Arts & Culture

If Andy Burnham is looking for inspiration for his great “council housebuilding comeback”, he would do well to visit Croydon. There, nestled into a steeply sloping site, sheltered by a canopy of mature trees, stands a cluster of crystalline pink and brown brick towers, where generous flats look on to a landscape of allotments, playgrounds and to the rolling hills of south London beyond. Designed by Mary Duggan Architects, with Ruff Architects, it is a model of council-led housebuilding – so much so that it has also been named this year’s best building in the UK, confounding the bookies’ outsider odds. Only once before has the RIBA Stirling prize ever been awarded to a council housing project, when Goldsmith Street in Norwich scooped the gong in 2019, for its rows of low-energy brick terraces, designed by Mikhail Riches Architects and Cathy Hawley. This year’s winner, Lion Green Road in Coulsdon, is an entirely different animal, and it puts a welcome spotlight back on housing design at a time when the government plans to pump £39bn into the sector.

Ahead of her memoir's release, we talk to Joan Kron about Andy Warhol, beating Sidney Janis to the punch, and why she calls herself a “renegade housewife” of Pop Art. Joan Kron with a remake of Roy Lichtenstein’s “Super Sunset Billboard” (1967) at the Whitney Museum of American Art (all photos courtesy Joan Kron)In 1962, the first-ever Pop Art exhibition on the East Coast was mounted at the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association (YM/YWHA) in Philadelphia. Just days before the Sidney Janis Gallery broke with Abstract Expressionism in its historic show The New Realists, the firebrand "housewives" of the Y had already featured many of the same up-and-coming artists, including Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg in Art ’63: A New Vocabulary. Brushing off the scorn from Philadelphia’s then-conservative art world, the show’s organizers, Audrey Sabol and Joan Kron, would go on to claim more firsts.

Among them champagne, new money, and an artist’s custom-scented bathroom installations. Visitors enjoy Theo Triantafyllidis's “Feral Metaverse (Spider)” (2026) at Frieze London. (all photos Naomi Polonsky/Hyperallergic)

This show takes local history as its starting point, that of a 19th-century balloonist’s assistant who performed a parachute stunt in the skies above Cardiff. It throws in a current-day tech billionaire, the space race, a time-travelling hot-air balloon, and – for good measure? – a lifesize seagull that speaks. Surprisingly, given the complications of writer-director Hannah McPake’s high-wire drama, it lifts off, swirling through the clouds on its air-bound set, crackling with humour and effervescent imagination along with a keen sense of unwritten history, to become a complete blast. Louisa Maud Evans was the real-life 14-year-old girl from Bristol who was enlisted to perform a parachute jump from a hot-air balloon during the Fine Art, Industrial and Maritime Exhibition of 1896. She had little experience of parachuting and she perished in the Bristol Channel after an unfavourable wind cast her out to sea. Rich imagination … Oliver Wood, François Pandolfo, Elin Phillips and Keiron Self.

The phrase “two things can be true” is a frequent refrain in popular psychology and it’s also a frequent response, I find, to witnessing the farther reaches of live art. Hmm, is this performance confusingly self-indulgent or utterly profound? Sometimes it can be both. In fact, it’s not just two things that can be true, it’s as many things as there are people in the audience, since this is all about the live subjective experience, in the moment; presence and connection. Launched in 1998, Fierce is Britain’s longest-running live art festival. For one week it takes over Birmingham’s conventional theatres alongside unconventional spaces, especially in ex-industrial Digbeth, which is fast becoming a creative hub. Also on the bill this year: late-night artist dinners, a show in a swimming pool, and a six-hour performance jam at a grand gothic hall that was apparently the inspiration for Cluedo. There’s a focus on the sensuous and sensory; it’s all about the physical body. But the first piece I experience is actually in virtual reality: Traversing the Mist, by Taiwanese artist Tung-Yen Chou. The setting is a gay sauna, and the VR tech is impressive.

The celebrated Prince Charles repertory cinema in London’s Leicester Square has announced that the threat of closure has been staved off by signing a new 25-year lease with its landlords. In a post on social media titled “You Saved the PCC”, the cinema said that “after 21 months of uncertainty, we’re delighted to have secured the future of the cinema” and that they had “signed a new 25-year lease with no break clause, ensuring our projectors will keep rolling for years to come”. The cinema also expressed its gratitude for the “support, commitment and belief of many, many people”. In January 2025, the Prince Charles launched a petition, claiming that its landlord, Zedwell LSQ Ltd (owned by developer Criterion Capital) was trying to “bully us out of the building” by demanding a break clause in its lease, due for renewal in September 2025. The break clause would have enabled Zedwell to give the cinema six months’ notice if it had other plans for the site. At the time, Criterion Capital denied that it was attempting to intimidate or disadvantage the cinema.

Whatever you think of Amol Rajan, he can’t be accused of not dreaming big. In the clip trailing the launch of his YouTube project The Amol Rajan Connection, he acknowledges the seismic volatility of our times but locates himself firmly at the heart of them. “We are about to get 100 years of change in a single decade,” he says. “And that’s scary. But maybe I can help.” Big talk for someone who somehow managed the singular feat of being outlasted by Richard E Grant in The Celebrity Traitors. But joking aside, Rajan’s bulletproof self-confidence remains titanium-tough. The branding of The Amol Rajan Connection features a mock-up of the poster from The Harder They Come, a Jamaican film about a renegade insurgent whose reckless defiance of the establishment’s rules culminates in him dying in a hail of bullets. But however he might see himself, it’s impossible to regard Rajan as an outsider. From his editorship of a national newspaper, via University Challenge and Today, he has shown an uncanny facility for arriving, briskly, at the very heart of one national institution after another.

Mendelssohn wrote 48 Songs Without Words for solo piano: eight sets of six, mostly under three minutes long, emerging over a 16-year period that spanned most of his short adult life. The handful that still regularly make their way on to recital programmes are only the tip of the iceberg; the complete set hasn’t been recorded as much as you might think, which makes this new release from Bertrand Chamayou still more welcome. Bertrand Chamayou: Mendelssohn Songs Without WordsThese pieces belong to the world of Schubert Lieder, and Chamayou brings a singing quality to them from the off. The Duetto that rounds off the Op 38 set is beautifully done, the melodic lines alternating like a female and male voice, each lingering just slightly as the other voice takes over. Compared to other interpreters, Chamayou is often softer-edged, his playing a little smoother and more flowing, although there are exceptions: Op 62 No 6 – known as Spring Song, but originally titled Camberwell Green after the then-elegant London suburb where it was written – is given a perky, almost frothy touch in the accompaniment: spring bubbling under like frogspawn in a pond.

A book on Palestine for young readers was pulled at Penguin Random House just before its scheduled release, following editorial disputes between the publisher and the book’s Palestinian American authors over their account of Palestinian history. In November 2024, Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House, signed the book deal with Alana Hadid, a philanthropist, activist and older sister of models Bella and Gigi, and Jenan Matari, an author and communications strategist. The book was promoted for release in September this year. The authors, both influential social media commentators, drafted a manuscript about the history of Palestine, Israeli occupation, Palestinian resistance, and the diaspora, interwoven with references to their own families’ stories of displacement. But the writers withdrew their book after objecting to edits by Random House that they said sanitized and misrepresented their views, and which they said were introduced after they thought the book had been finalized. A Random House spokesperson said the process “followed our standard bookmaking procedures”, and that the publisher ultimately supported the authors’ decision to pull the book.

In the decades after the death of the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer in 1675, few knew his name or work. He was so unknown that his paintings were sold with the forged signatures of more popular artists attached. All that changed in the mid-19th century, when his art was reassessed by French critics. Today Vermeer is one of the most admired painters in the world, although, says art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon, he has “proved stubbornly resistant to interpretation”. Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, Graham-Dixon’s biography which was six years in the writing, endeavours to answer some unresolved questions, among them: what was Vermeer’s life like? Why did he paint the way he did? What was the intent behind his paintings, of which only 36 exist? Unlike the Dutch genre painters of his time, the Delft-born Vermeer painted solemn yet luminous works featuring women in domestic settings and engaged in activities such as reading, writing, playing music or pouring milk. His ability to render light, and its softening effect on rooms and people, was unparalleled. Graham-Dixon is the book’s narrator and his reading is sharp, authoritative and animated.

Billy Connolly recalled being in a room with you, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake and John Martyn. Did you feel you were collectively doing something special? poscopy That might have been at the Royal Festival Hall [in 1969], where Fairport Convention had Nick and John as openers and Billy must have been backstage. He’d have been in the Humblebums with Gerry Rafferty, before he evolved from a banjo player who told jokes into a comedian who played a bit of banjo. He was always a fantastic bloke and we’ve been friends for a long time. There was a great camaraderie between the stable of acts Joe Boyd produced: Fairport, the Incredible String Band, John Martyn, Chris McGregor. We felt different, not special, and didn’t feel successful because we weren’t. None of these people really sold many records in their lifetimes, but people are still discovering them now. This album is my latest attempt to sell some units. Have you ever been on a 1952 Vincent Black Lightning and did that inspire the song? llamapaca

Where do you go after Mario? It’s a question the team at Ubisoft Paris found itself pondering three years ago after wrapping up work on the charming turn-based tactics adventure, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, sequel to its unexpected crossover hit, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. By melding a rather specialist genre with video gaming’s biggest household name, the developer introduced chin-stroking strategic play to a whole new audience. “Having the opportunity to work with the Mario franchise was a privilege, and it’s still something I’m very proud of,” says level designer director, Julien Vial. “I still remember seeing the first prototype and being blown away by all the possibilities.”Now, Ubisoft Paris has returned with a new project, but this time the studio is swapping the Mushroom Kingdom’s vivid palette for the blood-soaked grit of military action series Rainbow Six. Where Mario and Rabbids saw squishy creatures bounce harmlessly across levels as Mario encased foes in honey, Rainbow Six Tactics, a turn-based tactical spin-off from Rainbow Six Siege, sees balaclava-clad insurgents take shrapnel rounds to the chest. A seamless tonal shift, then. Unexpected hit …

The Russian submarine is on the fritz and as such remains at the bottom of the North Sea. Its fancy nuclear missile, meanwhile, has been purloined by the Americans in an operation presumably entitled Let’s Flush Our Alliance With the Brits Down the Bog (and potentially instigate the third word war while we’re at it). The prime minister, Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear), remains oblivious and a berk. The Russians are similarly unaware of the theft, for now at least, but the US ambassador to the UK, Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), predicts the eventual discovery will blast the Kremlin’s ushankas skywards. “Russia will come to get their sub,” she warns her unblinking husband – and current US vice president – Hal (Rufus Sewell). “They will lose their shit when they find their apocalypse weapon is gone and they will attack the United Kingdom!” “Hmm,” replies Hal, who has, one suspects, shiftier fish to fry. “Mmm.”This is where we find ourselves as The Diplomat returns for a fourth series of exquisitely fraught geopolitical skulduggery. Which is to say; we’re stuffed.

Plenty of abuse survivors don’t go on to commit terrible crimes, argues the titular Baby as she attempts to make sense of the cause-and-effect cycle that landed her in prison and saw her precious baby daughter forcibly removed. It’s a line that echoes the more merciless commentary surrounding the case of US death row inmate Christa Pike, whose failed execution last month led to global headlines. Produced by Brixton House and Clean Break, a theatre company built specifically for women in the sightlines of the criminal justice system, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s compassionate solo play offers a holistic, cradle-to-grave look at its character’s life, while spotlighting a broken pipeline. Once you’ve fallen through the cracks and into a gutter of crime and drug dependency, it argues, it’s impossible to climb back out. Survive and you’ll become a number with a case file and a lack of agency, whose remaining years will be spent pinballing between probation officers and case workers.

The imaginative, strange childhood dreams of twins Nikolai and Simon Haas materialize in a large-scale exhibition at Blanton Museum of Art. Working as the Haas Brothers, the siblings have been collaborating since 2010 and are widely known for their fantastical sculptures of flora and fauna with their signature cheeky, surreal twist. In Austin, the Los Angeles artists present a range of figurative furniture, plush cartoonish characters, and illuminated installations that showcase their idiosyncratic aesthetic. Previously on view at Cranbrook Art Museum and the Museum of Art and Design in New York, Uncanny Valley is the first mid-career survey for the duo, presenting a range of their quirky, genre-defying works. The exhibition also nods to the brothers’ childhood in Austin, where they lived from age 3 to 19, a time when the unofficial city slogan “Keep Austin Weird” became a cultural ethos and early influence.

For centuries, Navajo/Diné weavers have created intricate, geometrically patterned blankets and rugs on upright looms, powered only by the artisans’ bodies. More than a millennia ago in Mesoamerica, which encompassed much of what today is Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and parts of Central America, the Mayans produced ornate ceramics decorated with natural motifs like birds. Utilizing materials that could be foraged or cultivated in the landscape—the Diné have herded the distinctive Navajo-Churro sheep since the breed was introduced by Spaniards in the 16th century—the techniques, motifs, and cultural customs continue to influence artists today. Through the lens of Indigenous interpretations of mathematics, science, and architecture, Radiant Geometries: Vectors of Knowledge from the Indigenous Americas at Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University invites us into a multi-media encounter with a wide range of cosmological perspectives and views on nature, narrative, and innovation.

“I find that when I work from my emotions and experiences, I make a more powerful image,” Ann Toebbe writes. Meditating on the connection between physical spaces and the feelings and memories bound within them is central to the Chicago artist’s practice. In a review of Toebbe’s recent exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center, the writer Elisa Shoenberger teases out the distinction that grounds the artist’s work. “Space is the physical location, while place is the meaning we bring to it. It’s the difference between thinking about the physical location of your house (space) and the feelings, history and emotions tied up in your home (place),” Schoenberger writes. Rendering interiors and cross-cut buildings in impeccable detail, Toebbe concentrates on a particular sensation or mood and then constructs a series of architectural compositions that extrapolate on the theme.

When beloved art is revisited and revised, a familiar cry is often heard: “You’re ruining my childhood!” But with Nintendo’s Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time, there are also livelihoods at risk: specifically, the man running the shooting gallery in Castle Town. In the original 1998 version of the game, he’d rip off players as they funnelled rupees and fudged the then still novel analogue-stick aiming. But in 2026 we have more responsive frame rates and a motion-controlled slingshot that allows precision adjustments. His targets tumble on the first go, and with them his entire business model. Even in Hyrule, the death of the high street seems inevitable. Bad news for him but great news for Link, a child of the forest who, as in 1998, steps into a vast fantasy kingdom to vanquish a great evil, but now does so with a number of improvements. The boy can now sprint, preventing the ignominy of endless roly-polies to zip across grassy plains. He has a manual jump, free-rotating camera, a scrolling inventory bar that replaces menu screen faff and, crucially, a fatter wallet for holding all those gems he fleeces from struggling shooting gallery owners.