Amsterdam-based fashion brand Scotch & Soda released a collection this week that is inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat and features some of the artist’s work. The collection is a partnership with the Basquiat estate, via the global licensing agency Artestar.

In a press release, Scotch & Soda said that like Basquiat, who is best known for bold paintings featuring dozens of different figures and colors in energetic and at times chaotic compositions that drew inspiration from 1980s “New York City’s rich culture,” it too draws from “the vibrant culture of Amsterdam as an ever-evolving source of inspiration.”

The collection, first announced last year, offers options in both men’s, women’s, and children. Included in the collection are a blue short-sleeve button-up, a Breton-striped long-sleeve T-shirt, and jeans that feature embroidery of Basquiat’s signature three-point, gold crown and a sketch of a person’s eyes, nose, and mouth. Also on sale are T-shirts, hoodies, baseball hats, and a  light-blue souvenir jacket, all with the Basquiat crown.

The centerpiece of the collection are a series of items made from a print of Basquiat’s 1987 painting Unbreakable, an all-over painting the features different swaths of colors, Basquiat’s figures, different types of signage, and the titular word. The brand called the painting “a natural fit” for the way it embraces “imperfection and mixing street culture with refined craftsmanship. It reflects a spirit of confidence shaped by experience and strength that comes not from being untouched, but from enduring and evolving,” according to a release.

Items from the collection are already available for purchase on Scoth & Soda’s website, with prices ranging from $36 (for a T-shirt) and $48 (for a ribbed tank), on the low end, to $228 (for an Unbreakable pullover sweatshirt) and $268 (for the souvenir jacket) on the high end.

On Thursday, the School of Visual Arts announced that starting next year, it will no longer offer a masters of arts degree in curatorial practice. The update was shared with faculty via an email from Steven Henry Madoff, who founded the department in 2013 and has been chair of the two-year program for the past 14 years.

The sudden announcement follows years of financial difficulty for the New York art school. And, earlier this month, David A. Ross, chair of the MFA art practice program at SVA, abruptly resigned after ARTnews revealed that he had a friendly relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and appears a number of times in newly-released emails.

In his letter to faculty, Madoff explains that he informed SVA president David Rhodes a year and a half ago that he plans to retire in May 2027, and that Rhodes decided to end the masters program upon Madoff’s retirement. “We call this ‘teaching out the program,’” he wrote, while also referencing the school’s “financial challenges.”

As recently as January of this year, SVA was promoting the curatorial practice program online and soliciting applications for the coming fall.

“I know this may sound abstract, but the necessity of the Curatorial as a kind of tool-making for the world is both large and particular, based on technical skills and hands-on training…,” Madoff wrote in a post on e-flux’s platform for art schools. “This [is] what we try to bring to our work together in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.”

On Wednesday morning at 11 a.m., the VIP line for Felix Art Fair extended from the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom Ballroom out onto Hollywood Boulevard. And, as is always the case with this fair, the line for the elevators to ascend to the 12th floor was equally lengthy. For this reason—unlike the other fairs taking place during LA Art Week—the opening half hour was relatively quiet for exhibitors, as collectors, advisers, curators, and critics trudged through lines to reach the exhibition floor.

When I finally exited the elevator bank, I found myself in front of Amsterdam-based gallery Althuis Hofland Fine Arts, participating in Felix for the second time. “Last year went really well,” founder Jeanine Hofland told ARTnews, noting that they had shown a solo presentation of Masao Nakahara, who this year shares the room with Karel Dicker. Dicker’s intimate genre paintings in artist-made wood frames are especially charming. The gallery had pre-sold several works ahead of the fair, denoted by the rare price sheet marked with red-dot stickers, and so far there had been small waves of visitors—the seven or so people who fit on one elevator ride, most likely.

The energy at nearby Tribeca gallery Dimin was a bit more electric, where dealer Robert Dimin greeted guests with a friendly, “Let me know if you have any questions.” His demeanor was upbeat, considering he had landed in Los Angeles around 10 p.m. the night prior because of a Nor’easter that had dumped nearly two feet of snow on Manhattan and disrupted travel out of New York.

“It was a fight to get here,” said Dimin, who had been checking the Delta app every 30 minutes over the preceding couple of days to see if he could secure a better flight than the one he had been rebooked on, departing New York at 7 a.m. Wednesday. He surprised even himself by snagging one of the only direct flights to L.A.

Most New York dealers I’ve spoken to this week relayed stories of multiple connections in cities as far-flung as Fort Lauderdale, Minneapolis, and Austin. It was a sentiment I heard throughout the day at both Felix and Enzo, which features New York galleries exclusively, most of whom had also arrived late the previous night and rushed to finalize their hangs before the fair’s 2 p.m. opening.

The Birmingham Museum of Art is asking the public for help locating artworks by Corietta Mitchell, the first Black artist to have a solo exhibition at the museum during the city’s segregation era, according to local news outlet WVTM. The institution marks its 75th anniversary this year with a renewed effort to recover what it calls a missing piece of its history. 

Founded in 1951 amid Jim Crow laws that restricted Black visitors to the museum to one designated day per week, the museum now openly acknowledges its segregated past as part of a broader institutional reckoning. In March 1963, four months before Birmingham’s segregation ordinances were repealed, museum leadership quietly staged the exhibition for Mitchell, a prominent figure in Birmingham’s Black arts community. 

Despite newspaper coverage at the time, the museum says none of the works from that exhibition has been located. Only an exhibition checklist and a grainy photo remain. Museum officials are asking anyone with information about Mitchell or her art to come forward. 

“We’re looking back at the past and acknowledging our history — the good, the bad, and the ugly,” museum director Graham Boettcher said in a statement. 

The museum’s appeal comes as the U.S. art world is increasingly reframing the legacy of Black artists whose work was overlooked or marginalized by major institutions for decades. Major museums have recently mounted exhibitions aimed at correcting historical omissions and expanding narratives around African American art. For example, museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art have presented large-scale exhibitions tracing the impact of the Harlem Renaissance and elevating lesser-known Black artists, while other institutions organized surveys and retrospectives that place historically under-recognized creators in fuller context. 

The 2026 edition of Frieze LA kicked off yesterday with an invitation-only VIP day. The art fair, held in a tent on the grounds of the Santa Monica Airport, features about 100 exhibitors from around the world and runs through Mar. 1. ARTnews attended the opening, where dealers excitedly reported a “frenzy” of sales.

But! Frieze LA is not just about the sales. This edition of Frieze (which also hosts fairs in New York, London, and Seoul) is an easy draw for celebrities, whether to the main fair, satellite fairs like the Felix Art Fair and the Butter Fine Art Fair (new on the scene and spotlighting local Black artists), or any number of fashionable parties.

Take a look at some of the celebrities—among them Heated Rivalry‘s François Arnaud, television host Bill Maher, and actor Orlando Bloom—who made their way around Los Angeles for Frieze Art Week.

Seven years after being ousted by the nationalist government, Dariusz Stola will return as director of Poland’s premier Jewish museum, reflecting a broader cultural renaissance in the country.

Sola led the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw from its founding in 2014 to steady acclaim, until the newly ascendant right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party began a purge of museum leaders unwilling to accept their revisionist history. Law and Justice’s eight-year rule was defeated by a centrist coalition in 2023, closing a bleak chapter for artistic expression in Poland.

Stola has been reinstated by Poland’s new culture minister, Marta Cienskowska, who was appointed in 2025 by Prime Minister Donald Tusk. “In 2019, the then-minister [Piotr] Gliński decided to ignore the results of the competition,” Cienkowska wrote on social media. “That appointment should have taken place six years ago. Dear Professor, good luck.”

In an interview with Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Stola, a historian of Polish-Jewish relations and professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences, called his reinstatement “a victory of justice and rule of law.” He had stepped down in 2019 after his reappointment was blocked, ceding control to his deputy director, Zygmunt Stępiński. With his return, Stępiński will resume his role as deputy.

“This confirms that the strategy we took in 2019 was right,” Stola said. “I lost only temporarily, and we have preserved the autonomy of the museum despite heavy political pressure.”

Editor’s Note: This article was produced in partnership with CIFRA.

As the art world continues to grapple with how best to exhibit, preserve, and monetize digital work, a new streaming platform aims to do more than simply replicate the white cube online. CIFRA positions itself as a platform made for artists working in video, sound, and other time-based media. For years, digital artists have been constrained by social media platforms that privilege speed, virality, and short-form display over context and craft. CIFRA attempts to address that by allowing artists to upload complex works, list provenance, construct portfolios, and connect with curators and collectors in a purpose-built environment.

Audience participation and artist discovery on CIFRA moves beyond the scroll of our increasingly algorithmic internetscape. Public playlists allow the public to act as curators while navigational tools and curator spotlights help artists and audiences go into deep dives on genre, artists, and history, returning power back to users. Headquartered in Dubai and developed in collaboration with researchers and art experts around the world, CIFRA is betting that digital art needs more than exposure—it needs infrastructure.

And while media theorists parse through the shaky philosophical differences between the online world and IRL, digital-native artists are engaged in the lived reality of those two worlds. Many of the 1,500 artworks currently on CIFRA concern the nature of doubles, verification systems that attempt to separate humans from bots, and avatars that are both self and not self. Other works place their gaze on gamification. Prior to the internet, games meant suspending society’s rules to apply new ones in a controlled setting, allowing people to perform characters and enter into immersive world-building mediated by one’s imagination. But today the boundaries of the game have bled into everyday life; dating, finances, security, and even memory are all subject to gamification.

The six artists included in this playlist gesture at these blurred boundaries of our virtual world, showing how once closed fantasies increasingly dictate life IRL.