“The world hums with beauty and danger, harmony and discord,” says Jake Messing. “We walk through these shifting currents every day. For as long as I can remember, I have turned toward the natural world—studying its patterns, its relationships, its quiet lessons.”

In highly detailed, hyperrealistic paintings, the Northern California-based artist explores nature as a reflection of our inner lives. Abundance and beauty are sometimes confronted with tension and discomfort, and through nature, “I question the fears and unspoken rules that shape us,” Messing says.

Working in acrylic on canvas, the artist composes otherworldly vignettes of flora and fauna, often uniting creatures and plants in situations we’d be unlikely to encounter in the real world. Yet these dense, maximal clusters of succulents, insects, blossoms, birds, and other creatures summon what Messing describes as both “chaos and grace” in a vibrant meditation on ecosystems, interdependency, and biodiversity.

In an art historical sense, these works certainly nod to the meticulously detailed Dutch Golden Age oil paintings of the likes of Rachel Ruysch and Jan Brueghel the Elder, which were also typically set against deep backgrounds. Employing a bit of memento mori—a reminder of the inevitability of death—these often incorporated wilting petals and other nods to decay.

Messing taps into this tradition, yet he emphasizes full-blooded vivacity. Every floret and frond is bursting with life, while the occasional playful color gradient, bubbles, or shiny fabric place these compositions firmly in our time. “Through my work, I seek to bring the outside in, to honor the wildness that surrounds us, and to reveal the beauty and danger, the decay and renewal, that bind our outer and inner worlds together,” he says.

See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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For the better part of two decades, Irina Werning has traveled throughout Latin America searching for a specific trait: incredibly long hair. In her photography series Las Pelilargas—meaning “the long-haired ones” in Spanish—she chronicles a time-honored Indigenous tradition through a visual celebration of patience, joy, and cultural pride.

In a statement, Werning shares that when she asks young women in the many small towns she’s visited why they have long hair, they respond with simple reasons akin to, “Because I like it.” But, Werning adds, “The true reason is invisible and passes from generation to generation. It’s the culture of Latin America, where our ancestors believed that cutting hair was cutting life, that hair is the physical manifestation of our thoughts and our souls and our connection to the land.”

Nearly 90 images are included in Werning’s new book, Las Pelilargas, published by GOST Books. The photos span 18 years, starting with the artist’s first encounter with long-haired women in 2006 in Argentina, when she was photographing members of the Indigenous Kolla community.

“Guided by her intuition, she went on to spend months in remote mountain towns putting up signs in schools, hospitals, and markets, and organising hair competitions in an effort to seek out those with long hair,” GOST says. Werning continued to make the portraits until 2024. “She found that traditions were not just surviving, but evolving with long hair symbolising both continuity and subtle rebellion.”

Find your copy on Bookshop. You might also enjoy Celia D. Luna’s series, Cholitas Bravas.

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From the beaded phrases of Jeffrey Gibson’s sculptural weavings to Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s canoe series to Raven Halfmoon’s fingerprint-textured tributes, a new exhibition marks the largest presentation of American Indigenous work in the U.K. to date.

Opening next week, Hold to This Earth at Yorkshire Sculpture Park features nearly 70 pieces by 38 artists, which in turn represent 35 Tribal Nations. “(The artists) reference and honour ancestral knowledge whilst being steadfastly contemporary, asserting a powerful presence and countering narratives of erasure that too often position Indigenous cultures only in terms of the past,” says a statement from Tia Collection, from which the pieces are drawn.

Colossal readers will recognize works by Cannupa Hanska Luger, Dyani White Hawk, Nicholas Galanin, and more. The range of media highlights the diverse materials and approaches that Indigenous contemporary artists use and nods to cultural traditions, heritage crafts, and precious landscapes while also considering socio-economic issues, visibility and representation, and technology.

“Materials such as clay, hide, wool, beads, and natural pigments become carriers of powerful stories, memory, and tradition, rooted in connection to the earth,” says Tia Collection. “Newer modes of expression and understanding growing out of digital culture also speak to the shifting landscapes of Indigenous life in the 21st century.”

Hold to This Earth opens on June 13 and continues through April 18, 2027, in Wakefield. Keep up with exhibitions featuring works from the Tia Collection on Instagram.

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From factories and barrel-roofed buildings to gabled churches and towers, Charles Young’s sprawling yet diminutive city of paper models continues to grow. Known for his miniature constructions and animations that often double as three-dimensional color studies, the sculptor and animator highlights a wide range of architectural styles with an emphasis on color pairings.

Since 2020, Young has been making hundreds of miniature structures inspired by A Dictionary of Color Combinations by Japanese costume designer and painter Sanzo Wada (1883-1967). (There’s even a fun, interactive website based on the book.) So far, Young has completed 258 buildings from the first volume, which focuses on two-color combinations, and there are 90 to go. But he’s created a wide array of examples featuring multiple color combinations, too.

In June, Young will display 120 three-color paper sculptures at Galerie Handwerk in Munich. And in addition to the paper models, he also creates architecturally inspired sculptures from wood and woven cane, some of which are currently on display in Scotland at Kirkcudbright Galleries and MacLaurin Gallery. See more on Young’s Instagram and Tumblr.

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When it comes to photo dumps, NASA has upped the ante. The organization has added thousands of snapshots from the Artemis II mission to the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth archive. The album now holds 12,217 images by cosmic travelers Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen during their more than 250,000-mile, 10-day flyby mission around the moon.

According to PetaPixel, a couple of Nikons and an iPhone 17 were the cameras of choice for the journey. And even though many of the thousands of recently uploaded images are very similar—some are even quite blurry—scrolling through them gives the impression of being seated right next to the “Moonfarers” as they marvel at Earth and its satellite and simply can’t put the camera down—just like we tend to snap way too many photos of a beautiful sunset.

Some of the most impactful photos include the reflections of the astronauts’ hands and faces in the window of their vehicle, the Orion module. Juxtaposed with meticulously engineered equipment, the earth and moon seem somehow less abstracted from this unique vantage point, in which these orbs appear somehow more resonant and precious—and vulnerable.

Explore more of our favorites below, and learn about the Artemis II mission on NASA’s site.

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In folklore, twilight is often interpreted as a liminal, even magical time during which spirits emerge in the transition between light and dark. It’s sometimes even seen as a period when extra caution is advised, as will-o’-the-wisps, shapeshifters, and fae may try to influence people in their path. For artist Nicholas Moegly, nightfall sets the scene for neighborhoods and quiet streets in which curious creatures roam, and lights flicker on in houses, signaling the end of the day.

Many of Moegly’s works possess a dreamy realism along the lines of photographer Todd Hido’s Houses at Night or the illustrations of children’s book author Chris Van Allsburg. There is both a timelessness and a sense that these locations could represent virtually anywhere around the U.S. Sometimes, deer and foxes meander through yards or down alleyways, glancing backward as if responding to a sound. In other compositions, lights shine from upper windows of a house or shop on a hazy street corner, although people are nowhere to be seen.

Moegly is currently in the midst of the largest oil painting he’s made thus far, experimenting with the relationship between scale and realism in a way that’s challenging his artistic direction. He’s also working toward future exhibitions, transitioning from online releases to more in-person shows. See more on his Instagram.

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When Moffat Takadiwa sees a pile of rubbish—old technology parts, personal care items, clothing—he doesn’t just see a bunch of junk. The Harare, Zimbabwe-based artist has spent the better part of two decades collecting thousands upon thousands of pieces of plastic and metals foraged from landfills near the city’s Mbare neighborhood, where heaps of electronic equipment waste, also known as e-waste, ends up in illicit dump sites. In his studio, vast collections of colorful objects are meticulously sorted into collections.

Takadiwa is known for his elaborate sculptures made from what he describes as “everyday consumer residue”—discarded computer keyboard keys, toothbrush heads, plastic combs, buttons, and more. The colors, textures, and patina of wear and age produce patterns that it’s tempting to describe as “organic,” even though the materials are the opposite.

The artist’s current solo exhibition, The Crown! at Semiose, highlights the tension not only between visual harmony, consumer culture, and waste but also those of what curator Fernanda Brenner describes in the exhibition essay as “the tensions of Africa’s post-colonial afterlife.” Takadiwa describes it as the “colonial hangover.” For instance, afro combs appear throughout the show, “rooted in African traditions and the colonial self-fashioning they forced,” Brenner says. “Once tools for grooming and ritual, these combs now bear the weight of resistance and pride in Black political life.”

Takadiwa’s compositions drape, tapestry-like, with repetitive patterns and textures that alternate between softness and brittleness. From the distance, the details of unique components blur into a fabric-like substrate, but upon closer inspection, nail polish brushes, caps, and keyboard keys in various states of aged yellowing emerge as individual tributes to overconsumption and excess. “The result is beautiful, which is where the trouble begins,” Brenner writes. She continues:

If beauty could settle old scores, the art world would have solved more than it has…Rearranging the materials does not erase their origins. If you have ever pressed ‘delete’ and believed the problem was gone, his work offers a quiet correction. Nothing disappears; it only travels, usually to places like Mbare, where Takadiwa opened his artist-run space in what used to be a colonial beer hall.

The Crown! continues through May 16 in Paris. See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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A fashionable bat, a melancholy sun, and a springtime spirit with seasonal allergies are just a few of the characters conceived by Cat Johnston. Drawing on childhood memories, folk art, and nature, the London-based illustrator and model maker creates expressive sculptures and puppets that inhabit dreamlike realms.

Invoking historical costumes and cartoonish and emotive faces, Johnston’s otherworldly cast seems both familiar and strange, as if children’s book protagonists have sprung to life or converged with a strange dream. Recent characters comprise a series of gods representing sunburn, hay fever, and insomnia, which also—rather inconveniently—are the sun, flowers, and the moon.

Johnston recently made her first short film in collaboration with stop-motion animator and fellow puppet-maker Joseph Wallace called “The Wickywock and the Jubjub Berry.” As a mythical woodland creature deals with a bout of sleeplessness, a forest sprite appears with what seems like a practical solution, but things don’t exactly go as planned.

Coinciding with a local pagan festival called the Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green, which occurs every first weekend of May, Johnston will have a small solo exhibition at a local pub called The Crown. In addition to signing on to work with London-based cinematic studio Passion Pictures as a director, the artist continues to explore the possibilities of film.

Johnston is currently working on a few ideas for animated series and hoping to develop a slightly longer format stop-motion project while also working on another short film, “which will be a mix of live action puppetry and stop-motion animation and will feature two flowery monsters and an extremely cute bee,” she says.

You might also enjoy the quirky Hieronymus Bosch-inspired figures of Roberto Benavidez.

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Silk has been crafted in Vietnam for centuries, where it’s treasured as a lightweight, luxurious fabric used in traditional garments and art. For Kenny Nguyen, who was born in Ben Tre Province and is currently based in Charlotte, North Carolina, the material provides the foundation for vibrant, large-scale wall works that combine elements of weaving and tapestries, garment production, painting, and sculpture.

Using thousands of hand-cut strips of silk, Nguyen draws on his background in fashion design, employing techniques such as pinning, weaving, sewing, and layering to create what he describes as “deconstructed paintings.” Each work is created around a kind of imaginary body, its creases and undulating forms evoking movement and versatility.

Even though the works appear fixed, they are actually very malleable. Every time a piece is installed, its undulations are determined by where the pins are placed, and it assumes something of a new version. This complements Nguyen’s approach to silk as a kind of “second skin,” he says, which adapts to its environment, represents memories and heritage, and serves as a metaphor for his personal identity.

Nguyen’s work is currently on view in Textile Art Redefined at Saatchi Gallery in London and Earth to Sky at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Singapore. His work will also be included in the exhibition Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses at the Brooklyn Museum, which opens on May 16, and a forthcoming group exhibition at Sundaram Tagore’s London location. See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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Earlier this month, dozens of metallic discs suspended from the ceiling of a large industrial space invited viewers to immerse themselves in what SpY describes as “a continuous choreography of movement and reflection.” The artist is known for his large-scale installations, often repurposing objects like traffic cones and metallic rescue blankets to create striking urban interventions.

SpY’s most recent room-scale work, titled “Halos,” reimagined the industrial interior of a former railway-related factory in Florence—a place we typically associate with Renaissance elegance as opposed to brutalist design—as part of the city’s Bright Festival.

Three stories high, “Halos” interacts with the natural breeze that flows throughout the space, which is exacerbated by people moving around. Glimmering light further lends a sense of ethereality and even magic.

See more on Instagram.

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Softness and resilience. Presence and absence. Vitality and stillness. These are just a few of the dualities that permeate the atmospheric work of Jeanne Vicerial, whose textile-focused practice taps into history and femininity with precision and reverence.

A city-wide exhibition of Vicerial’s pieces titled Incarnation: Carte blanche Jeanne Vicerial opens across several historic spaces in Aix-en-Provence this month: Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme, Musée des Tapisseries, Chapelle de la Visitation, and Musée Granet. Situated amid centuries-old architecture and existing museum collections, the artist’s works nod to time, tradition, and remembrance. The show surveys sculptures and installations created throughout the last several years, including sprawling installations that feature yards of pooling rope and smaller, intimate, provocative wall pieces.

Known for her dramatic Armors series, Vicerial nods to medieval European heritage, such as knights’ armor and burial and memorial customs. “Gisante de cœur,” for example, which translates to “recumbent figure of the heart,” references the tradition of nobility or priests’ sculptural likenesses placed atop sarcophagi. Except in Vicerial’s world, these figures are all enigmatically, anonymously, and powerfully female. The silhouettes of bodies are conveyed through textile, which in turn is associated with clothing and its potential to both reveal and conceal as well as protect.

“Beyond practical functions, textiles carry within them a memory: the memory of gestures, of uses, and of the traces left behind by the bodies that have worn or transformed them,” says a statement. “Thus, the material becomes a silent witness to past presences—the medium for a history that is simultaneously individual, intimate, and collective.”

Incarnation opens on June 13 and continues through October 4.

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New York City in the 1980s felt like a very different place. Imagine subway cars cloaked inside-out in graffiti and Times Square without the monumental LED screens. Evidenced by the likes of photographers Steven Siegel, Willy Spiller, and Jamel Shabazz, not to mention Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style (1982), a period of intense, new, rough-around-the-edges energy was canonized. The era marked the birth of hip hop and New Wave, MTV, iconic fashion, legendary nightlife, and Pop Art.

In 1978, just prior to the economy reeling during a major recession, a 20-year-old Keith Haring (1958-1990) moved to Manhattan to study at the School of Visual Arts. “I arrived in New York at a time when the most beautiful paintings being shown in the city were on wheels—on trains—paintings that traveled to you instead of vice versa,” he said in a piece writing published by the The Keith Haring Foundation. The artist was fascinated by people’s responses to art encountered out in the open and unexpectedly—when it found its way into daily life and became a conduit to conversation and curiosity.

Whether with chalk or black paint, Haring could create decisive, confident line drawings of angels, UFOs, dancing figures, snakes, and other motifs virtually anywhere, many of which were temporary. His work is a highlight of the rescued Luna Luna amusement park, and a mural in Amsterdam was obscured by cladding for three decades before being rediscovered. My dad fondly recalls seeing Haring’s paintings in the hallway of the former Manhattan Pearl Paint art supplies store in 1980. I grew up recognizing his signature cartoonish style long before I knew who he was, wearing his work on a favorite T-shirt. And it’s this prescient “art everywhere” focus that grounds an exhibition opening this week at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art called Keith Haring in 3D.

While he didn’t consider himself a graffiti artist, Haring reveled in the technical precision of tags and unique interventions by street artists like Fab 5 Freddy, Lady Pink, Jean-Michel Basquiat as SAMO with collaborator Al Diaz, and many others were painting all over the city. “Graffiti spoke of a world that was hip and streetwise, creative and spontaneous and underground—all that he admired and wanted to be,” says the foundation. And as the trains rolled through subterranean stations lined with advertisements, Haring noticed something else: ready-made blank canvases.

During the recession, advertisers pulled their investment in subway station ad space, and the MTA replaced empty billboards with large sheets of black paper. By this time, Haring was already interested in the idea of art outside of gallery and museum spaces and how “different people saw different things in the drawings,” he says. As he made big works in an open-air space, he was fascinated by the number of people who would stop and the conversations he work would ignite. “This was the first time I realized how many people could enjoy art if they were given the chance,” he said.

Haring’s subway series, Art in Transit, launched him to the apex of the 1980s art scene, where Andy Warhol was already cementing Pop Art’s presence and a circle of graffiti artists, performers, and other creatives were defining the look, sounds, and feel of the decade. Haring made his drawings very quickly to avoid arrest—the police hauled him away on at least one occasion—and his friend, photographer Ivan Dalla Tana, documented many of the works before they were torn down or destroyed. Fortunately, a handful survive, including one in Keith Haring in 3D.

The tall chalk drawing on black paper is one of few two-dimensional works in the show, but it’s one of many in the collection of Larry Warsh, who has collaborated with curator Glenn Adamson to bring together a wide range of Haring’s sculptural and multimedia pieces. Today, Haring’s work is among some of the most recognizable by mainstream audiences, yet despite critiques that his work has become “sanitized” in its commercialization—something he was actively, and even controversially, a proponent of during his lifetime—viewers are invited into a unique dialogue with literally a new dimension to his work.

The exhibition is situated within a long, open space, so that viewers can see from one end to the other and meander through different areas free from a prescribed or chronological route. Most of the peripheral wall space is also entirely empty, steering visitors into the center to circumambulate a wide variety of forms and installations. Wandering around steel sculptures, ceramic vessels, archival items, and paintings on numerous found objects, the “all-over” sense of Haring’s oeuvre is manifest. I get the sense that Haring could see the potential in any object or space. If something had a surface, it could be art. How or where you personally encounter it, however, is fundamentally a part of the experience, and this is woven into the exhibition’s design.

From inflatable versions of his iconic “Radiant Baby” motif to an altarpiece made following his diagnosis with AIDS to a series of giant, router-carved “totems,” the works in Keith Haring in 3D celebrate experimentation and collaboration. The exhibition also spotlights, if incidentally, imperative issues in contemporary art today, from cultural appropriation to queer experience, not to mention his candid and direct approach to sharing his experiences with AIDS, from which he died at the age of 31.

Many of the artworks in the exhibition are drawn from Warsh’s personal collection. He had the foresight to collect artworks and fragments of Haring’s studio along with hand-painted garments, the embellished hoods of damaged yellow New York City taxi cabs, a headboard, and even a refrigerator tagged by an array of graffiti artists. With a magpie-like eye for the artist’s recognizably bold-lined paintings, Warsh rescued an illustrated steel I-beam from the building Haring worked in on Broome Street, plus jackets and other garments that the artist painted, among many other objects.

Warsh has long been fascinated by the way the artist applied his visual language to just about anything he could get his hands on. A papier-mâché sculpture called “Untitled (Elephant)” has a unique story to it, too. Adamson shares that the elephant belonged to Warhol, who encouraged Haring to add his own interpretation, but hidden beneath its black-and-white composition is actually an original pink-toenailed version by Basquiat.

A series of works Haring called Totems were inspired by Native American totem poles of the Pacific Northwest region, which he viewed as symbols of community and unity. Large wall-hung mask works are clearly influenced by African masking traditions, coated in Haring’s characteristic lines and bold shapes. Adamson acknowledges that today, we view a white artist’s appropriation of these cultural customs through a different lens, and he expounds on Haring’s interpretation of the “totemic” in a recent article published in Artforum.

Other facets of the exhibition highlight the role of music and pop culture, the New York City club scene, the commodification of art, and Haring’s death from AIDS. A number of posters and merchandise-type objects nod to the artist’s Pop Shop, a retail-meets-art-installation he opened in 1986 in New York City’s Soho neighborhood. It may be seen in the spirit of Claes Oldenburg’s The Store installation in 1961, which also circumvented the conventional gallery show with a DIY, entrepreneurial spirit—something we see so much of today with the aid of social media but at the time was virtually unheard of. Haring’s Pop Shop was controversial, but it was meant to prove a point: “It’s about participation on a big level,” he said. He wanted his art to be as accessible to as many people as possible.

That Haring’s work was virtually everywhere—music videos featuring Madonna and Grace Jones, on advertisements, in fashion, throughout subway stations—is the guiding principle behind Keith Haring in 3D also marking the inaugural show in Crystal Bridges’ expansion. The entire permanent collection has been re-imagined throughout a series of both existing and new spaces, which will open in their entirety this weekend.

Adamson and Warsh originally conceived of Keith Haring in 3D as strictly a book project, but it quickly evolved into something much more. A new book of the same title does coincide with the show, positioning the artist’s three-dimensional works in a new light. Find your copy on Bookshop, and visit the exhibition in Bentonville, Arkansas, starting June 6 and continuing through January 25, 2027. You might also enjoy the Keith Haring Pop Up Book by Poposition Press.

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