All images courtesy of Artevento, shared with permission For 16 days this spring, an international kite festival will soar above the beaches of Cervia. Artenvento returns to northern Italy from April 19 to May 4 with more than 200 participants from 50 countries and five continents. In its 45th year, the 2025 festival welcomes artist Kadek Armika, who’s known for incorporating Balinese kite-making traditions into his modern, flying sculptures. This iteration also…
Since the 1800s, hitching posts have shaped a history anchored in utility and community. Scattered throughout towns and outside common areas, the sturdy objects offered a secure point to tie down horses, especially during social events or gatherings. San Francisco-based artist Windy Chien reinterprets this functional object in her ongoing Hitching Post series. Interdependent forms are particularly fascinating to Chien. “If the object around which the hitch is tied were to be…
On expanses of beige linen, Melissa Calderón immortalizes pockets of a neighborhood or domestic space. Combining imagery from her childhood in the Bronx with her family’s native Puerto Rico, the artist translates familiar landscapes and sights into vivid embroideries, preserving her memories in thread. The intimate compositions capture how neighborhoods and communities change, particularly as long-time residents are displaced. Her current body of work, titled Gentrified Landscapes, explores “a place that once…
When Jose Lerma encountered “Reception of the Grand Condé by Louis XIV” by Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, he found himself drawn to the figures tucked far behind the crowd. Known for his meticulous realism, Gérôme rendered these small characters with minimal brushstrokes, a decision that has influenced Lerma’s work for more than a decade. Exaggerating the sparse quality of the figures, Lerma (previously) paints portraits in wide swaths…
Cities are constantly in flux, but Keita Morimoto (previously) invites us to linger in their transitions a little longer. The artist renders corner stores, vending machines, and lampposts that illuminate spaces that might otherwise go unnoticed. Either unoccupied or inhabited by just one or two people, Morimoto’s scenes are dimly lit but not eerie and invoke the environments most of us engage with for just a moment. “The anonymous, liminal spaces in…
In Nahuatl, an Aztec language indigenous to Mesoamerica still spoken by more than a million people throughout Mexico, kauani means “to flourish.” Designers Inés Quezada and Inés Llasera, co-founders of Tornasol Studio, conceived of a series of luminaires inspired by native flora in celebration of the region’s rich botanic diversity. The ongoing series, KAUANI, emulates details of endemic species, drawing on textures found on cacti, geometric agaves, and the rhythmic patterns of…
Many of us are familiar with titans of the Dutch Golden Age like Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt, Jan Steen, and more. Yet fewer of us have probably heard of Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), renowned during her lifetime for her original style but under-acknowledged through the centuries in the canon of Western art history. Co-organized by the Toledo Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, the…
Beauty and nature’s resilience are at the core of Vasilisa Romanenko’s work. The Connecticut-based artist paints faithful depictions of common yet dignified birds amid clusters of fruits and flowers, exploring the power of opulence in times of upheaval. A stately crow poses amid rust-colored roses, a great blue heron poses amid clusters of tangerines and lilies, and a small warbler perches amid pink poppies. Referencing the defiantly decorative works of English textile…
As the saying goes, if one knows very little about something, their knowledge could fit on the back of a postage stamp. But for tattoo artist Ash Aurich, the minuscule format provides a readymade canvas and frame ripe for experimentation, intrigue, and beauty. Using a fine line technique with delicate shading, Aurich outlines the unmistakable scalloped edges of the ubiquitous, tiny adhesives, filling rectangular compositions with Renaissance-inspired romantic and religious figures. A…
Treading the boundary between cuteness and discomfort—innocence and harm—South Korean artist Jinjoo Jo’s illustrations express the tenuous relationship humans conjure with nature and a personal response to a widely publicized tragedy. Blue Anger, a series Jo began in 2020, portrays young girls interacting with insects, which are unsettlingly large and imposing. “I have always loved nature, but in this series, I chose to use insects as a metaphor for predators,” she says.…
