Lifestyle

SCAD deFINE ART 2025 honors Zanele Muholi, a South African visual activist known for documenting Black queer identity and marginalized communities. Through photography, film and sculpture, Muholi challenges stereotypes and highlights the need for representation.The exhibition features key works, including Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), a series of black-and-white self-portraits where Muholi transforms everyday objects into powerful symbols of race and body politics. Brave Beauties celebrates trans women and nonbinary individuals in empowered poses, while Faces and Phases documents Black lesbians in South Africa facing discrimination. A new series of lightbox self-portraits continues Muholi’s exploration of identity and visibility.Muholi describes their work as a tool for repres...

London-based artist Rong Bao first turned heads with her 2023 debut solo exhibition at Saatchi Gallery. Fitting titled Rong Bao Is Me, the show welcomed audiences into Bao's whimsical universe through a lively romp of inflatable sculptures and immersive installations. The survey transformed the familiar into something wonderful, punctuating the typical solemnity of white-walled galleries with a refreshing burst curiosity.Now, Bao will inaugurate Carl Kostyál's Hong Kong space with a new solo show. Running from March 23 through April 30, the eponymous exhibition delves deeper into her ongoing exploration of mischief and defiance through a tactility, materiality, form and her signature sense of wit. “In my artistic journey, playfulness and humor are the core elements from which I craft a sur...

Ai Weiwei has built a career on defiance. Whether smashing ancient artifacts or filling museum floors with handcrafted porcelain sunflower seeds, his work is a challenge to authority, a refusal to accept history at face value. Now, Seattle will host his most expansive U.S. exhibition yet.Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei, opening this week at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), spans 40 years of work—over 130 pieces that confront power, censorship and cultural identity. Iconic works like "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn" (1995), "Study of Perspective" (1995–2011), and "Sunflower Seeds" (2010) will be on view, alongside new pieces making their international debut.For the first time in its history, SAM will dedicate all three of its locations to a single artist. The Seattle Asian Art Museum ...

Desert X is back for its fifth U.S. edition, planting a suite of site-specific installations in Southern California’s Coachella Valley. Curated by Neville Wakefield and Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas, this year’s exhibition features the work of 11 international artists, each responding to the vast desert landscape, in a living dialogue of art, land and deep time.The 2025 iteration spotlights the region’s resilient spirit, looking to the wisdom embedded in the timeless landscape as subject and focus. “Curated by the place it temporarily inhabits, Desert X reveals the [landscape] as a canvas of real and imagined histories, narrating tales of displacement, sovereignty and adaptation superimposed over visible testaments of time,” Garcia-Maestas noted in a recent statement.Works on view explore themes ...