A new year is symbolic of a new beginning. We resolve to do better going forward. This article discusses 6 potential goals for artists in 2026.
1. Set One, Big, Long-term goal
Artist’s resolutions tend to be focused on long-term goals. Maybe it’s making that one large painting, selling some of your work, or entering your paintings in a competition, but this long-term big goal will require attention and lots of work.
These bigger resolutions may not even be accomplished within a year and may look more like a 3-5 year plan. But start to consider and plan some things you want to accomplish as an artist. Be detailed in this long term goal and love it! Your journey may change, but if you have a bigger goal that you are consistently working towards, you’ll find that in the upcoming year you have a bit more focus and a view of the bigger picture.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Replica: Joseph Cornell’s Basement Studio Recreated in a Gallery Window in Paris
American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell never went to Paris. But now, thanks to filmmaker Wes Anderson, a recreation of Cornell’s meticulous studio is on display in that city.
“In his lifetime, Joseph Cornell’s studio was a top destination for many in the art world. But not all were invited to the basement of his modest Dutch Colonial home on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens. The painfully shy recluse extended the offer to very few—mainly women, who might furnish their male counterparts with a book and a seat at the kitchen table to wile away the time. But now, anyone can visit. Not the actual studio, of course, but a painstaking replica titled ‘The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Re-Created by Wes Anderson,’ which is the brainchild of curator Jasper Sharp and the filmmaker and will occupy the storefront windows at Gagosian in Paris through March 14.
“’He said let’s recreate the workshop and all of his tools and his table and his furniture,’ Sharp recalls Anderson suggesting. ‘So, that’s what we’ve done. We loved the idea of doing it on street level, a storefront, and creating an exhibition that we never open the door to. It’s entirely consumed on the street.’
“A famous hoarder, Cornell spent his days scouring secondhand stores, flea markets and other venues, choosing objects that caught his eye and storing them away for future use. The basement was more like a workshop than your average artist studio, packed to the rafters with items that might look like junk to anyone else, but to Cornell were sweet morsels which, when paired properly in one of his glass-fronted shadowboxes, conjured magic. Much like the artist’s own assemblages, the Gagosian installation paints a portrait of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
In addition to inspiring physicists, black holes make for a powerful symbol for artists.
“Black holes have long captured the imagination of both scientists and the general public. These exotic objects—once thought to be merely hypothetical—have also conceptually inspired countless artists all over the world. A generous sampling of such work is featured in Conjuring the Void: The Art of Black Holes.
“Author Lynn Gamwell spent ten years as director of the New York Academy of Science’s Gallery of Art and Science. She has an extensive background writing about the intersection of math, art, and science. So she was a natural choice to speak at the annual conference of Harvard’s interdisciplinary Black Hole Initiative a few years ago. Gamwell focused her talk on the art of black holes, and thus the seeds for what would become Conjuring the Void were sown.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Preparatory works behind French artist Claire Tabouret’s new stained-glass windows for Notre-Dame de Paris
A contemporary addition to a timeless space. What is it replacing? The article is not clear.
“At the Grand Palais in Paris, a rare exhibition invites visitors to step inside the making of history. D’un seul souffle (In a Single Breath) presents the monumental preparatory works behind French artist Claire Tabouret’s new stained-glass windows for Notre-Dame de Paris, offering an unprecedented look at a contemporary project that is still very much in motion.
“Unfolding inside Galerie 10.2, the exhibition showcases monumental, 7-meter-tall (almost 30-foot-tall) paper maquettes that will eventually be translated into stained glass for the six chapels along the south aisle of Notre-Dame’s nave. Tabouret was selected in late 2024, in collaboration with the renowned Atelier Simon-Marq, to desgin the new windows as part of the cathedral’s post-fire restoration. Rather than unveiling finished objects, D’un seul souffle focuses on process. Here the public will witness the scale, labor, and experimentation behind the work before it is permanently installed in stone and glass.
“The exhibition’s title references breath as both a physical and symbolic force. It echoes the biblical theme of Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit, chosen for the windows, as well as the act of breath itself: the wind, the voice, and the human presence that animates both painting and glass. This idea quietly shapes the experience of the show, where movement, repetition, and rhythm replace traditional religious iconography.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Bruce Onobrakpeya “Station V: The Cyrenean carries the cross” linoleum block print on rice paper (1969)
Pray for the persecuted Christians of Nigeria. This 2024 article discusses how one artist has incorporated traditional Nigerian motifs into biblical stories.
“From medieval frescoes to contemporary masterpieces, artists have long found inspiration interpreting Christian imagery. In his Renaissance mural, Leonardo da Vinci famously captured the Last Supper on the refectory wall of Milan’s Santa Maria delle Grazie convent. More than 400 years later, surrealist Salvador Dalí depicted the Crucifixion on a hypercube cross, a blend of science and spirituality, his wife the model for Mary Magdalene. In the hands of artists like El Greco, Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon, scenes from the Gospels and portraits of Jesus rendered in myriad styles have defined Western art and religious narrative.
“But one Nigerian artist, Bruce Onobrakpeya, a trailblazer of African Modernism, pushed well beyond the familiar portrayal of Christ’s story, creating a radical body of work about the Bible that now receives its due in Washington, D.C. A celebrated painter, sculptor and printmaker, Onobrakpeya reimagined the life of Jesus through Indigenous folklore to resonate with African Christians in early post-colonial Nigeria, while upending centuries of iconography.
“This summer, the soon-to-be 92-year-old artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United States, ‘The Mask and the Cross,’ is on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art through January of next year. The show brings together Onobrakpeya’s work made after Nigeria became independent in 1960, including a 1969 series of linocut prints titled ‘Fourteen Stations of the Cross,’ commissioned by the Catholic Church. The pioneering show comes to the Smithsonian following its premiere at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta last year.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Another iconic scene from the great Norman Rockwell, celebrating the joy of Christmas. The article identifies many of the models Rockwell used, including a self portrait and the painter Grandma Moses.
“At first glance, the artwork may not immediately scream ‘Christmas.’ There are no Christmas trees, ornaments, or overt holiday decorations. Instead, Rockwell uses the smiles and expressions of his characters, coupled with a few splashes of bright red paint, to create a festive atmosphere.
“The focal point of the painting is a joyous family reunion. Son Jarvis, fresh from school, has just arrived home and is enveloped in the loving embrace of his mother, Mary. The warmth of her hug speaks volumes, conveying the deep bond of family and the excitement of the season.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Luke Hua Xiaoxian “The Nativity” Collection of the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History (1948)
The birth of our Savior is celebrated around the world.
“Jesus was born in Asia. He was Asian. Yet the preponderance of Christian art that shows him at home in Europe has meant that he is embedded deeply in the popular imagination as Western.
“The artists in this photo essay bring him back to Asia—but not to ancient Israel. They make the birth a local event, translating the story into their own cultural contexts. And so we see Jesus wearing, for example, the bone necklace of an Igorot chief (the Indigenous people of northern Luzon, Philippines) or greeted by water buffalo at a roadside pavilion in Thailand.
“Some may object to depicting Jesus as anything other than a brown male born into a Jewish family in Bethlehem of Judea in the first century, believing that doing so undermines his historicity. But Christian artists who tackle the subject of the Incarnation are often aiming not at historical realism but at theological meaning.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Unfurling Paper Spiral Tree by Paper Artist Andy Singleton
For me traditional Christmas is best. Regardless, it’s interesting to see how designers reinterpret the Christmas tree into more elegant and/or pretentious displays.
“To celebrate the Christmas holidays, we’ve selected 10 creative Christmas tree designs from the Dezeen archive, including a tree trapped inside a giant ice cube and an upside-down tree.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
View of Michael Wang’s installation Extinct in New York at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Art Center on Governors Island, New York (2019)
The author of this lengthy article didn’t realize the truth. The reason art has lost its culture relevance is because at the institutional level it’s become just another form of Leftist propaganda. For example, art supporting the climate change hoax is presented as if mattered.
Real art is timeless, not reactionary.
“Many canonical 20th-century artworksare considered important in part because they were ahead of their time, from Marcel Duchamp’s readymades to Andy Warhol’s screen prints. Marshall McLuhan’s midcentury assertion—that art functions as a ‘Distant Early Warning system … tell[ing] the old culture what is beginning to happen to it’—encapsulates a common belief about art’s prognostic value. But the time when traditional artistic media could tell us about the future may be mostly in the past.
“While art can still serve a vanguard function in the early 21st century, the mainstream culture’s rate of change has accelerated dramatically; on social media and in the news, hordes of people are busy reporting its every move. Keeping up with the present—let alone getting ahead of it—has become harder than ever, and any forward-looking artworks today will necessarily look different from those of the past.
“My hunch is that the contemporary artworks likeliest to one day appear prescient, albeit not always in reassuring ways, will come from para-artistic digital practices, whether artistic experiments with AI; so-called Red Chip art (which Annie Armstrong of Artnet News defines as works with flashy aesthetics that abjure art history); or folk forms such as NFTs, memes, or TikTok lore videos. What these practices have in common is not just that they’re relatively new, with strong ties to digital culture, but also that they’re only somewhat recognizable as great art, or even art at all, under our inherited value systems. Traditionalists gasp, often justifiably, at the ethical and aesthetic challenges AI art poses, or at Red Chip art’s tawdriness, or at digital folk art’s simplicity. But such practices are telling the old culture what’s happening to it, even if the message isn’t what most fine arts audiences want to hear.
“What about all the painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance that people still love to make and see? They’re not going away, but it’s become harder to create fine art in those media while remaining on cultural discourse’s cutting edge. In her 2024 book Disordered Attention, Claire Bishop observes that contemporary artworks ‘tend to be symptomatic of larger conditions, rather than anticipatory fortune tellers,’ because ‘the world changes faster and more cruelly than even artists can grasp.’ Cycles of ideation, fabrication, and curation move far more slowly than online discourse, which explains, as do the Covid lockdowns and the precarious economics of art-making, why a number of very online artists like Artie Vierkant, Joshua Citarella, and Brad Troemel pivoted from art-making proper in the 2010s to art-adjacent content creation in the 2020s. Some artists, galleries, and museums still try to set or chase trends, and some small fraction of that work may one day prove to have been ahead of its time. But pursuing prognostic artistic relevance seems a fool’s errand when the cultural conversation evolves so rapidly. Museums in particular are entering a horse-and-buggy into a NASCAR race.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Tom Thomson “The West Wind” oil on canvas (1916-1917)
The unsolved mystery of a painter who left us too soon.
“On July 8, 1917, Tom Thomson disappeared into Algonquin Park’s Canoe Lake. His overturned canoe was found containing a gallon of maple syrup, some jam and a rubber sheet, but the painter’s body was nowhere to seen. In a way, 100 years after his disappearance, people are still looking for it.
“Thomson had been painting for five years, his focus being the natural beauty of Algonquin Park — the very same beauty that would take his life at 39, well before he became one of the most famous painters in Canada. Thomson attracted other soon-to-be famous artists to Algonquin park, including A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer and Fred Varley, a collective that would eventually become known as the Group of Seven, although not officially until two years after Thomson’s death.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
THE REMODERN REVIEW 
