2025-08-23 02:33:00
Anyone who’s donned protective glasses and spent hours camped outside with eyes toward the sky knows the strange, life-changing experience of witnessing a solar eclipse. The lunar equivalents are intriguing, too, and have fascinated people around the world for millennia.
A new archive collects maps, illustrations, and newspaper clippings documenting this alluring phenomenon from 1654 to the present day. Eclipse Atlas is a veritable trove, particularly the section cataloging ephemera from across the globe. There are 17th-century diagrams depicting the phases of totality, early photographs chronicling the events, and vivid advertisements prodding people to hop on the train so they don’t miss “the thrill of a lifetime!”
In addition to historical documents, Eclipse Atlas also shares footage from recent events and offers insight into how to best view those coming in the next few years.
See some of our favorite finds below, and explore for yourself on the project website. (via Kottke)
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2025-08-23 00:30:28
Those tedious email exchanges and endless Zoom calls don’t have to be boring. Thanks to Dirk McGirk, every work task can double as a mini cocktail party—just don’t get too dishy. The designer was inspired by a font resembling tiny cubes of Swiss to create a “mechanical cheese board,” a collection of 104 keycaps shaped like small bites of fromage, complete with knives, a bottle of wine, jam, and even a tiny mouse.
McGirk doesn’t sell a physical version of this fare, but you can purchase the files to 3D print the entire collection from Maker World.
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2025-08-22 23:02:45
Through millennia of artistic expression and within the natural world, the ubiquitous spiral continues to mesmerize. In ancient traditions, the form often represents cycles. The triskele, for example, consists of three interlocking spirals thought to symbolize death, life, and rebirth or the triad of mind, body, and spirit. Spirals also emerge naturally in seashells and plants, sometimes linked to the concept of the golden mean, also known as the “divine ratio.”
For Maria Nepomuceno, the spiral’s occurrence in nature—along with its spiritual significance relating to time and energy in perpetual flow—underpins a vibrant multimedia practice. Her forthcoming exhibition, Cunhó, which opens next month at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, emphasizes abundance. Iconographic references to female anatomy, jars, ceramic vessels, baskets, and seashells—the latter of which are emblematic of fertility and wealth—emphasize flourishing interactions and growth.
A made-up word, Cunhó takes its title from a nickname Nepomuceno’s mother gave to her. Employing traditional Brazilian craftsmanship, the artist creates undulating forms that hang on the wall or nestle into the juncture where perpendicular surfaces meet. Her sculptures are simultaneously soft and firm, meandering and structured. From a distance, they can be alternately read like magnified, amorphous, biological cells or what the gallery describes as vast “macrocosmic landscapes.”
Whorling beaded and woven forms envelop pearlescent bottle gourds or evoke tropical flowers with prominent stamens. In “Abraçaço,” for example, which in Portuguese means “hug” or “embrace,” a faceless female figure with a serpentine tongue encircles a large white shell and other amorphous shapes with long, slender arms. Other pieces, like “Mar Amor,” evoke an ouroboros, an ancient symbol usually consisting of a snake or dragon eating its own tail, which represents self-creation, interconnection, and eternal cycles.
Incorporating ceramics, wood, beads, straw, string, and other found materials, Nepomuceno merges the organic and inorganic in shapeshifting pieces that represent a continuous cycle of reproduction, nourishment, plenitude, and care.
Cunhó runs from September 2 to October 11 in New York City. Explore more by the artist on Instagram.
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2025-08-22 02:57:09
Across the expansive 140-acre grounds of The Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, six contemporary artists have been invited to create site-specific works engaging with the property’s meadows, trails, and woods, while highlighting their individual practices.
Sculptures by Yō Akiyama, Laura Ellen Bacon, Aboubakar Fofana, Hugh Hayden, Milena Naef, and Javier Senosiain dot a variety of sites, from manicured parkland to open fields to groves of trees.
Bacon, whose ethereal sculptures made of malleable twigs seem to move, has installed the nine-by-five-foot “Gathering My Thoughts” in a wooded area. Made from willow sourced from Ohio, the piece appears to writhe like a living, growing form.
Hayden has constructed a larger-than-life ribcage—species unknown—made of locally sourced hemlock punctuated by dozens of branches that poke out in every direction. Partly camouflaged amid the trees, the work invites us to consider themes of ecological vulnerability, extinction, and the climate crisis. Following the exhibition, the piece will be allowed to decompose on-site, mirroring the way animal remains also eventually vanish back into the earth.
Fofana’s installation of two botanical forms, titled “Bana Yiriw ni Shi Folow (Trees and Seeds of Life),” is the artist’s first public art piece. He draws upon his spiritual belief in the divinity of nature, incorporating rolls of African cotton dyed with indigo, representing seeds, into a curling metal frame.
Other works include Senosiain’s vibrant sea creature, installed in a pond, along with Akiyama’s conical monolith evocative of scorched wood and Naef’s marble slabs that merge with the negative spaces of a fallen tree.
Curated by independent scholar Glenn Adamson, the exhibition provides the opportunity to experience contemporary art in a natural setting. Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark Art Institute, says:
The Clark’s campus becomes an accomplice, of sorts, in helping us to see and appreciate each artist’s particular vision and the interconnection between art and nature. With this edition of Ground/work, our guest curator…has intentionally blurred the line that traditionally separates the consideration of art and craft, urging us to appreciate the art that is inherent in all forms of craft.
Ground/work 2025 continues through October 2026, with free access day or night, 24/7, on The Clark’s campus. Plan your visit on the museum’s website.
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2025-08-22 00:30:00
In Edinburgh, along a stream known as the Water of Leith, six bronze figures known as “6 TIMES” stand amid the current and beside bridges, peering enigmatically down the urban waterway. Similarly, in Liverpool, “Another Place” comprises 100 life-size sculptures made from 17 molds that artist Antony Gormley (previously) took from his own body, installed permanently along Crosby Beach. In fact, the artist has dozens of permanent installations throughout the U.K. and all over the world, the majority of which interact with shorelines, parkland, and historic sites.
Gormley has long been fascinated by the relationship between humans, landscape, and the built environment. While many of his figurative sculptures retain natural, muscular curvatures and a true-to-life scale, he also ventures into abstract territory, incorporating cubist and brutalist elements into geometric, three-dimensional forms. In spite of their blockiness, which we associate with built structures of rigid materials like concrete and steel, his pieces are anything but soulless.
Gormley’s recent solo exhibition, Body Buildings at Galleria Continua in Beijing, ran from November 2024 and April 2025 and forms the basis of a new monograph of the same title. Forthcoming from SKIRA, the volume is slated for release on October 7.
Using terracotta clay and iron for pieces like “Resting Place II” and “Buttress,” Gormley taps into materials often found in construction in the form of bricks or angular frameworks. He describes his approach as a means “to think and feel the body in this condition.” Whether arranged on the floor in various positions or leaning against walls, his figures are simultaneously independent of the architecture and indelibly connected to it. “Buttress,” for example, prompts us to inquire whether the wall is holding up the person or the other way around.
New scholarship published in Body Buildings by Hou Hanru and Stephen Greenblatt explores Gormley’s engagement with China over the course of the past three decades. And a photo essay by the artist traces his interactions with the region, sharing never-before-seen archival photographs that document a 1995 research trip, where he visited the phenomenal army of terracotta warriors in Qin Shi Huang’s tomb in Xi’an.
Pre-order your copy of Body Buildings on Bookshop, and explore more of Gormley’s work on his website.
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2025-08-21 22:04:54
In a world riddled with injustice and predicated on privilege for the few at the expense of the many, what does it mean to be well? An exhibition opening Friday at the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee considers the effects of concealed trauma and the inextricable ties between personal health and collective wellness.
No One Knows All It Takes invites four artists—Bryana Bibbs, Raoul Deal, Maria Gaspar, and Swoon (previously)—who utilize art-making to grapple with complex emotions, imagine solutions to widespread problems, and share their stories and those of others. The timely exhibition, curated by Colossal, brings forth pressing issues like addiction, incarceration, immigration, and a lack of support for caregivers, conveyed through visually arresting works across media.
No One Knows All It Takes opens with portraits by Deal, intimate renderings made through hours of conversations with the subjects. Paired with his wooden sculptures, the elaborate carvings explore the central role of immigration in American history and culture. Bibbs’ weavings and monotype prints—created while she cared for her dying grandparents with many of their belongings— follow as a sort of ghostly archive of what remains after death.
Swoon’s “Medea” fills the fourth gallery space, a deeply personal installation that the artist made, in part, to confront her mother’s lifelong struggle with addiction and mental illness. An exposed tarantula mother, portraits of Swoon’s own family, wooden windows, and audio elements layer personal artifacts with recurring motifs about intergenerational trauma.
The Wisconsin iteration of Gaspar’s Disappearance Jail series tucks into a smaller, more confined space at the end of the exhibition. Featuring images of 113 prisons, jails, and juvenile and immigrant detention facilities throughout the state, the project invites visitors to use hole punches to literally remove and obscure the carceral spaces. Because incarceration has historically been the only manner in which society addresses harm and trauma, Gaspar’s work tasks each person with the abolitionist exercise of imagining other possibilities.
The title, No One Knows All It Takes, came from a conversation with Bibbs, in which she described the emotional, mental, and physical toll of caring for her grandparents in their final months. Referencing the intersecting and multilayered effects of trauma, the phrase is also multivalent: it invokes the immense amount of energy needed to function while ill, the wide-reaching impacts of trauma on an individual’s life, and the social, political, and cultural costs of unaddressed issues.
No One Knows All It Takes will be on view from August 22 to December 20. The Haggerty Museum of Art is located at Marquette University in Milwaukee.
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