In the Malabar region of Kerala, India, an ancient Hindu ritual known as Theyyam exists in a continuum of ceremonial customs that date back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The practice carries on today through elaborate costumes and dances during which a performer wears sacred garments and invites a deity to enter their body as a way to seek blessings. Theyyam season, which typically runs from October to May, sees hundreds of performances around the region, with many concentrated in November and December.

“Theyyam is a reminder that the divine exists within and around us,” says artist Navneet Jayakumar, whose lens-based practice centers around explorations of ethnography and the surreal. “In an age of disconnection, its wisdom has the power to ground us and heal a fragmented world.”

Now based in London, Jayakumar grew up in Malabar, and Theyyam was a memorable part of his childhood. For the first time in 12 years, he returned to Kerala during the ceremonial season and was struck by its intensity and time-honored connection to the region’s cultural heritage. “Witnessing the ritual reignited my curiosity about the broader spiritual and historical context of my culture, the role Theyyam once played in it, and the ways in which colonial narratives had distorted my perception of both,” he says in a statement.

Jayakumar’s series Beyond the Colonial Gaze documents the ancient custom through an ethnographic lens, aiming to highlight an event that’s little understood outside of the region, primarily due to its oral traditions, which make it challenging to research. “With a lack of traceable records exacerbated further by centuries of colonial intervention, I discovered there was very little information available about the ritual’s broader spiritual context,” he says.

Through the innately visual medium of photography, Jayakumar set out to record Theyyam to counteract its lack of recognition—especially as an Indigenous tradition that was seen by European colonizers as “uncivilized” or “primitive.” His energetic, glowing images portray meticulously designed costumes and face-painted performers.

Exhibited in different parts of Europe, Jayakumar’s images represent what he describes as “a symbolic victory of a culture that was destroyed and shunned as barbaric but lives on through me and many, many people back home.” Find more on Jayakumar’s website and Instagram.

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As a communication designer, Kelli Anderson began her career in information design. “The act of data visualization is all about bringing facts from the abstract and numerical realm into the sphere of perception, so you can see them,” she says in a video on Kickstarter. “And I thought, why stop there? What if you could also feel and experience those facts?”

Last year, Anderson launched a remarkable, five-years-in-the-making project called Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape, an ABC pop-up book about typography. She spent thousands of hours researching design archives and meticulously engineering kinetic and three-dimensional letters to show how type styles have evolved through the ages.

“If you look carefully at letters, you can see a secret history of the world—from the Bronze Age to the Information Age,” Anderson says. “But because many of these methods, tools, and machines are now obsolete, this history is challenging to follow. Alphabet in Motion leverages tactile, interactive features to help clarify how letters have transformed alongside technological upheavals and shifting aesthetic moods.”

The project is composed of two conjoined, detachable books. The pop-up section includes an interactive, seven-segment display cover that changes from A to Z, 17 moveable paper elements, and hands-on activities. The accompanying 128-page section contains an essay diving into the history and concept of each pop-up, plus 300 color images from the history of type design.

Anderson’s book originally funded on Kickstarter and is now being released more widely. Secure your copy in the Colossal Shop. Follow along with her work on Instagram, and you might also enjoy another of her projects, This Book Is a Camera.

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When we think of the European colonization of Africa, one period that comes to mind is an era during the mid- to late-1800s known as the Scramble for Africa. The British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese—predominantly—had already staked control of communities in coastal areas. It was during this time that inland regions became increasingly attractive for resource extraction and the promise of further economic gain. But the so-called Scramble for Africa was far from the beginning.

By the 1870s, Europeans controlled one-tenth of the continent, mostly in the north, along the Mediterranean, and in the far south. The Dutch East India Company had established the first European settlement in Africa in Cape Town in 1652. But the transatlantic slave trade had already been active for nearly a century and would continue for nearly two more, during which a staggering 12.5 million or more people were put on ships—mostly to the New World.

During this time, colonists wrote and conveyed all messages by hand. Small, portable, wooden desks made it possible to send letters from virtually anywhere, with fold-out surfaces covered in leather and storage areas for holding pens, nibs, and ink.

For artist Sonia E. Barrett, these antique desks are a tangible connection to a protracted era of cultural clashes fraught with greed, violence, and usually a one-sided telling of history. “These were the laptops of the day,” Barrett says of the portable tools that form her Desk series. “On them, they ‘wrote Africa’ in letters home, journals, and reports that now form the archives in Europe of Africa.”

Using pieces of reclaimed wood, leather, velvet, pens, ink, and wicker in addition to the found Edwardian writing surfaces, Barrett animates her sculptures with expressive faces redolent of African ceremonial masks. “I thought (the desks) could be a way of speaking back to Empire beyond the archived letters written on them.”

While different regions and cultures across the African continent created unique masks reflective of their beliefs and traditions since time immemorial, the European fashion for collecting these objects gave rise to a commercial industry that continues today. Similar to the wooden desks covered in leather or velvet, the carved African masks were whittled from timber and embellished with leather. The mahogany used in the manufacture of the writing desk would have matured in a tropical climate, “shipped in much the same way as we were,” the artist says, referring to the international African slave trade.

Barrett adds wicker structures to the bases of the desks, which suggest shoulders and bodies and can also be donned loosely, as one would wear a ceremonial costume. In a sense, the pieces are like conduits or metaphysical transporters. “These heads can join with African diasporan bodies and enable us to reach back, as they enabled our ancestors,” the artist says.

Some of Barrett’s sculptures are on display as part of The Ground Beneath: Material Memory and the Resilience of Hope at Messums London, which continues through November 15. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

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Armed with tweezers, a porcupine quill, and more patience than most of us could fathom, the senior paper conservator of the Victoria & Albert Museum tackles a finicky restoration project in a new video. Susan Catcher walks us through her impeccably precise process as she restores a damaged fan dating back 200 years. She shares insights into her techniques and materials, all of which have to be reversible should the project need to be redone.

This video is one of many within the V&A’s series on conservation, which includes restoring Shakespearean costumes, a portrait of Marie Antoinette, and a Samurai figure. Watch more on YouTube.

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In the famous first stanza of the 17th-century poem “Auguries of Innocence,” William Blake writes:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

Perhaps Blake didn’t intend us to literally hold infinity in our hands, but he may have been aware that there was, in a manner of speaking, a way to don the entire known universe.

Combining the elegance of gold jewelry with the meticulous craftsmanship of intricate timepieces, a unique style of ring emerged from a fashion for the cosmos during the 16th and 17th centuries. Known as armillary rings, these deceptively simple gold creations can be worn on the finger like any other band, but when removed, they open up into a sphere made of several interconnecting circular bands operated by delicate hinges.

Examples of armillary rings in the British Museum and the Swedish National Museums of History have been traced to Germany, made during the Late Renaissance as the study of astronomy reached new heights. In 1543, Copernicus essentially launched the scientific revolution when he claimed that the Earth rotates around the Sun, not the other way around.

A few years later, Italian polymath Galileo Galilei, known as a pioneer of observational astronomy, built a telescope powerful enough to, for the first time, observe the stars of the Milky Way, see Jupiter’s four largest satellites, and make out Saturn’s rings, among other discoveries.

The historic gold rings are based on ancient astronomical instruments called armillary spheres, which emerged from the long-disproven theory that everything in the cosmos revolved around Earth. The designs, which were used since at least the 2nd century, place our planet at the center. A group of rings rotates on an axis, providing reference points for locating other celestial bodies. Separate bands correlate to the equator, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and the revolution of the Sun—a ring which also represents the constellations of the Zodiac.

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In 2022, twenty-one-year-old Tanya choked back tears as she held her boyfriend’s hand for what could be the last time. Crouching down to reach her, the military fatigue-clad Volodimir stands on a train headed for the city of Kramatorsk in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. He’s on his way to the battlefield to fight Russia’s invasion.

Taken by Ilvy Nijokiktijen, the photo capturing this heartwrenching moment is one of nearly 200 included in a book and large-scale exhibition at Fenix, a new art museum in Rotterdam that focuses entirely on migration. The Family of Migrants takes a broad look at human movement from 1905 to the present day, citing a wide array of reasons someone might relocate from war and economic crises to exile and internment to a search for opportunities abroad.

Spanning documentary, portraits, and photojournalism, the included images emerge from 136 photographers in 55 countries across 120 years. Providing such an expansive perspective of movement connects myriad experiences—from a Ukrainian soldier off to war to a young Afghan refugee to a poverty-stricken mother and her children—and is an attempt to broaden how we think of migration.

“In every era, there has been movement of people, be it out of free will, out of necessity, or under pressure. Migration shapes the world, separating and connecting people, but when we talk about migration, the focus all too quickly shifts to figures or politics,” curator Hanneke Mantel says.

The title references the 1955 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, The Family of Man. Curated by Edward Steichen, the bold exhibition included hundreds of photos that presented a narrative of global solidarity after World War II. Steichan wanted to depict “the gamut of life from birth to death,” a task Mantel seems to take on at Fenix by sharing a fuller story of migration today.

The Family of Migrants, published by Hannibal Books, includes photos by icons like Dorothea Lange and Ernest Cole, along with those working today like Alejandro Cegarra. Find your copy on Bookshop.

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When playwright Tennessee Williams reflected on the oeuvre of photographer Stephen Shore in 1982, he said, “His work is Nabokovian for me: Exposing so much and yet leaving so much room for your imagination to roam and do what it will.” The sentiment mirrors not only the power of Shore’s work but the capacity of street photography, more broadly, to provoke wonder and curiosity where we least expect it: the everyday.

Shore was among the first to adopt color photography as an artistic medium, traveling throughout America to document quotidian scenes of life in rural towns and big cities alike. His work followed behemoths of the medium like Walker Evans and Robert Frank and set the stage for others who emerged in his footsteps, including Alec Soth, Nan Goldin, and Martin Parr, among many others.

Shore is included in Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which explores the ever-evolving techniques and approaches that photographers use to document people and daily life. Seminal works from the 1970s to the 1990s by Shore, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Dawoud Bey, and Yolanda Andrade, among others, are complemented by more recent contributions to the genre by artists like Parr, Luc Delahaye, Katy Grannan, Amani Willett, and Zoe Strauss.

Today, smartphones with powerful digital cameras have made photography more accessible than ever—and also completely transformed the medium. With people always unabashedly filming—taking photos, making videos, posting to social media—in the city, “photographers are now less concerned with surreptitiously capturing an image and much more likely to collaborate with their subjects in the street,” the MFA says.

The difference between snapshots and art is perhaps partly in intention, although that line is often purposely blurred. Bey’s striking “A Man and Two Women After a Church Service,” for example, captures a seemingly simple scene, yet the composition and clarity are a testament to timing and technical expertise. In what feels like simultaneously a public and private moment, the 1976 image glimpses both a particular scene and an American historical period.

Whether taken decades ago or snapped within the past few years, the images in Faces in the Crowd invite us into each experience. Luc Delahaye’s “Taxi,” for example, captures a solemn, intimate, enigmatic moment as a mother holds her young son in her arms in the back of a vehicle.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto’s crowd photo, taken from the hip, immerses us in the thrum of a city thoroughfare. And Yolanda Andrade captures an uncanny blip when a street performer disappears behind the unsettlingly large head of a puppet. The MFA says, “Drawn to photography’s narrative potential, many employ the camera as a tool of transformation, taking everyday pictures from the ordinary to the strangely beautiful or even ominous.”

Faces in the Crowd opens on October 11 and runs through July 13, 2026. Find more on the museum’s website. You might also enjoy A Sense of Wonder, a monograph of the work of Joel Meyerowitz that was just released by SKIRA.

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Commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, Berlin-based artist Chiharu Shiota presents a poignant suite of large-scale works in Two Home Countries at Japan Society Gallery. That artist is known for her immersive string installations, inviting us into emotive, atmospheric experiences that tap into both universal and deeply personal narratives.

In Two Home Countries, viewers enter a vivid world shaped by red thread, redolent of intertwined veins and blood vessels that attach to the floor, take on the shapes of houses, and spread through an entire room with a cloud-like aura of red—filled with written pages. Themes of memory, mortality, connection, identity, and belonging weave through Shiota’s pieces, exploring “how pain, displacement, boundaries, and existential uncertainty shape the human condition and our understanding of self,” the gallery says.

An expansive, room-sized work titled “Diary,” which is based on an earlier installation and commissioned anew for Two Home Countries, incorporates a dense web of yarn in which float pages of journals that once belonged to Japanese soldiers. Some were also penned by German civilians in the post-war era. “The accumulated pages reveal an expansive record of shared human existence across national boundaries,” the gallery says.

“When the body is gone, the objects which surrounded them remain behind,” Shiota says in a statement. “As I wander the stalls of the markets in Berlin, I find especially personal items like photographs, old passports, and personal diaries. Once, I found a diary from 1946, which was an intimate insight into the person’s life and experiences.” For Shiota, the power of these objects are revealed in how she feels the presence of writer’s “inner self.”

Two Home Countries is on view through January 11 in New York City. Plan your visit on the Japan Society’s website, and find more on Shiota’s site and Instagram.

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Around 10,000 years ago, a paradigm shift in human history began to unfold. Prior to this transitional period, which archaeologists refer to as the Neolithic Revolution—the final phase of the Stone Age—small societies were organized around hunting and gathering for sustenance. During the Neolithic period, the gradual adoption of agricultural practices forever changed the way we live.

Over the next few thousand years, humans began domesticating plants and practicing animal husbandry in different parts of the world. And with less time needed for farming than for nomadically searching for food, ancient people could enjoy other activities that led to economic, political, religious, and artistic developments.

The Neolithic period saw the very first civilizations. It’s also when iconically old structures like Ireland’s Newgrange passage tomb and England’s Stonehenge complex were built, the latter of which was begun around 3100 B.C.E. and finished around 600 years later. For context, when Stonehenge was in its final phase, construction of the Pyramids of Giza was likely in progress. Recently, a series of circular earthworks dating to the 5th millennium B.C.E. (5000 to 4001 B.C.E.) in Burgenland, Austria, may predate much of Stonehenge by a remarkable 2,000 years.

At the newly excavated site, three monumental structures sit in close proximity to one another near the town of Rechnitz. The earthworks were initially discovered via aerial and geomagnetic surveys between 2011 and 2017. A total of four were found, three of which are ring-shaped structures that were previously invisible to the naked eye.

Known as circular ditch systems, the structures were built in the Middle Neolithic period—sometime between 4850 and 4500 B.C.E.—making them at least 6,500 years old.

“The Rechnitz site can be considered a supra-regional center of the Middle Neolithic period,” says Nikolaus Franz, the director of Burgenland Archaeology, in a statement. In the ditches measuring as much as 340 feet across, archaeologists have documented pits containing ceramic finds and post holes that indicate where timber beams in the ground once supported shelters.

Circular ditch monuments of this type, known as Kreisgrabenanlagen in German, are consistently found throughout Central Europe. While their intended function remains unknown, researchers generally believe they held an ancient religious, or cultic, purpose. Similar to Stonehenge, their orientation includes openings that align with the solstices and seem to correspond to an astronomical calendar.

“The excavations open a veritable window into the Stone Age,” Franz says. “We are learning a great deal about the Neolithic settler clans who found this a favorable location to establish the cultural techniques of agriculture and livestock farming in what is now Burgenland…After centuries of hunting and gathering, the gradual settlement of humans was truly revolutionary.”

You might also enjoy exploring the phenomenal complex of more than 10,000 earthworks made by prehistoric Indigenous societies in the Amazon basin.

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In many parts of rural America, the population keeps shrinking. Low birth rates, aging residents, and evolving or shuttering industries pair with a trend of younger people migrating to metro areas for jobs and more diverse cultural amenities. As of 2022, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that there are more than 15 million abandoned houses around the country, which have been left for myriad reasons ranging from foreclosures to structural issues to the death of inhabitants with no one else able or willing to shoulder the responsibility of a home and its furnishings.

Photographer Bryan Sansivero feels a strong pull to document and explore forgotten dwellings. His new book forthcoming from Artisan, America the Abandoned, explores deserted homes around the country in 200 striking images. From interiors strewn with garments, toys, knick-knacks, and decor to empty farmhouses gradually sagging into the prairie, he captures a spectral phenomenon ripe for storytelling.

Sansivero’s practice also revolves around portraiture, which lends itself to his approach of capturing these once-occupied houses. Although devoid of people, their enigmatic stories and vernacular personalities resonate through aged clapboard walls, overgrown shrubs, and forsaken belongings.

The images range from misty, haunting facades to everyday interiors. “These spaces are often littered with dust, mold, and creepy crawlies, and occasionally, they house one-of-a-kind relics: a tiger skin rug, a commemorative bicentennial piano, or a collection of mannequins,” the publisher says. “Taken together, this photographic collection serves as a time capsule—as an eerie reminder that everything we own is temporary and will eventually be forgotten.”

America the Abandoned is slated for release on October 14. Pre-order your copy on Bookshop, and check out more of Sansivero’s work on his website and Instagram.

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