The Back 9 of Par Excellence Redux, an artist-designed miniature golf course, is now open at the Elmhurst Art Museum. Curated by Colossal’s founder and editor-in-chief Christopher Jobson as part of an open call, the exhibition of playable artworks pays homage to the incredibly popular Par Excellence, which opened in 1988 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Back 9, which runs through January 2, 2022, includes artists Wesley Baker, KT Duffy, Eve Fineman, Joshua Kirsch, Annalee Koehn, Vincent Lotesto, Joshua Lowe, Jim Merz, David Quednau, Donna Piacenza, and Liam Wilson & Anna Gershon. More

 What begins with a calm morning filled with stunningly bright sunlight quickly morphs into a short film of existential crises and the life-altering implications of climate disasters. Directed by Frédéric Even and Louise Mercadier with production by Papy3D and JPL Films, “Sororal” is a profound stop-motion animation that follows three sisters as they react to warnings about the sea submerging the land. More

Coinciding with the rise of the vibrant book cover blob, Dave Eggers’ new novel takes a profoundly divergent approach. The Every was released this month by McSweeney’s—the author is also the founder of the San Francisco-based independent publishing house—and is a follow up to his hit dystopian work The Circle. Despite a similar focus on the rise of surveillance capitalism, The Every features 32 different cover illustrations and graphic renderings, casting each interpretation as a design object in its own right. More

 Selfish, hungry, and more cunning than he appears, the zany seagull in Adnan Peer Mohamed’s “Dead Meat” sends feathers flying. The animated short opens with the creature scouring a boardwalk for food, and after mistaking a bolt for a snack, he snatches an entire hotdog only to find a fellow bird is after the same sausage. Mohamed is currently a student at Vancouver Film School, and you can find more of his animations on Vimeo and Instagram. More

Spanish street artist Pejac (previously) addresses the concept of “returning to normal” in a discerning new series that focuses on the urgency of the issues affecting the world today. Centered on the increasingly disastrous effects of the climate crisis and the social issues that dominate the news cycle, the artist speaks to the myriad global crises in his largest exhibition to date, which opens on October 30 in a former train factory in Berlin. More

Movement, motion, and emotion permeate the joyful, pointillistic paintings by Ghanaian artist Betty Acquah. Rendering dancing children, costumed troupes, and their surroundings simultaneously, Acquah conveys celebratory moments by cloaking her scenes with countless dots of acrylic. “The background echoes the movement of figures and therefore create(s) a pulsating surface that brings the composition alive,” she tells Colossal. “By extending dabs of color in the subject matter into the background and vice-versa, an illusion of movement is created.” Each richly layered piece blurs the figures’ defining features, casting them as anonymous, everyday people. More

Airport security officials have confiscated more firearms this year than ever before, even though fewer travelers have flown during the pandemic and more than two months remain before the end of the calendar year. As of the beginning of this month, the Transportation Security Administration says it had stopped 4,495 ...

As part of a closing hand-off ceremony for the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games and the 2024 games in Paris, choreographer Sadeck Waff worked with 128 performers in a dizzying performance focused on arms and hands. The French dancer and choreographer has become known for his limb-centric performances which you can watch more of on Instagram. Music by Woodkid. (via The Kid Should See This)   More

In a lovely clash of anatomy and antiquity, artist Kit Paulson (previously) forms impossibly fragile objects entirely from glass. By referencing historical artworks through lace patterns, or traversing the structures of blood veins and bones found in the human body, she externalizes the internal and reveals hidden visceral structures all around us. She pushes the idea further still by creating wearable sculptures like masks and gloves. Paulson works primarily with slender tubes of borosilicate glass heated with a torch through a method called flameworking. More

In her new book, Sara Cwynar creates a dizzying helter-skelter through the chaos of our consumerist visual world to bring us face-to-face with our complex relationship with images.

New cafes, galleries, and studios are popping up along the Vltava River in Prague, although they’re not immediately visible from atop the embankment. Tucked inside former storage units embedded within the structure itself are 20 tunnel-like spaces redesigned for public use. Appearing like glass-doored portals lining the waterfront, the multi-purpose project is part of the Czech city’s efforts to revitalize a four-kilometer swath of the riverbank, which previously served as a parking lot, and are the undertaking of architect Petr Janda who helms the Prague-based studio Brainwork. More

The United States Postal Service has issued a set of colorful postage stamps that celebrate Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), an annual holiday celebrated in Mexico and beyond on the first two days of November. The vibrant stamps depict a family of four calaveras (sugar skulls) designed by Minneapolis-based Chicano artist and designer Luis Fitch who has been obsessed with postage stamps since a young age. A chance encounter near a train exit by the National Mexican Art Museum in Chicago lead to the creation of the stamps: Every year, the day before his birthday, [Fitch] writes a list of things he wants to achieve, asking the universe. More

In abandoned sheds, tiny campers, and imposing, hilltop castles, Scottish artist Andrew McIntosh (previously) nestles glowing entryways to mysterious new worlds. The illuminated portals are central to the artist’s ongoing interest in exploration, curiosity, and a never-ending desire to uncover the unknown, and they offer a tiny window into what lies beyond the immediate landscapes. Each of the compositions exudes a ghostly air, with fog or storm clouds hanging above the once-occupied spaces. More

Metro trains in Washington, D.C., will only run every 30 minutes on Monday while local authorities investigate an issue with axles on its newest rail cars, officials said Sunday. A defect was discovered in a car that derailed on the Metro's Blue Line last week, and the same issue was ...

BANGKOK — Silk Road travelers in ancient times cursed China’s largest desert as “Takla Makan,” an ominous Persian-Turkic expression that translates as, roughly, “Enter and you may never return.” Undeterred by the sandstorms and merciless terrain in the oblong basin north of Tibet’s glacier-packed peaks, Chinese engineers have announced the ...

LONDON (AP) — A Cambridge University college said Friday that it would return a looted bronze cockerel to Nigeria later this month, making it the first U.K. institution to hand back one of the artifacts known as the Benin Bronzes. Jesus College announced in 2019 that it would return the ...

One of the most expansive volumes of its kind, African Artists: From 1882 to Now compiles a broad sampling of works from more than 300 modern and contemporary artists born or living on the continent. Within its 350-plus pages, the massive text spans a range of mediums and aesthetics, from Mary Sibande’s sprawling postcolonial installations and Wangechi Mutu’s fantastical watercolor collages to the cotton-embroidered photographs by Joana Choumali. More

More than 12,000 sheets of delicate Xuan paper form the ruffled exterior of Zhu Jinshi’s suspended “Boat” sculpture. The renowned artist, who’s currently living and working in his hometown of Beijing, is widely regarded for pioneering Chinese abstract art, and this monumental installation from 2015 is a reflection of his conceptual, meditative practice. Spanning 18 meters long and seven meters wide, “Boat” is comprised of wrinkled paper layers draped around bamboo frames. Countless thin cotton threads hold the individual components in place and intersect the curved, tunnel-like form with straight lines that extend vertically to the ceiling. More

In Pat Perry’s Sensemaking, there’s no rubric for telling a story. In quiet scenes framed through roadside vantage points and performances of costumed figures and contemporary symbols, the Detroit-based artist (previously) considers the deeply American tendency to configure the world with single, flat narratives. Perry takes an opposing approach, though, and instead layers his pieces with contradiction, complexity, and unusual details that reflect the current moment. More

ROME (AP) — Italy’s bankrupt national airline, Alitalia, made its final flights Thursday before formally folding, marking the end of business for the 74-year-old carrier and an end of an era for Italy. A flight attendant at Rome's Fiumicino-Leonardo da Vinci Airport thanked passengers for their loyalty before boarding the ...

ROME (AP) — Italy’s bankrupt national airline, Alitalia, made its final flights Thursday before formally folding, marking the end of business for the 74-year-old carrier and an end of an era for Italy. A flight attendant at Rome's Fiumicino-Leonardo da Vinci Airport thanked passengers for their loyalty before boarding the ...

Photographic artist Jim Naughten casts a fantastical, candy-colored lens over luxuriant ecosystems and surreal animal portraits in Eremozoic, a solo exhibition on view at Grove Square Galleries through November 18. Comprised of digitally altered compositions, the series centers on rhinos, manatees, and myriad wild animals in strange, unearthly settings: a tall brown bear stands on its hind legs in a field of bright pink grass, a gorilla rests in similarly vibrant foliage, and orangutans swing through leafy branches in shades of blue. More

A ubiquitous decoration at birthdays and family celebrations, piñatas are conventionally associated with fun, festivity, and of course, their potential to split open and release candy and other treats. Now on view at Craft in America, a group exhibition re-envisions the party staple by connecting it with contemporary practices that extend the playful artform’s capacity for social and political commentary. Piñatas: The High Art of Celebration features approximately 50 works from Mexico- and U.S.-based artists and collectives, who explore the evolution of traditional construction techniques and the object’s broad cultural significance that reaches beyond its Mexican heritage. More

LONDON (AP) — Britain's Prince William has criticized some of the world's richest men for using their wealth to fund a new space race and space tourism rather than trying to fix the problems on Earth instead. William voiced his disapproval in an interview with the BBC aired Thursday, a ...

Artist Xomatok (previously) translates the vibrant, geometric motifs of handwoven Andean blankets, or ilicllas, into large-scale works that mark the pathways through the hilly Alisos de Amauta neighborhood in Lima, Peru. Painted during the course of two months as part of Pinta Lima Bicentenario, the 13 interventions were a collaborative undertaking by the artist and local residents, who transformed the public staircases that wind through the district into multi-level canvases. More