Artists had a hell of a year in 2025. While the NEA slashed funding and corporate layoffs hit creative industries hard, artists doubled down, making work that interrogated surveillance capitalism, reclaimed historical narratives, and asked uncomfortable questions about who gets to call themselves a victim.
Here's what stood out in 2025: the podcasts that made us think, the features that expanded the conversation, the exhibitions that challenged our assumptions, and the interviews with artists who kept making work when the world gave them every reason to stop.
Podcast Episodes
Curator Rebekah Tolley on the Rise of the Digitalism Movement
Curator Rebekah Tolley makes a convincing case for why digital art deserves a seat at the big kids' table. She traces Digitalism's lineage from pioneers like Nam June Paik to today's boundary-pushers, while prepping for the movement's 2025 showcase at London's Saatchi Gallery. Digital artists have been fighting the same legitimacy battles that photographers faced a century ago, and Rebekah is determined to speed up the timeline for acceptance.
Listen to the episode here.
Art21 Premieres Season 12 of 'Art in the 21st Century' Amid Funding Cuts
Director of Development Lolita Fierro discusses how Art21 managed to premiere Season 12 of their beloved PBS series despite losing an $85,000 NEA grant when funding got yanked earlier this year. The conversation digs into the season's first episode, "Between Worlds," which features artists exploring migration, borders, and the spaces between self and other.
Listen to the episode here.
Life After Layoff: Carmen Acosta Finds Purpose and Passion in a New Creative Chapter
Carmen Acosta (aka Jane Dope) talks about getting laid off from her creative director job at SoFi Stadium and pivoting into voiceover work, because when life closes a door, you might as well try talking for a living. She shares the messy middle of career transitions, from curating over 25 art exhibitions to figuring out what comes next when your corporate job disappears. It's an honest conversation that doesn't sugarcoat the uncertainty and still finds the silver linings.
Listen to the episode here.
Q+Art Interviews
‘Pretty, But Dead’: Christy Savage Subverts the Horror Trope of the Beautiful Victim
Christy Savage channels her childhood love of horror into paintings that flip the "Beautiful Victim" trope on its head, creating work where classic Poe, giallo films, and true crime collide on canvas. Her Discarded series takes aim at our cultural obsession with dead blonde girls (Laura Palmer, we see you) and asks why we're so comfortable consuming women's suffering as entertainment. It's gorgeous, unsettling work that will make you side-eye your true crime playlist.
Read the interview here.
Reframing the Gaze: Edie Nadelhaft’s ‘Biometric Portraits’ Challenge Traditional Roles of Subject and Observer
During the pandemic, Painter Edie Nadelhaft spent hours zooming in on irises and fingertips until they looked like alien landscapes, then realized she'd accidentally created a meditation on how willingly we surrender our biometric data to Big Tech. Her "Biometric Portraits" are equal parts stunning and creepy, covered with reflective domes that catch you staring at yourself staring at the work.
Read the interview here.
Tarot for a New (Age) Era: Josh Urban Davis Unveils His Ambitious Deck, ‘The Deleted World’
Josh Urban Davis walks us through The Deleted World, a three-year labor of love that blends tarot with vaporwave aesthetics, glitch art, and what he calls "vague paganism"—the spiritual system of choice for queer millennials with a God-shaped hole to fill. The deck features 80+ hand-collaged illustrations that combine neon animals, ERROR messages, and 18th-century women in towering wigs, creating an in-between space where occult symbolism meets early internet utopianism. Pull a card and see what the universe has in store.
Read the interview here.
Feature Stories and Series
Remote: Season 2
After the success of Remote’s first season, filmmaker Badir McCleary returned with six new episodes for Season 2, taking viewers on a cross-country tour of contemporary public art, from planned art parks to spontaneous graffiti. Badir explores how art in public spaces serves as a dialogue between artists, cities, and communities, examining historical memory, interactive installations, and the future of public engagement.
Explore Remote, Season 2 here.
Art Meets Heart: 'Arthouse' TV Series Launches Fundraiser to Showcase Local Creatives in Your Home
The piece profiles Arthouse, a reality TV series that pairs everyday buyers with local artists to find original artwork without the intimidation of galleries, following a Chicago couple racing to fill their bare condo walls before their baby arrives. Creator Scott Power and his team launched a $150,000 crowdfunding campaign to produce a full pilot after their pitch reel matched the couple with a breezy abstract by artist Linc Thelen. The show blends home makeover energy with artist spotlights, banking on the idea that people want art in their lives but need someone to demystify the process.
Read the story here.
NOT REAL ART School Launches Free Workshops on Collectibles, Community, Trauma, and Technology
This feature covers NOT REAL ART School's launch of six free workshops on topics from collectible toy design to trauma management, covering the practical territory that traditional art schools skip. Industry veterans like kaNO, Ben Goretsky, and Shana Nys Dambrot lead sessions on Web3 and NFTs, BIPOC artists in the primary market, and more, all moderated by podcast host Scott Power. It's professional development without the student loan debt, which in this economy feels revolutionary.
Read the story here.
First Friday Exhibitions
Witchy Women
Morgan Laurens curated this October show around the idea that witch hunts weren't just about superstition but about controlling women's bodies and knowledge during capitalism's early days, when the system needed compliant baby-makers for the Industrial Revolution. The exhibition reclaims the witch as a symbol of power rooted in sexuality, reproductive autonomy, and healing abilities, pushing back against how powerful men have co-opted the term "witch hunt" to play victim. A timely reminder that the women burned at the stake weren't the dangerous ones.
View the exhibition here.
Left Behind
For our September show, curator Kirsten Bengtson-Lykoudis gathered artists who transform trash into treasure, channeling Duchamp's readymade spirit to address consumer excess, environmental breakdown, sexual violence, and endangered species. The show features work made from old coins, fallen branches, crushed flowers, and fast food wrappers, selected from contenders for NOT REAL ART's biennial grant for their ecological focus and transformative power. It is proof that one person's garbage can become another person's meaningful commentary on 21st-century capitalism.
View the exhibition here.
Midwest Nice
With curator Morgan Laurens at the helm, our June show spans thirteen states from the Dakotas to Oklahoma, capturing the Midwest in all its shapeless, hard-to-define glory. The exhibition moves from the South Dakota plains to Rust Belt decay, stopping in places like Columbus, Indiana, for its architectural scene, before rolling into Chicago. A love letter to a region whose boundaries people can't even agree on, which somehow makes it the most Midwestern thing imaginable.
View the exhibition here.
Out of Body
Kirsten Bengtson-Lykoudis curated this show around artists who deconstruct and rebuild the human form, working across video, ceramics, textiles, and mixed media. The work explores the relationship between physical and emotional spaces, tracking bodies in motion, revisiting childhood traumas, and weighing freedoms against taboos in a world where teachers still get fired for showing Michelangelo's "David."
View the exhibition here.
All images published with permission of the artist(s); featured image: ‘Intimate’ by Hikaru Cho.