Thousands of protesters marched to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City on Saturday afternoon, November 25, as part of a massive action in support of Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed more than 14,000 Palestinians over the past month and a half. After nearly seven weeks of continual bombings following Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israel agreed to a “humanitarian pause” last week which was extended today for two additional days.  Activists gathered at 2pm at Columbus Circle, some 20 blocks south of AMNH. Organizers who spoke to Hyperallergic said that by the ti ..read more

A coalition of arts and cultural workers staged a sit-in at London’s Tate Modern on Sunday, November 26, to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Dozens of demonstrators gathered in the museum’s Turbine Hall around 3pm to show their solidarity with the Palestinian community and to pressure the institution to join the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement. The action came during the second half of a temporary ceasefire between the Israeli military and Hamas fighters that allowed for several exchanges of Israeli hostages and Palestinians held in Israeli prisons over the weekend. Featu ..read more

It was the first time my friend could recall four trans women artists having art shows in New York at once — and all within a few blocks of each other on the Lower East Side. Trans women artists are gaining visibility, from the recent survey Full and Pure, addressing embodiment and identity, at the Green Family Art Foundation to breakthrough shows for artists like Willa Wasserman and Cielo Félix-Hernández.  Michelle Uckotter’s work presents a more grim, surreal look at girlhood than the tender, pastel memes that flood Instagram. Currently on view at King’s Leap, the oil pastel self-portr ..read more

At last, artist-mothers are having a moment. For centuries women have struggled to balance the competing demands of art-making and childrearing — and many have been excluded from the art world as a result. Only in recent years has talk of artist-motherhood and its challenges entered the mainstream, with a spate of books and films and essays, along with new residencies and networks, continuing to push the conversation further. The consensus: Women with children need institutional support — from galleries, from the government — in order to thrive as artists. By now, the plight of artist-mothers ..read more

WASHINGTON — Turning an elevator into an art gallery may not be unheard of, but it’s still an uncommon impulse. Like a gallery, an elevator functions as a transient public space. However, transforming a machine designed to transport people and things between floors into a visual art showcase has its own quirks. According to Julia Bloom, director of the Freight Gallery in DC, an elevator serving as an art gallery embraces the “ephemeral” aspects of displaying art. And the term “ephemeral” precisely captures the sensation of witnessing one of her shows. Visiting the Freight Gallery is inconveni ..read more

If you’re shopping for the bibliophile on your list this holiday season (or you are said bibliophile), look no further! The Book by Design: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Greatest Invention (2023, University of Chicago Press) is an ambitious compendium that seeks to catalog and analyze the history of the book in myriad forms — from illuminated manuscripts to the illuminated screen of your Kindle; from scrolls to scrolling. Along the way, the book explores standouts from the British Library’s collection of historic manuscripts dating back to the 7th century and spanning millennia of inter ..read more

Over 30 artists will gather in Lower Manhattan on December 2 and 3 this weekend to sell their work at the National Museum of the American Indian’s (NMAI) annual Native Art Market. Another iteration of the fair will take place simultaneously at NMAI’s second location on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Creators from across the country will showcase art ranging from basketry to beadwork to painting, selected by curators and scholars at the museum from a wide-ranging group of artist applicants. The New York edition of the fair started in 2005 and has taken place annually ever since, attracti ..read more

Thin eyebrows are back, Brazilian butt lifts are out, and people are lining up to get their lip injections dissolved after years of the procedure trending — who can keep up with the beauty standards that change at the drop of a hat? Apparently, they’re inescapable even after death, as revealed by the restoration of a 17th-century portrait of an English Countess whose face was revised with larger lips long after the original work had been completed. Part of the Suffolk collection, the full-body portrait of Countess Diana Cecil of Oxford has undergone conservation and will be displayed at the K ..read more

LOS ANGELES — Abel Alejandre’s exhibition of pristine, meticulously rendered paintings at Launch Gallery, The Chicano Moon Landing of 1968, presents a captivating alternative history of the first moon landing. Using a grayscale palette in all but two works to mimic graphic novels, the artist has constructed a narrative that begins with “1968” (2023), a painting of a bull charging through the cosmos with fierce determination, under a banner that sets the event in 1968, a year prior to the actual moon landing and also the artist’s birth year. In “The Chicano Moon Landing of 1968” (2023), based ..read more

Dyani White Hawk, “Untitled (Pink and Blue)” (2022), acrylic, oil, synthetic sinew, 24k gold seed beads, glass bugle beads, and vintage glass seed beads on canvas, 47 x 47 1/2 inches (all images courtesy the Brooklyn Museum) During the United States’s internment of Japanese citizens in World War II, painter and printmaker Hisako Hibi used the canvas as a way to illustrate her family’s experience when they were forcibly displaced from their California home to Tanforan Assembly Center, then later Topaz War Relocation Center. Over the artist’s eight-decade career, Hibi was recognized for her oil ..read more