Weekly Newsletter
Remembering Ursula von Rydingsvard, an Epstein survivor’s message for MoMA, interviews with Paul Pfeiffer and Layli Long Soldier, and the best costumes of our artsy Halloween party.
On a fair afternoon in Queens, New York, a woman in a red dress crosses the street in front of me with an actual axe under her arm. Her face is stern, her step fast, and you can tell from the blood on her axe that she wasn’t using it to chop wood. A police siren wails in the distance, but that doesn’t seem to bother her.
I reach to lock the car and then remember it’s Halloween.
At a warm and lovely dinner at Cabinet Magazine, founder and editor-in-chief Sina Najafi shows us a photograph of tightrope walker Margret Zimmermann balancing on a high wire above the bombed-out ruins of the Haymarket in Cologne, Germany, in 1946. She looks her finest in her red lipstick, but a treacherous wind is blowing in her hair as a crowd watches from far below.
Outside, Brooklyn seems to be getting richer and poorer at the same time. A man wearing a bejeweled crown asks me for money. In this city, performance artists are beggars and beggars are performance artists.
At Hyperallergic’s art-themed Halloween party, dozens of guests show up with impressive costumes and really commit to the act. Claire Valdez, an artist and organizer who’s running for Congress, drops by and serves as a judge in our art costume contest. I don’t have a costume, but I perform all night.
“To live is to believe,” Marcel Duchamp says in a video on my phone screen. A little girl dressed as Lady Liberty crosses the street with her mother, a torch in her hand. She keeps the torch held high as they walk off, and that makes me smile.
—Hakim Bishara, editor-in-chief
The Greatest Art Costumes From Hyperallergic’s Halloween Party
A Dutch still life, “Beast Jesus,” several esoteric Goya characters, and not one but two Marina Abramović/Ulay references (and not even the most obvious ones!) walk into a bar … That’s a Hyperallergic Halloween, baby!
On Wednesday evening, October 28, almost 200 of our members, readers, artists, supporters, and their enthusiastic friends rolled into Oberon in Brooklyn for our annual art costume party.
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Art Books from the National Gallery of Art
Discover thoughtfully designed exhibition catalogs, insights from leading art historians and conservators, collection highlights, and more.
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Halloween Highlights
News
- Ursula von Rydingsvard, a sculptor whose monuments of cedar were partly inspired by her childhood in post-World War II refugee camps, dies at 84.
- Amid the spate of publicized museum heists sweeping the globe, one Los Angeles artist flips the script and adds his own artwork to the walls of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- Researchers contest the dating of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, identifying discrepancies between the celestial alignments in June 1889 and the painted night sky.
- Kid Cudi announces his hand in writing, directing, and starring in the forthcoming project JEAN, a biopic of late contemporary artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
- Designed by artisans from Mestiz Studio in Mexico, an enormous ofrenda titled “Twenty Petal Flower” begins to blossom in Manhattan before the start of Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead).
- An exhibition series organized by the Vatican brings together more than 100 artists to celebrate “fundamentally human” creativity in the face of AI’s rapid rise.
- Documenta 16 names four new curatorial team members, artist Catherine Opie wins a Yale University award, Dallas Art Fair partners with a university, and more in Art Movements this week.
Paris Art Week
The School of Art at the University of Arkansas Offers Tuition-Free Graduate Programs
Applications are now open for the 2027–2028 academic year.
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From Our Critics
Opinion
Books
The War on Art Is Repeating Itself
As an artist who lived through the Reagan-era Culture Wars, I recommend Isaac Butler’s “The Perfect Moment” for the stories that parallel our current fight to defend creative expression. | Martha Wilson
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Features
Interviews
Layli Long Soldier’s Poetic Lifeblood
I spoke to the poet, who is my longtime friend and colleague, about her new book, the threads connecting poetry and visual art, and how Lakota philosophy suffuses her work. | Dyani White Hawk
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Guide
