2026-08-14 01:38:34
From the collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, which features a wealth of artwork and artifacts related to social justice and community organizing, a new exhibition highlights American democracy and freedom of speech through the lens of art as an agent of change.
Turn the volume up! includes works by a diverse group of contemporary artists and photographers, from Spider Martin’s dramatic documentation of Freedom Marches during the Civil Rights Movement to Kara Walker’s multimedia interrogations of U.S. history and racial stereotypes. Visitors will also encounter works by the Guerilla Girls, Carrie Mae Weems, Kiki Smith, Bruce Davidson, and many more.
The Nasher has organized the exhibition into five thematic areas: Remarks, Organize, Records, Dissents, and Petitions. Photographs, sculptures, installations, paintings, and more illustrate the array of visual languages artists use to convey important messages, influencing how people discuss issues and are spurred toward civic action.
The Guerilla Girls, for example, famously pasted posters around Manhattan in the 1980s that shone a light on the glaring lack of representation of women artists in not only visual art but across popular culture. Davidson is renowned for illuminating social inequality in visceral photographs, from the Jim Crow South to impoverished neighborhoods in New York City. And Carol Summers’ bold screenprint of a giant red “X” over a photo of a Vietnamese mother and her children was part of a campaign by Artists and Writers Protest urging the end of the war in Vietnam.
Throughout the show’s run, pieces will be rotated in and out so that visitors can experience a wide array of works in the museum’s collection. Turn the volume up! opens on August 27 and will continue through July 11, 2027. Everything Now All at Once also continues through November 1.
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2026-08-13 21:34:14
Our oceans are places of mystery and biological wonders as much as they are essential to communities’ livelihoods. We tap these expansive bodies of water for recreation, food, transportation. From the Atlantic to the Arctic, oceans cover around 70 percent of the earth’s surface, and there is an incredible wealth of life yet to be discovered.
As the continuing climate crisis melts ice caps and raises sea levels, and industrial fishing and waste threatens endangered marine animals and habitats, reminders of the oceans’ irreplaceable value and power are ever more critical. That’s where Oceanographic magazine and Blancpain’s annual Ocean Photographer of the Year contest comes in as a catalyst for conservation.
This year’s finalists span categories from Adventure and Human Connection to Ocean Unseen and Conservation. To really delve into the complexity of issues facing our saltwater expanses, the latter is organized in two parts: Hope and Impact. Throughout, there is a sense that in order for people to really become aware of the problems facing our oceans, let alone feel motivated to act, we need to understand both the beauty and the terribleness of these waters, whether inherent or human-inflicted.
Founder and director Will Harrison describes the contest as a platform for stories to reach the world. “These photographs don’t just capture what’s beneath the surface; they surface the stories our planet most needs us to hear. As the pressures on our ocean grow, so does the importance of the artists who bear witness to them.”
The winners will be announced in September. See all the finalists in the competition’s online gallery, and follow updates on Instagram.
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2026-08-13 07:27:26
“The wind is my nemesis!” says Jennifer Latour, and rightly so. In her sculptural assemblages, single flowers or small clusters of blooms sprout from tree branches or thick stems, appearing like otherworldly forms standing in the landscape. A soft breeze could topple the Vancouver-based artist’s ephemeral works, scattering their delicate petals and spindly shoots before she has the chance to snap a photo.
These fleeting moments are preserved in Latour’s Bound Species series, which she began during lockdown by piecing together objects found around her home into unconventional, ikebana-style compositions. “During this time, I started having a recurring dream of giant flowers growing around me with multiple species of other flowers growing off one stem. I draw a lot of inspiration from my dreams, and this was something I had to test out in real life,” she tells us.
After a few trials, the process clicked. She ideated on the ways different colors and shapes might puzzle together into a sort of hybrid character and envisioned photographing on location, presenting the unorthodox arrangements in stunning, natural settings. When travel became possible, she jumped at the opportunity to bring the sculptures outdoors. That’s when she encountered the wind. “I quickly discovered how much more difficult this was,” she says. “It takes so much more patience and time to make my sculptures out in the wild but all that much more satisfying when it works out!”
Today, Latour continues to venture outdoors and often sources materials from local garden centers, flower shops, and even the occasional grocery store, should the botanicals be locally grown. She assembles each piece by hand, connecting stem to stem in a way that evokes “the interconnectedness found in nature, and serves as a reminder that all creatures are bound simultaneously by both their similarities and their differences.”
With trips planned to Arizona and the U.K. seaside in the coming months, the artist will continue to transform colorful specimens into strange, mishmashed forms. “I dream of taking the work all around the world to the most remote and unique locations,” she adds. “It’s a practice I see myself continuing to create and evolve until either my hands or my body stop working.”
Latour’s images are currently on view in two group exhibitions—Where the Seasons Endure at Gallery COA in Montreal and The House and the Forest at Can Balaguer in Palma, Mallorca—and she’s also planning for a solo show in 2027. Keep up with her travels and projects on Instagram.
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2026-08-12 23:59:09
From materials we normally discard like padded packaging or the mesh sleeves that protect fruit from bruising, Suzanne Jongmans summons elegant and dreamlike Renaissance portraits.
The artist drapes models in lush velvet fabrics and typically positions them against deep backgrounds in the vein of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” (1489-91) or Antonello da Messina’s “Portrait of a Young Man” (c. 1470). The settings and the addition of fine garments contrast found plastic detritus with hints of refinement and the figures’ dignified postures, mirroring the solemn, pious expressions of individuals in Renaissance portraiture. Recently, she has also incorporated copper coils extracted from the electric motors of disused household appliances and fuses.
Jongmans infuses her works with nods to gender roles and issues that still raise the hackles of “polite society,” such as breastfeeding in public. The artist seamlessly ties a centuries-old aesthetic to salient contemporary concerns, exploring femininity, individuality, and the nature of concealment. Through the latter especially, she delves into the human capacity for wonder and its significance at a time when technology, the gears of so-called progress, and revisionism endanger our connections to the natural world, our histories, and one another.
The artist describes her approach as an exploration of the space between the material and the immaterial world, one where society, eras, emotions, and cosmic forces converge. “Since the Enlightenment, reason has been glorified and the Western tendency towards a drive for modernization and mechanization has increased,” Jongmans says in a statement. “The significance of myths and imagination in our daily lives seems to have been lost or at least faded into the background.”
By exploring the past, Jongmans creates exquisitely contemporary compositions, prompting us to consider the meaning of value and how it is assigned. The works are also sensitive, introspective meditations on human feeling, and she has even occasionally turned the camera on herself. “In the Midst of It All,” for example, is a self-portrait taken during the pandemic that serves as a reminder to slow down, rest, and reconnect not only with the surrounding environment but with oneself.
See more on Jongmans’ Instagram.
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2026-08-12 22:19:34
Scientists have long studied how magnetic energy powers solar activity. The constant motion of plasma particles and the sun’s rotation are major contributors to its cycles and events, such as flares and coronal mass ejections, which lob huge quantities of plasma and gas into space.
Sometimes these explosions reach the earth’s magnetic field and cause geomagnetic storms, which are when we see some of the most brilliant auroras. But they also disrupt or damage our communications systems, power grids, GPS, and satellites, and researchers want to further understand how the sun builds up its magnetic energy so we better know how to guard against its massive fits of activity. They’ve also been trying to figure out why the sun’s corona, or atmosphere, is millions of degrees hotter than its surface.
Thanks to the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, which has pride of place at the National Solar Observatory on Maui, Hawaii, the highest-resolution image of the sun ever captured has revealed unique features that may give solar scientists some insight into how this magnetic energy builds.
Rippling forms that physicists call Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability (KHI) demonstrate the effect of two fluids flowing past each other at different velocities. It’s a phenomenon named for the two scientists who observed it for the first time around 1870, and it can be seen in clouds, ocean waves, and the atmospheres of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn.
The Inouye telescope, the most powerful of its kind, was able to capture features smaller than 12 miles across, providing insights that remained hidden in earlier photos. The details may illuminate part of a solar process that scientists refer to as “flux braiding,” because the way the sun’s magnetic field lines move around one another result in a plaited effect. But the tension builds and builds before eventually breaking, which is when we see flares and similar events. The swirls of KHI may have something to do with how these twists happen in the first place.
“This could solve this biggest mystery of the last half a century for solar physics and astrophysics,” team scientist Dr. David Kuridze told The Guardian. “When you have this instability in the system, it is very easy to cascade the energy into smaller scales. And at some point, it just dissipates as a heat. This could make hot coronas, hot outer atmospheres of the sun and similar stars.”
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2026-08-12 03:24:39
Like many kids, I struggled with bedtime. I was a naturally anxious child with a vast imagination and siblings who loved to watch scary movies, leaving me capable of generating an endless array of terrifying things that could happen once the lights went out. To remedy this problem, my mother designated a particular stuffed bear as my guardian, and before retreating to her own room, she would grab its squishy body and infuse it with her protective “power” should I need some comfort and safety during the night. For a time at least, this plush toy was enough to get me to sleep.
For Seoul-born, Chicago-based artist Sungho Bae, the meaning and emotion we ascribe to our childhood possessions gets flipped inside out. Bae gathers once-beloved toys from shops and disposal sites, which he then deconstructs and reconfigures atop a figurative armature. What emerges are uncanny sculptures and reliefs made of a vibrant, fleshy patchwork that resembles organs, tissue, muscle, and more.
In his exhibition Apotropaia, Bae presents a suite of new works likened to charms, amulets, and other magical forms that ward off evil. The title references the ancient Greek belief in mystical powers and nods to the ways in which humankind has long found meaning in objects, rituals, and materials. Why were these presumably cherished toys discarded? And how might their former significance be reshaped?
One of the less abstract and fantastical works is “Dansu,” a head and cross-cut neck with taxidermy eyes and feathers standing in for hair. The piece references a state in the Korean game of Go in which there’s only one move left before capture. Presented atop a weathered game board, the figure embodies the tension between natural and artificial and spirit and death, as he stares with vacant glass eyes originally designed to replicate life in a mounted animal.
Additional wall works, each titled “Gut,” are more amorphous. With wispy hair encircling an edge and bits of clay embedding into the mishmash of color and texture, the strange pieces revel in their ambiguity, inviting the viewer in for a closer look.
Apotropaia is on view through September 6 at 4th Ward Project Space. Keep up with Bae on Instagram.
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