Category: Design

“New York is humanity itself. Every type of person is here—every ethnicity, every culture, every religion, every viewpoint. And somehow, despite the honking, the yelling, the shoving, we find a way to make it work,” says Brandon Stanton. Creating one of the most well-known archives of city life, Stanton is the photographer behind Humans of…

Most of us can imagine a time when we felt tethered to something or someone we knew wasn’t right for us. Perhaps a job takes too much energy, a loved one needs care that’s physically and emotionally demanding, or we find ourselves in a situation where we feel stuck and don’t know how to let…

Whether portraying families at play, people walking along urban streets, or portraits of individuals, Derrick Adams celebrates Black identity and experience. His collage-like compositions evoke West African masks, reliquary figures, and other carved sculptures, highlighting contemporary, everyday scenes and leisure activities of Black Americans. A new monograph from Monacelli surveys more than two decades of…

In 2016, while artist McKay Lenker Bayer was still an undergraduate, her professor assigned the class the task of exhibiting their work. Unsure about presenting her work to the public, she downsized, quite literally, showing miniature paintings with teensy-tiny labels. And the idea for a minuscule exhibition space was born. In 2018, Lenker Bayer established…

Beneath ominous skies and set within flat, green parkland, Lee Madgwick’s folly-like buildings strike an unsettling note. His surreal paintings feature dilapidated facades and uncanny shrubbery against cloudy, deep gray skies—usually with something just a little strange going on. In “Drift,” for example, bricks dislodge from the top of a boxy structure and float into…

For fans of cozy cottages, sipping tea with a good book, exploring misty woodlands, and relishing timeless folk- and fairytales, the illustrations of Vanessa Gillings tap into a sense of comfort and wonder. Her protagonists, often donning witchy or wizard-like hats, appear to be on marvelous and mysterious journeys, sometimes accompanied by ravens, foxes, or…

For Lydia Ricci, a broken pencil, outdated forms, long-ago paid bills, and tattered bits of fabric are prime materials for her elaborate, small-scale worlds. The artist credits her parents’ obsession with collecting as the beginning of what’s grown into a scrap-centric process. “My mother was an immigrant from the Ukraine who could improvise anything when…

In a world this absurd and disastrous, do we gravitate toward cynicism or levity? For the artist duo known as Murmure (previously), both are the only option. The Caen, France-based pair presents a new body of paintings and charcoal drawings in their plainly titled exhibition, La fête est finie, or The party is over. Through…

Coincidence is around every corner, and immortalizing a split second of fleeting chaos takes a special eye. Since 2020, Pure Street Photography—an initiative focused on connecting international photographers—has commended visual storytellers through an annual competition. This year’s edition drew an impressive 1,160 submissions across 34 countries and five continents. Judged by British writer and curator…

In the famous first stanza of the 17th-century poem “Auguries of Innocence,” William Blake writes: To see a world in a grain of sandAnd a heaven in a wild flower,Hold infinity in the palm of your handAnd eternity in an hour. Perhaps Blake didn’t intend us to literally hold infinity in our hands, but he…