This fall, the McMullen Museum’s third floor features an exhibit consisting of fifty-five digital prints taken by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Martin Karplus during his travels across Europe and North America in the 1950s and 1960s. Known for his groundbreaking work in developing computer-based models for complex chemical systems, Karplus managed to defy expectations by also pursuing his deep passion for photography. Through taking a multitude of photographs, meeting people from all walks of life, and drawing on his personal experience that shaped his strive for exploration and academic curiosity, Karplus’s exhibit and life’s work truly encapsulate the bridge between science and art, in addition to the art of being human.
At the young age of 8 years old, Karplus and his family fled Nazi-occupied Austria for the United States following the arrival of German forces in 1938. Leaving everything he knew to live in a foreign land, he found himself drawn to chemistry during his time at Newton High School. It was from there, Karplus attended Harvard University for undergrad, and eventually Caltech for his doctorate program. Following his graduation from Caltech in 1953, his parents gifted him a Leica camera, and that is where the magic started.
During his postdoctoral fellowship studies at Oxford at 23, Karplus utilized this opportunity to step away from his traditional academic schedule and take photos during his travels. With just a Volkswagen Beetle and his camera, he was able to capture vast cultures, everyday people, beautiful architecture, and authentic cuisine. And in a post-World War II and Cold War society filled with growing sentiments of competition and disconnection, Karplus’s documentation served as a rich portal, highlighting the reconstruction and resilience of different societies during this time period, focusing on fundamental human emotions and connections.
Decades later, in 2013, Karplus received a Nobel Prize for his research efforts toward the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems. Because of his lifelong commitment and curiosity for chemistry, from receiving his first Bausch and Lomb microscope as a teenager to his later study of the bifluoride ion, he was able to utilize this pursuit and later transfer it into his photography journey.
In 2015, Karplus gave back to his country of origin, exhibiting his groundbreaking collection in the Austrian embassy in Washington. Guests were greeted by his photographs from all over the world. His collections feature vivid pops of color paired with incredible interconnected relationships between landscapes and people. For example, one of his collections features schoolgirls walking in a line with bright pink skirts in Rome, Italy, and another shows Diné men sitting and smoking cigarettes in a doorway in Gallup, New Mexico.
These symbolic messages presented sentiments of hope and despair, youth and old age, and quiet and loud. But most importantly, it captured the simplest yet universal qualities of human nature. Karplus’s precision to detail alongside his lifelong efforts of curiosity, science, and observation allow him and the vast viewers of his works to explore the everyday moments and indulge themselves in the lives of others.
Right before he died in 2024, Karplus and his wife gifted 134 digital prints of his photography to the McMullen Museum. Now, they stand ready to be viewed by students and professors at BC and beyond, living out Karplus’s legacy of crossing borders, documenting and observing the diverse world around us, ready to be explored.
The Student Ambassadors hosted their biannual student opening at the McMullen Museum of Art on September 5, 2025, debuting three feature collections: Medieval | Renaissance, A Fresh Vision, and Martin Karplus. With overflowing trays of charcuterie and platters of cannolis, students enjoyed crafts, games, live performances, film, and of course, new art!
Sexual Chocolate started a night of memorable student performances. Gathering a sizable crowd in the museum’s glass atrium, the all-male step group stunned visitors with their set and finished their performance to loud applause. Acapella performances by The Dynamics, The Common Tones, and The Acoustics followed, creating a joyful and energetic atmosphere. BC’s Music Guild wrapped up the night, showcasing a variety of talented individual performers and bands.
The Daley Family galleries on the second floor, the temporary home to Italian Medieval and Renaissance art and Belgian landscape paintings from the Tervuren artist colony, were transformed into crafting spaces where students crowded around tables to make framed mosaics and felt figures. With ceramic pieces and small gemstones spilled onto tables, students spent time laying their designs, applying grout, and sealing their creations.
In the 3rd floor gallery, next to the collection of post-war photographs by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Martin Karplus, was a space dedicated to making gold-leaf motifs. A nod to the ornate use of gold embellishment in works of the Medieval | Renaissance, student ambassadors showed visitors how to prime, adhere, and apply gold leafing to their stationary item of choice.
A beloved tradition of Art After Dark, indoor and outdoor games remained popular throughout the night. Inspired by the featured collections, participants tried their hand at Italian board games like Scope, Briscola, and Tressette, as well as Renaissance classics such as Tuscany, Citadels, and Trade and Triumph. The fun continued outdoors where visitors enjoyed the summer evening with lawn games like Axe Throwing, Giant Yahtzee, Giant Connect Four, Giant Jenga, and Lawn Bowling. Offering a break from all the entertainment, Moby Dick and other movies played continuously in the 1st floor galleries to offer students a place to enjoy food, drinks, and good company.
However, one of the most popular activities of the night was the Art After Dark Scavenger Hunt, affording winners the opportunity to pick their choice of a McMullen t-shirt or hoodie. Visitors dashed between floors, through galleries, and raced to find an ambassador to claim their prize. A favored tradition of Art After Dark, the scavenger hunt offers visitors a way to engage and explore the museum in a more meaningful way–-rewarding lucky winners with signature McMullen merch.
The McMullen Museum’s exhibitions showcase a diverse spectrum of artistic vision across centuries. Medieval | Renaissance presents nineteen rarely seen works from Florence’s Frascione Collection, tracing the evolution of Italian painting from the late thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries and exploring the transition between medieval and Renaissance art. A Fresh Vision highlights a transformative gift of thirty-six nineteenth-century Belgian landscapes from the School of Tervuren, celebrating artists who turned to nature for truth and renewal amid modernity’s rise. Complementing these historical collections, Martin Karplus: Photographic Journeys features fifty-five vibrant digital prints from the 1950s and 1960s, revealing the Nobel laureate’s humanistic lens on a changing postwar world. See all of these exhibits, as well as our featured first floor permanent collection, until December 7, 2025.
Welcome to CultureCheck-In, a recurring column that captures what’s trending right now across fashion, design, and culture. Every few weeks, I’ll dive into the styles and aesthetics dominating social media, runways, and everyday life, from rising color palettes to viral accessories. The goal is to document what’s “in,” trace emerging patterns, and explore how these quick-turn trends reflect and reshape the larger cultural landscape.
By: Serenna Sousa
This season, the world feels both softer and louder, like everyone collectively decided to calm down and overdo it at the same time. After years of sterile minimalism and beige everything, we’re finally craving texture, humor, and proof that a human (not an algorithm) is behind it all. Fashion, interiors, even dishware are embracing imperfection and personality; chunky, colorful, lived-in, and proudly a little extra. It’s less about looking polished and more about proving we still have a pulse.
Fashion & Aesthetic Trends
Trendy Pieces: Style right now has weight…literally. Structured woolly hats have replaced floppy beanies, and tall boots have returned as the anchor piece of fall wardrobes. The humble capri, or what I like to call “highwaters,” is having an unexpected renaissance, styled deliberately with a cute pair of kitten heels. There’s definitely some playfulness in how people are dressing right now; waist scarves that move in every direction, blazers with softened structure, and jewelry that’s expressive, like mini pieces of art. The era of tiny sunglasses is over; big, rounded aviators have taken their place, bringing back a bold, cinematic look.
Textures: This fall, fashion is about feeling as much as seeing. Suede is everywhere: on jackets, skirts, and accessories, bringing back that 70s feeling. Fur returned, but now in moderation: a trim on a sleeve or a collar, no longer screaming luxury but now more of a whisper. And then of course there’s still leather, specifically leather skirts, the elevated and sleek evolution of the leather pant. Once reserved for a night out, but now more of an everyday staple. Together, these materials feel more grounding in an increasingly digital world.
Lifestyle & Design
The shift toward tactility and expression is also shaping interiors. Maximalist dishware, chunky, colorful, and unapologetically impractical, is dominating home life. Every dinner table is beginning to look like an art project. Meals have become optional these days; it’s all about how good your plate looks on camera.
With all of these interiors getting louder, relationships are getting quieter. In her viral Vogue essay “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?”, Chanté Joseph captures a strange new etiquette of public intimacy, one defined by soft-launches, restraint, and irony. Love, like design, is curated. It’s not that the romance has disappeared; it’s that the commitment has to be styled correctly to avoid cringe. But the point isn’t that having a boyfriend is embarrassing: it’s that your identity shouldn’t disappear into the relationship. Be the girl who happens to have a boyfriend, not the girl whose whole personality is her boyfriend. The goal isn’t to ever be someone’s girlfriend; it’s to be yourself, and you just happen to have one. Being single isn’t a waiting room anymore; it’s a privilege to exist in a time when women can build, buy, and be everything on their own. Having a boyfriend isn’t a goal; it’s an addition, something that fits into your life, not something that defines it. It’s a partnership built on choice, not dependence. You’re not waiting to get chosen…you’re doing the choosing. And in a culture obsessed with image, performance of detachment has become its own aesthetic, where emotional transparency feels riskier than any bold pattern or paint color.
Meanwhile, the cracks are showing, literally, in the old aesthetic ideal of minimalist luxury. 432 Park Avenue, once the ultimate status symbol of wealth, has become a cautionary tale: flooded elevators, creaking walls, and lawsuits between billionaires. 432 Park was built to outlast taste, but maybe that’s the point…it didn’t. The cultural mood has changed; people want spaces that feel alive, not untouchable.
Art is also reclaiming accessibility. The Bob Ross Foundation recently announced it will donate 30 original paintings to support public television, a full-circle moment for an artist who built his career on the belief that creativity belongs to everyone. In an era where art is increasingly treated like an investment portfolio, Ross’s philosophy feels rebellious. His gentle optimism, that anyone can paint, anyone can make something, reads less like nostalgia now and more like a challenge: what if art were truly public again?
Technology & Culture Collide
In a time of excess, technology insists on subtraction: smaller devices, fewer buttons, less noise. Apple’s new thinnest iPhone ever, the iPhone Air, carries on the company’s legacy of minimalism, forever behind the curve on creativity, yet perfectly aligned with the culture’s Ozempic obsession. Meanwhile, translation-enabled AirPod Pros hint at a world where language divides dissolve in real time. Finally, we can all understand each other…which means terrible news for nail salons.
The thinnest iPhone ever. With the power of pro inside.
Bridge language barriers in person.
Then there’s the AI necklace, a device marketed as your “friend,” designed to converse, advise, and keep you company. New Yorkers began tearing down its advertisements, calling the concept absurd, but the creator seemed delighted by the outrage. Maybe that was the point: to provoke reflection on our increasingly parasocial relationship with machines. The same question hangs over the Neo home robot: a glossy, wide-eyed companion that remembers your routines, greets you by name, and claims to understand your mood. Should we be building companionships or simulations?
“Someone who listens, responds, and supports you”
“Transform Your Home”
Brand Collabs & Power Moves
Partnerships are running the cultural show as much as runways.
Nike x Skims fuses athletic function with sculptural femininity, reimagining performance wear through a body-conscious, minimal lens.
NikeSKIMS
Nike x KNWLS, meanwhile, injects underground edge into performance wear; think corsets as athleisure.
KNWLS Nike
Lululemon’s unexpected link-up with the NFL pushes this crossover even further, bringing luxury athleisure into the arena of mainstream sports culture. If the rumors about Jaden Smith at Louboutin are true, it’s official: high fashion is now taking notes from Gen Z.
Meanwhile, Dior Sauvage keeps dominating as the top-selling scent, a rugged fantasy that somehow still sticks. And the revived Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show has everyone debating: are we being too critical of traditional beauty, or just finally holding it accountable?
Even tiny details carry weight. The Taylor Swift necklace incident, a tiny design choice with surprisingly big historical echoes. It sparked debates about intent, ignorance, and the crucial role of diversity awareness within creative teams. Moments like this are uncomfortable, sure, but they also remind us how closely fashion, art, and identity are intertwined: even a necklace can carry the weight of history.
Elsewhere, Banksy’s installation outside London’s Court of Justice blurs the line between activism and satire, proving that street art can still provoke, unsettle, and make you think twice about authority. The New Yorker’s 2013 Ernie & Bert cover, recently honored by The New York Times as one of the most influential magazine covers of all time, shows another side of subtle resistance: quiet, playful, yet impossibly powerful in shaping cultural perception.
Muted mouths, screaming wallsLove is love
Even in media, small shifts signal bigger cultural moments, like Netflix and Spotify bringing video podcasts to streaming, where talk shows now meet algorithms.
Color Forecast
This season’s color story leans grounded and sensual: chocolate brown, deep purples, olive, butter yellow, and sharp chili pepper red, emerging in the place of burgundy. There’s always the subtle sophistication of blue and brown together, a pairing that always feels modern and effortlessly chic. These tones are more subtle but not just seasonal; they definitely have our attention.
The past few years have been about restraint and minimalism to the max, but now we’re finally leaning into touchable textures, oversized shapes, and artful details that aren’t just an aesthetic preference.
