Artists & Personalities

Beast’s “Want Justice? Here Justice” Makes Memory Part of the Wall

September 10, 2026

At first glance, Louis-Ferdinand Céline appears to have been painted directly into the remains of an abandoned farmhouse in the countryside near Reggio Emilia, Italy. His figure, approximately fifteen metres high and six metres wide, seems to share the building’s cracks, stains and erosion, as though the writer were emerging from the architecture itself. Completed in late August 2026, Want Justice? Here Justice is the latest and largest work in Italian street artist Beast‘s ongoing series “…and we hired a bloke to fix the wall”, developed over the past three years around the relationship between cultural memory and physical decay. Beast’s process begins not with the portrait, but with the wall. The surface is photographed in detail, and its particular scars, cracks, stains, missing plaster, and erosion are digitally transferred onto an image of the chosen subject. The resulting portrait is then printed at monumental scale on paper and pasted back onto precisely the same wall, with the printed imperfections carefully realigned with those of the architecture underneath. The result is an image that almost disappears into the surface supporting it, creating the impression that Céline has emerged from the abandoned farmhouse itself. Rather than hiding the building’s deterioration, Beast

Beast’s “Want Justice? Here Justice” Makes Memory Part of the Wall

September 10, 2026

At first glance, Louis-Ferdinand Céline appears to have been painted directly into the remains of an abandoned farmhouse in the

Nathan Fielder’s Secret Documentary Debuts at Telluride

September 9, 2026

Sophie Lin: Where Art Flows, Fluid in Form, Limitless in Creation

September 8, 2026

Meet Chasing Luena, Melbourne’s Indie Rock Storytellers Making Their Mark

September 6, 2026

Vivian Nicole Tesler Lights Up Las Vegas with “Glow Baby Glow”

September 5, 2026

Beyoncé Releases Expanded B’Day 20th Anniversary Edition

Beyoncé Releases Expanded B’Day 20th Anniversary Edition

September 5, 2026

Beyoncé has released the B’Day 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, adding six previously unreleased recordings, Spanish-language tracks and collaborations with Maluma and Selena Quintanilla. The 31-track release also includes remastered songs and updated music videos, expanding the original 2006 album with archival material and new recordings. Key Takeaways The B’Day 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition was released September 4, 2026. The digital edition contains 31 tracks, including rare and previously unreleased recordings. The release includes “Cuerpo Tumbao (Get Me Bodied)” featuring Maluma. “Irreplaceable (Como La Flor)” uses previously released Selena Quintanilla vocals with Beyoncé. The album’s songs were remastered, while its videos were recolored and finished in 4K. Beyoncé Releases the B’Day 20th Anniversary Edition The Beyoncé B’Day 20th anniversary release adds new and archival material to the album originally issued on September 4, 2006. The 31-track digital deluxe edition combines the original album with bonus recordings, Spanish-language versions, remixes and newly released collaborations. The anniversary edition includes six previously unreleased recordings: “Morning Dew (Donk),” “Can I Watch You,” “My First Time,” “Lost Yo Mind,” “Creole” and “Back Up.” The tracklist also brings together material that had previously appeared as bonus tracks or related releases. The release follows Beyoncé’s July rollout of

For Dante Nero, Reinvention Has Always Been Part of the Act

September 4, 2026

By: Nadia Kareem The Brooklyn comedian behind Man School 202 has spent decades moving between comedy, acting, radio and relationship media, without ever treating any one version of himself as the final one. Dante Nero has never had much interest in staying inside one box. That can be inconvenient when people ask what he does. Comedian works. Actor works. Podcaster works. Relationship strategist works too. But none of those titles completely explains a career that has unfolded through a series of unexpected reinventions. Long before Nero became the voice behind Man School 202, he was a Brooklyn kid imagining an entirely different future. He studied biology and psychology and once thought he might pursue genetic engineering. He trained in martial arts, competed in fencing, and worked with young people in foster care. Then came New York nightlife. For roughly a decade, Nero worked as a male exotic dancer. He later says he fought bare-knuckle for money and produced large male revue productions before eventually finding the stage that would define much of his professional life. Stand-up comedy. What looks like a collection of unrelated chapters from the outside makes more sense through Nero’s eyes. Every one of them gave him

Continuing to Grow in New York: Huang Xiaoxia’s Dance Practice and Arts Education

September 4, 2026

By: Andre On June 28, 2026, the multimedia live performance SUNGOD (Destiny) was presented at The Sanctuary at St. Paul & St. Andrew in New York as part of the CWP Evolution Festival. Set against the cultural traditions of the Ibaloi people of the Philippines, the work brought contemporary dance, visual media, and live music together in a single performance space and was created by participants from diverse cultural and artistic backgrounds. Huang Xiaoxia participated in the work as a featured performer and choreographic collaborator. With years of experience in dance education and choreography, she continued to explore embodied expression and collaborative creation through this cross-cultural artistic project. Before coming to New York, Huang Xiaoxia spent many years at Tsinghua University teaching and choreographing for students who were not dance majors. Beyond focusing on movement and technical training, her teaching emphasized how students could develop an understanding of themselves and others through embodied experiences and creative processes. During her studies at New York University, she also gained practical experience with the Education Department of the Joyce Theater. Her individual choreographic work, cross-cultural performances, and arts education activities have gradually become important components of her professional practice in New York, allowing

David Bowie Immersive Documentary Debuts at Venice Film Festival

September 3, 2026

David Bowie: Unseen | Unheard is competing in Venice Immersive with more than 800 images from photographer Denis O’Regan’s archive, Bowie recordings and spatial audio. The 25-minute installation shows how O’Regan, Nick Ryan and Joe Crossley are turning two decades of Bowie photography into a timed audiovisual experience. Key Takeaways Bowie: Unseen | Unheard is competing in Venice Immersive during the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, which runs from September 2 to 12, 2026. The 25-minute David Bowie immersive project features more than 800 iconic, rare and previously unseen images from Denis O’Regan’s photographic archive. Denis O’Regan, Nick Ryan and Joe Crossley are credited as directors in the festival’s current project listing. Bowie’s music and original compositions by longtime collaborator Mike Garson accompany a spatial audio soundscape created for the installation. The Venice competition appearance follows an earlier presentation at SXSW London in June 2026. David Bowie Immersive Project Enters the Venice Competition Bowie: Unseen | Unheard has brought more than 800 images of David Bowie into the Venice Immersive competition, transforming photographer Denis O’Regan’s archive into a 25-minute installation combining photography, music, commentary and spatial audio. The UK production is part of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, which

How DEHKO Built Tektroit From Detroit Basements Up

September 3, 2026

The Night the Music Failed DEHKO’s career began with the kind of moment most people would rather forget. At 12, Sam Dehko threw a party for his classmates and hired his best friend’s older brother to DJ. For nearly half the night, the music setup refused to cooperate. The party did not unfold as planned, but Dehko left with a new obsession. He believed he could learn to do it better. His parents backed that curiosity by buying his first setup from the same DJ. He taught himself to mix, scratch and organize music, spending hours learning how a room could change when the right record arrived at the right time. His First Paid Booking At 13, he began testing those skills in real rooms. His first paid booking ran four hours in a basement. His mother drove him there with roughly six large speakers, boxes of cables and the rest of a setup that he carried inside and assembled himself. The pay was modest. The signal was enormous. Someone had paid him for a skill he had built from nothing, and that booking turned a fascination into a pursuit. Detroit Became the Training Ground By 16, Dehko was making

The Forgotten Legacy of Abstract Expressionism

September 2, 2026

A Jackson Pollock painting was recently sold for $181.2 million. A Narducci painting prompts the question: Who is he? The disparity points to one of art’s enduring mysteries: how value is assigned, who receives recognition, and what happens to artists whose work falls outside the machinery that establishes value. In William Boyd’s 1998 book Nat Tate: An American Artist, 1928–1960, readers are introduced to a fictional Abstract Expressionist invented as an elaborate literary hoax. Pietro Antonio Narducci needs no invention. He painted for more than 60 years inside the same circle that produced Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, yet almost nobody has heard his name. Daniel Lerner, who represents the Narducci estate alongside his sister Susan Freeman, wants to change that. He remembers hanging one of Narducci’s paintings after helping the artist’s daughter move out of the family studio. Lerner states, “Every single person who saw it asked, ‘Oh, is that a Pollock?’ and I had to tell them, ‘No, I don’t have a Pollock, but I have a Narducci, who was a member of the founding Abstract Expressionist movement that met at the renowned Cedar Tavern.’” Born in Italy in 1915, Narducci emigrated to the United

Young K. and the Development of Histograph in Contemporary American Art

September 1, 2026

During the late twentieth century, modern American art underwent a dramatic transformation alongside developments in media, photography, and electronic technologies. Artists pushed the boundaries of representing reality, challenging how images influence human perception and how culture reads signs, symbols, and media narratives. The era witnessed increased recognition of the significance of photography and photomontage in framing cultural memory. Critics and institutions alike argued over the degree to which images depict truth or make it up, and how artists manipulate them to imply alternative ways of perceiving the world. Young K., an American contemporary artist, appeared on this changing scene. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts, more popularly known as CalArts, one of the most powerful art schools in the United States. Established in 1961 and traditionally known for producing alumni who defined movements in performance, video, and conceptual art, CalArts provided rich ground for Young to hone his craft. His studies there placed him in an institution consistently ranked among the best in art and design, with U.S. News & World Report frequently naming CalArts among the best of its kind. Among Young’s works, his most well-known

Washington, 1975: Everyone Is Pretending to Be Something They Are Not, and Caroline Taylor Has Written a Novel About What Happens When the Faking Finally Runs Out

September 1, 2026

By: Catalina Santorini There is a particular kind of historical fiction that uses its period setting not as decoration but as the actual source of its moral and psychological tension, in which the specific social and political pressures of a specific historical moment create the conditions for a story that could not have unfolded in quite the same way at any other time or place. Caroline Taylor’s The Faker’s Guide to Survival is that kind of fiction, set in Washington, DC in 1975 in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, when the country was still sorting through the wreckage of a decade of conflict and deception, and when the art of faking it, of presenting a face to the world that had little to do with the reality underneath, had become practically a survival skill for anyone caught on the wrong side of the forces at play. Flora has been faking it since she was a teenager, doing what she had to do to protect her mother, maintaining a version of herself carefully constructed for public consumption while the person underneath lived a far more complicated reality. That long-practiced art of strategic self-presentation is about to be tested beyond

Yue Zhou Review, Before The Future Takes Form

August 31, 2026

By: Seetal Solanki When it comes to Yue Zhou’s approach to Before Becoming (2024) and her practice, it’s less about the presence of anticipation as a dramatic action towards a permanent destination than the quiet position of suspense. Her use of oil paint intensifies the presence of these tensions and consolidates them into a place where the threshold before identity is opened up to the future; this begins to wield its authority, all while the shape of that future is unknown. Zhou ultimately generates a fertile space which feels alive and in constant flux, which gets the viewer to overcome the absence as presence. There seems to be no measurable moment with Zhou’s paintings, which depict an environment of two opposing realities – one of wakefulness and the other a dream state. These states are further enhanced by Zhou’s use of muted tones, which set the scene of what would be considered two opposing realities in coexistence with one another, with an interrelatedness. Borderless realities are formed in Zhou’s worldbuilding, which in turn inhabits non-specific ecologies of space where the figures appear to rest effortlessly. This may offer up uncertainty with the viewer, and this is the whole point. When

Harry Styles Opens 30-Show MSG Residency in New York

August 29, 2026

Harry Styles MSG residency has begun a 30-show run at Madison Square Garden that will keep the singer in New York through Oct. 31. Beyond the concerts, the two-month engagement includes venue activations, an East Village pop-up, themed dining and transportation options that extend the event beyond the arena. Key Takeaways Harry Styles is scheduled to perform 30 shows at Madison Square Garden between Aug. 26 and Oct. 31, 2026. The New York engagement represents Styles’ only U.S. dates on the Together, Together tour this year. The residency doubles the 15-night Madison Square Garden run Styles completed in 2022. Official merchandise, photo activations, a separate East Village pop-up and themed food offerings have expanded the fan experience beyond the concerts. Airport shuttle services and nearby businesses have also adapted offerings around the repeated show schedule. Harry Styles MSG residency opened Aug. 26 with an unusually long New York engagement: 30 performances at Madison Square Garden spread across more than two months. The Together, Together dates are scheduled primarily on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays through Oct. 31. According to Madison Square Garden Entertainment, they are Styles’ only U.S. performances on the 2026 tour and represent the highest number of shows at

Jiangyu Huang’s Surreal Film Explores Class, Social Mobility And The Prison Of Time

August 29, 2026

By: Lee Sharrock Jiangyu Huang is an intriguing emerging artist whose practice examines the intimate ways in which social mobility and class mechanisms shape individual lives. Huang works across installation, video, and research-based practices to create contemporary discourse through art. His work investigates the space where private memory intersects public structures. A strong example of Huang’s exploration of entrenched societal systems of power, value, and social hierarchy is his 2024 digital film ‘Classed Time’. ‘Classed Time’ is a 7-minute 47-second digital film in which time becomes material and subject, opening on a scene featuring a young, puppet-like man gazing through an airplane window. Any momentary thought that he is going on holiday is thwarted when the camera pans out to reveal an empty airplane. Although his face is romantically illuminated by sunlight penetrating the window, the revelation that he is alone on the plane and seemingly unable to disembark suggests a sinister undertone. Although Huang is working with digital film, he has a cinematographer’s intuition and a film director’s sense of suspense, moving from an idyllic view of green fields, flowers, and open space outside the airplane, to empty rows of economy-class seats, replacing a vision of travel and freedom

Jay-Z and Rick Rubin Explore His Music in HBO Docuseries

August 28, 2026

HBO has set a September 18 premiere for Jay-Z in 8, an eight-part documentary series featuring Jay-Z and producer Rick Rubin discussing selected songs from the rapper’s catalog. The series examines the creative development behind recordings spanning Jay-Z’s career, with Rubin directing the documentary project. Key Takeaways HBO will premiere Jay-Z in 8, an eight-part documentary series, on September 18. Jay-Z and Rick Rubin will discuss selected songs from Jay-Z’s music catalog. The series examines the creative development behind recordings from different stages of Jay-Z’s career. Rick Rubin directs the documentary series. The eight-episode release is scheduled to run through October 9. HBO Sets the Premiere Date for Jay-Z in 8 The eight-part Jay-Z in 8 documentary series is scheduled to premiere on HBO on September 18. The series will focus on Jay-Z’s music through conversations involving the rapper and Rick Rubin, the producer who also directs the documentary. The episodes are scheduled for release through October 9. The rollout gives the project an eight-episode structure centered on individual recordings and the creative work connected to them. Jay-Z is the central artist featured in the series, while Rubin serves as both an interviewer and director. Their roles place the rapper’s

Inside Jazz, TX and How Doc Watkins Is Reimagining the American Jazz Club Through Live Music, Hospitality, and Community

August 28, 2026

In Jazz, TX: A Love Letter to Live Music, Community, and the Little Club That Could, pianist, entrepreneur, and club owner Doc Watkins reveals how one unlikely San Antonio venue became a blueprint for bringing people back together. Walk into Jazz, TX, and the room feels less like a concert venue than a celebration in progress. A piano rolls through the melody. Brass fills the room. Glasses clink at the bar. Plates arrive from the kitchen. Someone laughs during a solo. A couple begins dancing near the stage. The musicians respond to the energy in the room, and the audience becomes part of the performance. For Doc Watkins, that is not a distraction from jazz. It is the point. Watkins is the pianist, singer, bandleader, entrepreneur, and club owner behind Jazz, TX, the San Antonio supper club he opened in 2016. He is also the founder of Doc’s, a sister jazz club that opened in Houston in 2025, and the cofounder and CEO of TurnTable, a ticketing and marketing platform created for jazz clubs. Now, Watkins is telling the story behind it all in his first book, Jazz, TX: A Love Letter to Live Music, Community, and the Little Club

Cathleen Ireland Keeps Moving Forward Through Four Decades of Music, Pittsburgh Spirit and the Power to “Breathe”

August 26, 2026

By: Samantha Reynolds For Cathleen Ireland, a career in music has never been about finding one perfect role and remaining there. Singer, songwriter, producer, bandleader, filmmaker, each title represents another chapter in a creative life stretching back more than four decades. Through changing bands, changing sounds and the inevitable detours of adulthood, one principle has remained remarkably consistent: keep going. It is advice Ireland now gives younger artists, but she learned it through experience. “Each role has played its part in helping me to learn and grow,” Ireland says. Some of her most important lessons came not from recording studios or awards ceremonies, but from working as a wedding singer. Those performances taught her that an audience expects something deeper than technical proficiency. “People want to be entertained,” she explains. “They want more than to see you perform your material. They want you to shine and to go deep and let your emotions come through.” Equally important were the lessons learned simply from being part of a band. Ireland discovered early that musicianship alone doesn’t sustain a group. Personality, generosity and attitude matter. “If you are a joyful person, it comes across in all that you do,” she says, “and

The Art Curator Xin Liu Through“Looking Back At You” Exhibition

August 26, 2026

By: Valentina Shaeva As an international, independent curator, Xin Liu explores the relationship between modern technologies and memory configurations in a cross-cultural context in contemporary art. Her curatorial practice focuses on observing how contemporary art reimagines personal experience in a global digital world. Furthermore, she demonstrates how digital art and installations shape and alter our perception of reality and social histories. In the recent exhibition “Looking Back At You”, curated by Xin Liu and held in London from 17th to 21st August, we see a continuation of her exploration of these themes. The curator asks us to consider to what extent our perception of ourselves truly belongs to us. At the center of the project, the viewer sees an essence shaped not only by personal experience but also by the expectations of family, society, and culture at large. However, Xin Liu does not provide a prepared answer. Instead, she structures the exhibition so that the viewer finds themselves within this conflict. Her curatorial logic for the project is particularly evident in the juxtaposition of the exhibition sections “Conversations with the Self” and “Ghost Marriage. While “Conversations with the Self” addresses the viewer inward: our doubts, loneliness, and the dependence of