Across the city’s major art museums, directors including Astrup Fearnley’s Solveig Øvstebø describe reworking permanent collections and curatorial frameworks to reflect a more diverse, contemporary understanding of identity.

“The Making of a Medieval Manuscript,” curated by conservator Nancy Turner, brings together volumes ranging from animal-skin folios to gilded books, with Christian, Jewish and Islamic examples drawn from Europe, Armenia and Ethiopia.

After receiving the category commission, Nobel Prize artists learn who the year’s awardees are at the same time as the general public. From there, they have just a few weeks to determine how best to represent what are oftentimes extremely complex or nuanced accomplishments.

Corporate art collections and cultural programs are widespread, but their impact remains inconsistently measured and reported. A new Deloitte framework links cultural investment to ESG strategy without reducing it to a single metric.

Where figures like Mouna Ayoub, Azzedine Alaïa and Daphne Guinness once assembled private couture archives, a broad new audience of young buyers sees storied handbags and runway pieces as both personal expression and investment.

In conversation with Observer, the artist describes working without concept or deadline, the longing for completeness he borrowed from Kafka and how Marseille inspired him to embrace a broader palette.

At the Venice Biennale and beyond, the Japanese Canadian artist turns handmade paper into sculpture that links psychological wellness, ecology and the attunement to nature modern life rejects. The solutions to humanity’s problems, according to Hatanaka, are within reach, embedded in knowledge passed down from generation to generation: “This includes traditions that connect us to our bodies, to nature and to one another.”

Making climate-conscious art at scale and in public is arduous, expensive and often exhausting. Agnes Denes, Mary Mattingly, Maya Lin and their peers have built substantial careers, sustain themselves through their practices and hold places in major collections, yet haven’t shied away from creating works that help the planet.

The trail expands on the $1.4 billion tri-government investment reshaping Toronto’s waterfront through flood protection, environmental restoration and new public spaces. LAT’s curator, November Paynter, told Observer that the curatorial process began while the park was still under construction, with the team researching the site’s engineering, natural environment and history, before conducting studio visits with artists whose practices could respond to those conditions.

Under the dim lights of the Lower East Side’s Maison Nur, art world luminaries gathered to celebrate Observer’s Art Power Index—and each other. From the impassioned speeches to the sharp tailoring and Damien Hirst over the bar, the evening embodied our legacy of chronicling power with style.