana Mendieta, and Chunghi Choo.

Another installation, “Expansive Visions,” highlights artists as rulebreakers who have broadened the scope of human expression. Mural is show together with Sam Gilliam’s Red April, as well as works by Hawaiian artists Toshiko Takaezu and Tadashi Sato, Leon Polk Smith, and Philip Guston, underscoring the reciprocity of global cultural influences on abstraction.

“Points of Departure” reconsiders pathways into creation and celebrates undervalued interpretive perspectives. This installation includes Miró’s 1939 A Drop of Dew Falling from the Wing of a Bird Awakens Rosalie Asleep in the Shade of a Cobweb and Beckmann’s 1943 Karneval,as well as works by Lee Krasner, Stuart Davis, and Miriam Schapiro.

The installation “Reencounters” spans two galleries and highlights works of art that stage new encounters, technically and pictorially, by reinventing genres or traditions. Here ceramics from the American Southwest illustrate the cross-generational transfer of knowledge while communing with Ad Reinhardt’s monochrome Abstract Painting. Grant Wood’s Plaid Sweater is flanked by Simone Leigh’s 103 (Face Jug Series) and a poignant 1956 photo by Gordon Parks, illustrating the nuance and complexity of portraiture.

Works in the installation “Human/Nature” consider our relationships to our surroundings and to one another, while those in “Action and Reaction” show the continuing evolution of Contemporary artistic expression.

Homecoming also nods to the university’s reputation as a preeminent site for African art in “Fragments of the Canon: African Art from the Saunders and Stanley Collections.” The installation centers on the contributions of Black Iowan Dr. Meredith Saunders, whose breathtaking personal collection of art purchased during his travels in West Africa now forms a vital segment of the museum’s holdings. While it plays to one of the museum’s strengths, “Fragments” doesn’t shy away from reckoning with the Stanley’s complex legacy by probing questions of narrative agency, value, and authenticity in the field of African art.

Beyond “Fragments” are two additional installations. “Centering on Cloth: The Art of African Textiles” explores the theme of global exchange through textiles that incorporate materials, motifs, and techniques from around the world. And “About Face: African Masks in Iowa” emphasizes historical, material, and artistic relationships in West and Central African masks from the permanent collection, and features new work by contemporary artist Hervé Youmbi.

Just as pieces in the Stanley’s collections have traveled far and wide since the disruptive event that scattered them in 2008, “Homecoming” similarly explores cultural exchange and movement across time and geography. The crux of this is the installation “History Is Always Now,” which expands its focus from African and Asian art objects to include Indigenous art from Oceania in the Americas and positions them alongside contemporary works. Framed in this way, the installation erases divisions perceived through the context of era and cultural origin and invites viewers to view these as relationships of influence—particularly the influence of Black and Indigenous artists.

That this perspective is a core tenet of the reinvigorated Stanley Museum of Art marks an evolutionary turning point for the Iowa Idea—one that expands upon the University of Iowa’s multidisciplinary approach with an additional dimension of intercultural and intertemporal dialogue, offering a wider, kaleidoscopic lens to view the canon even as it unfolds in generations of artists to come.

Visit Stanley Museum of Art to learn more.

With the theme of “Post-human Age,” the call invites creators of any age or nationality to submit works that “explore the relationship between life and nonlife in the future, revisit the positioning of human beings, and respond to the coming era increasingly characterized by pluralism and sophistication.”

Digital artworks submitted by both individuals and teams will be accepted in the forms of media art, including video, animation, and sound art; software, data-driven, and AI art; and interactive art, especially virtual-reality and augmented-reality-based works, among many other forms.

“The most essential qualities that distinguish us from other calls are our core values, great inclusivity, and openness, which are also the values that govern the world of NFTs,” said Sydney Xiong, director and curator of the APENFT Foundation and secretary general of the Art Dream Fund. “We’ve always been committed to nurturing and supporting young artists and creators who are open-minded, daring, imaginative, and able to inject fresh vitality into the art sphere.”

That commitment extends beyond mere financial resources. The foundation pledges to support winners with mentorships in marketing, communications, copyright protection, and legal affairs, signifying an investment in the professional development of talented digital creators as they advance in a cutting-edge and rapidly evolving domain.

The 2022 contest builds upon the success of the Art Dream Fund’s inaugural call in late 2021. The 2021 grand prize winner, selected from more than 500 submissions, was a piece titled Infinite Falling (2021), by WMD Studios. Entries were judged by a panel of NFT experts, including Xiong and Justin Sun, founder of TRON, an open-source blockchain operating system that hosts APENFT and jointly established the Art Dream Fund.

More than just an opportunity to mobilize its resources for championing forward-thinking artists in the NFT space, the 2022 Art Dream Fund marks a milestone for APENFT as it continues to cement its credibility as a major player in both the global art scene and the crypto community.

APENFT was founded in 2021, with the mission of creating a space for world-class artworks on blockchain by registering both physical and digital works as NFTs. The foundation’s collection, valued at over $150 million, includes physical artworks by Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Alberto Giacometti, alongside works by pioneering crypto artists like Beeple, Pak, FEWOCiOUS, and Mitchell F. Chan, making APENET the first foundation in the world whose holdings encompass both physical and digital NFT artworks.

APENFT’s marketplace and foundation are now divided into two units, with the foundation focusing on not-for-profit initiatives. Its aim is to use its robust resources as well as its platform as a premier tech-driven art foundation to build a bridge between the traditional art field and the crypto space, thereby elevating the profile of burgeoning NFT artists and their contributions to the medium.

While NFTs are still in their relative infancy, they have already had a seismic impact on the way art is catalogued, valued, and disseminated. The practice of registering physical artworks as NFTs has become an increasingly attractive mode of authenticating ownership, as the unchangeable nature of blockchain technology makes such data impervious to theft or forgery.

This benefits not just collectors, but also creators, as it provides a means for artists to collect royalties on a sale each time a work changes hands. What’s more, the surge of interest in the NFT space from backers of all stripes has also spurred a tidal wave of aesthetic innovation as creators from diverse backgrounds seek to carve creative niches within the crypto space. This influx of talent has introduced novel approaches to overcoming the limitations and exploring the formal uses of the digital medium.

That innovation isn’t confined to the works themselves. NFT artworks have been exhibited in navigable digital galleries in the metaverse that simulate real-world places (think Alaska’s Matanuska Glacier) or are embedded into open-world video games, like Minecraft. Presenting works in this context also invites new modes of engagement between art and viewer, and blurs the lines between fine art and other creative disciplines, including game design.

This is a key feature of the 2022 Art Dream Fund’s open call. Winners will have the opportunity to have their works displayed in The Sandbox, a metaverse game currently in development by APENFT and TRON, which will further democratize the user experience by enabling individuals to not only view but also interact with these and other works.

Interactivity is a salient aspect as well. APENFT has also partnered with AsyncArt, a platform that provides tools to help creators—even those without a coding background—produce visual/audio-interactive NFT artworks; together they will present the Async Visual-Audio Award, which recognizes experimentation and innovation in interactive art, at the 2022 contest.

Says Async Art founder and CEO Conlan Rios, “Through the Async Visual-Audio Award, we invite artists to join us to turn the existing concept of art on its head and pave the way for a whole new category of programmable media. This is just the start, but we believe these simple building blocks will open up a world of possibilities for the creators out there, and we are really excited to see the genius ways people might use it.”

Even as APENFT and the Art Dream Fund continue to pave the way for technological and artistic innovation, they keep one foot firmly planted in the realm of physical art. During the open call period, APENFT will host forums to invite discourse around the NFT’s place in the fine art landscape; principles of NFT sponsorship and collection; and the influence of the metaverse on art creation.

Buy-in from the traditional art world for the Art Dream Fund is evident. The 2022 judging panel is made up of a broad spectrum of experts, from veteran collectors and curators to crypto moguls, such as Rios; Philip Tinari, director of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art; Jonathan Crockett, chairman of Asia at Phillips; art advisor Josh Baer; and collector Sylvain Levy. The nomination and selection panel includes contemporary artist Cheng Ran; Laura Shao, director of international development for the Hive Center for Contemporary Art; art writer Kenny Schachter; Ciara Sun, cofounder of C² Ventures; Claire Huang, Async art advisor and columnist; and Mimi Nguyen, lecturer at the University of the Arts, London.

“In a crowded marketplace, there is never a shortage of talent,” says Baer, “but often the support needed to ensure the artists of today and tomorrow just isn’t there. That is why I’m excited to be part of this initiative. Along with my esteemed arts colleagues, we have a chance to make a significant impact on the careers of the next crop of young great artists, so they’re empowered to do what they do best—make art—and get a foothold in the global art market.”

For registration details on APENFT’s 2022 Open Call, visit artdreamfund.apenft.io.

Now, BMW’s Art Car ethos is hitting the mass consumer market. Unveiled at the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the new BMW iX M60 inaugurates Digital Art Mode, which transforms the inside of the car into an immersive digital installation by Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei. For now, Cao’s work, Quantum Garden, will be the sole artwork available in selected BMW models, including the recently launched 7 Series; but BMW drivers should expect to see Digital Art Mode continue to develop.

Quantum Garden is just the latest in a series of fruitful collaborations between Cao and BMW. Cao created the most recent Art Car model for BMW, ingeniously off-roading the use of augmented reality when she incorporated it into her design for the 2017 BMW M6 GT3. She also served on the jury for the recently founded BMW M4 GT4 design competition. In addition, her first major solo show in the UK was commissioned and presented by Rolls-Royce’s Muse art program. (Rolls-Royce is a subsidiary of BMW Group.)

Cao’s freewheeling, psychedelic work trades canvases for screens and nostalgic musings for fantastical utopian futures—a perfect fit with BMW’s bleeding-edge creative vision.

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“Last year, when BMW was thinking about the concept of Art Mode, they thought I might be a suitable artist for this project, because the future mode of driving is very closely connected with digitalization,” Cao tells ARTnews.

But, while Cao is accustomed to working in the digital realm, Quantum Garden indisputably presented new challenges for the Beijing-based artist. First of all, the experience would be both mass-produced and mass-programmed in selected BMW models. Cao had to fit her work to specific screen dimensions and keep Art Mode’s practical limitations front of mind at all times.

“I don’t want it to distract drivers. But to some extent, that’s a very difficult challenge for an artist, because you create art to catch people’s eye,” Cao says. “It’s not like regular artwork—you need to consider functionality and safety features.”

To this end, a BMW spokesperson confirmed that the current iteration of Art Mode moves more slowly while the car is in motion, so as not to distract the driver. Cao’s design—Technicolor 3-D streaks and shapes, undulating over a pitch-black backdrop—is designed to be visible yet unobtrusive, no matter the time of day.

The Art Mode will be available in various models, including the new all new BMW i7 pictured here

Art Mode joins other mood-oriented My Modes experienced inside the new line of BMW vehicles, which can change multiple settings in the cab—lighting, sound design, and more—with the click of a button. Quantum Garden is shown on the car’s main display, the imagery enhanced through these multisensory settings. The abstract artwork evokes the brilliance of a restless skyline at night, albeit observed from a tranquil distance. The new 7 Series especially, with its innovative light features across the cockpit, allows for an immersive experience of the piece.

“I would describe the color effects as quite meditative,” Cao says. “It’s not meant to grab [people’s] attention, but to provide a relaxing and reflective atmosphere.”

That design task weighed heavily on Cao while creating Quantum Garden. BMW first reached out to her about the project last year, at a time when much of the world was still sheltering in place and curbing in-person interaction. She began thinking about the automobile’s expressive potential as a space that was mobile but all one’s own—an agent of connection at a time when many were feeling more estranged than ever.

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“I see this work as releasing a kind of quantum energy through [driving],” she says. “It’s a way of spreading my vision of healing and connecting people. You can see it in the art: Different dots connect, circle, and interact in the bigger picture.”

If Quantum Garden can be some small part of making tentative steps toward that reconnection, Cao will feel like she achieved what she set out to do when she took the commission last year.

“I hope that, no matter how far we are from one another, people will come together to bring back our lives,” she says. “I’d like this quantum garden to bloom.”

Click here to learn more or follow @BMWGroupCulture on Instagram.

This is the impetus behind a recent acquisition campaign coinciding with the 50th anniversary in 2022 of SAAM’s Renwick Gallery, the nation’s leading center for American craft. Formally launched in 2020, the acquisition program has brought more than 200 objects into SAAM’s permanent collection, markedly increasing the number of Black, Latinx, Asian American, LGBTQ+, Indigenous, and women artists represented in the museum’s holdings.

“When it comes to expanding the museum’s collection, our priority is to break barriers further,” says Nora Atkinson, the Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-in-Charge for the Renwick Gallery, who chaired the campaign. “At 50 years, we have an opportunity to look back at our history, see where we have succeeded and fallen short, and recalibrate as we embark on the next 50 years. By including people of all genders, sexualities, ethnicities, and abilities in our collection and examining all forms of craft practice with genuine curiosity, we are building a national collection that showcases a multiplicity of perspectives and experiences.”

The Renwick Gallery’s acquisition campaign is part of a larger SAAM initiative that has to date brought in many significant works by a broadly representative and diverse group of American artists in all media, from painting and sculpture to time-based media, photographs, self-taught art, and contemporary craft. Such notable works include Orilla Verde at the Rio Grande (2012), one of three paintings by Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick; Ana Mendieta’s iconic 1973 short film Sweating Blood; and the multimedia installation Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me—A Story in 5 Parts (2012), the first work by 2013 MacArthur Foundation Fellow Carrie Mae Weems to enter SAAM’s holdings.

Carrie Mae Weems, Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me—A Story in 5 Parts, 2012, video installation (color, sound) and mixed media, 18:29 min. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase. Photo courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

The recent acquisitions similarly bridge the chronological span of its extant collection. A milestone bequest by collector Larry J. West in 2021 introduced a trove of early photographs dating from the 1840s to 1920s, including work by pioneering African American daguerreotypists James P. Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge, and Augustus Washington. Anchored on the opposite end by contemporary entries such as Arthur Jafa’s 2016 short film Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, the museum’s collection presents depictions of Black Americans by Black artists nearly two centuries apart.

A new wave of landmark works by David Harper Clemons, Karen LaMonte, Sharon Kerry-Harlan, and others will be unveiled in “This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World.” The exhibition, which will open on May 13 and run through April 2, 2023, at SAAM’s Renwick Gallery, demonstrates the sheer breadth of new craft work in the museum’s permanent collection, with approximately 135 of the 170 artworks on display never having been seen before at this site.

There is an undeniable political through-line that binds the works in the exhibition, which takes its title from This Present Moment (2019–20), a sculpture by Texas-based artist Alicia Eggert. The striking billboard quotes a line from a book by futurist Stewart Brand (“This present moment / Used to be / The unimaginable future”), displaying the text in pink neon—a nod to the #MeToo movement.

J. P. Ball, Untitled (young boy), undated, sixth-plate daguerreotype. Smithsonian American ArtMuseum, the L. J. West Collection of Early African American Photography, Museum purchase made possible through the Franz H. and Luisita L.DenghausenEndowment

Indeed, the present moment is the focus here, and many of these touchstone works date from the past decade. The exhibition also notably debuts a new piece by quiltmaker Bisa Butler, who weaves vibrant threads into captivating life-size portraits of Black Americans. Butler’s Harlem Hellfighters (2021–22) brings to life a segregated unit of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I. The soldiers are rendered in a patchwork of cotton, silk, wool, and velvet against a quilted backdrop. In typical Butler fashion, their eyes are trained on the viewer; the intensity of their gaze, coupled with the electrifying colors and sumptuous materiality of their vestments, imbues Butler’s subjects with a lifelike immediacy.

The exhibition also points to the iterative nature of craft art in works that refract traditional elements through the prism of modernity. Bold extrapolation upon form is the calling card for Philadelphia-born ceramist Roberto Lugo, who embellishes luxury porcelain objects with a graffiti artist’s sensibility to comment on social issues. His 2021 work Juicy elaborately adorns a stoneware vase with the likenesses of hip-hop icons and bright colors suggestive of his family’s Puerto Rican origins.

Other pieces signify an extension of that tradition. Glass artist Preston Singletary creates elegant sculptures that draw upon the iconography of his Tlingit heritage. Safe Journey (2021) is excerpted from his series of “Spirit Boxes,” based on traditional storage boxes used by Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest.

One of SAAM’s most momentous new additions is also one of its most timely. Sonya Clark’s Monumental (2019) was inspired by a discovery she made in the Smithsonian Institution’s collections in 2011, when the noted fiber artist was conducting research as a Smithsonian Artist Residence Fellow. The object was a white dishtowel, which was waved to announced the Confederate Army’s surrender in 1865 at the Appomattox Court House.

Sonya Clark, Monumental, 2019, woven linen with madder dye, 180 x 360 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Clark’s own piece, woven from linen using traditional methods, recreates its unassuming source material on a massive scale. The title both alludes to the work’s utter scope and draws a connection to ever-unfolding conversations on racial justice and the significance of historical symbols amid a nationwide reckoning over Confederate statues.

Monumental is arguably the linchpin work of “This Present Moment,” not least because its message succinctly distills the thesis of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s recent acquisition efforts. Situated mere blocks from the National Mall and the White House, the SAAM galleries share psychic real estate with some of America’s most ideologically significant sites. This proximity raises a question: While it’s true that monuments are principally signifiers of history, are they not also ongoing testaments to shared values?

Unlike fixed monuments, however, an art museum has the opportunity to evolve its values based on the curation of its contents. The expansion of SAAM’s collection to include such bold and varied pieces as these underscores the museum’s commitment to both championing significant works by American artists and offering nuanced insight into the plurality of the American experience.

“This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World” opens at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery on May 13, 2022. Visit the museum’s website for more information about SAAM’s recent acquisitions.

Though always well regarded within his immediate circle, Little has flown under the art world’s radar for more than half a century—until now, thanks to his inclusion in the 2022 Biennial, where more than half a floor is dedicated to his series of “Black” geometric compositions. The seven grisaille canvases that fill the space are a revelation, establishing once and for all Little’s importance as an American master of Abstraction. The show is the fulfilment of a long-held dream, he says: “When I got out of graduate school and came to New York, being recognized in the Whitney Biennial was the one thing I wanted more than anything else—anything.”

Installation view, James Little at the 2022 Whitney Biennial floor 6. From left to right: Stars and Stripes, 2021; Big Shot, 2021; and Exceptional Blacks, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL.

Little’s late-career flowering was the result of both choice and circumstance. Instead of attempting to appeal to the fleeting tastes of the art market, he always focused first on the principles of his medium, engaging in a rigorous study of color theory, pictorial design, and painting technique. At the same time, like most African American artists, he was consistently undervalued by white dealers, collectors, and curators. This was especially true during the 1970s, a period dominated by Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Performance Art. By then, Little’s formalist approach—and, indeed, painting itself—was out of fashion; but Little didn’t care, describing himself as “a guy who just stuck to his guns… It sounds stubborn as hell, but that’s me.”

Little’s determination was, to a large degree, shaped by his background. He was raised in Memphis, Tennessee, during the 1960s; and though the Civil Rights movement had begun to dismantle the strictures of the Jim Crow South, the city remained highly segregated, forcing him to stay mindful of where he could and couldn’t go, lest he attract the attention of the Ku Klux Klan or other racists bent on violence. His parents both worked, his mother as a cook, his father as a construction worker. And while Little says the family’s financial situation wasn’t “dire,” they  did live paycheck to paycheck, an experience that instilled in him frugal habits—such as grinding his own paints and mixing his own additives and binders—that continue to this day. “I had to learn how to invent things and be creative,” he says. “I buy raw materials and create my own stuff instead of getting it off the shelf. Rather than pay $50 for a quart of varnish, I can make it for $10. All these things play into the whole idea of not having something.”

James Little, Big Shot, 2021. Oil and wax on linen, 72 x 72 in. Courtesy of the artist and Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL.

Yet, despite their difficult circumstances, Little’s parents supported his artistic ambitions. He notes how unusual this was at the time: “If you were from Memphis, you became a musician, an athlete, or a minister,” he says. “That was it. There was nothing else.” As a very young child, he was inspired to draw by watching his older brother work on art assignments he brought home from school. When he was 8, his mother gave him a paint-by-numbers kit for Christmas; after finishing it, he wondered what to do with the leftover paint, and his father offered a solution by giving him pieces of shirt cardboard from the cleaners. Little used them to render copies of a painting by Thomas Eakins he found in an encyclopedia.

Another formative experience in Little’s art education occurred at Syracuse University, where he went to graduate school in the mid-1970s. There he attended seminars taught by New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer as well as writer and critic Clement Greenberg, an SU graduate who played an essential role in promoting the ascendency of American art after World War II, when New York displaced Paris as the world’s art capital. Greenberg championed Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, insisting they were the true inheritors of the Modernist avant-garde because they pursued pure abstraction through “medium specificity”—that is, applying paint for its own sake, without reference to subject matter or spatial depth.

James Little, Exceptional Blacks, 2021. Oil and wax on linen. 72 x 72 in. Courtesy of the artist and Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL.

This emphasis on “flatness,” as it was more generally referred to, dates back to Maurice Denis—a late-19th-century artist associated with the Symbolists and the Nabi group—who postulated that above all else, a painting was “a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.” Greenberg; the Abstract Expressionists; and, later, Color-Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland followed Denis’s notion to its logical conclusion. Their example was not lost on Little: “I want to create a flat, frontal, modernist space and eliminate as much illusion as I possibly can,” he says of his technique. “But I also want an animated space that’s engaging.”

While Little has used both raw pigment on paper and conventional oils on canvas, the material he’s most frequently associated with is one that dates back millennia: encaustic. Believed to have been invented in Ancient Greece, encaustic—a mixture of varnish, pigment, and wax heated to a liquid state—is difficult to use. As he does with most everything else, Little formulates his own encaustic, then flattens them out in smooth layers arrayed in hard-edged patterns like chevrons, angled striations, and triangles. And though he acknowledges his appreciation for the medium’s “robust and central qualities,” Little says he also wants to “expand it beyond the conventional notion of encaustic, so when you look at my paintings, you don’t really know what medium they’re made with.”

James Little Stars and Stripes, 2021. Oil and wax on linen. 72 x 72 in. Courtesy of the artist and Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL.

Regarding art world expectations that his work address issues of race, Little has resisted being pigeonholed, remaining true to his commitment to abstraction. While perfectly content for people to interpret his “Black” paintings through the prism of race—“Because I’m Black, people try to see that in the work, and part of it is true”—he also rejects an outright pursuit of the issue. “I don’t buy it,” he says. “But if you want to go out there and paint these things about race and that kind of thing, I mean, be my guest.”

Still, he adds, dealing with racism in the abstract pales in comparison to what he experienced first-hand, growing up in the tumult of the segregated South. He also cites the transient nature of making work topical, posing a hypothetical: “What if things change tomorrow, and we don’t have racism anymore? What do you paint then? That’s why I paint pictures for everybody. Race doesn’t have a space in my art.”

Installation view, James Little at the 2022 Whitney Biennial floor 6. From left to right: Stars and Stripes, 2021; Big Shot, 2021; and Exceptional Blacks, 2021.Courtesy of the artist and Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL.

Although the Biennial showcase will certainly expose Little’s work to a much wider audience, it hasn’t gone completely unnoticed over the years. In 2009, the artist received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in painting; and in 1980, he was included in the group show “Afro-American Abstraction” at MoMA P.S.1, along with such luminaries as Mel Edwards, Ed Clark, Sam Gilliam, Richard Hunt, Al Loving, Martin Puryear, Jack Whitten, and William T. Williams.

Yet only now is Little receiving his due. His perseverance over five decades has been remarkable, especially considering the number of artists who, in the course of history, have simply given up in the face of such seeming indifference. But Little’s passion for painting and art history, as well as his belief in the universality of art, always kept him going. He didn’t—and, perhaps, couldn’t—quit.

“Art is like religion to me,” he says. “It has to have feeling and emotive content, and it has to be transcendent. If it lacks that, then it’s just clinical. It’s a clinical exercise.”

James Little in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Kavi Gupta.

Forthcoming: James Little, Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth Street FL 1, Nov. 12 – Dec 20, 2022