NYC Health + Hospitals officials on April 17 unveiled a new mural by Dindga McCannon at Rikers Island, the 413-acre East River isle housing New York City’s largest prison. Titled Towards a Brighter Tomorrow!, 2024, the vibrantly hued work graces the exterior of the prison’s Reentry Service Center, through which visitors enter and released inmates exit ..read more

For viewers (this correspondent included) who were unable to sort out the registration to visit the Holy See pavilion—at the Giudecca Women’s prison, and with Vatican-grade security (the pope himself is due to visit on Saturday)—I urge a visit, just across the Giudecca canal, to Bulgaria’s impassioned excavation of the psychological afterlives of political imprisonment. Krasimira Butseva ..read more

Eddie Martinez at San Marino pavilion: Micro-nation enthusiasts, unite! Because if there has to be such a thing as countries, then they should be as tiny as possible. Though there’s nothing diminutive about the paintings and sculptures of American artist Eddie Martinez, who was chosen to represent this cute little Italy-enclosed splotch. Martinez’s own splotches, loaded with chromatic ..read more

“I WANT TO TURN THE VIEWERS INTO FOREIGNERS,” Tesfaye Urgessa says to me. We’re in one of the baroque rooms in Venice’s Palazzo Bollani near San Marco, where, this week, the Addis Ababa–based painter is the first to represent Ethiopia in its debut official Venice pavilion. I tell Urgessa that his new oil paintings—scenes of ..read more

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has repatriated to Iraq a Sumerian copper alloy statue dating to the third millennium BCE. Museum officials returned it to Iraqi authorities in a ceremony in Washington, DC, with Iraqi prime minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani in attendance. The ancient artifact, measuring over fourteen inches high and depicting a ..read more

A Pro-Palestinian protest greeted visitors to the Sixtieth Venice Biennale’s inaugural preview day, held Wednesday, April 17. The demonstrators—reportedly numbering upward of a hundred—made their initial stand outside the Israeli and US pavilions, which are proximate, where they scattered and handed out red fliers reading “No Death in Venice—No to the Genocide Pavilion.” Some demonstrators entered ..read more

Staff, emergency workers, and shocked bystanders braved the towering flames that consumed Copenhagen’s iconic seventeenth-century former stock exchange on April 16 to carry historic paintings to safety. The fire, which was reported at about 7:30 a.m. local time, according to The Guardian, broke out as the 1625 building was undergoing restoration. The scaffolding surrounding the bourse ..read more

“THIS SHOW IS CHANGING PEOPLE’S LIVES,” an artist said to me on the windy evening following the Sixtieth Venice Biennale’s Tuesday pre-opening. She wasn’t kidding. Deftly telling a story about artistic self-invention by marginalized groups, curator Adriano Pedrosa’s “Foreigners Everywhere” is the rare mega-show that renders a deep picture with a deceptively light curatorial hand ..read more

ALWAYS START YOUR DAY with something you know you’re gonna like. For me, that usually entails a book and a quadruple espresso: a luxury I can’t afford when I’ve been tasked with seeing as much of the Venice Biennale—“Foreigners Everywhere,” curated by Adriano Pedrosa—and its multitudinous collateral exhibitions and events as possible within three days ..read more

Ruth Patir, the artist representing Israel at the forthcoming Venice Biennale, and curators Mira Lapidot and Tamar Margalit, who are organizing her exhibition, have said the country’s pavilion will not open to the public until Israel and Hamas reach “a cease-fire and hostage release agreement.” The trio’s announcement comes as the death toll in Gaza owing to Israel’s continued assault ..read more