Culture

The Prime of Your Life, at Marc Straus Gallery in New York, brings together 18 women artists over 75 in varied media. The review uses Linda Nochlin's idea of late style to ask what "prime" means when recognition and market validation come late, citing Marina Abramovic's photograph as an example.

— via Hyperallergic, Leah Triplett Harrington

Art Basel Paris will shut early on October 23 ahead of nationwide protests over living and working conditions, and will remove its outdoor sculptures on Winston Churchill Avenue. The Louvre, Musée d'Orsay, Orangerie, Picasso museum and Gagosian also plan to close.

— via Hyperallergic, Hyperallergic

Street Photography Africa, edited by Nadine Barth and Azu Nwagbogu and published by Thames & Hudson, gathers hundreds of images by 33 photographers across the continent. The nearly 300-page survey treats public spaces as a stage, showing performers alongside everyday fashion and routines.

— via Colossal, Grace Ebert

Kenyan-born painter Wangari Mathenge's solo show Re-membering at Lévy Gorvy Dayan in New York, running through October 24, uses oil paintings of domestic scenes to explore cultural memory and Kenya's post-colonial transition. The series draws on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Something Torn and New, and she depicts herself as every woman shown.

— via Colossal, Kate Mothes

Casa Cueva, a 1954 modernist home built inside a lava cave in Mexico City, was largely destroyed after its owners sold it in 1969. At Museo Jumex, Álvaro Urbano revives it with painted metal plants that hover in mid-air, each copied from a specimen in Helen Fowler O'Gorman's 1961 book on Mexican flowering trees.

— via Colossal, Grace Ebert

Unionized staff at the V&A plan to strike at all four of its London sites on October 29 and 30, after two earlier location-specific walkouts in September. The unions cite alleged "Amazon-style" conditions at the new V&A East Storehouse, including too few breaks for water and restroom use, and want a 4% minimum raise plus a £14.80 hourly floor for the lowest paid.

— via Hyperallergic, Rhea Nayyar

Priced out of other Brooklyn neighborhoods, artists have made Sunset Park one of their last refuges for affordable studio space. Its converted factories, warehouses and three-story walk-ups now sustain a three-day Open Studios festival with more than 300 spaces.

— via Hyperallergic, Aaron Short

Museums, foundations and other well-resourced cultural institutions have no excuse for using generative tools instead of paying writers, argues a Hyperallergic editor. Artists squeezed for time and money are a different case, she says, since they turn to AI to protect their studio hours.

— via Hyperallergic, Valentina Di Liscia

Five tenured MIT professors have been gluing googly eyes, rhinestones and tinsel onto campus surveillance cameras, a protest against the university's $3 million-plus purchase of more than 500 AI-capable cameras. The decorations don't interfere with the cameras' function, and seven sessions in, students and staff have joined in.

— via Hyperallergic, Anna Lee

Rithika Merchant's new paintings put human bodies with raptor heads among luna moths, ravens, floods and eruptions, in scenes that read as rituals or communions with nature. The Mumbai-based artist draws on research into the Beguines, medieval lay Christian women who lived financially independent lives, and her solo show runs at Galerie LJ in Paris through November 21.

— via Colossal, Kate Mothes

Oldenburg's most famous piece of writing, "I Am For...", runs about 700 words and starts with an art that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. He insisted it wasn't a manifesto, and later called it a "slightly satirical ode" to making art from anything in one's surroundings.

— via Colossal, Kate Mothes

Authorities raided the film crew's hotel room in Tabriz and confiscated the footage Mani Haghighi shot for his documentary's original opening: a woman without a headscarf on a foggy mountain road. His film about artist Nasser Bakhshi and his wife Roghayeh Najdi, and their vast home archive of Iranian cultural history, begins differently as a result.

— via Hyperallergic, Greta Rainbow

A new show at Puerto Rico's contemporary art museum gathers more than sixty artists from the island, the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia, and it skips the usual chronology for a web of relationships spread across four galleries. Many works from El Museo del Barrio in New York will be seen in Puerto Rico for the first time.

— via Hyperallergic, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico

DRIFT's "Aeolus" fills a room with glass rods holding tiny lights that respond to visitors' movements, so the work only fully exists when people move through it. It runs at Carpenters inside London's Ladbroke Hall through October 25, and the studio's 8,000-square-meter DRIFT Museum is slated to open in Amsterdam in early 2027.

— via Colossal, Kate Mothes

Rosana Paulino says Brazil has never looked critically at the images of itself that Europeans made, and that schoolbooks she grew up with still used them to show slavery. Her artist's book ¿História Natural?, which reworks photographs from Louis Agassiz's 1865–66 expedition, won her a $25,000 prize.

— via Hyperallergic, Daniela Mayer

David Reed rarely shows his paintings and drawings together, and this Rodder show pairs work from 2013 to this year. The reviewer recalls a 2010 interview in which Reed said he makes only "studio paintings" and likes to rework them, so he almost never feels he has finished one.

— via Hyperallergic, John Yau

The Lion Nebula's face is a bubble of ionized gas cooked from the inside by a dying star's white dwarf core, and astronomers estimate the whole thing will fully disperse in about 10,000 years. Webb's NIRCam and MIRI images show dust filaments surviving in some places while the star's radiation destroys dust in others.

— via Colossal, Kate Mothes