Rocky statue moved inside the Philadelphia Museum of Art for new show. https://ift.tt/OECw1RQ

Rocky is going the distance. A statue of the fictional boxing hero, first brought to life by Sylvester Stallone in 1976, has been moved from its longtime perch outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) into the building ahead of a major new exhibition. “Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments” features 150 works by more than 50 artists to explore the changing role of monuments throughout 2,000 years of art history. The show will run from April 25th to August 2nd.

The Rocky Balboa statue is one of three monuments dedicated to the fictional boxing star located in Philadelphia. The bronze statue was created by American sculptor A. Thomas Schomberg in 1980 for Rocky III. It featured prominently behind the actor during a speech in the film. The nine-foot, 1,100-pound bronze statue has lived outside the museum since 2006. The exhibition will coincide with the 50th anniversary of the original Rocky.

The PMA announced that it will frame the exhibition “Rising Up” “through the lens of the Rocky statue.” This work will be featured alongside a wide range of ancient monuments and contemporary artworks. Among the works on view will be the ancient vessel Neck Amphora (ca. 510–490 BCE) as well as Hank Willis Thomas’s bronze statue of a raised fist, Solidarity (2023). “‘Rising Up’ asks why millions of people each year visit a statue of the most famous Philadelphian who never lived as a way to better understand our complex and vital relationships to our public monuments,” said Paul Farber, curator of the exhibition and co-founder of Monument Lab.

The exhibition will also feature works by Keith Haring, Rashid Johnson, Delilah Montoya, Tavares Strachan, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.

“‘Rising Up’ is an opportunity for the art museum to reframe the narrative around Rocky and the steps, placing it in the context of Philadelphia’s civic and cultural identity,” Louis Marchesano, the museum’s deputy director of curatorial affairs and conservation, said in a statement.

There is a second Rocky statue at the museum, perched on the “Rocky Steps.” It will remain outside for the duration of the exhibition. The third edition is housed at the Philadelphia International Airport. Meanwhile, a statue of real boxing legend “Smokin” Joe Frazier, who triumphed against Muhammad Ali, will replace Rocky outside the museum.

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Hurvin Anderson’s Luscious Paintings Explore the Meaning of Home https://ift.tt/ucmngRb

In Ball Watching (1997) by the British painter Hurvin Anderson, a group of boys stand on a patch of grass by a lake. The sky is a hazy blue, the water a vivid turquoise. The green beneath them, as they face away from the viewer, contrasts with the dark gravel behind, isolating them in what feels almost like their own tropical island.

Anderson returned to this scene repeatedly between 1997 and 2010, turning a 1983 photograph he took in the overgrown Handsworth Park in Birmingham, U.K., into an emotionally charged vision of both his hometown and the Caribbean, where his parents immigrated from. In a later version, Ball Watching (Five-a-Side) (2010), Caribbean trees dominate the skyline, their usual vibrancy muted by washes of gray.

“The way the ball was in the middle of the photograph in the middle of the pond, it seemed like the moon had fallen out of the sky,” he said in a recent interview. Throughout his career, such atmospheric explorations of home and belonging have become his hallmark.

Hurvin Anderson’s major retrospective

Now 61, Anderson spoke to me at a café at Tate Britain ahead of his largest presentation to date. Curated by Dominique Heyse-Moore, senior curator of contemporary British art at the institution, “Hurvin Anderson” will be on view through 23 August. It brings together more than 80 works spanning three decades.

Since graduating from Wimbledon College of Art and the Royal College of Art in 1994 and 1998 respectively, the artist has developed a significant body of work that explores migration, memory, and identity. His dynamic paintings, which predominantly blend his own photographs and recollections with painterly abstraction, earned him a Turner Prize nomination in 2017 and are held in major collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kistefos Museum in Norway, and the British Council Collection in London.

When we met, Anderson was dressed casually in a green beanie hat, blue polo shirt, and gray fleece. His friend, the renowned British artist and academic Keith Piper, waits for us nearby. It’s two weeks before the opening, and Anderson is in the middle of installing the show. Despite being widely described as one of the leading painters in the country—in 2021, his swimming pool scene Audition (1998) sold at Christie’s for more than $10 million, one of the highest prices achieved at auction by a living Black British artist—he remains unduly modest. “I’m not sure I've done enough, and there are many people who have been around longer and haven’t had this,” he said. “I’m still trying to work out ‘why me?’ at this moment in time.”

At the time of his nomination, the Turner Prize judges described Anderson as “an outstanding British painter whose art speaks to our current political moment with questions about identity and belonging.” Yet almost a decade on, many of these conversations remain globally pertinent.

Themes in Anderson’s paintings

Anderson is predominantly known as a landscape painter who often depicts the Caribbean and England, referencing his own sense of in-betweenness, which many immigrants can relate to. His paintings are “usually looking at a particular mood, time of day, a particular corner, a particular home,” said Heyse-Moore. “But then there’s always the thought of another place.”

Anderson described his work as being about “travel,” which encompasses both physical migration and leisure. His parents moved from Jamaica to Birmingham, England, in the early 1960s as part of the Windrush generation: Caribbean migrants invited to Britain to work between 1948 and 1973. Out of his parents’ eight children, he was the only one born in the U.K. Anderson grew up hearing about Jamaica, which he first visited as a teenager in 1979. His work shows a deep affinity to the country and its landscapes, often depicting spaces occupied by immigrants. “It’s part of Black people’s condition—wrestling with this idea of wanting to be somewhere else,” he explained. “If it's not [as a result of] history, [for example], slavery, it’s migration because of poverty, or potentially now, again, because of the political situation—that state is always there.”

Anderson’s impressionistic oil paintings also traverse French art history, and paintings of leisure in particular. “I was slightly obsessed with [Edgar] Degas and the small painting in the National Gallery called Young Spartans Exercising (1860) and [those by] Georges Seurat,” he said. “I can’t escape my connection to those paintings.”

Painting a wider history of migration

Anderson’s long-running series of barbershop paintings, which he began in 2006 and continued for almost two decades, bring his explorations of belonging indoors. His “Peter’s Series” in particular, which he started in 2007, portrays an attic converted into a makeshift barbershop that his father frequented. With white barbers reticent to cut Black hair, Caribbean immigrants of the 1950s and ’60s would cut one another’s hair at home.

Yet Anderson’s barbershop paintings were also about the aesthetics of looking. By the time he painted Skiffle (2023–26), which depicts mirrors, barber chairs, and barbershop décor to create an almost abstract composition, the viewer is as much a part of the painting as the sitter. “In the earlier paintings, you are always outside,” he said. But by the mid-2020s, “you are joining in…the barber, a new customer, for a moment you are there.”

While the political elements of Anderson’s paintings are often subtle, his recent body of work is more explicit. Passenger Opportunity (2024–25), commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami, explores the wider social history of migration between Jamaica and Britain. “It’s probably the most ambitious work in the show,” said Heyse-Moore of the 13-by-32-foot piece.

Over 16 panels, Anderson offers a deeply layered narrative of arrivals, departures, family life, officials gathering, scenes from colonial history, and more. In the top left corner, he reworks an advertisement known as “Passenger Opportunity” that invited Jamaicans to leave their country to work in England. “He moves through this story, which is principally about the different generations, so children and adults who become separated for a time while these new lives are established,” Heyse-Moore explained. “There’s depictions of the Caribbean, there’s depictions of England, and it’s really intensely colorful, but then also at times it's clearly from black-and-white photographs.” In the bottom right corner, Anderson has illustrated a scene that suggests slaves being sold in green, white, and black.

Painting helps Anderson make sense of the world; his captivating landscapes and intimate interiors form a complex, shared history. “I’m trying to understand our times,” he said. His work is a way to “start to understand everything a little bit more.”

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BTS performs at the Guggenheim Museum for “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon. https://ift.tt/1jZKN90

With K-pop dominating headlines—especially following K-Pop Demon Hunters’ win for best animated film at the 2026 Oscars—the genre is now making art world inroads. Beloved K-pop boyband BTS performed their new single, Swim, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York for a segment on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon this past Wednesday.

The performance celebrated the release of BTS’s 10th studio album, ARIRANG, which was released on March 20th—six years after their last album. The recording shows the seven original members at the center of the Guggenheim’s signature rotunda. “With a storied history of drawing in the most creative minds in arts and culture for nearly 90 years, the Guggenheim was the perfect fit to bring BTS’ vision to life for their return to the stage,” the Guggenheim staff wrote in a statement.

The museum is currently showing a massive retrospective of work by Carol Bove, which opened on March 5th. Bove is known for her epically scaled sculptures, which incorporate brightly painted industrial materials, such as steel tubes and rebar. Fallon introduced the boyband at the beginning of the video in front of Bove’s Vase Face I / The Ascent to Heaven on a Dentist’s Chair (2022). After the introduction, the singers make their way around the rotunda among Bove’s minimalist metal sculptures, including the yellow Cutting Corners (2018).

BTS’s leading man, RM (Kim Namjoon), is one of South Korea’s leading art collectors. Artsy reported earlier this year that RM has engaged with artists including Kim Whanki, Yun Hyong-keun, Lee Ufan, Lee Jung-seob, and Kwon Jin Kyu. Meanwhile, his bandmate, V, has collected a deer sculpture by South Korean artist Kim Woo Jin and Woo Kuk Won’s painting Lunatic Beauty (2022), among other works.

Beyond BTS members, several other young K-pop stars are also avid art collectors. They include T.O.P, Taeyang, and G-Dragon from the band BIGBANG, and Cha Eun-woo of ASTRO.

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Rashid Johnson photographs Jay-Z for GQ. https://ift.tt/S4oq7kz

GQ tapped American artist Rashid Johnson to photograph Jay-Z for its new special global issue, which was released on March 24th. The photoshoot accompanies a major interview with the musician and art collector, tied to the 30th anniversary of his debut album, Reasonable Doubt.

Johnson is known for exploring Black American life through an extensive body of work that ranges from photography and painting to large-scale installation. For this photoshoot, which captures Jay-Z in contemplative poses, Johnson pulled from the observational photographs of Harlem Renaissance artist James Van Der Zee and the surrealist tendencies of Francis Bacon, according to his interview with GQ. In one image, Jay-Z partially covers his face with a mask as he stares into the camera.

Jay-Z, an avid art collector and champion of Black artists, has collected Johnson’s work for a decade. Johnson similarly hopes to champion Jay-Z’s legacy through these new photographs.

“Jay’s music, lyricism, and sophistication are very much in line with a lot of interesting and historically important Black thinkers,” Johnson told GQ. “He unpacked the density, the complexity, and the rigors of aspects of the Black experience, from issues of developing credit and finding credibility.”

Over the last two decades, Jay-Z has become one of the most active high-profile celebrities in the art world. His collection includes works by artists such as Damien Hirst, as reported by the BBC, and Laurie Simmons, as reported by CBS News. The rapper filmed a music video for Picasso Baby at New York’s Pace Gallery and commissioned Derrick Adams to transform a painting of his into an NFT. Sotheby’s revealed that Jay-Z owns Adams’s Style Variation (2020), as reported by ArtNews.

Johnson has made headlines several times in recent years. In 2025, Johnson was the subject of a massive retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York, which featured almost 90 works. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth Paris in 2024 and Stockholm’s Moderna Museet in 2023.

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From Mallorca to St. Moritz, Art Fairs Are Meeting Collectors Where They Vacation https://ift.tt/1eguKoa

Paired together, the terms “art fair” and “beach” can still conjure images of scattered stalls brimming with tourist art or factory-made craft mementos. To be sure, two decades into Art Basel Miami Beach, quality has long since planted itself in the sand. Still, in the serious art world, jet-set leisure locales tend to be dismissed as either unserious or too far removed from art market epicenters to matter.

But these assumptions are changing. What’s emerging instead is a splashy new shift: As collectors move, so does the market. And increasingly, parts of the art world are meeting this jet set where they already are.

Lo and behold, the rise of the destination fair. What defines these events? While mega-fairs like Art Basel and Frieze take place in destinations in their own right, they still anchor the art market calendar. Destination fairs invert that logic: They’re not about drawing the art world in—they’re about plugging into places where the world’s collectors already circulate.

Often staged off-cycle, these fairs land in locales memorialized in Maison Assouline books, Slim Aarons portraits, and the seasonal circuit of the ultrawealthy—Mallorca and Ibiza in Spain, St. Moritz and Gstaad in Switzerland, Capri, Italy, the Berkshires, Punta del Este, Uruguay, Joshua Tree, California—all of which have boutique fairs. Places where people don’t just visit—they “summer,” they après-ski, they settle into second homes. Even Saint-Tropez, France, will soon host the glitzy 20-exhibitor design fair PAD in early July. “There is a clear advantage in having a fair in Saint-Tropez,” said Flore de Ségogne, the executive director of PAD. “Everyone travels here between June 1 and July 20!”

For galleries, these events offer an alternative to the well-trodden art market circuit.

“I hear it all the time—that there is art fair fatigue because we all participate in so many fairs,” says Nathalie Kates, founder of the four-year-old Lower East Side gallery Kates-Ferri Projects. “At the anchor art fairs, you see the usual suspects because the fairs are so expensive.”

Kates is part of the debut edition of Art Cologne Mallorca, the storied German fair’s new outing in the neo-brutalist Palau de Congressos. Running from April 9th to 12th, with 88 galleries, most exhibitors hail from Europe, with 15 based in Palma itself. Kates-Ferri is one of five US exhibitors attending.

Increasingly, the audience for these fairs is sticking around for more than skiing or sunshine.

“What has changed is that many of these destinations are no longer purely seasonal resorts,” said Baptiste Janin, cofounder of MAZE Art Gstaad, which wrapped up its third edition in February and has hosted editions in locations including the Alps and Côte d’Azur.

“Each salon is conceived in relation to a specific place and to the rhythm of that destination,” Janin explained. “We tend to choose destinations where collectors and experienced art audiences are already present.” He added: “The possibility of discovering and acquiring art simply becomes part of the cultural life of the place during certain moments of the year.”

Small in scale—often under 50 galleries—and deeply tied to their surroundings, these events operate less like marketplaces and more like temporary ecosystems. “Residents are already asking what will happen at the fair this year and tell us they are ready and waiting,” explained Edgar Gadzhiev, Lara Kotreleva, and Nadezhda Zinovskaya, the directors of VIMA, in an email interview. The fair will return to Limassol, Cyprus, in May for its second edition. “At VIMA’s inaugural edition in 2025, we saw that the fair was becoming a point of attraction for this international audience in addition to its local counterpart,” they added.

Crucially, these events are recalibrating how—and with whom—art is being experienced. “They increasingly position themselves where collectors already spend time,” confirmed Anne-Claudie Coris, executive director of Parisian powerhouse Templon, who recently participated in MAZE Gstaad. “The atmosphere was relaxed and convivial—a very different pace from the major fairs, and it allowed for many meaningful conversations with collectors,” she noted. Plus, “Sales were good.”

It’s easy to dismiss this as another luxury detour. But the success of these events hinges on something much harder to manufacture: community. These fairs are not just capturing wealth; they’re embedding themselves within it.

NOMAD St. Moritz, one of the clearest early blueprints, was conceived nearly a decade ago as “an alternative to the usual white-cube fair in exhibition halls in big cities,” according to its founder Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte. “The idea was to develop a different type of experience and to become a sort of door opener for new possibilities.” Built on word of mouth, it has since held editions in Venice, Monaco, Capri, and Abu Dhabi—transforming each setting into a temporary, lived-in exhibition. “People love this more intimate format. They come with no pressure,” he added.

Next stop, the Hamptons. In late June, NOMAD will take over the Watermill Center, tapping into a locale long synonymous with cultural capital but rarely treated as a destination for international fairgoing audiences. “You don’t know how many people from Europe, from the Middle East, have told me, ‘You know what, I’ve never been to The Hamptons. It has always been my dream!’ So to make the Hamptons a cool destination for people from abroad is something unusual,” he said.

Indeed, these fairs are complementing—not competing with—the traditional art world calendar. “We look into creating a unique reality for our audience, and that’s it. We don't want to compete with anyone or anything. We just come as a complement in a new perspective,” Bellavance-Lecompte noted.

And these in-situ formats are also pulling in new audiences. As Michele di Robilant of storied gallery Robilant + Voena notes, “NOMAD’s non-traditional venues and its leisure-oriented locations attract a broader audience than traditional art fairs, drawing visitors who might not typically seek out the fair environment.” These fairs also draw in a much-coveted younger demographic, added Janin; “We’re noticing a younger generation gradually joining—sometimes the children of established collectors.”

Kates has seen it firsthand: “More and more, we see the children or the grandchildren of collecting families adding their two cents on where the collection is going,” she said.

“They are more interested in storytelling, and investment is a word that never even comes out of their vocabulary. Investment is not transactional. Investment is investing in culture. And that, to me, is exciting.”

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Hirshhorn Museum announces acquisitions by 8 major artists ahead of reopening. https://ift.tt/o684QHd

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has announced the first eight acquisitions to be installed in its renovated outdoor sculpture garden. These include works by Mark Grotjahn, Raven Halfmoon, Lauren Halsey, Izumi Katō, Liz Larner, Woody De Othello, Chatchai Puipia, and Pedro Reyes. Japanese photographer and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto of the Tokyo-based New Material Research Library is responsible for the sculpture garden’s redesign, which will reopen in October.

The eight works will be installed at the sculpture garden’s home along the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The museum intended to underscore the institution’s commitment to supporting public access to art. This is the sculpture garden’s most significant transformation since it first opened in 1974.

San Francisco–based artist Woody De Othello will present Cool Composition (2026), a large-scale rendition of his distorted, boxed fan sculptures, which honor memories of his family gathering around a fan to escape the harsh Miami heat. The piece also raises questions about air quality and circulation. American abstract painter Mark Grotjahn will unveil an untitled bronze cast of one of his mask works, assembled from cast-off cardboard and resembling an anthropological artifact. The artist has gifted the work to the museum in honor of its 50th anniversary.

Dancing at Dusk (2024) by sculptor and painter Raven Halfmoon, a member of the Caddo Nation, references contemporary Native life alongside ancestral tradition. The carved stone sculpture depicts faces stacked atop one another and a headpiece that echoes the ornamental regalia worn by female Caddo dancers.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles–based artist Lauren Halsey’s keepers of the krown (antoinette grace halsey) (2024) pays homage to Halsey’s community in South Central Los Angeles with a massive column inscribed with local signs and advertisements. The column is topped with a portrait of the artist’s grandmother.

Japanese multidisciplinary artist Izumi Katō’s Untitled (2026) will feature an otherworldly figure assembled from stones sourced in Japan, cast in aluminum, and painted. The work is informed by an ancient myth that asserts natural elements contain spirits. American sculptor Liz Larner has long explored the “X” motif in her mirrored stainless-steel sculptures. At the Hirshhorn, she will present 6 (2010–11), a continuation of this series in which two multicolored cubic forms intertwine.

And Thai artist Chatchai Puipia’s Wish You Were Here (2008) offers a monumental bronze work based on the artist’s lower body, with its legs crossed and torso wrapped in traditional Pha Khao Ma cloth. The piece, which sees the figure lying as if on its back, conveys the tension and interplay between the modern world and ancient cultural traditions.

Lastly, Mexican multidisciplinary artist Pedro Reyes will unveil Tonatiuh (2023), which is carved from volcanic stone collected from the Popocatépetl stratovolcano in central Mexico. The piece, named in honor of the Mexican sun deity, features a circular carving in its center that juxtaposes the stone’s irregular edges and echoes shifting sunlight.

“As we near the completion of the Sculpture Garden's renovation, we are pleased to share the first details of some of the new acquisitions that will soon welcome visitors,” said Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu in a press statement. “This revitalization was envisioned to showcase art of the 21st century while honoring the modernist icons already at the heart of our collection. These first additions demonstrate how the garden will serve as a vibrant stage for contemporary voices on our National Mall for years to come.”

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Pat Steir, known for her colorful, cascading “Waterfall” paintings, dies at 87. https://ift.tt/NElRtTS

Pat Steir, known for her monumental, abstract “Waterfall” paintings, in which she poured paint down the surface to create veils of color, died at 87 on March 25th. Her death was confirmed by her husband Joost Elffers, niece Lily Sukoneck-Cohen, and Marc Payot, president of her representing gallery, Hauser & Wirth.

"Working so closely with Pat Steir—spending so much time with her, immersed in her work together and enjoying such a close friendship—counts among the great privileges of my career,” Payot said in a statement. “She emerged out of minimalism and conceptualism, but Pat created a visual language wholly her own – a new kind of abstraction that encompasses poetry and philosophy, in a practice that also involved writing, performance, and mentoring.”

Steir sustained a decades-long practice that explored abstraction through repetition, balancing control with chance happenings. She poured paint onto giant canvases from the top of a ladder or lift to create her colorful, asynchronous paintings. Throughout her career, she welcomed the chaos as a way to teach herself and discover something new. “Learning means putting one foot in front of the other,” she told Artsy in an interview pegged to her show at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles in 2024. “Sometimes you don’t learn correctly and make a misstep; other times you learn correctly and find a beautiful way.”

Steir was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1938 and grew up surrounded by art. Her parents attended art school, so Steir pursued the arts herself and graduated from Pratt Institute in 1962. She started her career in publishing, working as an art director for Harper & Row. Shortly after, she started teaching at Parsons School of Design and the California Institute of the Arts, among others. Alongside her partner, fellow artist Sol LeWitt, she co-founded Printed Matter—New York’s beloved art book non-profit.

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Steir’s paintings became increasingly abstract. Then, in the 1980s, she started experimenting with paint pouring. These entropic paintings, where paint succumbed to gravity’s will, became her “Waterfall” series. In her interview with Artsy, she said these paintings are left up to “gravity and chance.” Steir first presented them at the Robert Miller Gallery in 1990.

The artist maintained a studio practice into her 80s. Her most recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. in 2019, The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in 2019, and the Long Museum in China in 2021. Hauser & Wirth staged two solo shows of her work in New York and Zurich last year.

“She was so devoted body and soul to the medium of painting itself, to experimentation, that she has left behind one of the great legacies that will continue to inspire and provoke new conversations,” Payot said. “That Pat worked until the very last of her days is a testament to the power of her vision and the fierceness of will that really defines great artists.”

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