ROME (AP) – Nearly five months after President Joe Biden declared “America is back” on his first presidential visit abroad, the president's challenge now that he's back in Europe is convincing the world that America is here to stay. Attending twin summits in Rome and then Scotland, Biden is asking ...

A lucent half-circle, “Hometown Moon” is nestled within the rugged topography of China’s Mount Tai. The glowing orb, which was designed by Syn Architects, radiates on a surrounding water feature, creating a dramatic, mirrored reflection that appears to make the cleaved design whole. With illuminated pillars to support the concrete chapel below, the construction mimics “a moon that never sets,” designers told Dezeen. “We returned to the birthplace of Confucianism, rebuilding the relationship between dualities such as city and the countryside.” Inside the venue, a mountain-like sculpture covered in moss sprawls throughout and ends at the bottom half of the massive design. More

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — The island nation of Tonga on Friday reported its first-ever case of COVID-19 after a traveler from New Zealand tested positive. Tonga is among the few remaining nations in the world that have avoided outbreaks of the virus. Like many of its neighbors, Tonga's isolation ...

In Vorja Sánchez’s ghostly dreamworld, spectral creatures plunge from the sky with long, wispy appendages that grasp onto the landscape. The Barcelona-based artist and illustrator (previously) disrupts otherwise peaceful photos with the massive forms that haunt unsuspecting hikers and farm animals as they peek out from behind a hill or congregate in airborne groups. Prints of the playfully illustrated phantoms are available in Sánchez’s shop, and you can find more from the series on Instagram. More

 Regardless of its unabashed tech culture, San Francisco remains a hub for analog artforms, hosting an annual festival that uses a 7-ton steamroller to print linocuts and housing one of the last remaining publishers of its kind. Arion Press is dedicated to the age-old practice of bookmaking, and with a small team of type casters, proofreaders, printers, and binders, painstakingly produces artist publications entirely by hand. An episode of Raw Craft, a film series produced by The Balvenie distillery, visits the publisher with the late Anthony Bourdain as host. More

In a poetic new series of works on canvas, German-Pakistani artist Jasmin Siddiqui, aka Hera, nods to her background in street art with sweeping, spray-painted marks, chaotic drips and splatters, and snippets of text. The gestural pieces are rooted in narrative and feature wide-eyed characters who wear headdresses of long-nosed rats, wolves, and strange, hairless creatures. In each imaginative rendering, Hera positions the possibility and wonder of adolescence alongside wild animals often deemed nuisances to human society, with “I’m fine really” displayed next to a child whose finger is snapped in a mousetrap and the title of another work, “Love Her But Leave Her Wild,” accompanying a contorted figure. More

Diving into family lore during the pandemic, Kai Yokoyama meets his ancestors through photography, weaving together archival pictures from the past with his own hushed images of the present.

The designer team at the wildly popular Yearcalendar evokes the fresh start of a blank notebook with its oversized 2022-at-a-glance. Uniquely organized to display the months in long columns, the wall planner is complete with an A4 page’s ubiquitous blue and red rules and punched sides. This year’s calendar comes in two sizes, 50 x 70 and 70 x 100 centimeters, a Swedish and international format, and is only available for pre-order. More

DENVER (AP) — The United States has issued its first passport with an “X” gender designation — a milestone in the recognition of the rights of people who don’t identify as male or female — and expects to be able to offer the option to nonbinary, intersex and gender-nonconforming people ...

Based in the coastal town of Shoreham-by-Sea, England, artist Louise Durham creates towering wooden sculptures of reclaimed sea defense timber and vibrant stained glass. She embeds stripes and circles in a full spectrum of color within the totem-style works, which when illuminated, cast kaleidoscopic shadows on their surroundings. “It is all about the light,” she says. “That’s the magic of glass and the magic of all living things.” In a note to Colossal, Durham explains that she utilizes traditional leaded light techniques, along with fusing and slumping—these involve connecting two pieces together and melting the material in a mold, respectively—to create bisected circles and asymmetric stripes. More

A campaign that began with ordinary people donating frequent-flyer miles has raised enough in two months to provide 40,000 flights for refugees from Afghanistan, and organizers and the White House are looking to nearly double that figure. About 3,200 flights with donated miles have already carried Afghans from temporary housing ...

Seoul-based artist Yeesookyung (previously) fuses Korean and Japanese craft traditions in her elegant, gilded sculptures. Blending ornately patterned vessels with deities and animals, the delicate assemblages meld shards of discarded ceramic into new forms with bulbous sides, halved figures, and drips of metallic epoxy. Utilizing fragments from previous works references the Korean tradition of discarding porcelain with small irregularities, while the visibly repaired crevices draw on Kintsugi techniques, the Japanese art of highlighting the beauty of broken vessels with thick, gold mendings. More

Salamander silhouettes, an ant clutching a snack, and the diverse findings of an unintentional insect trap are a few of the winners of the 2021 Close-Up Photographer of the Year contest (previously). Now in its third year, the global competition garnered more than 9,000 entries across 55 countries, an incredible selection that unveils the stunning and minuscule details of the natural world. See some of our favorite shots below, and view all winners on the contest’s site.  More

Two new site-specific pieces by Courtney Mattison (previously) position ceramic sculptures of corals, sponges, and anemones in a swirling cluster of ocean diversity. Titled “Revolve” and “Our Changing Seas VII,” the wall reliefs are the latest additions to the Los Angeles-based artist’s body of work, which advocates for ecological preservation by highlighting the beauty and fragile nature of marine invertebrates. In both installations, Mattison contrasts the vibrant, plump tentacles of healthy creatures with others sculpted in white porcelain to convey the devastating effects of the climate crisis, including widespread bleaching. More

A series of monumental spiraling structures with vaulted roofs and balconies overlooking a 45,000-square-meter site in Sibang Kaja, Bali, is an innovative foray into sustainable architecture. Designed by IBUKU back in 2008, “Heart of School” is made of local bamboo and grasses that once deteriorated, can be easily removed, composted, and replaced with similar materials. The multi-story structure features thatched roofs evocative of coiled nautilus shells that sit atop three, open-air towers. It houses a high school and its administration and was a catalyst for Bamboo U, which offers courses in architecture and design using the woody material. More

PARIS (AP) – In a move with potential ramifications for other European museums, France is displaying 26 looted colonial-era artifacts for one last time before returning them to Benin - a decision authorities in the West African country described as “historic.” The wooden anthropomorphic statues, royal thrones and sacred altars ...

Russian artist Alisa Lariushkina molds countless coiled ribbons and small twists from air-dry clay to create idyllic scenes brimming with color and texture. Reminiscent of Post-Impressionist styles, her sculptural landscapes are imbued with movement, and she uses undulating forms to convey a river’s gleaming surface and a mix of tiny discs to imitate grasses and wildflowers. Lariushkina currently lives in Vilnius and works primarily on commission, and you can follow her latest pieces on Instagram. More

What began in July 2003 as a single visit to the frigid Ilulissat Icefjord in western Greenland morphed into a decades-long project for German photographer Olaf Otto Becker. That initial trip prompted fourteen subsequent voyages to the Arctic coastlines, where he captured monumental glaciers calving and crumbling into the ocean and still expanses of water through bleak nighttime light. “Every day, huge thundering masses of ice break into the sea, causing the sea level to rise slowly but incessantly,” he writes. More

 A dreamy new ad for Burberry meditates on the dual powers of humanity and nature. Directed by Megaforce, “Open Spaces” zeroes in on four figures as they venture into a wheat field when a strangely powerful gust of wind propels them across the landscape. They subsequently rush toward a steep cliff in graceful, choreographed movements before saving each other in an airborne embrace. You can find more from the Paris-based director, who’s worked on promotional videos for the BBC, Tame Impala, and an array of high-end brands, on Vimeo. More

In her surreal black and white photographs, Sara Cucè explores the in-between spaces of migration in search of a visual form that describes what it feels like to be neither here nor there.

In the hypnotic portraits of Argentinian artist Sofia Bonati (previously), women find themselves embraced by backgrounds of black-and-white linework, foliage, and abstract geometries. The feminine characters often have rosy cheeks and earnest expressions, and they seamlessly meld with their patterned environments, which sometimes conceal the outlines of their figures and accentuate their unique facial features. Now based in Oxfordshire, Bonati will show some of her dizzying drawings in a group exhibition with Wow x Wow this December. More

According to Olso-based photographer and researcher Jon Larsen, the most exotic particles from across the universe are likely hiding in a rain gutter or scattered among debris on rooftops. Larsen, who works in the geosciences department at the University of Oslo, has been at the forefront of micrometeorite discovery since 2009 when “a shiny black dot suddenly appeared on my white veranda table while I was having strawberries for breakfast.” The event sparked a now decades-long exploration into the field of “cosmic dust particles, the oldest solid matter there is, ‘ash’ from dead stars, etc,” he tells Colossal. More

We’re sorry to introduce you to the cursed cast of the History Center of Olmsted County’s notorious Creepy Doll Contest: there’s the demonic “Miss Abyss” and her glowing portal-like eyes, the conniving criminal mastermind “Professor Moriarty” that will likely convince you to commit some unspeakable atrocity, and “Lizzie Bordon” that, like the infamous ax murderer herself, is sure to chop you to bits. The center launched the project in 2019 as an innocuous way to explore its collection, although it’s since created an annual event of unleashing the horrors you see here. More

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