“Post-It Note Drawing #89.” All images © Aron Wiesenfeld, shared with permission When a friend asked for a small drawing on a Post-It note to add to his growing collection of artworks on the iconic yellow square, Aron Wiesenfeld obliged. The North Carolina-based artist rendered one of his introspective scenes and enjoyed the process enough to create an entire series on the 3 x 3-inch canvas. Wiesenfeld has since created dozens of drawings in black ink, translating the mystery and ennui of his paintings onto the scaled-down surface. In one work, an open dresser drawer reveals a toddler tucked ..read more

All images © Rüdiger Schlömer, shared with permission Rather than build the letter “A” or “R” through digital layers, Rüdiger Schlömer constructs the alphabet, numbers, and basic symbols stitch by stitch. The Zurich-based designer devised Typeknitting, a project that interlocks two distinctive creative forms into a methodically constructed, tactile hybrid. “Typographic knitting to me is a process of translation between two very different fields, hand knitting structures and type design. This is what makes it so interesting to me,” he shares. Schlömer first melded the two practices when refas ..read more

 A new video released by the European Space Agency (ESA) reveals the riotous activity of the sun’s atmosphere in unprecedented detail. Taken by the Solar Orbiter in September, the footage captures a lush blanket of “corona moss” met by bright arches, or the magnetic field lines that shoot from the interior. Researchers say the brightest regions reach a whopping one million degrees Celsius—the cooler spots appear darker because they absorb radiation—and the “fluffy” hair-like structures are made of charged plasma. As the video illustrates, spires of gas, a.k.a. spicules, shoot up along the hor ..read more

Gustav Klimt, “The Kiss.” All images © ND Stevenson More than 100 years after it was first exhibited, art historians still debate whether Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” submitted to the 1917 Armory Show in New York, was a wry joke or sly commentary on modern art—or both. That’s because the sculpture, a urinal the artist signed “R. Mutt,” was just a standard piece of plumbing. But Duchamp is also known to have coined the term “readymade,” in which he displayed objects like bicycle wheels or snow shovels as artworks unto themselves, posing the fundamental question that still thrills theorists ..read more

All images © Fidencio Fifield-Perez, shared with permission Fidencio Fifield-Perez’s Dacaments series began as a response to the bureaucracy of the U.S. immigration system. The Oaxaca-born artist immigrated with his family as a child, making him eligible for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). To qualify and retain his status, he needed to collect official documents, the envelopes from which became the substrate for his paintings. When the Trump administration terminated the policy in 2017, people like Fifield-Perez were thrown into limbo before the Supreme Court reinstated it in ..read more

“Abetare” (2024). All photos by Eileen Travell, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, shared with permission When visiting his hometown of Runik, Kosovo, back in 2010, Petrit Halilaj realized that his elementary school was being demolished. He went to the site—which had miraculously survived the Yugoslav wars that spurred his family to flee to an Albanian refugee camp in 1998—and found a pile of desks, many with doodles and notes scratched into their surfaces. These etchings have now found their way to New York, where they’re perched atop The Met’s rooftop garden for Abetare, which tra ..read more

Lisa Ericson, “Chariot“ Every month, Colossal shares a selection of opportunities for artists and designers, including open calls, grants, fellowships, and residencies. If you’d like to list an opportunity here, please get in touch at hello@colossal.art. You can also join our monthly Opportunities Newsletter.   $3,500 Artist Grants | The Hopper PrizeFeatured The Hopper Prize is accepting entries for Spring 2024 artist grants. The program offers two awards of $3,500 and four of $1,000. Submissions will be juried by Lauren Rosati, Associate Curator, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Yor ..read more

Edge of the Horsehead Nebula. All images courtesy of NASA/ESA/CSA Focused on the part of the sky where you can spot the constellation Orion (“The Hunter”) on clear nights, the James Webb Space Telescope’s latest dispatch blinks in astonishing images from an area known as the Orion B molecular cloud. At 1,300 light-years away—more than 7.8 quadrillion miles from Earth—the cloud is the closest star-forming region to our solar system. And rising from the turbulent field of gas and dust is Barnard 33, commonly known as the Horsehead Nebula. The gradually collapsing, interstellar cloud is more th ..read more

All images © Suzanne Saroff, shared with permission “You know how when you smell a fragrance that brings you to a specific time—like if you wore a certain scent for a year in college or if your grandmother always smelled like Channel No. 5—each time you smell that fragrance it brings you right back,” says Suzanne Saroff. “The process of chewing the gum for this series did that in a jarring way.” Saroff is referring to a new body of work highlighting tiny bubblegum sculptures on the brink of deflating or popping. Conjuring memories of childhood competitions and absent-minded chomping, the pho ..read more

L’Église Saint-Nicolas, Heremence, Switzerland. Designed by Walter Maria Förderer, constructed 1967-1971. All photos © Jamie McGregor Smith, courtesy of Hatje Cantz, shared with permission In the mid-20th century, a bold, angular architectural style emerged as a celebration of post-war renewal, innovation, and symbolic strength. Brutalism, known for its bare, monochrome, industrial materials like concrete, brick, and steel, became a way for centers of influence like municipal hubs, government buildings, and cultural institutions to convey magnificent resilience and contemporaneity. Religio ..read more