Diriyah Art Futures’ Irini Papadimitriou named Seoul Mediacity Biennale director.
The Seoul Museum of Art has appointed Irini Papadimitriou as artistic director of the 14th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, set to open in August 2027. Papadimitriou currently serves as director of exhibitions at Diriyah Art Futures in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She previously held roles at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and FutureEverything, a Manchester-based organization focused on art, technology and digital culture. Her proposal was chosen from 70 submissions through an open call. An international jury of Korean and global art professionals selected it for its exploration of the relationship between technology, power and the future, as well as its potential to address those questions within Seoul’s cultural and geopolitical context. The edition will be titled “Machines of Repair,” and is intended to prompt reflection on the values and purposes that scientific and technological progress ultimately serve. Papadimitriou hopes to build on the biennale’s history of placing art and emerging technologies in critical dialogue.
Toledo Museum of Art’s new initiative puts art books in African libraries.
The Toledo Museum of Art has launched the Africa Art Library, an initiative to donate art books to libraries across the African continent. Earlier this year, the museum gave around 100 books to the Koyo Kouoh Library at the Gihanga Institute of Contemporary Art in Kigali, Rwanda, and a second donation is headed this month to the Nubuke Foundation in Accra, Ghana. Recipient libraries select titles from the museum’s inventory, spanning African and African diasporic art and art history, criticism and museum education. The idea grew out of years of collaboration with African institutions, where access to books emerged as one of partners’ most frequent requests. During the museum’s ongoing reinstallation, president and CEO Adam M. Levine said staff also recognized gaps in how the institution represented artistic traditions from the continent, particularly modern and contemporary work. Alexandra Nickolaou, the museum’s fellow in African and African Diasporic Art, is leading the project and hopes to bring other U.S. museum libraries on board and expand to more countries.
The Eames Institute releases new renderings for its Herzog & de Meuron-designed museum in Novato.
The Eames Institute has released new renderings and details for its museum campus in Novato, California, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, with Field Operations as landscape architect and San Francisco’s EHDD as executive architect. The 88-acre site, about 20 miles north of San Francisco near Olompali State Historic Park, is a 1960s corporate campus by Jan Lubicz-Nycz that the institute acquired in 2025. The plan combines adaptive reuse with new construction. Visitors will arrive at a court fronted by Lubicz-Nycz’s 134,000-square-foot 1965 warehouse, whose hyperbolic paraboloid roof will be exposed inside, peaking at 36 feet above galleries. A 120-foot mirror-clad bridge, itself a display space, will lead to maker spaces and a new 88,000-square-foot rectilinear museum with a cafe, reading areas, and a courtyard-facing loggia. Field Operations is designing 10 linked gardens planted with natives such as oak, manzanita, and California poppy. The museum is slated to open in 2030.
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize unveils shortlist ahead of 30th anniversary.
Hoda Afshar, Lotus L. Kang, Sasha Kurmaz and Salvatore Vitale are the four artists shortlisted for the 2027 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, The Photographers’ Gallery in London announced. The selected projects span photography, film, sound, sculpture, archives and collage, each examining how images shape our understanding of bodies, war, labor and power. Afshar is recognized for Performing the Invisible at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, which uses mirrors to turn the colonial gaze back on viewers. Kang is nominated for The Face of Desire Is Loss, her installation at the Bulgari Pavilion of the 61st Venice Biennale. Kurmaz is shortlisted for Red Horse, an 800-page collaged diary of life in Ukraine. Vitale’s SABOTAGE, shown at Photo Elysée in Lausanne, examines the hidden human labor behind the digital economy. An exhibition of all four projects opens at The Photographers’ Gallery on March 10, 2027, before traveling to Frankfurt.
Ursula von Rydingsvard dies at 84, leaving a legacy in wood.
Ursula von Rydingsvard, whose towering sculptures of hand-cut cedar became some of the most recognizable works in contemporary American sculpture, has died at 84. Working with standard cedar beams that she and her assistants cut, distressed and stacked into vast, undulating forms often darkened with graphite, von Rydingsvard developed a language that evoked cave walls, waves and fossils. Emerging when Minimalism dominated New York, she embraced its repetition while rejecting its coolness, pursuing work that felt bodily and of the earth. Born in Germany to Polish and Ukrainian farmers, she spent her early childhood in displaced-persons camps before her family settled in Connecticut, a heritage that shaped works such as Zakopane (1987). Her sculptures are held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art, and her 19-foot Ona remains a public landmark at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.
Attractive Distractions:
Prada’s holiday campaign brings hand-drawn animation to life.
Lawrence Schiller revisits his years photographing Marilyn Monroe.
Michele Bönan, the designer behind Casa Cipriani and J.K. Place, isn’t slowing down.
Cartier’s new high jewelry collection pays tribute to its century-long ties to Japan.
