Continuing: Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists at Folk Art Museum

This engaging show offers a reminder that the best summer exhibitions often feel like bouquets gathered from many gardens, celebrating the enduring pleasure of stories drawn from everyday experience. Curated with a keen eye for how familiar subjects can continually be renewed through color, composition, and imagination, the show beautifully dismantles the myth of the isolated, accidental outsider. By grouping roughly 60 creators across a century into a personal gallery tour of self-portraits, alter egos, and visual autobiographies, it reveals how these artists possessed absolute agency and intent, utilizing a dazzling variety of techniques and approaches to look at their world from entirely new vantage points. Above: Joe Coleman, Voyage to Candyland, 2006

Save the date, Wednesday, September 9, 5:30pm: Curator’s panel on The Art of Minnie Evans. Tickets

American Museum of Folk Art, 2 Lincoln Square, New York, NY Info

Saturday, August 22, 5:30–7:30pm: Sand & Paddle Classic Ping-Pong Tournament

Put this on your list of beach day events: Between Tides, a one-of-a-kind ping-pong tournament open to players of all levels at Rockaway Beach 67! The Sand & Paddle Classic is presented as part of Between Tides, Public Art Fund’s summer exhibition of artist-designed playable sculptures installed right on the beach. Test your skills in a multiplayer game or return a serve from a professional player while you rotate between the sculptures, and adapt to unconventional surfaces that challenge precision, improvisation, and expectations. Part competition, part public artwork, the Sand & Paddle Classic celebrates creativity, community, and the joy of play. Prizes will be awarded to the top finishers. Free and open to all. Registration not required. Paddles and balls will be provided. Info  Directions

Sunday, August 23, Last Chance: The Whitney Biennial

The eighty-second edition of the Whitney Biennial—the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States—features work of 56 artists, duos, and collectives that reflects the current moment and examines various forms of relationality, including interspecies kinships, familial relations, geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, shared mythologies, and infrastructural supports. Above: Installation by Pat Oleszko

Whitney Biennial 2026 offers a vivid atmospheric survey of contemporary American art shaped by a moment of profound transition. Rather than offering a definitive answer to life today, this Whitney Biennial foregrounds mood and texture, inviting visitors into environments that evoke tension, tenderness, humor, and unease. Together, the works capture the complexity of the present and propose imaginative, unruly, and unexpected forms of coexistence. This exhibition includes a billboard across from the Museum’s entrance on Gansevoort Street.

Whitney Biennial 2026 is co-organized by Whitney curators Marcela Guerrero, the DeMartini Family Curator, and Drew Sawyer, the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography with Beatriz Cifuentes, Biennial Curatorial Assistant, and Carina Martinez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow.

Whitney Museum of American Art, 92 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY Info

Looking ahead

Watercolor painting in a garden with Peggy Roalf, four Wednesdays starting September 9

The historic Mount Vernon Hotel Museum and Garden, on the Upper East Side, is offering artists the opportunity to learn watercolor painting, literally from the ground up. The Garden, sheltered behind the stone structure that dates from 1799, is the perfect place to refine your skills—or learn this versatile medium from scratch. The program starts with the color mixing and water control. Subsequent sessions cover various aspects of this fluid medium, including tone and value; different brushes for different marks; fifty shades of green, and much more. Wednesdays, September 9th, 16th, 23rd, 30 from 10:30am to 1:00pm at the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum and Garden, 421 East 61st Street, New York NY Registration and information. More about Peggy here and  here

Just in from the Home Office

If you attended ICON13, hosted by MICA in beautiful Baltimore, and missed getting a cool sweatshirt designed by Baltimore artist, Andrew Haener, you can still get one here.

Check out the ICON13 photo gallery on Flickr where 1,000 photos from Baltimore will quench your nostalgia, fuel your FOMO, and keep you going until ICON14. Thanks to our fantastic ICON13 photographers, Nessa Kessinger and Adrian Steinbach for covering the conference from every angle. Please credit them in any place you use these photos.

Whether you attended the conference or not, we want to hear from you about how to improve the ICON experience, because, well...we can't wait to see you again at ICON14 in 2028! Please take the survey here

ICON13 The Illustration Conference brought the illustration and graphic arts communities together for four full days of impact, insight, information, and inspiration. ICON is a nonprofit organization run by a board of volunteer illustrators, art directors, and educators. It is produced "of, by and for" the community in service to the greater creative industry.