Editor: Ben Davis
Location: Bentonville, Arkansas
Over four nights and three days, upwards of 10,000 visitors flowed through Bentonville, Arkansas to attend the inaugural edition of FORMAT. Event producers describe the flashy new affair as a blend of “art, music, and technology.” If this year’s iteration is a reliable indication, what that means is a heady cocktail of cyborg art, NFT interventions, and other high-production performances.
Read the full report on Artnet News.
Editor: Benjamin Sutton
Location: Santa Fe, New Mexico
Even rain couldn’t keep the Santa Fe Indian Market from springing to life. On 20 August, thousands of visitors—under brightly-coloured coats and with umbrellas in hand—stormed the city’s historic Plaza for the Southwest Association of American Indian Art’s (SWAIA) centennial milestone. In keeping with tradition, the organisation held all of the usual ceremonies, opening the sprawling annual fair for Indigenous art with a morning prayer and proffering this year’s juried “Best-of-Class” awards across ten categories. Russell Sanchez, a San Ildefonso Pueblo potter native to the region, took home the event's “Best-of-Show” prize for his bejewelled polychrome jar, 100 years in the making! (2022).
Read the full report on The Art Newspaper.
Editor: Benjamin Sutton
Location: O'ahu, Hawai'i
The year was 1972. Terrilee Kekoʻolani, then a young native Hawaiian activist, is pictured in a black-and-white photograph at a Save Our Surf (SOS) demonstration on Oʻahu’s east end. “We need to protect our resources, and stop land development and evictions of our people,” Kekoʻolani said. “We need to remember that Hawaii belongs to Hawaiians.” This and other significant moments from the ongoing sovereignty movement, as documented by photographer Ed Greevy and the late scholar Haunani-Kay Trask, play out along a wall-filling installation at the Honolulu Museum of Art—all challenging dominant notions of migration, access and power that surround them in the inaugural Hawaiʻi Triennial, titled Pacific Century — E Hoʻomau no Moananuiākea.
Read the full report on The Art Newspaper.
Editor: Benjamin Sutton
Location: Seattle, Washington
Kevin McCoy did not set out to terraform the art world. But on 15 January, addressing a private audience during the Seattle NFT Museum’s opening weekend, the digital artist acknowledged that the moment was nothing short of historic.
Read the full report on The Art Newspaper.
Editor: Ben Davis
Location: Sheboygan, Wisconsin
Collecting art is risky business. But preserving art is on a level all its own. This was the biggest takeaway following a recent, socially-distant tour of Wisconsin’s new Art Preserve. Situated a short five-minute drive southwest of Sheboygan’s historic downtown, the colossal structure, designed by the environmentally-conscious architecture firm Tres Birds, is the culmination of a Kohler family heiress’s passion project, nearly fourteen years in the making. Now, after surviving a few pandemic-driven setbacks, the Preserve is revving up for its grand opening in late June.
Read the full report on artnet News.
Editors: Whitney Mallett, Carl Swanson
Location: New York, New York
The Queens International is an art biennial distributed throughout the borough. Queens Museum assistant curator Sophia Marisa Lucas and her co-curator, artist Baseera Khan, joined forces to assemble 43 artists and collectives, from across 15 distinct neighborhoods, for the eighth edition. “Volumes” is co-hosted by select branches of the Queens Library, making it even more democratic. In this way, Queens is, itself, either by design or coincidence, very much on display — and with all the news about coming corporate-driven gentrification, it’s an opportunity to better understand the diverse, cross-generational patchwork of people from all over the world we stand to lose. Still, if you don’t live there, or only live in one part of the borough, it can be hard to find your way around, which is why we’ve made this art guide.
Read the full report on Vulture.
Editors: Whitney Mallett, Carl Swanson
Location: Dallas, Texas
Dallas is not afraid of spectacle. It’s also a serious art city with its discerning collectors and well-regarded museums (there are shows on Ida O’Keeffe and Günther Förg right now.) But even locals who don’t ever make it into the museums can enjoy the Aurora public art showcase downtown, which has been quietly upping the ante since 2010. Last weekend was its latest iteration.
Read the full report on Vulture.