Weekly Newsletter
Yayoi Kusama, Sliman Mansour, and Dolly Parton pass away, and a major Pompeii show comes to the US.
From a high platform in the Broadway Junction station, I see a forlorn cloud hovering over the rooftops of East Brooklyn. The sky around it is perfectly clear. The next morning, I find it still standing in the same spot, but it’s faded, famished. That’s how bad things have gotten: The loneliness epidemic has now reached the clouds.
Espresso in Williamsburg, watermelon juice in Ditmas Park, writing session in Ridgewood, soccer camp in Bed-Stuy. At a street corner, a mural by @blkopslife shows a hand holding a famous 1964 photo of Malcom X leaning on the shoulder of his tuxedoed friend, Muhammad Ali. It’s in a Black neighborhood that’s been almost completely gentrified.
Dolly Parton suddenly dies at 80. She touched the hearts of millions working nine to five. Sliman Mansour dies at 79. He carried the weight of Palestinian pain on his back. I hope he catches a break in the afterlife. And then Yayoi Kusama follows, passing at 97. She’ll live on for eternity thanks to her Infinity Mirrored Rooms. At lunch, the guy from the falafel place tells me that all humans were created from a single soul. I say that sounds good, but no lettuce for me, please. I fear it more than death these days.
I watch clips of China’s humanoid robot olympics and don’t know whether to be amused or frightened. One robot boxer keeps jumping and kicking long after its head is ripped off. At a cafe, I overhear a businessman on a Zoom call announcing, “We’re going to make a big AI push towards the end of the year.” On the other end of the call I see the workers who will probably be replaced by that AI.
I laugh at first when I hear that Vancouver police raided an art gallery because someone mistook a sculpture for a man in need of medical assistance. But then it turns out that passed out men are a common sight in the streets of the opioid crisis-stricken city.
The moon is about to turn full, and a lot of aggression starts to make sense. A place called Insomnia Cookies is ironically most empty at night. Summer is on its hind legs, still acting out. Thousands flee for their lives from a huge wave in Nepal. But fall is pushing in, and I do believe it will be kind.
—Hakim Bishara, editor-in-chief
Yayoi Kusama, Artist of Infinities, Dies at 97
Artist Yayoi Kusama, who channeled psychological phenomena into impossibly kaleidoscopic artworks that enamored millions around the world, died in a hospital in Tokyo on August 14 at the age of 97. The news of her death was announced by her studio and David Zwirner Gallery today, August 26.
The labor-intensive quality of her works, combined with a Borgesian fascination with mirrors and the infinite, an openness about mental health struggles, and her ever-present red bob, rendered her an icon closer to a rock star or a spiritual leader than a contemporary artist. | Valentina Di Liscia
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News
- An exhibition of artifacts from Pompeii will make its United States debut at the Dallas Museum of Art this December.
- The Department of State removes Kehinde Wiley’s 2015 commissioned painting from the United States embassy in the Dominican Republic, claiming that the artist’s “violent and racist words and depictions” have no place in the foreign relations agency.
- Sliman Mansour, a renowned Palestinian painter who chronicled over six decades of his country’s fight for liberation, dies at age 79.
- Welsh music photographer Justin Thomas is accusing painter Elizabeth Peyton of copyright infringement on his photograph of Liam and Noel Gallagher of the British rock band Oasis.
- Ex-Pussy Riot Member Margarita Konovalova, who went by the alias Rita Flores, claims she was coerced by Russia to spy on other dissident artists.
- Mayor Zohran Mamdani announces more than $8.4 million in grants toward nonprofit and small business initiatives, including public art commissions and arts programming.
- The 70-year-old Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen gets a three-year prison sentence for his sculptures of communist revolutionary and leader Mao Zedong.
- Sir Joshua Reynolds’s celebrated “Portrait of Mai (Omai)” will be displayed at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles beginning on September 14.
- As part of the School of Sexuality Project’s 2026 “Vulva Gala,” artists dressed in handmade vulva costumes paraded down the aisle of a church in Long Beach as part of a community-centered celebration centering on approachable, destigmatized learning.
- Maya Lin, the architect and artist behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and the Civil Rights Memorial in Alabama, will debut her next public art commission in April 2027 at the University of Texas at Austin.
- Art Movements: Four Native artists are commissioned for the Counterpublic Triennial, the High Line’s fall lineup, new curators at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a laid-off Artnet News reporter speaks out, and more.
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