V-Day issue featuring my top 10 art reads from last week, plus some love-themed picks.
Feb 14, 2026
Hi artsies, and happy Valentine’s Day!
I’m back home after a week of work travel, where I had to really flex my adaptability and harmony muscles. In the art world, it was a week of unveilings (MoMA PS1 revealed the artists included in their ‘Greater New York’ exhibition, Frieze New York named galleries for its 2026 edition, Studio Museum in Harlem announced its 2026 Resident Artists, and TEFAF announced exhibitors for its 2026 New York edition) and looking ahead.
Enjoy my top 10 art reads of last week, or skip ahead to some bonus love-themed picks.
Brad Feuerhelm frames Ribeira’s photos as a necessary break from objective documentary tradition, using the heavy symbolic language of the Western Christian canon to turn the physical struggle of immigration into allegory.
A dive into the “pervasive fear” lurking beneath the beads at Nick Cave’s Smithsonian exhibition, where the sparkle doubles as a shield against institutional erasure.
Jonathan Stevenson on why Kehe’s minimalist abstractions at 15 Orient read like a “subjective Rorschach test” for our modern anxieties.
In a new exhibition ‘Basquiat - Headstrong,’ made up of mostly intimate works on paper, we get a front-row view of his draughtsmanship—and the raw psychological pressure he was under.
Ahead of Emin’s imminent Tate Modern retrospective, she shares the visceral “before and after” of her cancer diagnosis and how facing death cured her lifelong nihilism.
A sharp account of the controversy around a secular artist interpreting Pentecost for a historic French landmark, including her supposedly “vampiric” approach.
Laura Luo on how Humeau turns the gallery into a “deep cave zone,” building monuments that feel like they’re surfacing from a West Papuan cavern.
Manson traces how a "core memory" of a rickety playground swing evolved into a monumental, four-year ceramic undertaking now on view at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco.
Richter celebrated his 94th birthday this week. I know I’ve covered this retrospective many times, but this piece by Zeynep Gülçur perfectly captures the “monastic discipline” of 270 works curated by Nicholas Serota inside Frank Gehry’s “glass cathedral” in Paris.
"If I wasn’t enjoying the process, there was no point," says the Czech artist on her defiant pivot from "old-fashioned" abstract painting to the labor-intensive, tactile world of woven Gesamtkunstwerke.
