Latest news with #contemporaryArt
Condé Nast Traveler
a day ago
- General
- Condé Nast Traveler
Where to Go in Japan That Isn't Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka
Here's where to go in Japan when you've already seen the big cities—and want to come home to your besties (and make them jealous) with travel tales from further afield. Naoshima in the Seto Inland Sea is a living museum, where contemporary art and striking architecture are woven seamlessly into the landscape. Unsplash Naoshima, for art aficionados Are you an art lover? Then you should check out Naoshima. Lara of First in Service says that this tiny island in the Seto Inland Sea is a living museum, where world-class contemporary art and striking architecture are woven seamlessly into the landscape: 'Think Yayoi Kusama's iconic dotted pumpkins sitting by the water's edge, Tadao Ando's minimalist masterpieces carved into hillsides, and entire fishing villages transformed into open-air art projects.' Neufville of Neufville Travel agrees, and recommends that travelers also check out the other Seto Islands, which also have a plethora of contemporary art installations and galleries. Since there are many outdoor exhibits, the best time to visit Naoshima is whenever the weather is nice: spring, early summer, and late autumn are best. That window of time also coincides with the Setouchi Triennale 2025, a contemporary art festival which happens every three years and showcases even more art on various islands in the Seto Inland Sea (tickets for the fall session, from September 1 to November 9, are now on sale.) Getting to Naoshima can be tricky: It involves taking a train from Kyoto Station or Shin-Osaka Station to Okayama Station; a car transfer from there to Uno Port; then a ferry from there to Naoshima's Honmura Port. Treat yourself after the journey to a sleek stay at Naoshima Ryokan ROKA, where you'll find 11 minimalist guest rooms of wood, washi, and tatami; and wonderful sunken bathtubs with walls of glass opening onto green vistas. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial (a.k.a. Genbaku Dome) was the only structure left standing in the area where the first atomic bomb exploded on August 6, 1945. Pexels Hiroshima, for a piece of world history Hiroshima offers a moving, essential experience for any and all travelers visiting Japan. This city was largely razed to the ground in World War II by one of two atomic bombs detonated by the United States in 1945, during World War II (the other exploded in Nagasaki, on the island of Kyushu). Today, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park contains the ruins of Genbaku Dome, one of the few buildings that was left standing after the historic event. Referring to the dome, the park, and the city more broadly, Lara of First in Service says, 'It stands as a powerful symbol of peace and rebirth, making it a great place for those drawn to the deeper currents of history and human endurance.'
New York Times
a day ago
- Business
- New York Times
The Billionaire Behind Japan's Art Islands Has One Final Jewel in His Crown
On a tree-dotted hill on Naoshima, an island in Japan's Seto Inland Sea, a museum was being completed, with construction equipment on hand and workers finishing their day. Opening Saturday, the Naoshima New Museum of Art, a concrete structure by Tadao Ando, has a few unusual touches for a building by this Pritzker Prize-winning architect. There's a pebbly wall along the walkway to the entrance. To harmonize with the townscape, it has a black plaster exterior, exhibition spaces that are largely underground, and a single story above, topped by a sloped metal roof. The iridescent sea is visible from the top floor. The museum is the latest star in the constellation of more than three dozen museums and projects called Benesse Art Site Naoshima, which spread across three islands. The New Museum is the first to focus exclusively on contemporary Asian art. And it is likely to provide more fuel for global art pilgrims — some six million of them since 2004 — who have flocked to the islands, most taking a couple of trains and a ferry to experience major artworks in unusual settings. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Goodwood Art Foundation: Rachel Whiteread proves simplicity is best
Few things at Goodwood are muted. On this 12,000-acre estate, crowned by that sprawling country house, the Duke of Richmond and Gordon hosts shooting parties, a high-speed hillclimb and a classic-car festival. But seek out, in a corner of his domain, the new Art Foundation, which opens this weekend, and you'll be met by serenity. Glad of it, as well: the selection of contemporary art on display – 14 works, or groups thereof – thrives in these 70 acres of ancient trees and winding paths. The Foundation has two small galleries; a third is in the works. In the larger space is the inaugural headline act: Rachel Whiteread, represented indoors by two sculptural installations and, rare thing, a selection of photographs. Few British artists make work as consistently high-calibre. Whiteread's ability to give form and shape to the traces we leave behind, the absences that build our worlds, hasn't palled since she won the Turner Prize with House in 1993. In the Gallery, she presents Doppelgänger (2020-1), a shed assembled from found materials then painted a uniform white; and Bergamo III (2023), materialisations of the space beneath chairs and stools, cut from north-Italian stone. These pieces hint at struggle and loss – the latter in particular, given Bergamo's experience in the Covid-19 pandemic – but their meaning remains, in Whiteread's familiar way, so beautifully elusive: not quite romantic, not quite sad. Occasionally, she verges on funny. Of all the works at Goodwood, the Instagram star will be one of her outdoor offerings, Down and Up (2024-5), a pair of staircases heading to nowhere, placed at a meadow's edge. The leading role may be Whiteread's, but look for two gems by Veronica Ryan: a pair of bronzes, which give us magnolias in one case as a pod, and in the other as heads in bloom. The subtlety of the metalwork, the fineness of the hues: Ryan's craftsmanship stops you dead. Most of the pieces you encounter here are of comparable quality. That said, small exhibitions expose any weaknesses, and Goodwood has a few. Rose Wylie's pineapple-like sculptures try to be bobbled and daffy while also retaining an edge – exotic fruit means colonial imports; one looks a bit like a bomb – but they don't get the balance right. Isamu Noguchi's geometric stack isn't one of his more interesting works. Still, as at Yorkshire Sculpture Park or Hauser & Wirth's Somerset branch, it's a pleasure not to be jammed in a heaving urban gallery: to wander down woodchip walks and quiet glades, and see art in the open air. Best of all, you don't need a smartphone: just pick up a handsome printed map, less a leaflet than a brochure. (Or even do without one, although the sign by each work omits to name its materials, which most people like to know.) You could call some of these pieces, undemonstrative forms in a natural setting, straightforward – even 'simple', as the Foundation calls its grounds. If so, fine: simplicity can be rich. Whiteread's art is proof of that.
Forbes
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Bonniers Konsthall explores fragile notions of shelter, home and refuge
Mire Lee "Endless House: Four Heads, Two of Which Open" (2021–2025) at Bonniers Konsthall What does it mean to seek shelter? For those of us fortunate enough to live in peace and have the means, shelter is home—a place of safety, sanctuary, permanence perhaps. But for many, sadly too many, shelter carries other, more painful meanings: a marker of dislocation, of homes gone, of safety, memory, and love lost. Shelter can also be the site of quiet renewal—a space where peace begins to settle, where new memories are invited in. A place for new loves and new lives. 'That Which Carried Me' at Bonniers Konsthall gently holds these layered ideas in tension. The group exhibition at the Stockholm contemporary art space brings together six international artists whose works respond to the concept of shelter in ways that are visceral, poetic, and at times deeply unsettling. Across sculpture, sound, kinetic installations, and earth-bound materials, it explores how power, politics, gender, memory and climate shape, and often shift, our sense of belonging. Mire Lee "Look, I'm a Fountain of Filth Raving Mad with Love" (2024) at Bonniers Konsthall The idea grew from an ongoing interest in how we seek shelter and protection (physically, emotionally, politically, materially), especially in times of uncertainty and flux, explains the senior curator, Yuvinka Medina. 'I began with the idea of shelter as both a structural necessity and an intimate, lived experience. From there, I sought out artists whose practices could enrich and complicate this framework.' She describes the exhibition as an exploration of how structures built for safety often expose their own fragility—and how protection is frequently bound up with exclusion and boundaries. 'In this context, sculpture becomes more than form—it acts as a vessel for memory, reflection and feeling. It may appear as a monument to a lost home, a body in flux, or a space for care and resistance.' Mire Lee "Look, I'm a Fountain of Filth Raving Mad with Love" (2024) at Bonniers Konsthall Some of the artists had been long-standing figures in Medina's research; others surfaced through more recent conversations. What connects them is a shared material sensitivity—a tactile, process-led approach to ideas of vulnerability, migration, care and transformation. 'I was committed to gathering perspectives from across geographies and experiences,' she says. 'Most of these artists had never exhibited in Sweden before, and it was important for me to introduce their voices to a new context. The curatorial direction was guided by a strong desire to work with women and non-binary artists whose practices sit at the intersection of the personal and the political, and who approach their work through embodied, materially driven methodologies.' Mire Lee "nippleless bitches" (2024) Mire Lee's 'Look, I'm a fountain of filth raving mad with love' (2024) is both tender and disquieting. Working between Seoul and Amsterdam, her practice occupies a space between the mechanical and the visceral, the kinetic sculptures tend to pulse with raw emotion. At Bonniers Konsthall, with its low mechanical rhythm and amorphous forms, the sculpture breathes and shudders in a space that feels eerily alive—a shelter of desire, decay, and instability. Here, the body is part-machine, part-organism. 'A body that rots is a body that has lived, that has been touched, held, connected,' she explains in an interview with the curator. 'There is something deeply erotic and archaic about the inevitability of breakdown—about the way we dissolve into each other, into time, into the world.' Mariana Ramos Ortiz, Breezeblocks (derrumbe), (2023) In another space, Puerto Rican artist Mariana Ramos Ortiz responds to shelter through the lens of architectural fragility. Her sand-based installations, 'Estudio de una Tormentera (182 Picaflor)' and 'Breezeblocks (Derrumbe),' both completed in 2023, call attention to the illusion of permanence in places shaped by environmental trauma. Sand, breeze blocks, storm shutters—these are materials of survival and exclusion, shaped by the hurricanes that regularly devastate her homeland. Her work is quiet yet potent, mapping collective memory and the ongoing violence of colonial and climate disruption. Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino "Privacy" (2023) at Bonniers Konsthall Brazilian-German artist Wisrah C.V. da R. Celestino turns to questions of exchange and authorship. 'Rental/Father' (2023) involves building gates loaned from the artist's father, with the gallery mediating the agreement. 'Privacy' (2023) features curtains on loan from friends and family in Brazil, with the promise of return at the show's end. These subtle performative interventions question ideas of art ownership and value, offering shelter as a relational and negotiated act—a space built not just from material, but from trust. 'The Cabinet' (2010–2025), Swedish artist Åsa Cederqvist at Bonniers Konsthall While curating the exhibition, Medina felt it was essential to include local voices—selecting Swedish artist Åsa Cederqvist, whose layered, mid-career practice warrants broader recognition. In 'The Cabinet' (2010–2025), the artist presents shelter as both a physical and emotional vessel. Constructed in collaboration with Medina for the show, the cabinet becomes a metaphor for body and mind—a container for memory, for emotional sediment, for the trace elements of being. Cederqvist's wider practice moves fluidly between sculpture, film and performance, often working with instability, rawness, and transformation. Her installations blur the lines between body and object, intellect and instinct, so we can consider what it means to be in flux. Narges Mohammadi "Attempts for Refuge" (2021) at Bonniers Konsthall Narges Mohammadi's work feels particularly poignant. Born in Afghanistan, taking refuge first in neighboring Iran and then the Netherlands, where she is now based, hers is an intimate understanding of shelter as a matter of urgency—of necessity. Her installations made from straw, clay and earth speak to the impermanence of refuge. Explains Medina, 'Materials were central to the exhibition's language: porous textiles, oxidized metals, reclaimed wood, and pliable clay carried with them narratives of shelter, loss, and endurance. These material choices reinforced one of the exhibition's central propositions—that fragility, rather than weakness, can be what carries us through change. Narges Mohammadi "Attempts for Refuge" (2021) at Bonniers Konsthall In 'Attempts for Refuge' (2021), childhood memories of displacement are carved into walls and floors. In 'That Which Carried Me' shelter is not a structure but a journey, something we carry, lose, rebuild. 'My work is more guardian than master,' she says. 'It's an act of waiting—an intimate exchange where I listen rather than push.' Mohammadi works with materials that disintegrate, for instance halva, soap, letting their ephemerality echo the fragility of memory. 'These are not passive materials. They press back and remind me that nothing ever holds its shape for long.' 'That Which Carried Me' is on at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm until June 15, 2025. For more art around Stockholm see Market Art Fair here.
Forbes
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial Strives To Bring City More ‘Wow' Moments
New Red Order, 'Material Monument to Thomas Morton (Playing Indian),' 2025, installed at Quincy Market as part of Boston Public Art Triennial. Chadd Scott More 'wow' moments. One of many goals for the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial opened May 22, 2025. ''Wow' are those moments that you don't expect,' Kate Gilbert, Executive Director of Boston Public Art Triennial, told 'The city is gorgeous and has a lot of very important, classical, revolutionary (era) buildings and history, and it's a little stuck in a certain period of time. We don't have those moments to turn a corner and say, 'What is that?' We want to see more of that.' Throughout the triennial's duration, turning corners in Boston will bring moments of wow, wonder, curiosity, delight, puzzlement, and amusement thanks to 16 new contemporary art commissions distributed widely across town. In addition to the new Triennial commissions, Boston museums and institutions—including the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, MassArt Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and MIT List Visual Arts Center—will present temporary and permanent projects throughout outdoor spaces and publicly accessible sites, for a total of 20 new commissions and 21 sites for public art experiences through October 31, 2025. Stephen Hamilton 'Under the Spider's Web,' detail, 2025, and 'Oruko Pe: The Names are Complete,' detail, 2025, installed at Roxbury Community College as part of the Boston Public Art Triennial. Cameron Kincheloe When planning this first Boston Public Art Triennial, organizers looked to similar events across the country, including Counterpublic in St. Louis and Prospect in New Orleans. Whereas those 'ennials attempted to situate their host cities amid larger global geographies, Boston's triennial focuses inward. 'The whole world comes to Boston,' Artistic Director Pedro Alonzo told 'We have leading scholars from around the planet who are visiting regularly. This is a very cosmopolitan city. You walk around the streets, you hear multiple languages continuously. It's not a city that needs tourism. We have plenty of it. It's a city that, for as small as it is, has an outsized impact globally.' Harvard, M.I.T., the Red Sox, John Adams, J.F.K., Tom Brady. Matt Damon. This triennial isn't trying to sell L.A. or London on Boston. If it's trying to sell anyone, it's trying to sell Boston. 'It has to resonate with the city and the people who live, work, and call this home. We need to be proud of our city,' Gilbert explained. 'In this first one, we need everyone to be on our side. Yes, we've got all the institutions. It's the connective fibers that are important, so people don't feel alienated by those institutions. What's happening at a neighborhood level, at the artistic community level, that's what we're trying to knit together.' The triennial achieves this by dispersing commissions beyond downtown and heavily touristed areas. Artworks can be found in Charlestown, Dorchester, Mattapan, and East Boston. Not places visited by the duck boat tours. Even long-time Boston residents don't visit all these places regularly. Stephen Hamilton's (b. 1987) fantastic weavings at Roxbury Community College are a perfect example. Roxbury C.C. doesn't have a school spirit bookstore selling logoed merch like Boston College. 'I'm from Roxbury. This is a Roxbury institution,' Hamilton told media touring the triennial on May 21. 'I wanted to create work that would be in a place that's accessible for the communities that this piece represents and who I want to engage with the programming around.' Hamilton's installations serve as an ode to the textile traditions of West and West Central Africa. He spent nine months in Nigeria learning weaving. 'The point of the piece is to highlight the beautiful craft histories of those regions and also to highlight the cultural and historical relationship those traditions have with the diaspora,' Hamilton said. 'It's important this work is in a Black community where people of African descent congregate.' He hopes to present weaving, dying, and sewing workshops at the college and the Royall House and Slave Quarters during the triennial. That's another way the triennial is bringing the city together, through partnerships with 75 local organizations hosting regular programming over the next six months. 'To all the artists, thank you for helping us tell the story of Boston how we choose to tell it,' Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said at a ceremonial opening for the triennial on May 22. 'This is a moment where voices outside our city are trying to describe who we are, who we represent, and the values that we stand for. But Boston is not a city where others get to tell our story Boston.' On the day the triennial opened, the Trump administration announced its intention to bar Harvard University from admitting international students. With the entire city in play, artists and locations could be specifically tailored to each other. Like Brazilian artist Laura Lima's (b. 1971) art for animals at a Mass Audubon location in Mattapan. 'Laura Lima's project would not have worked in the Boston Commons or in the Public Garden,' Alonzo said. 'We wanted urban wildlife, and the Boston Nature Center is the perfect place to do that. She wanted a forest. She wanted animals. So we did it there, whereas Stephen Hamilton wanted something in his community.' For out of towners, Boston Commons–site of Hank Willis Thomas' The Embrace sculpture, an ode to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King–and the adjacent Public Garden–America's first public botanical gardens–do belong on a 'must see' list. They're just not part of the triennial. A stay at super-luxe The Newbury Hotel will put you on their doorstep, as well as Beacon Hill and the state capital, bustling Newbury Street, serene Commonwealth Ave. The Bull & Finch Pub, inspiration for 'Cheers,' is three blocks away. Patrick Martinez, 'Cost of Living,' 2025, installed on Franklin Street as part of the Boston Public Art Triennial. Faith Ninivaggi The Boston Public Art Triennial's theme is 'exchange.' Artists from around the world were strategically paired with local experts, from climate scientists to historians, public health workers to civic organizers. 'What makes this city truly singular is that expansive talent pool,' Alonzo explained. 'Artists are interested in this scholarship, this work, and often are looking for that as a form of influence, as a form of collaboration, as a reference. Why not give them direct access and create those links when possible?' The scholars and scientists and engineers have as much to learn from the artists. 'Boston is a city that is full of experts, but I also think that the hyper specialization of the disciplines here makes it very siloed and difficult for new things to emerge. It's a city where people like to investigate, research, plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, research, investigate, and maybe, is action taking action even necessary,' Alonzo continued. 'There's a lot of fear of failure. This is a great way of breaking down silos and reminding experts about the importance of creativity and how research without creativity is useless.' Alonzo sees the work of artists and researchers as more similar than different. 'The scientific method and artistic practice are almost the same thing. It's basically trial and error, but one has a very defined, utilitarian goal, the other one is more experimental, open ended,' he explained. No installation combines these worlds more profoundly than Nicholas Galanin's Aáni yéi xat duwasáakw (I am called Land) inside the MassArt Art Museum. In a warehouse-sized gallery, Galanin (b. 1978; Tlingit/Unangax̂) has suspended an oversized Tlingít box drum. The drum is activated by a robotic arm mimicking a heartbeat. A mother's heartbeat. A baby in utero has been painted on the side of the drum in classic Pacific Northwest formline. Alan Michelson's sculpture of Julia Marden on a pedestal outside the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Chadd Scott Indigeneity serves as one of the triennial's main themes. Directing this effort was triennial curator Tess Lukey, member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah. Behind the MassArt Art Museum in front of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Galanin has a deconstructed/reconstructing bronze Pacific Northwest kootéeyaa–totem pole–sculpture. Three blocks from MAAM, Alan Michelson's (b. 1953; Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River) The Knowledge Keepers takes one of the most high-profile positions among triennial artworks: high on the concrete pedestals framing the entrance to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Represented are two contemporary local Indigenous cultural stewards, Aquinnah Wampanoag member Julia Marden and Nipmuc artist Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr. Contrast them with Cyrus Dallin's statue of a non-specific Plains Indian figure on horseback on the lawn. Michaelson grew up in Boston and went to grade school at Boston Latin riding the trolly past Dallin's sculpture daily. 'It reigned over the front of the museum for more than a century and it's beaming out this tragic story, which I guess was the story, or that's the way that they conceived of Native future in 1909,' Michelson told assembled media on the MFA's front steps between his new sculptures on May 21. 'When I was invited to do something on these two pedestals, I thought that is really not an expression of where things are with Native people. Maybe it never was. If they had asked the Lakota or any of the Plains tribes that he's representing in a stereotypical way how would they want to be represented, I don't think that would have been what they would have chosen.' The museum has been wrestling with how to contextualize Dallin's insulting depiction since awareness of those subjects came to a wider consciousness. Michelson takes it on by 'fighting bronze with bronze' in his words, 'with contemporary figures who were inspiring, and who were all about their communities, and all about the continuance of traditions, not the death, or that extinction paradigm, very much in their in their agency, in their beauty.' Both figures are gilded in platinum. 'I purposely wanted them to be gilded because among Eastern Woodland people, and I'm from that tradition, we have a reverence for shine, that luminosity that certain materials give,' Michelson explained. 'In the old days, it was shell. It was also native copper from the Midwest, but then when silver was mined and brought by Europeans, that became a medium also.' Like Michelson, Galanin's sculpture in front of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is cast in bronze. The material sending a message along with the figure. 'The figure is reconstructing itself in a material that we'll see a lot of in cities like Boston with bronze monuments,' Galanin said. 'This idea of permanence and monument includes a desire to tell narratives of history, colonial narratives through something like bronze, in contrast to our kootéeyaas which would oftentimes return back to the ground where they came from. The permanence I think is important here is the knowledge, opposed to the object.' To Western institutions, the object takes primacy. To Galanin, the people and land come first. Galanin's kootéeyaa has fallen apart, chopped into pieces by colonialism and capitalism and Christianity, but the figure is picking its pieces up and rebuilding itself. Swoon, 'In the Well: The Stories We Tell About Addiction,' inside the Boston Public Library during Boston Public Art Triennial, May 22-October 31, 2025. Cameron Kincheloe. All Boston Public Art Triennial commissions and associated installations and programs are free to attend. 'That's why public art is so important, because it is outside, it is free, and anyone can access it,' Alonzo said. Anyone. 'As someone who grew up in a family with many, many ways in which we felt that systems and cities and places weren't necessarily designed for us, coming from an immigrant background, facing the language barriers and cultural walls that my parents–new to this country–had experienced, art was always a way to transcend those walls and boundaries, to get beyond language, to get beyond the day to day into a sense of our shared humanity,' Wu said. 'If there was ever a moment where we needed to tap into our sense of shared humanity, the ability to build community… now is that moment.' Everyone. 'If you look at the transit system in Boston and the history of redlining–and lots of mistakes that we've made in our urban planning–there are neighborhoods that are not connected to the core of downtown,' Gilbert explained. 'It's harder for folks living in the neighborhoods to come downtown where there is more activity, more free opportunities, museums. It was important to make sure that works were in the neighborhoods where there isn't a contemporary art museum or access to contemporary art.' Free to All. These words are carved above the entrance to the Boston Public Library by Copley Square, as good a place as any to begin exploring the Triennial. 'The piece we did in the Boston Public Library with Swoon (b. 1977), the Boston Public Library is basically the border of the homeless population, scholars, students, it is a thriving melting pot, a cross section of society,' Alonzo explained. 'When you're doing a piece that deals with the opioid crisis and addiction, and the stories that we tell about addiction, the library turned out to be the perfect place, because they're at the front lines of engaging with that community on a regular basis. Try and use the bathroom at 9 AM when the library opens the public bathroom, there's a line of people, some of them are going in there to clean themselves up.' In addressing the opioid crisis, a crisis the artist has personal experience with through her mother, Swoon selected the library because that's where the stories of addiction are being experienced in Boston–not only in books on the shelves, but by the Bostonians walking through the door. This triennial mirrors a library. Libraries were designed as free outlets of knowledge for the public. Books and information and ideas without admission fees. Similarly, the triennial shares contemporary art with the public outside of museums, no admission fee. Free access to arts and culture and history and knowledge is important to Wu. Partnering with local institutions and philanthropic organizations, she developed Boston Family Days, opportunities for Boston students and families to visit 13 different museums for free on the first and second Sunday of each month through December 2026. 'We are undeterred and steadfast in building a home for everyone in this community–by everyone, we mean everyone,' Wu said. 'Where our stories aren't wielded to intimidate or divide, but are invitations to come closer, look deeper, and create that connection, to see ourselves reflected in the humanity of each other.' Wow.
