Weekly Newsletter

Hew Locke’s Constant Motion

Remembering Cecilia Giménez and "Beast Jesus," Public Domain Day, the art of Fred Wilson, this month's Opportunities, and more.

Hyperallergic

January 3, 2026 — 4 min read

Happy weekend! Look, I know New Year’s resolutions are a cliché, but I want to share mine with you: This year, I’m going to finish my thesis. I completed coursework for my master’s degree in Art History years ago and wrote about half of my thesis before letting other projects, and plain old exhaustion, push it down the priority list. This made me feel guilty, and the guilt became another deterrent. Every time I sat down to write, a sense of shame loomed over the work ahead like a slowly expanding ink blot.

Any writer or artist will know this feeling quite well. Yet we find a way to keep going.

This week, Hyperallergic’s reporters and contributors authored pieces that spoke to resilience and momentum, like critic Seph Rodney’s moving review of a Hew Locke exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art. In Locke’s suspended sculptures of vessels, loaded with cargo as though “plucked from the sea mid-journey,” Rodney sees how vestiges of the past carry into the present. The show, he writes, “is about transitions, movement, both to and from what we might recognize as our home shores.”

We also looked back at a legacy and found insights for the future. Spanish artist Cecilia Giménez, who died this week at 94, left not just the world’s most beloved botched restoration, but also the remarkable lesson that what might seem like a mistake could turn into your life’s most beautiful surprise. That’s a bit of wisdom we can all lean into — including us thesis writers …

And on we go. Thank you as always for reading.

— Valentina Di Liscia, senior editor

News

Piet Mondrian, “Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow” (1930) (photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Dozens of works of art, film, literature, and music entered the public domain on January 1, including a historic painting by Piet Mondrian and Betty Boop's debut appearance. Boop-Oop-a-Doop!
We celebrate the outsized legacy of Cecilia Giménez, the Spanish artist whose botched restoration of a church fresco of Jesus became an artwork in its own right. The unlikely artistic icon died this week at the age of 94.
The Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny got the side-eye from Mexican heritage authorities after he touched an ancient artifact at the National Museum of Anthropology.
Heated Rivalry, the gay hockey romance TV series, is well on its way to cult status. How do we know? It's been memed the world over.

MFA, MA, and PhD Programs to Apply for by Early 2026

A list of arts-related graduate programs to explore and apply to before deadlines close.

View the full list

From Our Critics

Hew Locke, "Ambassador 4," detail (2022), mixed media, including resin, metal, MDF, fabric, and plastic; Yale Center for British Art (© Hew Locke, image courtesy John Hammond)

What Hew Locke Carries

With his haunting exhibition Passages, the Guyanese-British artist reminds us that when we survive, so do our ghosts and our wounds. | Seph Rodney

Fred Wilson Reflects Our World in Black and White

The artist confronts us with a colonial shadow of real and manufactured images that reflect our current existence and its distortions. | Chenoa Baker

Opportunities

Keisai Eisen, “Winter Landscape” (Edo period, 1615–1868), woodblock print, ink and color on paper, 10 x 15 inches (image courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1918)

Opportunities in January 2026

Residencies, fellowships, grants, and open calls from Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and more in our monthly list of opportunities for artists, writers, and art workers.

Best of 2025

The Pérez Art Museum Miami acquired Guan-Hong Lu's “Apocalypse Now: From Cradle to Grave” (2024) (image courtesy Nunu Fine Art)

15 Landmark Museum Acquisitions in 2025

A rare Jacob Lawrence painting, the Louvre’s first video artwork, a trove of Indigenous art, and a Frank Lloyd Wright house are on this year’s list.

From our coverage of the Louvre heist to the rising authoritarianism in the White House, this year has generated plenty of fodder for art discourse, memes, and more.