Diana Thater a Recipient of MCA Santa Barbara's 2025 Art Award →

Diana Thater | MCA Santa Barbara Art Awards

The Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara’s Art Awards honor and recognize individuals or organizations that have made a significant impact on the arts and culture of the region.

Diana Thater is awarded this honor alongside composer Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin and artists Gabriela Ruiz and Manjari Sharma.

Thater has pioneered the use of film, video, light, and sound, continually challenging the boundaries of time-based media and installation art. Her work explores the relationship between the natural and man-made worlds while critically examining the structures of mediated reality. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including literature, animal behavior sciences, mathematics, chess, and sociology, her evocative works directly engage their surroundings, producing an intricate relationship between time and space.

More Information

Pae White in Fictions of Display at MoCA, Los Angeles →

Pae White
June 29, 2025 - January 4, 2026 | Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Pae White, Pantone Pony #284, 1997
Women’s size 10 cowhide shoes
Dimensions variable

Exploring the intertwined themes of theater, performance, and museum display—ranging from props, stages, and pedestals to actors, impersonators, avatars, and the ghostly image of the audience itself—this exhibition presents works from MOCA’s permanent collection. Through sculpture, video, photography, painting, and archival materials, Fictions of Display foregrounds performance strategies that permeate museum spaces and its modes of presentation.

At its core are iconic works from MOCA’s collection, including Claes Oldenburg’s sculptural renditions of everyday consumer goods—shoes, dresses, cakes, ice cream—made from muslin soaked in plaster and painted with enamel that were originally part of his immersive, performative project The Store (1961–62). These works set the tone for a broader exploration of how objects are not only displayed but also staged—re-staged within the conventions of a museum after initially being displayed outside an institutional context. In a note written in 1962, Oldenburg stated that theater was the most powerful art form because it is the most involving. A few lines later he added: “I no longer see the distinction between theater and visual arts very clearly . . . distinctions I suppose are a civilized disease.”

The exhibition also introduces several new acquisitions, as well as works never installed in our galleries, like a painting by groundbreaking Polish theater director Tadeusz Kantor, known for his avant-garde and deeply personal approach to performance, or Catherine Sullivan’s video installation, which merges theater, film, and visual art to examine systems of acting and representation.

Fictions of Display includes figures who have made significant contributions to the history of performance, such as Eleanor Antin, Colette, Rebecca Horn, Mike Kelley, Senga Nengudi, Yoko Ono, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, and Johanna Went, among others. A live element is subtly woven into the gallery experience: For Tania Pérez Córdova’s Portrait of an Unknown Person Passing By, a performer dressed in a garment featuring the same pattern as a ceramic object on view will quietly circulate among visitors at unannounced moments.

Fictions of Display is organized by José Luis Blondet, Senior Curator, with Paula Kroll, Curatorial Assistant.

More Info

Book Release & Panel Discussion at 1301PE: MICROINTERNATIONAL

Saturday June 28, 5-7pm | 1301PE

Join us Saturday June 28 for a book release and panel discussion for Microinternational with Jan Tumlir, Frances Stark, Brian Kennon and Kevin Hanley.

Microinternational is a comprehensive catalogue documenting a performance project that emerged from the interactions of a shifting group of artists in Los Angeles. Active between 1993-1999 and organized by Kevin Hanley and Jonathan Kroll, Microinternational included Kai Althoff, Casey Cook, Francesca Gabbiani, Michael Krebber, Anja Medved, Carlos Mollura, Dave Muller, Frances Stark, Jennifer Steinkamp, and Cosima Von Bonin among its many participants. This book chronicles an otherwise forgotten “art group” and their projects within the nascent art scene of 1990s Los Angeles.

Includes historical texts by Kevin Hanley and Jonathan Kroll, complemented by new texts from Deidrich Diederichsen, Kevin Hanley, Frances Stark, and Jan Tumlir.

Purchase the publication here

Rirkrit Tiravanija in Homage: Queer Lineages on Video at Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery →

Rirkrit Tiravanija
June 27 - October 19, 2025 | The Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University Lenfest Center of the Arts

Curated by Rattanamol Singh Johal, Homage: Queer Lineages on Video presents works by seven contemporary artists selected from the Akeroyd Collection who use moving images to pay tribute to cultural figures and histories that have been formative, if often (but not always) overlooked. 

The works in the exhibition, all made over the last two decades, explore how lens- and time-based media have enabled artists to articulate desiring and melancholic modes of relationality across generations. 

Intervening in commemorative genres of image making—including portraiture and documentary—through performative acts, selective appropriation, and imaginative staging, these works produce and problematize queer forms of kinship. 

Artists in the exhibition include Dineo Seshee Bopape, Tony Cokes, Carolyn Lazard, Kang Seung Lee, P. Staff, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

More Info

Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow on Jack Goldstein at the Hammer's Lunchtime Art Talk Series →

Jack Goldstein
June 25, 12:30pm | The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1984
Acrylic on paper
29 1/4 x 41 5/8 x 1 3/4 in. (74.3 x 105.7 x 4.4 cm)
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Promised gift of Susan and Larry Marx

The Hammer's curatorial department leads free, insightful, short discussions about artists every Wednesday at 12:30 p.m.

This talk on Jack Goldstein is led by Curatorial Assistant Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow.

This free program is not ticketed. All public programs at the Hammer are free and made possible by a major gift from an anonymous donor.

More Info

Petra Cortright: Paper-Thin Wood Veil Wide Range Hop Suisse! →

Petra Cortright
June 21 - October 10, 2025 | Zeughaus Teufen, Switzerland

Petra Cortright looks at the Appenzellerland with a keen feeling for digital aesthetics and the courage to beauty - without ever having been there. The starting point of her new series of works is the image database of Appenzellerland Tourismus AR with more than a thousand photographs that reflect the visual self-image of a region between staging and idyll. The entrance was given to the artist on 1. June 2023. Cortright, one of the most important voices of digital painting, feeds these images into her personal archive of brushes, filters and textures. This results in projections, textile views and, for the first time, works on wood – shimmering, multi-layered compositions that are reminiscent of impressionistic landscapes but are produced purely digitally. Her works are considered a contemporary counterpart to Monet: it paints quickly, directly, with Sofiware instead of paint. What emerges is a radical view of our own - not critically, but lovingly: "For the first time, I cannot make the pictures more beautiful," said Cortright in the zoomcall, "the reality with you is already too beautiful." A plea for beauty – and for a new vision.

More Info

Charline von Heyl: The Road to Ruin at The George Economou Collection, Athens →

Charline von Heyl
June 14, 2025 - March 2026 | The George Economou Collection, Athens

Across three floors of gallery space, The Giddy Road to Ruin will feature select works from the last several decades. The earliest is an outstanding painting from the George Economou Collection—an emblematic example of the artist’s practice—Untitled (11/93, I) (1993), while the most recent is her first-ever photographic work, Athens, made in 2024.

Charline von Heyl is one of the most significant painters of her generation. Educated in Germany in the 1980s and inspired by both senior artists and contemporaries—including Martin Kippenberger, Rosemarie Trockel, and Michael Krebber, as well as Albert Oehlen, Jutta Koether, and Cosima von Bonin—her work began to carve out new territory, particularly after her move to New York in 1996. While her paintings share the rigor and intensity of theirs, von Heyl’s work eschews irony in favor of a more openly amused humor and a certain nimbleness in the synthesis of mind and hand.

Charline von Heyl: The Giddy Road to Ruin is co-curated by Adam D. Weinberg and Skarlet Smatana, the director of The George Economou Collection, in close collaboration with the artist. A publication with essays by Weinberg and artist Helen Marten will accompany the exhibition.

More Info

Artist Jonny Niesche takes us on a tour of his home →

Jonny Niesche | Esquire

by Amy Campbell

One of the most exciting names in contemporary Australian art right now, Niesche has exhibited all over the world, from Ibiza to Amsterdam to Germany, where he was the official artist for the 2024 Munich Opera Festival. Just this year, Gucci handpicked him to reimagine its iconic silk scarves and archival motifs as part of the Italian fashion house’s 90 x 90 project. His work is held in the collections of some of Australia’s biggest institutions, the NGV, MCA and MONA among them.

But we’re not here to talk only about the work Niesche makes. In addition to being a successful working artist, he is also an avid collector. The collection he and his wife Amber have built, which brightens the walls, floors and surfaces of their two-story home, contains some of the most significant names in contemporary Antipodean art.

Read more here.

Uta Barth in Split Diopter 2, curated by Jan Tumlir and Reza Monahan, at SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles →

Uta Barth
June 6 - July 20, 2025 | Southern California Institute of Architecture Gallery, Los Angeles

Uta Barth, Field #9, 1995

Split Diopter 2 explores the relationship between fine art and cinema, as well as the impact of technical optics on creative practice. This exhibition disassembles the cinematic apparatus of the “waking dream” into a collection of parts: still frame, action sequence, mise-en-scene, soundtrack, film reel, promotional poster, etc.—each of which is assigned to an individual work of art. Navigating this array of objects in the space of the gallery, viewers are enjoined to imagine their own filmic narrative, while also reflecting on its material means of construction.

Split Diopter 2 features works by Uta Barth, Matthew Brannon, John Divola, Alex Israel, William E. Jones, and Hedi El Kholti. A soundtrack has been composed for the exhibition by Eyvind Kang. Also included is a dance video shot with a split diopter lens, choreographed by Brian Golden and performed by Jas Lin, Madison Ostrach, and Euseon Song. Finally, Split Diopter 2 presents a documentary in which artists Stan Douglas, Lynne Marsh, Patti Podesta, Jeffrey Stuker, and Liam Young discuss the influence of cinema on their respective practices.

*Split Diopter 2 is based on Split Diopter held at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery and Co-Curated by Guggenheim Gallery Director, Marcus Herse.

More Info

Screening and Talk: Ana Prvački's 'Flowering under stress' at àngels barcelona →

Ana Prvački'
June 2 | àngels barcelona, Spain

Ana Prvački’s videos combine humor, poetry, and sharp observation to question everyday rituals, social codes, and our relationship with the environment. Through small performative actions and a carefully crafted visual language, the artist introduces subtle twists that invite us to rethink the familiar from a playful and critical perspective. Her works, positioned between the conceptual and the sensorial, offer unconventional/ offbeat yet incisive reflections on the norms that shape daily life. This screening of Flowering under stress is presented in collaboration with The Voice of the Art as a part of àngels films’s spring screening series.

Find more information on the screening here.

Playfulness and Wonder: Ana Prvački for The Gorgeous Nothings →

Ana Prvački
March 15 – October 5, 2025 | Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England

Berlin-based artist Ana Prvački has conceived four site-specific performative pieces for this year's exhibition, The Gorgeous Nothings: Flowers at Chatsworth. 

The work takes inspiration from the goddess Flora and involves a live trail through Chatsworth's Garden and Park. With particular reference to the Ludi Florales or Games of Flora, the ancient Roman festival that honoured the goddess of flowers, vegetation and fertility, Prvacki leads her viewers into a realm of playfulness and wonder.

Intersections of science, folklore, spirituality, and human connection emerge in Prvacki’s conversations with nature.

This first film, above, focuses on her findings on and around Flora. 

Ana Prvački's second film is set in the historic Kitchen Garden at Chatsworth House. 

It is a sensual and surprising meditation on the intelligence of gardens. Blending gentle humour with ecological insight, the film explores how gardens are not only sites of cultivation but also of deep resourcefulness and imagination.

With a focus on soil as a living, breathing body—hot, steamy, and craving cover— Prvački draws poetic connections between fertility, gravity, and the intimate choreography of growth.

This is gardening as performance, as philosophy, and as provocation.

More Info

Jorge Méndez Blake in BE-LONGING: An Exhibition of the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection in Mexico City →

Jorge Méndez Blake
May 30 – August 31, 2025 | Espacio CDMX, Mexico City

Curated by Polina Stroganova for the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, BE-LONGING brings together selected works from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection and contemporary artists living and working in Mexico. The exhibition explores the theme of identity, a subject deeply embedded in contemporary artistic discourse and continuously negotiated within society at large. The works by 32 international artists illustrate not only the relevance and complexity of the chosen topic, but also its potential to promote individual and collective resilience.

The exhibited works deal with identity-forming aspects such as bodies, origins, memories, geographies and vocations. These thematic strands allow for multiple interpretations and perspectives on identity emphasizing the concepts of fluidity, dialogue, and the interplay between different points of view. Visitors are invited to contribute their own experiences and associations to this dialogue, making a space for exchange, reflection and critical engagement with the evolving nature of identity in contemporary society. The exhibition’s scenography is designed by the esteemed Mexico City-based architectural studio C Cúbica, which has developed a modular display tailored to the concept of the exhibition. This design reinforces the exhibition’s emphasis on interconnectedness and multiplicity.

The show marks the launch of a series of dialogue-driven, international exhibitions of the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection designed to engage with local artistic practices. Through a dynamic and modular approach, this initiative aims to reach a broad international audience while fostering collaborations between Mercedes-Benz employees, different communities as well as diverse artistic networks in key international locations—Mexico City being the first.

More Info

Simryn Gill and Tom Melick's Stolon Press in 'Flat earth' at Monash University Museum of Art →

Simryn Gill
May 29 – July 12 2025 | Monash University Museum of Art

Working with the question of how an exhibition might be a book, Flat earth presents a diagrammatic flat plan of a proposal in space.

Stolon Press is a Sydney-based art and publishing collective whose work sits somewhere between art and book, image and text. Established in 2019 by writer Tom Melick and artist Simryn Gill, Stolon Press has published twenty books to date, regularly involving an extended network of collaborators and friends.

Conceived as a flattened ‘map’, Flat earth creates a shared space where artistic, linguistic and material practices converge. Artworks overlap across the galleries as a material gesture toward cohabitation and neighbourliness. Flat earth brings together work by longtime Stolon Press collaborators, including writer, translator, and anthropologist Elisa Taber, and Lebanese-born, Sydney-based artist Khaled Sabsabi. Considering the postponement by Monash University on March 25, 2025, the artists have chosen to show works from their practices and processes made from residual materials.

More Info

Jessica Stockholder returns to Canada and the landscapes that shaped her work →

Jessica Stockholder | The Globe and Mail

Artist Jessica Stockholder poses for a photo in her installation, The Squared Circle: Ringing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, on April 17. Courtesy Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail

by Kate Taylor

Artist Jessica Stockholder has erected a bright yellow wrestling ring on the ground floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto. Visitors aren’t permitted to clamber up there themselves, so they will have to make do with the symbolism: It’s a platform.

Like a museum, it’s a performance space for a controlled encounter. Like the world these days, it’s a site for violent display and boastful victory. Yet it is also resolutely cheery, surrounded by walls and floors painted with large geometric shapes in orange, red and green and accompanied by a sculpture made of deconstructed standing lamps and a net of hot-pink cords.

Stockholder, who grew up in Vancouver but made her career in the United States, has taken over the entire lobby space, blurring the lines between her art and the museum’s signage and mechanical elements. Wall texts, featuring witty bits of concrete poetry, insert themselves into awkward corners; a video screen hangs alongside an air vent of a similar size.

“It’s not a white cube space. A lot of people describe it as difficult to work in,” Stockholder said in a recent interview. “There’s a front desk, there’s two entryways. […] I really had a lot of fun. I sort of welcomed everything about the space. If you are not spending your time wishing for a white cube, it’s a lovely space.”

Read more here.

The Art Collective Superflex Wants to Change the World and Thinks You Can Too →

Superflex | The New York Times

Superflex’s Superbrick Factory is a work space in which “Superbricks” are produced and used to construct sculptures in the space. Superbricks are pink, curved bricks made from unfired clay that are constructed to avoid the right angles and straight lines of human architecture. Credit": Mathias Lassen/Courtesy of Museum Jorn

by Laura Rysman

If humans have any chance of saving themselves and life as we know it, we need to see the world in a whole new way — from the point of view of other species.

It’s a theory championed by the Copenhagen art collective Superflex, which builds on the philosophy that art and artists can and should play a role in the future of the world. […] That kind of thinking has placed Superflex among the innovative artists addressing the world’s ills today. Key to their philosophy and others like them is the belief that people should consider the impact on other species and work not only with fellow artists, architects and other experts, but also with communities to address those ills.

“We believe that today art is, and should be, at the forefront of making infrastructure at every possible level,” said Bjornstjerne Christiansen, one of the founders of Superflex, speaking on a panel titled “Worlds Imagined: Biodiversity and Tech” at the Art for Tomorrow conference in Milan last week. “It’s in the actual landscape-making where art has a crucial role to play.”

Read more here.

Petra Cortright in Electricity for All at Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee →

Petra Cortright
May 15 - August 16, 2025 | Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee

‘Electricity for All’ at the Knoxville Museum of Art features work by contemporary artists exploring the complex relationships between technology, information, and power. Curated by KMA’s assistant curator, Kelsie Conley, the exhibition showcases work by Petra Cortright alongside pieces by Jim Campbell, Petra Cortright, Daniel Canogar, Nathan Hylden, Beryl Korot, Frederick Hammersley, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Amor Muñoz, Iván Navarro, Marilène Oliver, Mimi Ọnụọha, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Elias Sime, Jered Sprecher & Sam van Strien.

More Info

In Dialogue: Angela Bulloch, Richard Deacon, Janice Kerbel, Pae White and Jim Amberson →

Angela Bulloch and Pae White | STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore

Artists in the exhibition New Releases Old Friends, Angela Bulloch, Richard Deacon, Janice Kerbel, and Pae White, come together for a panel discussion at STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery moderated by Jim Amberson.

New Releases Old Friends spotlights new facets of their respective practices, with fresh works by Bulloch, Kerbel and Rehberger premiering in Singapore alongside earlier works by Deacon and White – all developed in close collaboration with STPI’s Creative Workshop during their residencies with the esteemed Visting Artists Programme (VAP).

Find more information on the exhibition here.

The Decisive Moment with Jonny Niesche, the Australian contemporary artist behind Gucci's 90x90 project on his career-defining epiphany. →

Jonny Niesche | Assouline Culture Lounge

Photo by Dirk Tacke.

by Sofia Quintero

In the occasion where fine art meets high fashion, few brand collaborations strike the perfect balance between heritage and innovation. But not every brand is Gucci. To celebrate its iconic silk scarves, the Italian heritage brand launched "90x90," a special campaign featuring nine international artists tasked with reimagining five archival themes: flora, fauna, nautical, equestrian, and the GG Monogram.

Among these visionaries is Jonny Niesche, an Australian contemporary artist whose vibrant works have captivated the art world at large with his hypnotic blend of romanticism, abstraction, and minimalism. Known for his explorations of light and space perceptions, Niesche brings a distinct angle to the collaboration. "I have loved Gucci since my teens," Niesche says. "The brand has always had an elegance and classic style that really resonates with me." 90x90 marks Niesche’s first partnership with a fashion label. He deliberately waited for the ideal opportunity, and Gucci was the perfect fit.

Read more here.

Diana Thater and 8 Other Artists Pick Most Influential Environmental Art of the Past Century →

Diana Thater | Cultured Magazine

“This might not be environmental art, but it is an astounding image of the living environment, and it does what 'environmental' art should do and that is to give us an appreciation of the fascinating lives of others. It covers the 'art' part of the equation be being a REALLY GOOD photograph—something, ironically enough, we see very little of these days.

The story is this: A photographer was filming crested black macaques in Indonesia. He left his camera, and a female macaque snapped a series of self-portraits. You can see her thinking about it across the range of images. There are several shots where she tries serious looks—then she finally grins. Presumably, she was looking at her own reflection in the lens as she tried out different attitudes. In some of the photos you can see the camera lens reflected in her eyes. It’s not just a charming image of self-reflection; smiling from ear to ear, this macaque presents herself to the world. My purpose in making art is in representing those who do not represent themselves. But this macaque doesn’t need me. Crested black macaques are critically endangered.”

Read more here.

Review: Jorge Pardo at 1301PE →

Jorge Pardo | ArtForum

by Jan Tumlir

“Art is what it has become,” Theodor Adorno unequivocally declares in Aesthetic Theory (1970). His statement implies that the original meaning of a work can be completely overturned by its contemporary circumstances. A similar point can be made about gallery practice: Operational protocols, once seemingly set in stone, can undergo ground-up rethinking with every slight shift in our systems of informational and economic distribution. Jorge Pardo’s latest outing at 1301PE addressed this process from an ironic distance. But some measure of warmth could also be felt here, directed from the artist to the gallery’s founder, Brian Butler, with whom he has worked closely since the earliest days of his career. 

This show consisted of just one painting, Untitled, 2024, the scale and proportions of which closely matched those of the wall on which it hung, one that faced the entrance to a reconfigured downstairs gallery. Normally, this space opens onto a corridor that connects to the reception desk and office, and, farther on, to a stairway leading up to a second showroom. On this occasion, however, the passage had been sealed. In a period when commercial galleries are increasingly prone to hedging their bets with “mixed nuts,” something-for-everyone assortments of art, this was a rather striking proposition. Even more so was the fact that this work could be read as a kind of tribute to its site. At a distance, the painting appeared resolutely abstract, nonreferential, this impression reinforced by its title (or lack thereof). Observed more closely, it was revealed to be suffused with information. Its surface teems with material gleaned from every poster Butler had produced to accompany the gallery’s exhibitions up to then. Snippets of typography and fragments of imagery are scattered throughout, as if drawn through a shredder and then spread, mulch-like, across the picture plane. As with much of the artist’s work, Pardo layered, condensed, and recomposited the source data with the aid of computer programs run with minimal interference. Nevertheless, the result bore a strikingly organic aspect. From its earthy, autumnal tones to the quasi-gestural application of each daub of color, the painting greeted the eye as a kind of Arcadian landscape akin to those by Édouard Vuillard.

Read more here.