2025-11-01 02:59:15
The arboreal designs featured in TASCHEN’s new book aren’t your dad’s Home Depot box variety. Uniquely stunning, all 62 structures in Modern Tree Houses respond to the surrounding environment, whether a tiny, winterized pod for escaping the snow or a split-level playground complete with climbing ropes and nests. Built by architects and amateurs alike, each dwelling is varied in material, layout, purpose, and aesthetic, although all thrive because of their proximity to nature’s beauty.
“Modern tree houses are proof that happiness doesn’t have to be built big—just built right,” author Florian Siebeck says, presenting an array of spaces from luxurious escapes to children’s hideouts. Pre-order your copy in the Colossal Shop.
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2025-10-31 22:53:35
The shortlist for this year’s Close-Up Photographer of the Year competition has arrived. After deliberating for a total of 20 hours on Zoom, 22 judges evaluated a record-breaking 12,557 photographs and consolidated its most promising contenders. Capturing the diversity of wildlife and nature landscapes across 11 unique categories, each photo highlights stunning close-up, micro, and macro perspectives.
CUPOTY’s Top 100 photos are yet to be selected from this collection in January 2026. Find the entire shortlist on the contest’s website, and in the meantime, follow Instagram for updates. Can’t get enough of these extreme close-ups? Immerse yourself in images from past cycles of the contest.
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2025-10-31 05:21:18
Throughout her practice, Renée Condo draws on the philosophical tenets of her Mi’gmaq ancestry. The Montreal-based artist works with wooden beads that she sands, paints in bold acrylic, and nests into energetic compositions depicting juicy fruits, raindrops, and brilliant, golden suns.
Condo is interested in mntu, or spirit, and what she refers to as heart knowledge, acts that emerge from empathy and love. Through sculptural pieces that emphasize interconnection and flow, the artist draws on Indigenous creation stories and myths, considering her beadwork a reimagining of various traditions.
Condo often engages the relationship between the component and composition, emphasizing the ways in which a singular piece would appear abstract without a broader context. “The bead as fundamental entity, as infinite potentiality, can appear as divided, as unit, as part,” she says, “but is at once whole and all-encompassing, holding secrets of the world and to the nature of reality.”
This fall, Condo will have work on view at GAVLAK, where she’s represented. You can find more of her practice on Instagram.
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2025-10-30 22:11:16
Caledonia Curry’s story of the Sibylant Sisters starts like many others in the fairytale genre, although it takes just a few words to realize that something is off: “Once upon a swampy ol’ dirt road, two sisters, Caelum and Terra, were growing up under the care of a spindly little witch by the name of Katarina.” The narrative continues with the sorcerous mother beginning to unravel, prompting the siblings to rely on the younger Caelum’s magical powers to survive.
“This story is drawn from my own childhood growing up at the end of a dirt road with a mother who was in the midst of a psychotic breakdown, and a lifetime spent teasing out the relationship between creativity, intuition, magic, and madness,” the artist says.
Curry, who’s better known as Swoon (previously), has taken a sort of narrative turn in her practice as of late, translating her interest in family and intergenerational trauma into a sprawling, mythical tale. Seven years in the making, the project is multi-disciplinary and spans sculpture, installation, costume, film, and more. Many of the works can be seen in a four-part read-aloud, and they’ve also spawned an 88-card deck called “The Oracle of the Sibylants,” complete with symbolic imagery distinct to the artist’s practice.
Included are renderings common in divination, including stars and smoking cauldrons, along with more idiosyncratic objects like a glowing Skee Ball machine and flailing garden hose. “Suffused with joy and tenderness amidst the hardship, these cards speak the language of fairytale, because there are some truths that can only be told by witches and unicorns, ogres and toads,” Swoon adds.
“The Oracle of the Sibylants” is currently funding on Kickstarter, which features a video glimpsing some of the live-action and animated films to come. Stay up to date with the entire project—which Swoon envisions as a traveling exhibition, films, novella, and theatrical production—on Instagram.
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2025-10-30 02:33:44
From feminist activist Angela Davis to iconic symbols of peace amid political upheaval, Shepard Fairey is known for his bold illustrations and instantly recognizable posters. He rose to prominence within the world of street art and skateboarding culture, creating a sticker in 1989 with the phrase “Andre the Giant has a posse,” which was distributed widely and led to a recurring motif of the wrestler’s face on dozens of subsequent prints.
Fairey’s graphic motifs hit the mainstream in 2008 during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, in which his portrait sits above the word “hope.” The optimistic work exemplifies how grassroots activism, especially through the form of printing and sharing imagery, can become iconic and have immense influence.
Out of Print, a retrospective of Fairey’s work presented by Beyond the Streets, celebrates what the gallery calls “the rebellious, democratic force of ink and paper.” More than 400 prints designed over the past few decades are joined by new works. Many of the posters emphasize his interest in activism, empowerment, and protest. His subversive practice, known as Obey Giant, even has a slogan: “Manufacturing quality dissent since 1989.”
Fairey often incorporates the color schemes and modernist, graphic motifs of early 20th-century propaganda posters, especially of the Soviet Union. By incorporating design motifs associated with fascism into messages of peace, feminism, love, and democracy, he reinforces the power of the medium. “Some people say digital media has ended print, but the provocative, tactile experience of a print on a wall or in the wild can’t be replaced,” Fairey says. “Printing still matters!”
The exhibition runs from November 15 to January 11 in Los Angeles. Learn more on the gallery’s website, follow updates on Fairey’s Instagram, and purchase prints in his shop.
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2025-10-29 22:54:00
As a communication designer, Kelli Anderson began her career in information design. “The act of data visualization is all about bringing facts from the abstract and numerical realm into the sphere of perception, so you can see them,” she says in a video on Kickstarter. “And I thought, why stop there? What if you could also feel and experience those facts?”
Last year, Anderson launched a remarkable, five-years-in-the-making project called Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape, an ABC pop-up book about typography. She spent thousands of hours researching design archives and meticulously engineering kinetic and three-dimensional letters to show how type styles have evolved through the ages.
“If you look carefully at letters, you can see a secret history of the world—from the Bronze Age to the Information Age,” Anderson says. “But because many of these methods, tools, and machines are now obsolete, this history is challenging to follow. Alphabet in Motion leverages tactile, interactive features to help clarify how letters have transformed alongside technological upheavals and shifting aesthetic moods.”
The project is composed of two conjoined, detachable books. The pop-up section includes an interactive, seven-segment display cover that changes from A to Z, 17 moveable paper elements, and hands-on activities. The accompanying 128-page section contains an essay diving into the history and concept of each pop-up, plus 300 color images from the history of type design.
Anderson’s book originally funded on Kickstarter and is now being released more widely. Secure your copy in the Colossal Shop. Follow along with her work on Instagram, and you might also enjoy another of her projects, This Book Is a Camera.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Pop-Up Letters Set the ‘Alphabet in Motion’ in Kelli Anderson’s Playful Book appeared first on Colossal.